Oculus' 'Santa Cruz' wireless VR headset will have Touch-like motion controllers

At the Oculus Connect event in San Jose today, Facebook VR VP Hugo Barra updated devs on the company's progress in developing its "Santa Cruz" wireless VR headset prototype and confirmed that it will support positionally-tracked hand controllers.

This suggests that VR games designed to take advantage of the "hand presence" afforded by the Oculus Rift's Touch controllers should be able to do something very similar on Santa Cruz, which Oculus hopes to release next year.

"We leverage the same constellation tracking technology that we developed for Rift and Touch," reads a company blog post detailing the Santa Cruz controllers. "Getting the infrared LEDs on our new Santa Cruz controllers to work with the sensors used for inside-out tracking on the headset was a significant computer vision, design, and engineering problem."

The headset tracks them using "four ultra-wide sensors" that Oculus claims allow for more natural and unrestricted movement. This appears to set it apart from the Oculus Go, the newly-announced $200 standalone VR headset that Oculus also plans to ship next year.