Virtual Reality headsets such as Facebook's Oculus Rift and Sony's Project Morpheus have been in the hands of developers for a while now and they are just a few months away from consumer release. Nonetheless, Microsoft head of Xbox Phil Spencer is still not convinced that the technology is ready for prime time yet.
"Right now, it's just been about technologies and things that I think we need to do on Xbox One to make the experience better, and that's where our focus has been," explained Spencer. "And I don't think VR is a now thing. I'm not saying it's five years from now, but it's not really a now now thing. Valve's got their VR thing, which I think is great; Samsung has GearVR, too... Funnily enough, they are very interested in Minecraft and how it could work in those VR spaces."
Microsoft recently revealed its own Augmented Reality "HoloLens" but it wasn't marketed as an Xbox product.
"Well, we haven't announced it as an Xbox accessory," confirmed Spencer. "But it sits within one team, and we have the conversations. Right now, we want to focus on a standalone, untethered device and make sure that we can prove out that scenario. That's where we started, and that's what we announced in January: the first fully self-contained headset."
"The tethered scenarios around VR I think are interesting, but we were going for something different," he added. "Not being tethered to either a PC, Xbox or a phone as part of the solution was one of our design challenges for HoloLens, and we did that. Now we can say, 'Well, OK, if I do have an Xbox or a PC, what are those scenarios?' We haven't publicly talked about what those are, but you can imagine, as we continue to drive and get success with HoloLens, those scenarios will become obvious and developers will take advantage of them."
