Oculus Touch is the missing piece of the puzzle for many VR games, allowing us to bring out hands into the experience. For Rock Band VR, however, you’ll still need a few more things.
Harmonix’s upcoming Oculus Rift debut is one of the more exciting titles to be designed for the position tracked controllers. You’ll use one of the classic guitar-shaped plastic peripherals that the series was built upon to step onto a stage and jam as if you were a real rock star. To make the game as accurate as possible, you stick a stock to the end of your controller, which then houses one of the Touch devices. This allows it to be tracked in the game and mimic your real world movements.
That stock might have meant that players would have to buy a third piece of kit to finally start playing Rock Band VR, but it seems that Oculus and Harmonix are saving you the trouble.
In a new preview from The Verge, it’s stated that anyone that buys Oculus Touch when the controllers finally launch later this year will also find the guitar stock in the box. We’ve reached out to Harmonix and they’ve confirmed that this is indeed the case. Of course, you’ll still have to get hold of a compatible guitar controller by yourself; no one’s that generous.
For now, Rock Band VR is only going to let us play with guitars, though we’d love to give the drums a whirl some day. It still retains the series’ classic gameplay in which colored notes will travel down a line and must be pressed when they hit a certain point. We played it all the way back at GDC in March and, for a few moments, it made us feel like rock gods.
We don’t yet know when Rock Band VR is release, but the inclusion of the stock suggests it won’t be too far off the launch of Touch itself. We’re expecting to hear a final date for the controllers next week when the Oculus Connect 3 developer conference gets underway.
Elsewhere, Harmonix is currently preparing another title, Harmonix Music VR, for launch of PlayStation VR in just a few weeks’ time.
