Facebook has teamed with Lenovo to design a new virtual reality headset geared toward gamers. The Oculus Rift S will be made available later this spring for $399.
The social media giant announced the Oculus Rift S at last week’s Game Developers Conference. The headset promises higher resolution, better optics, and a new Passthrough+ feature that enables a user to view the physical world without taking off his or her headset.
Lenovo partnered with Facebook on the Rift S, and the device incorporates the Oculus Insight inside-out tracking technology. That system relies on five cameras, including one in each corner of the headset, to scan nearby items via computer vision algorithms. This eliminates the need for using sensors elsewhere in the room. Then Insight system can accurately render nearby topography and furniture into the virtual world.
Oculus Studios will launch two new games in conjunction with the Rift S debut, Asgard’s Wrath and Stormland. The Rift continues to leverage the processing power of a gamer’s PC, but Facebook is also planning to release a standalone VR unit, the Quest, this spring.
SportTechie Takeaway
Market research conducted by Technavio last fall predicts a 67-percent compound annual growth rate in the VR gaming market through 2021, with PC-based games continuing to make up at least 40 percent of that share. The Rifts S is a notable step forward since the March 2016 release of the original Oculus Rift, and Oculus should continue to be, as VentureBeat reported in December, the leading provider on the market.