The Oculus Rift virtual reality headset has been in development for a couple of years now. Things changed for the company when Facebook acquired it. Oculus then had access to resources that it previously didn’t so it allowed the company to do things that it might not have been able to do for want of resources. Despite shipping developer kits of its VR headset Oculus has still not confirmed when a consumer launch will take place. It is now being speculated that the Oculus Rift release might be delayed beyond 2015.
Palmer Lucky, the founder of Oculus, was at SXSW today where he took part in a panel discussion to talk about the future of Oculus Rift. Luckey had previously said that if everything went right consumers would be able to purchase the Rift VR headset by the end of this year.
Naturally during the panel he was asked about the 2015 release timeframe. Luckey reiterated that the company has made a lot of changes to its roadmap and expanded its ambition around the product and what it wanted to achieve with the Rift.
He highlighted that being acquired by Facebook meant that Oculus could hire 300 people that are focused on “getting the Rift out as quickly as possible at the level we want it.”
Lucky said that he couldn’t comment on the date at this point in time, “but I can say that nothing is going horribly wrong. Everything is going horribly right.”
That’s as vague as one can get and many are now speculating that this possibly means the consumer version of Rift might not arrive until 2016.
Filed in . Read more about Facebook, Oculus Rift and Virtual Reality (VR).