Oculus Rift release date, specs, and pre-E3 press event round-up

Oculus Rift held their Pre-E3 press event moments ago, officially announcing the Oculus Rift as an official commercial product. Along with this announcement were some other surprising announcements made on stage, including the fact that the Oculus Rift headset will come bundled with an Xbox One controller and adapter, as well as working natively with Windows 10 and allowing for Xbox One game streaming to the headset.

Along with all the announcements that the Oculus Rift is now a commercial product, the bundled controller, and so on, Oculus also revealed that there will be a separate sensor, which is small, that will sit on a desk or table for external sensoring of your movements. As we mentioned above, Oculus will be partnering with Microsoft so that the headset will work natively with Windows 10, with the company citing that developers can just develop games they want to make with their favorite platform to work on.

Another interesting point is that the ergonomics were worked on quite a lot, making sure that the headset would easily slip on and off while remaining tight when wearing it, and comfortable as well. There are also built-in stereo headphones attached to the headset, but these are removable should you want to use your own. Also removable is the faceplate, for easier replacement, which has also been designed to fit around glasses comfortably. Inside the headset are two OLED screens and Rift Tracking sensors. Underneath the headset is a dial to adjust the distance of the internal lens for better comfort as well as better performance, focus, and immersion.

While the Oculus Rift comes with an Xbox One controller bundled with it, there is also Project Half Moon which will be available soon as well. These are a pair of hand tracking peripherals, featuring some extra buttons and a thumbstick as well as tracking hand movements for inside games and apps. These are now officially called Oculus Touch.

As for content, which is a big thing, there is the ability to stream select Xbox One games to the headset as well as a few outside Steam games were announced. There was Eve Valkyrie announced for Oculus, as well as a Horror game called Edge of Nowhere, both of which were shown off during the event. Additional games include AirMech VR (virtual reality version of AirMech), VR Sports Challenge (multi-sports sim game), ESPER, and Lucky’s Tail. Even better, development support is natively available within Unity and Unreal Engine for the Oculus Rift, so making games should be fairly easy.

So overall there was a lot announced during the Pre-E3 press event for Oculus Rift. What wasn’t announced was pricing or a specific release date for consumers to purchase a headset, only that it would be coming in Q1 2016. The other thing not touched on was the earlier announcement of mobile (Android) support. We will be going hands-on at E3 2015 with the finished consumer version of Oculus Rift, so if you have any questions, let us know in the comments below.