Sometimes, all it takes is a little digging in a website’s style sheets to find a vein of gold. In this case, an enterprising Reddit user discovered a set of gorgeous high-res images of the final Oculus Rift virtual reality headset and a never-before-mentioned game controller — two days before Oculus’s big reveal. Whoops!
Oculus founder Palmer Luckey has already gone on the record to state that these images aren’t final — just some old concept images. That’s almost certainly the truth. Everything about the leaked website looks like it’s designed to be a placeholder, from the rough edges on some of the renders to the missing text to the woefully out-of-date PC system requirements you’ll need to power one of these headsets. Plus, it clearly says “Copyright 2014” at the bottom of the website.
“Don’t expect everything to carry through to the stream on the 11th,” Luckey warns.
Still, these placeholder images map very closely to the official images that Oculus has already released so they might give us a decent glimpse into what we’ll see this Thursday at Oculus’ big reveal. And — importantly — it shows us the never-before-announced peripheral that might actually let you reach out and grab things in virtual reality.
As you can see in the picture above, it’s not just the headset on display, but a cylinder on a stand and a tiny pill-shaped remote control too. As of 2014, that remote control was apparently called the Simple Input Device (SID), and it’s got so few visible buttons that it seems likely to be a motion control wand of some sort, like Nintendo’s Wii Remote, the HTC Vive’s wand controllers or Sony’s PlayStation Move.
The cylinder, meanwhile, is dubbed the “Rift tracker,” and it could just be the latest look for the little infrared camera that let previous Oculus Rift prototypes to track your head as you turn. (Previously, it followed little infrared LEDs built into the headset.) But maybe not… because it looks like there’s also a camera built into the front of the headset now.
The final Oculus Rift is coming in 2016, and we’ll know a heck of a lot more about it this Thursday. Set your alarms for 10AM PT / 1PM ET on Thursday, June 11th. Gizmodo will be there.