Science fiction a step closer as Oculus virtual reality headsets near release

Oculus is closing in on the consumer release of its Rift virtual reality headset, accelerated by an aggressive hiring spree since the company was acquired by Facebook for $2bn in March.

It showed off its new “Crescent Bay” prototype at Connect, its first developer conference held in Los Angeles on Saturday. With improved display, motion tracking and audio features that chief executive Brendan Iribe said brings the Rift headset "much closer" to a finished product that can be sold at retailers.

Although Oculus has set no deadline, the Rift is expected to go on sale in 2015, after selling about 130,000 of its $350 development kits over the past two years. 

In early September, Samsung unveiled its Gear VR headset, a collaboration with Oculus that will soon enable users to have a cinematic VR experience.

As it becomes more confident about solving some of the initial technical challenges of virtual reality, Oculus is now looking to rally developers to create a "killer app" that will drive sales.  

Oculus hopes to take VR technology beyond the video games for which the technology is best known and into much more ambitious arenas, from television and video to new forms of social networking and teleconferencing.

“Our mission is to transform gaming, entertainment and the way we interact,” Mr Iribe told the 800 developers at the conference. Facebook's purchase has given Oculus almost unlimited resources to achieve this goal.  

Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus, told the Financial Times that “the number one thing” that has changed in the six months since the deal “is that we have been able to acquire a lot of the talent that we only dreamt of getting before”.

Alongside 100 new staffers, it has made several acquisitions, including Carbon Design, the team responsible for the handheld controller of Microsoft’s Xbox game console and its Kinect motion-sensing camera.

“That’s impossible to do without a lot of guaranteed resources,” he said. Facebook has promised Oculus “everything we need – and something like this has a lot of needs”, he said.

Mr Luckey declined to specify how much the social network was spending.

But one of his new recruits, Michael Abrash, a gaming industry veteran who joined Oculus in March, said it might take more than $1bn for its VR technology to fulfil its potential.

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While Oculus now has the human, capital and technical resources to get its PC-based Rift to market, one thing is still missing: content.

“The killer app for VR hasn’t been created yet,” said Mr Abrash. He called on the assembled developers to solve this problem: “Come along on the adventure of a lifetime as we make science-fiction real.”

This includes becoming much more in tune with the social-networking mission of Facebook. Almost all the VR applications demonstrated at Connect are experienced in isolation. Oculus executives said that this would change, and within five years, grandparents will be watching their distant grandchildren’s birthday parties through a VR headset or chatting with realistic, digitised avatars of their friends.

“I believe sharing virtual spaces will ultimately be the most powerful and widely used aspect of VR,” Mr Abrash said. “Imagine anyone on the face of the earth being able to be anywhere, with anyone, doing anything, whenever they want.”