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No consolation: Oculus Rift’s future is PC-only

Oculus VR

There are two consoles coming out this month. Both are quite beefy, and one has a camera that watches your blood every minute of the day. It seems only right that players be able to gaze back, Nietzsche-like, via the enhanced depth perception of VR.

But Oculus’ future is tied to the PC and the PC only. The reason? The usual one. Sony and Microsoft’s boxes don’t adapt well to change.

“Consoles are too limited for what we want to do,” implausibly young and fantastically named Rift inventor Palmer Luckey told TechRadar. “We’re trying to make the best virtual reality device in the world and we want to continue to innovate and upgrade every year – continue making progress internally – and whenever we make big jumps we want to push that to the public.”

While Sony and Microsoft are both warming to the idea of incremental updates via World of Tanks and Planetside 2, there’s no getting around the fact that their machines are spec-locked for a decade to come.

“Look at the PCs that existed eight years ago,” explained Luckey. “There have been so many huge advances since then. Now look at the VR hardware of today. I think the jump we’re going to see in the next four or five years is going to be massive, and already VR is a very intensive thing – it requires rendering at high resolutions at over 60 frames a second in 3D.”

Sony are working on their own VR tech – we’ve a suspicion that might be where Eve Valkyrie is headed first, in fact – but the Rift is going to be all ours for the foreseeable future. Is that a good thing?