Oculus talks about its Crescent Bay prototype headset at SXSW

Nate Mitchell, the vice president of product at Oculus, answered some of the many questions that people have had about the company’s Crescent Bay prototype virtual reality headset. Speaking at a panel at SXSW yesterday, Mitchell and Oculus founder Palmer Luckey described how the headset’s dual screens provide a significant quality boost over mono-screened headsets and even discussed the rise of augmented reality. 

Speaking at a panel today at SXSW, Oculus VP of product Nate Mitchell answered a long-standing question about the company’s Crescent Bay prototype headset: it looks so good because it actually uses two screens instead of one. Oculus founder Palmer Luckey chimed in as well, saying that it was “super obvious” that the prototype used two screens, but nobody had really looked closely enough before to notice it. (The headset was announced in September 2014). Using one screen to save costs was one of Oculus’ first big advances, but there’s definitely been a jump in quality since then. The panel was a wide-ranging Q&A about Oculus and the future of VR. One of the first questions was about what Luckey thought about Microsoft’s HoloLens technology, which is an augmented reality platform instead of a virtual reality platform.