Oculus Rift VR Headset is Coming to Android

[dgstorm]

For those of you who have experienced the Ocular Rift Virtual Reality Headset on the PC, it will be easy to get excited by today's news. Up until now, the PC has been the sole purview of the Oculus Rift technology, but that is about to change. The Oculus VR CEO, Brendan Iribe, recently shared the company plans to bring the device to the Android OS. Here's a quote with a few more details about the device and the version coming to Android,

The Oculus Rift – for the unaware – is a visor with a 7-inch screen split into two 640×800 zones (one for each eye) that can produce a realistic 3D experience. The consumer version is expected to sport 1080p resolution, and it will likely weigh quite a bit less than the dev kit at 0.83lbs. The dev kit is also $300, which will hopefully come down a bit for the final product. Oculus VR plans to have a version of the Rift for Android ready for launch with the PC consumer version, or slightly after. The Android edition will probably be more portable than the PC headset, and it will be designed to offload image processing to the ARM chips used in smartphones and tablets.

There's one other interesting sidebar to note. Apparently there are some hefty development obstacles in bringing this device to the Apple iOS platform, so, at least for a while, the Oculus Rift will only be a PC and Android exclusive. Regardless, it's intriguing to see that the VR craze of the eighties didn't actually die off. It just needed to hibernate for a while until technology could catch up to the concept.

Source: AndroidPolice

 

[johnomaz]

A different device for each platform, thats...not good. I plan on buying one for my PC when it releases. Even if it works as a display without the head motion ability, I'd still use it plenty. For my phone, it would be nice for those who travel a lot and use their Android device to watch movies/TV on or use it primarily for gaming.

[[EDIT]]

Nevermind, apparently it was confirmed by the Oculus folks on Reddit that it will be the same device for both platforms. Very nice!