When the HTC Vive and PlayStation VR launch in April and October, respectively, the headsets will feature accompanying controllers that track the user's hands through space. The launch of the Oculus Rift this month, though, won't include the similar Oculus Touch controllers, which are currently slated for the second half of 2016.

Now, Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey tells Ars that the Touch controllers aren't a missing piece for the Rift's big March 28 roll out, but that the company always intended for things to be this way.

"We never planned on launching Touch with Rift," Luckey said during a roundtable discussion at the Game Developers Conference. "We're going to have a really great Touch lineup later in the year, but we really wanted to focus on the games people have been working on for years with gamepads right now."

Unlike the HTC Vive, which includes two hand tracking controllers in it $800 package, Luckey said he didn't want to "force people to buy [hand-tracking] controllers they might not even be interested in, that are only useful for certain genres especially when there's a very limited content library so far. That never was the plan, and I think that we've done a really good job of sticking to our plan as well."

A multi-year process

Business plans aside, the lack of hand-tracking at launch is a pretty big omission from a gameplay perspective. Many if not most of the most intriguing virtual reality experiences we've tried to this point rely on the ability to simply reach into the 3D virtual environment and interact with objects. Even many of the best demos at Oculus' own pre-launch event at the Game Developers Conference utilized Touch controllers that won't be available for months.

With the Rift finally launching in just a few weeks, Luckey was realistic about the speed with which virtual reality would (or could) become a truly mainstream product. "People talk a lot about 2016 being the year of virtual reality," he said. "To a degree that is going to be true. But it's not going to be all of a sudden everyone in the world is using virtual reality, or even that all gamers are using VR. There is going to be an adoption curve over time, starting with more early adopters and PC gamers that own or are willing to buy a high-end PC."

The Rift's launch is just year zero in a multi-year process, Luckey said, one that will see the Rift hardware updated at a rate "somewhere between a phone and console" (so, anywhere from "every year" to "every six years," we suppose). With the passage of time, Luckey said, "we're going to get our hardware better and cheaper and lighter, and the computing power required to drive the headsets are going to get much cheaper and lighter to reach a much larger audience."

For the time being, though, Oculus will be leaning heavily on exclusive software to differentiate itself from the competition. That's especially important, Luckey said, because Oculus isn't making any profit on its hardware, but only by selling games through its own platform.

That doesn't mean Oculus is committed to locking as much content as possible to its own headset forever, though. "We've said in the past we're not going to get to a billion headsets on our own," he said. "Right now, at this stage, of course I want people to buy the Rift [over the competition]. Our goal is not to lock every piece of software to it, just like we have software that's on the Rift and on Gear VR, and I don't care which of those they buy it on. Eventually there's going to be a lot more headsets to support."

Luckey and CCP CEO Hillmar Pétursson (who worked on Oculus launch title) also dismissed concerns that the Rift headset wouldn't be comfortable to use for long periods.Pétursson said he's seen users "spending 12 hours straight in the [alpha test on [Oculus Rift development kits], then logging on again the next day."

For Valkyrie specifically, Pétursson said the CCP team focused on iterating countless different flight models until they found the "sweet spot" of comfort and 360 degree flight control in virtual reality. Limiting parallax movement in the scene and adding a solid cockpit to anchor the player's view helped in that regard, he said. "I have never met anyone who's been really uncomfortable in Eve: Valkyrie for at least a year, now."

Luckey allowed that the long-term comfort was "going to vary by person, but generally speaking you should be able to use it for long periods of time without any issues. Most of the time I've put people in for long periods, they don't stop playing because of any problem with the headset, they stop playing because they have to do something in the real world. [Playing for] 12 hours [straight] is great, but I haven't been able to do that since I didn't have a job."