If you were one of the first Oculus Rift adopters and thought you were going to be getting a pair of Oculus Touch controllers soon, bad news: it looks like you’ll be waiting much longer than that.
In a blog post, Oculus has thanked early adopters and potential customers for their patience with the Rift’s rollout. “We appreciate that without your support, VR wouldn’t be where it is today,” the company said.
Oculus also added that they were “on track to launch Touch and introduce true hand presence” later this year, saying they would have “lots more” to say about the controllers at Oculus Connect 3 — which doesn’t kick off until October 5 in San Jose, California.
Brendan Iribe, Oculus’s co-founder and CEO (as well as someone who worked on the UI for Civilization 4), clarified early this morning that Touch wouldn’t be launching until the fourth quarter of this year:
Oculus Rift is now shipping in 2-4 days. Apologies for initial delay. We’re fully caught up & ramping production. Touch ships in volume Q4.
— Brendan Iribe (@brendaniribe) July 12, 2016
Iribe added that thousands of Touch dev kits were being shipped to developers now, and that the investment “in quality and polish” would have a massive effect on virtual reality.
On the bright side, the company says that all pre-orders of the Rift have now finally shipped. On top of that, new orders from the Oculus.com website are “shipping within 2 to 4 business days”.
That said, it’s more added frustration for users who jumped on the Rift train early only to beset with delays. The company originally delayed the release of Touch until the second half of this year. We’re technically still in that window, but there’s a big difference between July and August and the middle of October onwards.
Comments
5 responses to “The Oculus Touch Controllers Won’t Be Launching Until At Least Mid-October”
Well thats a disappointment.
I really like the half moon design over the Vives ‘stick’
And where is VR today? After the initial oohs and ahs and headset exclusivity controversy it’s kind of disappeared. PS VR is releasing later this year so I expect to see a resurgence of “VR is great yeah!” articles but other than that there’s no real sense of VR slowly revolutionising the way we interact with the world. Is it that lull where everyone is slowly working on the next step or is the honeymoon period over and it’s make or break time where we see if it gets adopted into the mainstream or goes to sit with the Kinect and Wii U pad?
I think the issue with VR at the moment is that is exclusive to a subset of a subset of a subset of people, people who play video games, who have a pretty decent level pc, and who are willing to pay over $1000 extra for the privlage of playing some limited vr games and experiences.
By the time psvr launches there will be some more games and experiences out there, but the subsets will change slightly to casual gamer or person who owns ps4 for cod/Br playback, interested in $500 vr games and experiences.
It will take time, but once it gets a foothold I don’t feel it will go away. It’s like all computer entertainment stuff, the hardware is important but with out compelling software it is going to die.
I cant afford the Rift or Vive at the moment, however I have had a Gear for awhile. While not as good as either of those it does work and for a fraction of the cost.
What I am noticing however is the oculus store for the Gear is growing continually. So I would say, at least in terms of the gear, its actually doing pretty well from what I can tell. This is not just games either. To be honest I actually think the Gear is better for media experiences at the moment, this is what I am enjoying anyway. 3D movies, movie promos etc.
Not really. The first announced release window was “H2 2016”, before that there was nothing to be delayed.
No disappointment here though, I feel like October was already more or less known as the approximate release time though I can’t at all remember why. Hugely looking forward to it but still got tonnes to play in the meantime.