Oculus' founder Palmer Luckey, who left the company in March, recently opened up on record for the first time in an interview since September 2016. Among a range of topics discussed, Luckey spoke of the timeline of future VR headsets from major hardware players. Luckey was a long time tinkerer of head mounted displays prior to building the first Rift prototypes which lead to him founding Oculus and taking the Rift to Kickstarter in 2012 for what would become a wildly successful crowdfunding campaign. At the time he teamed up with Brendan Iribe who would fill the company's CEO role, and, while Luckey didn't hold any of the company's executive positions, he was a key figure for the company externally and an important stakeholder internally where he held an engineer-like role as he oversaw the company's growth and eventual acquisition by Facebook in 2014. Luckey stuck with Oculus under Facebook for several years, but after the reveal of a polarizing political stance and a major lost lawsuit—brought by a company which Oculus was involved with in its early days—news broke that he had left the company in March. Now outside of Oculus and Facebook, Luckey recently went on record in a series of interviews with Japanese VR publication MoguraVR—which have been translated for Road to VR—during which, among other things, he spoke about his expectation for the future of VR hardware. [caption id="attachment_10794" align="alignright" width="325"] Palmer Luckey, Founder of Oculus, circa 2014 | Photo courtesy Oculus[/caption] Certainly unable to reveal the specifics of what Oculus and Facebook's forward-looking plans are, Luckey spoke generally but did offer up his expected timeline for the next generation of VR headsets, something which VR early adopters are eagerly looking forward to. Despite last week's introduction of new VR displays from Samsung suitable for the Rift and Vive, Luckey doesn't expect that we'll see the launch of major hardware revisions over the next 12 months from any of the high-end headset makers already in the market (that would include the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR): [...] There will be no big movements in [the next 12 months*]. The hardware will not change. Of course there might be hardware from new companies entering the market, but the hardware of the major players in the market will stay the same. In that way the next 12 months will be rather uninteresting for VR users that are just waiting for the next hardware generation. It is going to be the time of content and applications. But for VR developers and enthusiasts it will still be a very exciting 12 months. I think there also will be some announcements and new prototypes. 12 months from the time of this quote would push things out to May 2018 or so. Luckey doesn't seem to be ruling out that we could see announcements of new hardware and maybe even a look at some prototypes within the next 12 months, but he doesn't expect that any next-gen headsets will launch from the major players within that timeframe. This roughly affirms what we've heard from other key figures in the VR space. Oculus' own Brendan Iribe—the company's CEO up until the end of 2016 (now head of Oculus' PC VR team)—said back in March that the Rift is unlikely to be superseded by a new version for “at least the next two years," putting his timeline for a next-gen Rift / Rift 2 well into 2019. Similarly, HTC's China Regional President of Vive, Alvin Wang Graylin, told us back in January that he expects next-gen headsets to come in one to three year cycles—more slowly than we've typically seen in the smartphone space where a hardware refreshes comes every 12 months or so. Continued on Page 2: Why Wait? » Why Wait? Though the enthusiasts among us are excited for next-gen headset hardware because it's easy to see much better the headsets are going to get just by enhancing the basic specs like resolution, weight, and field of view, there's good reason for the major players to take a slow and steady approach. [irp posts="63622" name="Samsung's New VR Display Has Nearly 3.5x More Pixels Than Rift & Vive"] HTC's Vive General Manager, Daniel O’Brien, said recently that the company doesn't want to push out a new version of the existing Vive headset until it can offer something new. “It’s not about picking a production cycle and timeline, it’s about bringing really meaningful innovation that helps the developer community to create compelling new experiences," he said. Given the current market climate, it makes sense to have as few hardware revisions as possible so that developers have a cohesive audience to target. If these companies began offering relatively small hardware improvements on a yearly basis, it would risk divvying up the fledgling audience of VR gamers that developers rely on to fuel the creation of compelling content (which in turn drives sales). [irp posts="62935" name="An Estimated 25 Million Steam Users Now Have VR Ready GPUs"]Until there's something game-changing to add to the hardware, a 'Rift 2' or 'Vive 2' with slightly higher resolution doesn't add enough value to justify the risk of dicing up the still growing consumer market. In The Meantime So what happens while we wait? At the moment, the biggest value that headset makers can add to the VR market as a whole is not new headsets with new features, but the same headsets at a lower cost. [caption id="attachment_60121" align="alignright" width="325"] Oculus Rift[/caption] In March, Oculus managed to chop $100 off of the Rift headset and $100 off of the Touch controllers, bringing the Rift + Touch package down to a more palatable $600 (rather than $800). [caption id="attachment_61523" align="alignright" width="325"] HTC Vive[/caption] Meanwhile, HTC has introduced easily accessible financing options to let eager customers split up the cost of the $800 Vive system over a longer period. The company recently expanded that offering to bundles covering the system and a VR Ready PC or GPU. And while HTC hasn't made any permanent price cuts, they have perhaps been working from the other end (improving the headset while keeping the price the same) by significantly reducing the weight of the headset and beginning to ship tweaked base stations, not to mention new accessories introduced in 2017. [caption id="attachment_53683" align="alignright" width="325"] PlayStation VR[/caption] Sony hasn't made any price cuts to its PlayStation VR headset, though as the most affordable option (and so far best selling) from the get-go, you can imagine why they're pretty happy with the status quo. My hope is that holiday season 2017 will bring the best deals yet on these VR headsets, significantly bolstering the install base. Holiday 2016 saw roughly a $100 discount as the best deal on the Rift or Vive, but for holiday 2017 sales I'm really hoping we'll see limited time Rift + Vive sales priced at $400 with the Vive priced at $500. As for Sony, so far the company hasn't offered up a PlayStation 4 + PSVR bundle and I'd love to see one on sale for the holidays at $500.