Oculus Rift will be able to achieve "Matrix level virtual reality" in just a few years

The found of Oculus Palmer Luckey has stated that VR tech may be able to achieve "Matrix level virtual reality" virtual reality within just a few years, "depending on how lucky we are."

In a talk with Eurogamer Luckey predicted a bright future for VR technology: "VR tech is still very crude," he said, "but it's advancing rapidly."

The Oculus Rift device is going from strength-to-strength this year. Over 20,000 dev units have been shipped, and the company recently recruited id veteran John Carmack as its CTO. Oculus is now working on making the device combatible with Android mobile devices.

The next step beyond that would be to bring the device to games consoles. It's simplicity means it would be a relatively easy thing to accomplish. "From our point of view you just need an HDMI input, and both consoles have HDMI," said Laird Malamed of Oculus. "My experience has been that to get access to the USB side, that's typically where you need software level support and that's where you need their help."

This could be nixed if Microsoft and Sony choose to release their own VR headsets for their respective next-gen consoles. Malamed said that the competition would be a positive thing for the technology.

"They're big companies with lots of resources. For us we'd say good. With John Carmack coming over as our CTO, we've had a great Kickstarter campaign, they continue to be great supporters, but we're still a start-up. VR's had a lot of failures in the past, and so the more people that enter the market is good because developers that ultimately have to develop the content, they know they'll have people playing their games which is better for all of us."

It's conceivable then that VR headsets could become commonplace during the next console generation.