Oculus' Vice President of Product Nate Mitchell teased that there was room for the Oculus Rift to partner up with Microsoft or Sony during the Disrupt Event in New York in the beginning of May. Mitchell said that Oculus hadn't "announced any sort of partnerships to date", but it was something they were "exploring.”
The Oculus Rift will be compatible with both the PC and Xbox one.
During today's pre-E3 2015 press conference Oculus confirmed that they had a partnership with Microsoft. Each Oculus Rift headset will ship with a wireless Xbox One controller, an adapter and the ability to stream Xbox One games.
Phil Spencer, the Head of Xbox, elaborated what the partnership entailed:
“The opportunity for us to bring our wireless controller, the one that we’ve spent so many years refining, to every Oculus user at launch is incredibly exciting for us.
The Rift will natively work with Windows 10. And we all know that VR experiences require the highest performance, and with Direct X 12, we believe we’ll be able to create state of the art virtual reality experiences on top of Windows.”
Microsoft has been hard at work on the Hololens, their augmented reality headset, and has finally joined Sony (and others) in the virtual reality headset competition.
Oculus Rift is expected to launch in early 2016.
