The Oculus Rift has come a long way since its first development kit, and this spring the virtual reality headset will finally be available to the public as a finalized product. I tried out the consumer version of the Oculus Rift, along with Oculus VR's optional Touch controllers, here at CES 2016.
The final version of the Rift is similar in design to the Oculus Rift Development Kit and the DK2: a black plastic VR headset that you connect to a computer. This version features its own built-in headphones, which were missing in the earlier versions. The hardware is more powerful and complex than the development kit versions', but the consumer model actually feels a bit lighter on the head. I didn't notice it shifting on my nose or becoming misaligned when I moved my head, which occasionally happened when I was using the development kits.
The Touch by Oculus controllers are wireless hand grips equipped with face buttons, triggers, and analog sticks similar to halves of a conventional gamepad. They also have round, flat rings around the grips that are studded with small reflectors and work in tandem with a pair of positioning cameras to determine exactly where they are in space. The positioning was surprisingly accurate; the Rift showed gray, texture-less models of the Touch controllers floating in space before starting the demo, and they were located precisely where they sat in reality. I had to peek under the Rift a few times to make sure the controllers where the Rift said they were.
I tried a sculpting program called Medium with the Rift and Touch. The app put me in a virtual room and presented me with a large block of featureless clay. The Touch controllers were my hands, loading various tools selected through wheels I could access with the analog sticks. I could "draw" with clay in three-dimensional space, adding to the lump in front of me and building shapes around it by pulling the upper trigger on the right controller. The lower trigger let me move and rotate the sculpture with a wave of my hand.
The demo let me add more clay, remove clay, inflate or sand down different parts of the sculpture, and even paint the surface with an airbrush. A button on the left Touch controller brought up a color palette, and I could pick any color by pointing at it with my right hand and pulling a trigger. It even offered special features like holding up a plane through the sculpture so I could sculpt symmetrically, and spin the sculpture slowly while I worked with it like a lathe or a potter's wheel.
The Touch controllers work very well, which is why it's surprising that Oculus has postponed their release until Q3 2016. The units I tried here felt and performed like final products, and worked flawlessly in tandem with the Rift. However, if more time will let Oculus eliminate any issues I might have missed in my short demo, it's a worthwhile wait. As it is, the Touch controllers impressed me as the most comfortable VR control system I've tried yet. It's gamepad-like design with conventional analog sticks, face buttons, and triggers fit well with the extensive motion-tracking of the hardware, producing a really immersive and functional control scheme.
The consumer version of the Oculus Rift faces a notable price hurdle the earlier versions lacked. The final Rift is available to preorder for $599, almost twice as much as either of the development kits. This is more powerful and polished hardware, but that price jump puts the Rift up there with the PlayStation VR as a sizable investment, even without the Touch controllers, whose price has not been announced.