At long last Minecraft, one of the most popular games on earth, has officially arrived on the Oculus Rift in beta form as part of a new beta update for the Windows 10 edition.

Minecraft VR support finally officially today via the latest Windows 10 beta update for the title. You can grab a copy via the official Windows 10 store, or via the Oculus Store, where it appeared for the Oculus Rift earlier today. Existing owners will receive the update for free.

Lagging behind the already available Gear VR Edition which appeared in April, the PC version with Oculus Rift support arrives sporting features largely identical to the mobile VR version. Most notably, is the inclusion of an in-game switchable “virtual living room” mode, which allows the player to pull out of the default fully immersive view and into a less ‘intense’ windowed mode. The transitions for this whilst in game are particularly well handled as it happens and, although I suspect most may eschew the feature, there’s no argument that it’s present isn’t a necessity considering Minecraft‘s huge potential audience. Comfort features to ease player locomotion, specifically the implementation of ‘stepped’ character rotation, where your view shifts in 22.5 degree increments.

Impressively, this new beta edition now allows cross-platform play on for users of Rift, Gear VR, iOS, Android, and Windows 10 devices.

Launched alongside the new beta edition is a short film which sheds light on how team Minecraft at Mojang formed another special team including members from Oculus in an effort to help guide the VR version to launch. “The development has been a very iterative process,” says Saxs Persson from the Minecraft team, “we looked at pretty much all controls and how you play Minecraft and tried to figure out what is the best way that we can do this in VR.”

Intial impressions are good, albeit somewhat familiar. Having played Minecrift, the unofficially modded version originally built for use with the Oculus Rift DK1 headset years ago, it was no surprise how great the title can look when viewed immersively. A similar mod called Vivecraft also appeared more recently for the HTC Vive, along with room-scale support too.

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Minecrift however has now ceased to exist in response to a request from Mojang and in light of this new, official version appearing. One of Minecrift’s developers confirmed as much via Reddit today saying “I received notice a few days ago that I can no longer use the name “Minecrift” or the minecraft-vr.com domain.” Apparently, although Mojang objected only to the use of those particular names and domains, the Minecrift team decided, after many years of work, it was time to throw in the towel. “Admittedly, StellaArtois and I have burned ourselves out and there hasn’t been much development for the last year, which is why we’re shutting down our mod rather than completely refactor it to remove the “Minecrift” name.”

Minecraft Windows 10 Edition Beta can be downloaded for free either via the Windows 10 Store or the Oculus Store right now with an upgrade to the full version priced at $9.99.

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Paul James
Based in the UK, Paul has been immersed in interactive entertainment for the best part of 27 years and has followed advances in gaming with a passionate fervour. His obsession with graphical fidelity over the years has had him branded a ‘graphics whore’ (which he views as the highest compliment) more than once and he holds a particular candle for the dream of the ultimate immersive gaming experience. Having followed and been disappointed by the original VR explosion of the 90s, he then founded RiftVR.com to follow the new and exciting prospect of the rebirth of VR in products like the Oculus Rift. Paul joined forces with Ben to help build the new Road to VR in preparation for what he sees as VR’s coming of age over the next few years.
  • Luke

    how to play the official version with vive? thx

    • Myrddin Emrys

      Vivecraft works well. I tried to install it a while back, and I couldn’t get it to work… it required installing an SDK, recompiling, etc… huge amount of work down the drain.

      But the NEW Vivecraft installer for 1.10.2 works much easier, I got installed in minutes and it worked the first time. I’m having a blast.

      Getting it to work with mods may be much more difficult (I have not tried yet), but getting it to work with Vanilla Minecraft is a breeze.

  • me

    Too bad there is a ton of us that cant get it to work…

  • Luke

    on the oculus there is not roomscale right now. so how does movement works in this relase? thx

    • Justos

      Roomscale would limit this game quite a bit. (youre always walking somewhere) Locomotion is done with the controller

  • Wednaud Ronelus

    This is the dawn of a new age.

  • I think 3D VR box is more cheap that you can watch 2016 RIO Olympic games and play vr games.http://www.trendsloving.com/3d-virtual-gaming-glasses-headsetmix-p-22.html

  • Peter Hansen

    I think the most important aspect of Oculus VR is that the tester always has a hipster beard and wears a hoodie. That is so cool.

  • Justos

    Great release on the Oculus store. Having a blast playing it