From the stage at Oculus Connect 4, Oculus’ Nate Mitchell just announced Rift Core 2.0. It’s designed around Touch, offering a motion-control-focused interface that apes a lot of what hackers have been doing with BigScreen. The big addition is Dash, which as its name implies, is a dashboard accessible from within any VR app or experience. It lets you use your desktop apps within VR, too. “It’s a total game changer,” Mitchell said. You can permanently pin something to the dashboard, too. “Every application can have its own virtual display,” Mitchell said.
This sounds incredibly ambitious, and like it’s going to take a lot of power to run. Mitchell said that it was made possible thanks to NVIDIA and AMD. As an example of what Dash is capable of, Mitchell said they debugged Dash from within Dash in VR. Yo dawg.
The company also overhauled Home, and you’ll be able to fully customize it to make it feel like, well, home. Couches, works of art, you name it, you can decorate your virtual domicile with it. You can even mount your achievements on the wall, and you’ll launch games by dropping old-school cartridges into a Sega Genesis look-alike. Oh, and you’ll be able to visit your friends’ apartments too. The beta starts this December and will be free to access for everyone with a Rift.
