Nintendo continues to play with our emotions over its new console, Switch, and the subject of VR. Despite rumors, last month’s reveal of the new device made no mention of support for the tech, but don’t count it out just yet.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima stated that the company “can’t say no” to the possibility of VR support in the future and that it was something it “must consider.”
“I can’t say that we have no interest in VR because VR offers new ways of playing, but that depends on what kind of software can be played,” Kimishima said. “But what kind of software works, that’s only something you only know once you actually experience it. And our games are ones that are usually played for a long time.”
Switch is a hybrid console that, when at home, you insert into a dock and play on your TV. When you want to play elsewhere, you simply remove the device from the dock, insert a pair of handheld controllers on either side, and then play on a screen located in the middle. While VR support didn’t look likely at first, Switch does use Nvidia’s powerful Tegra technology, pulling off experiences like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, that give us hope it could at least match current high-end mobile VR standards if it were to support the tech later down the line.
As we wrote when the device was revealed two weeks back, it’s a long shot. But we’d welcome an add-on that perhaps consisted of a lightweight HMD that you could connect to the console and then use its controllers as a form of input.
Nintendo is set to reveal more details about the Switch in January 2017. Two months later in March, the device will launch. We don’t expect any VR support to be announced in the near future, but hopefully if devices like PlayStation VR prove popular then Nintendo might dig a bit deeper into a technology we’d love to see them working with.
