Oculus CTO Explains Pursuit For A “Controller-free SKU” For Future Oculus Headsets In Recent Interview

In the past week or so, Oculus unleashed a surplus of news for its platform with more games on the way with the addition of Oculus Quest 2-supported titles as well. On April 21, the Facebook-owned subsidiary held its inaugural Oculus Gaming Showcase to feature some namely titles on the way to its platform in the coming months.

One in particular that stood to be an eye-opener happens to be Capcom’s Resident Evil 4 VR. During its Resident Evil Anniversary showcase, the Japanese publisher shared that the team is working to bring a fully dedicated Oculus Quest 2 version to the virtual reality headset later on in 2021.

As for plans outside of its games, leadership at Oculus expands on its aim for new models from the firm, as transcribed by UploadVR. In particular, the company shares that there are possible SKUs that rely solely on hand tracking and will not require users to be equipped with the designated controllers.

It’s interesting how we are on this multi-year path to phasing that away as a core feature, where we want to be able to have a controller-free SKU in the future where we rely just on hand tracking for people that want to use keyboard and mouse and don’t want to pay for the controllers.

So it is clearly more valuable for gaming than I initially expected. But I think that we will wind up in those cases where lots of the users will not wind up taking advantage of those in the future. And that’ll be nice to have that as a separable feature.

John Carmack, Oculus Chief Technology Officer

Andrew Bosworth, Facebook head of AR/VR went on to interject, “The good news is we can do both.” He explains, “We can do both, you can have a set of techniques and development that are going to put something out there that has a more featureful presence.

“And this is going to go at maybe lower volume in terms of the number of units, but also advances the state of the art, inspires developers, I think unlocks a lot more use cases. And then as that technology matures, finds its way into these scale units that get out to so many people, which we want to continue to advance the drum beat on that.”

Do you believe that Oculus could implement a headset without controllers needed?

Source: UploadVR