SXSW is a great time to get to hear directly from leaders in the industry. Today, Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus, held a panel discussion at the conference to discuss the future of the Oculus Rift. Previously, Luckey indicated that unless things went terribly wrong, the device would be available for purchase by the end of 2015.
Unfortunately Luckey seems to have backed down from that promise. When asked about the 2015 date, he stated:
I did say that before we made a lot of changes to our roadmap and we"ve expanded a lot of the ambition we had around the product and what we wanted to do. Us partnering with Facebook allowed us a lot of things that we wouldn"t have been able to do otherwise like hire 300 people to be working on getting the Rift out as quickly as possible at the level we want it. I can"t comment on the date one way or another in either direction but I can say that nothing is going horribly wrong. Everything is going horribly right.
That hardly sounds like a confident release date, and with competitors like HTC/Valve making announcements of impending product releases, it remains to be seen whether Oculus will remain the king of the virtual reality landscape, or whether they"ll end up being nothing but hype.
You can watch the entire presentation yourself on Twitch.tv.