Oculus Rift Virtual Reality Headset to Support 'Next Gen Cellphones' [iOS Blog]

The Oculus Rift headset, which features a fully immersive virtual reality experience, originally made its debut on Kickstarter last summer where it raised almost $2.5 million. Since that time it’s been in development and while a dev kit is available, the initial consumer version is expected to debut next year.

As the dev kit is only compatible with the Mac and the PC, there’s been speculation about whether or not the Oculus Rift will work with next generation consoles, like the upcoming PS4 and the Xbox One, but it turns out that’s not what the company is aiming for.

According to Oculus Rift CEO Brendan Iribe, who spoke with Edge, the company isn’t planning to develop the headset with upcoming consoles in mind, and instead plans to focus its efforts on both PCs and mobile devices.

“I love consoles but internally we’re a lot more excited about where mobile’s going to go, and being able to plug it right into a next gen cellphone,” he told us. “It’s the innovation, and how fast cellphones are now improving – where we’ll be with the next Galaxy or the next iPhone compared to where consoles are. Those things are almost doubling every year, compared to a console that’s just stuck it out for eight years – it just makes us very excited. There’s a lot of improvements that can be made on the hardware side for VR that no-one’s doing yet because it’s a new thing. The mobile rate of innovation is going to be able to make a lot of those improvements.”

As our sister site TouchArcade points out, mobile devices like the iPad and the iPhone are fully capable of supporting the headset’s 1080p display and the technology exists for a potentially wireless system using Bluetooth and AirPlay. With the addition of MFi game controllers, mobile gaming could be entering a whole new era with the Oculus Rift.

Iribe wasn’t able to give a specific release date for the Oculus Rift, but he said that the company “would love for it to be next year.”