Oculus Rift development halts for Mac and Linux as PC specs announced

Oculus Rift headset — The Oculus Rift. Oculus VR

Oculus have halted development of Mac and Linux support for their virtual reality (VR) headset the Rift, with chief architect of Atman Binstock announcing that the company does want to return to those platforms in the future.

Oculus Rift PC recommended specs:

NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater.
Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater.
8GB+ RAM.

Required:

Windows 7 SP1 or newer.
2x USB 3.0 ports.
HDMI 1.3 video output supporting a 297MHz clock via a direct output architecture.

In a blog Binstock said: "Our development for OS X and Linux has been paused in order to focus on delivering a high quality consumer-level VR experience at launch across hardware, software, and content on Windows. We want to get back to development for OS X and Linux but we don't have a timeline."

Oculus also revealed the hefty recommended PC specifications for the Rift, with Binstock saying: "The recommended spec will stay constant over the lifetime of the Rift. As the equivalent-performance hardware becomes less expensive, more users will have systems capable of the full Rift experience."

The Oculus Rift is the headset which kicked off the looming VR boom, which is why Facebook bought the company for $2 billion. The Rift will have competition when it launches next year in the form of Sony's PlayStation-compatible Project Morpheus and the Valve-supported HTC Vive.

Be sure to check out the IBTimes UK run down of each of the major headsets coming soon.