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Oculus VR News | March 19, 2024

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Oculus Rift Support for Xbox One Not Coming Anytime Soon

Oculus Rift Support for Xbox One Not Coming Anytime Soon

Image courtesy of: Oculus

FRΛNK R.

Ever since the Oculus and Microsoft partnership was announced at Oculus VR’s pre-E3 press conference in June, many have speculated if the partnership would extend to bring Oculus Rift support to Xbox One.

Now, although both companies appear to be growing pretty close, having an Oculus Rift on the console is not something in the works…at least for now.

Speaking to Polygon, Oculus VP of Product, Nate Mitchell, revealed while there have been talks behind the scenes on possibly bringing the VR headset to the gaming console, Mitchell admits the team is “not so close” to pursuing that option right now.

“It has been a conversation, but I can say we’re not so close,” says Mitchell. “What we were finding is that it’s hard enough to deliver a great experience reliably on Windows, never mind adding OS X and Linux to that, which are different beasts entirely. Because of that, we’ve been laser-focused on getting Windows in awesome shape. No one is really thinking right now about bringing the Rift to a console, especially when the spec is so different from what we’re targeting right now.”

Mitchell went on to clarify that it’s not a lack of power from the Xbox One hardware to support VR, in fact, he points out that the console is actually quite capable of doing so. Similar to how Gear VR delivers great virtual reality experiences, powered by a phone, it all comes down to undertaking a different challenge and designing specifically for the platform.

“That’s the thing, you can absolutely deliver a great VR experience on Xbox One, what I should say is with the hardware that’s in the Xbox One,” said Mitchell. “We’re not really focused on it right now. It really depends on the content you want to put there.”

While Microsoft has focused its attention primarily on augmented reality (AR) through projects like its HoloLens, the company does remain open and optimistic about the future of VR technology. It will be interesting to see if, and when Oculus and Microsoft decide to push their mutual VR endeavors even further.