Although the Oculus Touch ‘Half Moon’ motion controller prototype was revealed back in June, there’s not yet an openly available development kit like the Rift DK1 and DK2 to speak of. Like the Crescent Bay headset prototype (predecessor to the consumer Rift) however, select developers have their hands on Half Moon already.
When asked at this week’s Gamescom how Oculus planned to introduce Touch to developers, Founder Palmer Luckey told Road to VR’s Scott Hayden that the process has already begun.
“We haven’t announced it officially yet but we’ve been bringing devs in internally to Oculus to work with them [on Touch],” he said. “We also have some Touches out there in the hands of a few developers, but we’ll be talking about it more at Connect.”
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Connect is the company’s developer conference which will see its second annual showing next month. There the company will host presentations and workshops, likely some of which will be dedicated to working with the new Touch motion controller.
It’s unclear if the company will create an openly available Touch dev kit or go straight to a consumer version. Oculus has said that the Touch controller will become available for pre-order in 2015, alongside a pre-order of the consumer Rift headset, but it hasn’t been confirmed whether this would be a development kit of the controller or the final product.
As to whether or not pre-orders will ship alongside the release of the consumer Rift, it would seem that Touch will stick to its own production timeline, as the company has advised an expected Touch release date in the first half of 2016 compared to the more specific ‘Q1 2016’ date for the consumer Rift.
We expect to hear more specifics about Touch release plans at Connect in September.
