The new Oculus Go standalone headset was revealed yesterday at Oculus Connect, the company’s annual developer conference. According to Oculus CTO and legendary programmer John Carmack, developers could have their hands on the $200 standalone mobile headset as soon as next month. As an added piece of the puzzle, developers can also request Oculus Go dev kits via the company’s dev portal starting today.

In Carmack’s famous stream-of-thought keynote speech today, where he touches on almost anything on his mind when it comes to the future of Oculus, he revealed that devs should expect to get their hands on Go starting next month. Since Go wasn’t present at Oculus Connect, it lends credence to the idea that he means Go developer kits, and not Oculus Go demos as such.

Image courtesy Oculus

Using it as a dedicated media device for the past few months, Carmack says he’s been using the headset to watch Netflix in short intervals, watching 15 minutes of a show at a time and returning back to work. Although the friction of entering VR is much lower when it comes to a dedicated standalone like Oculus Go, he says developers shouldn’t make Go-specific applications, instead targeting both platforms as one in the same.

Image courtesy Oculus

Both Go and Gear VR feature a single 3DOF controller and will share the same mobile software, says Carmack, although the $200 price-point makes the dedicated standalone headset more ‘giftable’ than a Gear VR of Oculus Rift.

Oculus maintains Go is headed to consumers in “early 2018.”

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Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • MosBen

    It’s weird that for a product that seems like it has to be close to finalized in terms of hardware they’re not releasing details about the specs yet.

  • Firestorm185

    Just sent in my developer’s application. Hopin’ to try this out on my development stuff before it comes out, looks like an amazing piece of tech!

  • Lucidfeuer

    Couldn’t see any form for Santa Cruz.

    • benz145

      Santa Cruz isn’t the dev kit for Oculus Go, they’re different products.

      • Lucidfeuer

        Indeed, I realised that after. I wonder what “dev kit” there even could be about Oculus Go since it doesn’t have any functionality that are new or to be iterated but I guess that’s a preview product.

  • dk

    so Carmack is saying it’s android and it runs on top of that ……..what I’m hearing is ……u can hack it and run daydream ……..cool