Gleaning Information From The Oculus Rift CV1 "Leak"

This morning a set of images of the final version of the Oculus Rift consumer version (CV1) were leaked. While at first it appeared that these images were finalized photos of the headset set to be released next year and revealed in full tomorrow, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey took to Reddit to confirm the "placeholder" nature of the images. In short – they look radical, they look great, but they're not what you're going to be buying in 2016. They're close, but no cigar.

What you're going to see are far more likely a set of renders. Made to set in place while the finalized hardware is prepared, these images do not represent the final headset, but in all likelihood DO represent earlier iterations of the hardware that will be released.

Expect something very, very similar.

"This is an old placeholder concept image that we accidentally leaked," said Luckey. "Everything in it is ancient, certainly nowhere close to final (as evidenced by the GPU specs and the game named "war")."

"Enjoy checking it out, at this point," said Luckey, "but don't expect everything to carry through to the stream on the 11th."

In addition to the headset itself with a wire that runs from the front to the back and out to nowhere, you'll find a wired camera/sensor to the left and a controller to the right.

Therein lies the likely unrevealed bit of this equation – the way you're going to be able to dive in to this machine in a manner like the Samsung GearVR – without needing to take your headset off.

A controller could have been expected and guessed at – it's just the sort of thing that doesn't need to go through many iterations before final delivery.

Luckey also commented last month on the matter of the Oculus Rift not being "the latest tech."

"CB "debuted" in extremely limited hand-built quantities via early engineering samples that were later improved in ways that are not related to resolution."

Luckey continued, "If the development cycles of all companies were as open as Oculus, you might be surprised to discover that almost every product you own is based on years old technology, by that definition."

We'll be bringing you the full story on the finalized version of the Oculus Rift for consumers come 10AM Pacific Time tomorrow, the 11th of June, 2015.

Head to our Virtual Reality portal to stay up to date as this event unfolds.