Why Oculus isn't worried about PS5 or Xbox Scarlett

For an Oculus Connect conference with no new hardware, there wasn’t a shortage of notable announcements. The start of the week was marked by Facebook’s acquisition of Central Labs, with a mind to working on neural interfaces for the Oculus platform – meaning you could one day possibly navigate VR using just the power of your mind. If that��s too sci-fi for you, we also caught word of changes coming to Oculus in the nearer future: hand tracking capability for the Oculus Quest, and the ability to run Rift VR games on the Quest headset with a new cable peripheral, the Oculus Link. But it’s hard to talk about VR or gaming in the home without mentioning Sony and Microsoft, both of whom are on the cusp of releasing the latest iterations of their home consoles – while Microsoft has said the next Xbox will launch in late 2020, we expect Sony to do the same for the next PlayStation too. Both the Xbox Scarlett and PS5 are likely to occupy price points similar to the $399 / £399 / AU$732 Oculus Quest, and there are many households that will end up having to choose between the known strengths of a traditional console experience and the growing potential of VR headsets. We put the question to some of Facebook’s top executives working in VR and AR, to see what they thought about the incoming competition.