With all of the talk surrounding the Xbox One, Wii U and PlayStation 4 at this year's E3 conference, many are looking to the big three next generation consoles as the future of the gaming industry. However, thanks to a bold new idea from a small startup company, the future of gaming might just be in its hands.
Oculus Rift, showed that it can deliver a virtual reality gaming experience in 1080p at this year's E3. With the company recently getting an additional $16 million in funding outside of its original Kickstarter campaign, which raised $2.4 million, it's dreams of bringing that experience into the average gamer's living room is closer than ever before. Oculus CEO Brandon Iribe recently told Edge Online about his plans to release the device sometime soon for an initial price tag of $300, about the same as a new next generation console. However, he hinted that he'd like for the technology to be free one day, just for the sake of allowing Oculus Rift to deliver on its lofty promises to a bigger audience.
"The lower the price point, the wider the audience," he said. "We have all kinds of fantasy ideas. We'd love it to be free one day, so how do we get it as close to free as possible? Obviously it won't be that in the beginning. We're targeting the $300 price point right now but there's the potential that it could get much less expensive with a few different relationships and strategies."
While this sounds like just a little bit of creative dreaming from a visionary young CEO, the idea itself is sound. If more people are allowed to use a technology, more people will develop for it. The future of gaming, in Iribe's eyes has little to do with hardware and a lot to do with developing software and games. As for what relationship he plans to have with developers that will allow the price to be cut that drastically, he made no mention and its unclear if such a relationship could possibly exist at this time, as Forbes points out. However, that shouldn't stop gamers from getting excited at the inevitable release of the Oculus Rift 360 virtual reality gaming headset.
Below is a video of someone testing the Oculus rift technology.
