Oculus Rift to Hit Public Beta In 2015, According to Sources

Of course, like any good PC gamer and journalist, I’ve had my eyes on the Oculus Rift for a while now, even if I remain unconvinced that it’s truly the future of video games.  It’s still exciting to see gaming software grow and develop and garnish the attention from developers and youtubers who are lucky enough to try it for themselves, but before today it seems my hopes of ever trying one for myself would remain distant and unreachable… unless I wanted to buy a dev kit, which is technically open for the public.

But then there came two separate but mirrored reports, coming from TechRadar and VRfocus, respectively, that both say an official “public beta” of the Oculus Rift is on its way.  “Multiple Sources”, the reports claim, say that the public beta could begin as early as May 2015 or as late as around the middle of summer, but they all agree its incoming.   “The plans were still not entirely nailed down”, according to one such source.

Oculus VR representatives declined to comment when reached out.

Public hardware betas aren’t uncommon in the world of hardware development.  Perhaps the example you would know best would be the many public hardware betas released for some of the Steam Machine, where Valve had people go on a little “quest” to qualify to be one of 500 lucky beta testers.  While this isn’t exactly the same (and we don’t know how people would qualify for this future open beta, if requirements are necessary at all) it should give you a good idea of what to expect.

Either way, the Oculus Rift has been a long time coming.  It seems it’s been fluttering in and out of the news for years now, it’s nice to see some solid steps being taken in the actual, final release of the product, which feels rather overdue.

Hopefully, we’ll all be pleasantly surprised.