On stage at Facebook’s F8 conference, the company’s CTO, Mike Schroepfer, may have just let slip a hint at the Oculus Rift release date.
We don’t often give much care to rumors of an Oculus Rift release date, but when the CTO of Oculus’ parent company speaks up, our ears naturally perk up.
On stage moments ago, Mike Schroepfer began talking about the company’s long term strategy of using Oculus’ VR technology. He first focused on explaining why VR is ready now when prior attempts in eras past have failed. To do this, he showed the undeniably impressive Eve Valkyrie trailer that debuted at Fanfest 2015 last week.
Following this, he noted to the audience that, “You’re gonna be able to do this this year in VR [pause] … and you’re gonna be doing it in [pause] something shipped by Oculus.”
It was the curious pauses that made this stand out:
Now this could very well be a general statement about the overall quality of computer graphics and virtual reality that will be achieved in 2015. But if we consider that he was talking specifically about the Oculus Rift and about Eve Valkyrie, then it’s a clear hint that the consumer version of the Oculus Rift will ship in 2015, and I’ll tell you why.
See Also: Hands-on – Eve Valkyrie’s Latest Build from Fanfest 2015, Played on Crescent Bay
Eve Valkyrie is officially an exclusive title for the Oculus Rift headset on PC and for Sony’s Morpheus on PS4. Given that we now know that Morpheus will ship in 2016, it doesn’t conform with Schroepfer’s quote. And while he could have been talking about another system like SteamVR / HTC Vive, that can’t be the answer, given exclusivity of Eve Valkyrie.
If we assume Schroepfer was speaking specifically about the Oculus Rift and Eve Valkyrie, the conclusion seems clear: the Oculus Rift consumer headset will ship in 2015. If he was only talking generally about the state of VR and graphics, then we’re no closer to knowing the release date than before.
Update (3/26/2015, 12:30pm PST): The Outcast Agency, a marketing agency representing Facebook, reached out to point us to a tweet from Schroepfer posted after the keynote saying that he was speaking generally about the state of VR in 2015 and not specifically about the Oculus Rift and Eve Valkyrie. The tweet was in response to New York Times tech reporter Vindu Goel who also believed Schroepfer to be speaking specifically about an Oculus Rift release date:
Goel further pressed the Facebook CTO on his statement along with Financial Times SF reporter Tim Bradshaw.