Last year, Oculus gave a brief glimpse of a standalone headset concept called “Santa Cruz.” Today, we’ve learned the headsets are going to be in developers’ hands “next year,” and will work with some new motion-tracked controllers.
This headset will not have the giant wire that the Rift sports, nor the external wired sensors that track the headset. Losing all the wires comes as a result of bringing onboard inside-out tracking for the headset utilizing four onboard cameras.
All of the compute fits in the front-part of the headset. No word on specs or battery life, though I’m verrrry curious.
The new controllers look a lot like the Oculus Touch controllers that work with Rift. Interestingly, Oculus claims that the headset+controller combo “bring the power of Rift and Touch to the standalone category.”
The device is tracked using tiny infrared LEDs that will be tracked by the headset’s onboard cameras. The cameras will be able to see when the controllers are above your head, highlighting a limitation of Microsoft’s headset reference design.