There has been a lot of talk, and more pleading, about the arrival of virtual reality on Xbox. Since PlayStation bet on the format and Oculus increasingly dominated the headset market, many players have wondered if Microsoft would ever bet on a technology that in the gaming sector has tremendous appeal. Is virtual reality coming to Xbox?
A pretty descriptive message
Although Phil Spencer himself made it clear a long time ago that virtual reality did not count in Xbox plans, it seems that the idea of betting on virtual reality could be closer than ever. That is what we can understand after seeing an image shared by the editor of IGN Italia, Giovanni Marrelli, who being calm at home testing the new wireless headphones that the company has just launched for his console, he saw how in the interface of his Xbox showed the message “VR Viewer needs to be updated.” Beyond a simple transcription error, the button that appears below to continue with the process again describes “Update VR viewer”, so we could almost certainly say that these messages are recorded in the system for some reason.
Are you going to launch a virtual reality headset?
The message has not done more than raise a wave of tremendous rumors, since now there are many who return to bet on the existence of a viewer that allows playing games in virtual reality. In addition to discovering the supposed appearance or functionalities, it remains to be seen if both Series S and Series X would be able to move the VR content or if, on the contrary, only Series X would be the exclusive model to enjoy virtual reality. There are many questions that remain to be resolved, so it is best to forget about this message and let things flow at their natural speed. When is the next Microsoft conference?
One more piece to the Microsoft puzzle
With Xbox Game Pass running at full throttle and nearly 100% of the service’s users fall in love, the arrival of a virtual reality viewer would serve to boost the growth of the Microsoft ecosystem. With xCloud enabling cloud gaming and intertwining the PC and console platforms, virtual reality would serve to offer another point towards a vision of the future in which Sony is already several steps ahead.
Recall that Sony confirmed that PS5 would have a new virtual reality viewer with which to offer more definition and improve the virtual experience, a helmet that has raised the interest of PS5 players and possibly has quite a pull in the market. It is possible that Microsoft does not want to leave the whole virtual cake to Sony again, so the launch of its own viewer would serve to attract those users who still need to enter that complicated world in which you do not know the difference between the real and the virtual.