Oculus hardware will arrive in 2015 - announced by facebook.

Virtual reality gaming is coming "this year," Facebook's chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer said on stage at day two of the social network's F8 Developer Conference in San Francisco on Thursday. He also said people would be able to game in VR on "something" shipped by Oculus.


Schroepfer showed off what appears to be an advanced version of Eve: Valkyrie, a game that puts users in the cockpit of a spaceship.


"Why is VR going to work now, when it didn't work in the '80s and '90s?" asked Schroepfer. Because the technology is more advanced than before and ready for primetime, he said: "Each one of these core tracks of technology had to hit a minimum core viability...to get to that sense of presence to sense that you're truly there."

"You're going to be able to do it in something shipped by Oculus," Schroepfer said. "This is going to be incredible."

"Virtual reality done right truly is reality, as far as the observer is concerned," added Oculus chief scientist Michael Abrash. "VR today is good enough to create experiences, but just barely." "VR today is good enough to create experiences, but just barely."

Abrash outlined areas of VR that still need improvement: haptics, being able to use your hands in VR; better visuals, ideally with 5K x 5K or 16K x 16K resolution display technologies — per eye; and audio will bring a realistic sense of spatial immersion.

While Schroepfer said earlier in the keynote that Oculus would be shipping some kind of hardware this year, Abrash backpedaled on it just a bit, saying consumer-ready VR headsets would arrive "soon" and could take "a year or two" before they're ready for the type of realistic VR experiences that trick the brain into perceiving digital bits as real.



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