Oculus Touch will not ship alongside the Rift

Oculus has an amazing virtual-reality controller solution, but it won’t ship with the consumer version.

Oculus’s Touch controllers won’t ship until the second quarter of 2016, according to the company’s presentation at Oculus Connect today. That is an entire quarter after the Rift goes on sale in Q1 2016.

The company spent a long time talking about the possibilities and importance of Touch. This enables people to bring their hands and fingers into VR, which seems like a crucial step to give people a feeling of presence. So it feels like a missed opportunity for the company not to launch the Touch at the same time as Rift.

That missed opportunity is potentially exacerbated by the fact that the SteamVR-powered HTC Vive will launch with its touch-style controllers before the end of the year.