Talking to a Reddit interviewer at CES, Oculus Founder Palmer Luckey and VP of Products Nate Mitchell explained that the Oculus is being built with a focus on seated players. So you’ll have to but a lid on those dreams of walking around your office while exploring city 17. However, Luckey explained why it was problematic to have full spacial tracking.
“With Crystal Cove it’s gonna be just the seated experience,” said Mitchell. “We don’t have any announcements to make right now for the consumer version”
“We can say we’re focussing generally on a seated experience,” explained Luckey. “I mean, we have a cable to deal with anyway, that’s very much a limiting factor. I’d love to have VR games where people can stand up and walk around and run around. Aside from the liability concerns and everything else, that’s a really tough problem.
“People have been trying to make positional tracking stuff for a long time and with a lot of money too. If we had really great localised positional tracking that could move over large spaces in any direction without external points we wouldn’t have GPS, that’s what we’d be using instead.
“So it’s a very tough technical problem to solve and we think what we have right now iw pretty much the best option available for seated VR.”
There’s a load more about the Oculus’ development and the changes that would be going into the second generation of developer kits in the full interview, which you can watch below: