Xbox: ‘We’re very excited about VR’

It may not have a VR headset, but Xbox told MCV that the technology is not far from its thoughts.

The firm has partnered with other VR companies, such as Oculus, yet unlike PlayStation, has not developed its own product.

Yet head of operations Dave McCarthy says that Xbox is planning to support VR with its new console – Project Scorpio – and also points to its VR Minecraft game.

We’re excited about VR,” he said We brought Minecraft to Gear VR in the spring and Oculus this summer. We’re learning a lot as a game maker in the virtual reality space. There’s a tonne of healthy activity, especially in the high fidelity space on Windows 10, right now.

And we’re making sure with Project Scorpio in 2017 that the capabilities are there with six terraflops, doing things at the right time with the next step. We’re big on this space and we think it’s going to work well across our ecosystem.”

McCarthy says there’s ‘nothing to announce’ in terms of its own headset, but says its other hardware initiative – HoloLens – remains a focus for the firm. The AR tech was demoed at E3 2015, but was absent from this year’s show.

[HoloLens] was magical last year,” he said. From a practical consideration, the HoloLens team is focused on their developer edition that they are putting out right now. They are heads down trying to get that done at this point in time. Our commitment in the Windows ecosystem on VR, AR, MR hasn’t changed. We want to push all of those things going forward.”