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“We don’t have anything to announce,” Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey said up front at the company’s South by Southwest panel today in Austin, Texas.
But hey, it’s Friday afternoon! There’s nothing else going on, so let’s read some tea leaves.
Luckey was asked about the company’s 2012-Kickstarted project, the virtual reality headset Oculus Rift. Although the Rift is credited with reigniting interest in VR, it’s now one of several headsets headed to market, and is still only available as a developer prototype and lacks a consumer release date.
Luckey copped to having said in the past that something would have to go “horribly wrong” for the Rift to not come out in 2015: “I did say that, before we made a lot of changes to our roadmap,” including ramping up the target quality level of the consumer device and “partnering with Facebook.” The social networking giant bought Oculus nearly a year ago for $2 billion.
“I can’t comment on the date one way or the other, but I can say nothing is going horribly wrong,” Luckey added. “Everything is going horribly right.”
VP of Product Nate Mitchell said the company is aiming for perfection because it wants “to make developers successful.”
“With the Rift, our team wants to launch this as soon as we possibly can, but with no compromises,” Mitchell said.
Oculus will have a VR headset out and on consumers’ heads this year, however. As CTO John Carmack announced at the Game Developers Conference earlier this month, smartphone-powered VR headset partner Samsung will give an updated version of the two companies’ joint product, the Gear VR, a “full consumer” push in time for the holidays.
A rival headset to the Rift that will also connect to PCs, the HTC Vive, is scheduled for consumer launch later this year. Sony’s PlayStation 4-connected VR device, Project Morpheus, is slated to launch sometime in the first half of 2016.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
