The end times are fast approaching: The long-awaited consumer version of Oculus Rift is set to arrive in the first quarter of 2016.
So far, the virtual reality headset—which went from a $2 million Kickstarter to a $2 billion Facebook acquisition in less than two years—only works with PCs. But it's not impossible for Rift to work with game consoles, an Oculus exec said this week, noting that Oculus had talked to Sony and Microsoft about it.
The fact that Oculus has talked to Sony and Microsoft means little on its own because everybody is always talking to everybody; for every deal that gets done, a hundred more never get past an initial lunch meeting. But the idea that Oculus might hook up to game consoles isn't just a pipe dream, and it would be a huge win for both parties.
You may find this contradictory, but it seems to me that the platform with the biggest chance of supporting Oculus is actually the one that already has its own first-party VR hardware—PlayStation 4.
Sony's public position on Oculus has always been that it doesn't see Oculus as competition, but as something of an ally in the larger battle of making virtual reality an actual reality. You see stuff like this a lot:
