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Oculus reveals new standalone Santa Cruz headset design with improved controllers

Oculus reveals new standalone Santa Cruz headset design with improved controllers

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Virtual reality without all the cords

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Photo: Oculus

Oculus VR today revealed a new prototype headset design for its upcoming standalone product, codenamed Santa Cruz, at its Connect developer conference in San Jose, California. The headset was first shown off last year at Connect, but it was much further from the polished design Oculus showed today. The goal with Santa Cruz is to create a headset that does not need to be tethered in any way to a PC, nor tracked by external cameras.

In addition to a new headset design that looks similar to the consumer version of the Rift headset, Facebook’s vice president of virtual reality, Hugo Barra, also detailed all new Touch motion controllers.

The new controllers work in tandem with new sensors on the face of the Santa Cruz headset to aide in what’s known as inside-out tracking, or the ability to track a user’s movement and body in space without the use of external, tethered cameras and without needing the headset to be plugged into a PC.

Oculus says the Santa Cruz developer version will start shipping in 2018.