This week’s F8 developer conference was a big one for VR, with Facebook and Oculus launching the Go standalone headset at the show. Perhaps more exciting for VR enthusiasts, though, was the in-depth look at what Oculus Research is currently working on, which included several big teases about the future of VR. However, you shouldn’t expect all of these teases to be included in the next iteration of the Oculus Rift.
Oculus’ Nate Mitchell recently said as much on Reddit. Responding to one fans’ enthusiasm, Mitchell tried to temper expectations. “Maria covered a bunch of areas of long term research for us,” he said. “This is just a peek into some feature prototypes we’ve been working on. However, don’t expect to see all of these technologies in a product anytime soon.”
It sounds like some of these experiments might be closer to consumer-ready than others, then. The only question is what? At F8 Oculus teased a ‘Half Dome’ prototype headset with a 140 degree field of view and varifocal display as well as advanced hand-tracking and photorealistic avatars among other things. Which of these features, if any, will make it into the next iteration of the Rift?
Perhaps for that answer you can look to Micheal Abrash’s Oculus Connect talk from a few years back, where he predicted what headsets would look like in five (now three) years’ time. The Oculus Chief Scientist did indeed predict a 140 degree field of view for headsets with a variable depth of focus, suggesting the Half Dome might be closer than you think.
Other than that it’s hard to say what the future of the Rift looks like.
