In what could be described as possibly a killer app for the still in vitro virtual reality market, Facebook, Inc.-owned Oculus Rift has announced that the ever popular Minecraft is coming to the platform.

The news was delivered on the second day of the Oculus Connect conference (yes, they have a conference despite still not having launched) when Chief Executive Officer Brendan Iribe took the stage and promised that the virtual reality device will now ship in the “second quarter next year.”

Not surprisingly the version coming to Oculus Rift is the recently launched Minecraft for Windows 10 Edition, the non-java based native version that allows users to play online and local multiplayer with other Minecraft for Windows 10 users, as well as those using the Minecraft Pocket Edition.

Presumably the virtual reality version will also allow users, as with the standard Windows 10 version, to utilize the ability to record and share gameplay highlights with the built-in GameDVR.

While details of the Minecraft release were fairly thin on the ground, Iribe did imply that in-world platforms such as Minecraft had inspired him to found Oculus to begin with, saying “that experience of playing in these virtual worlds got me thinking for the first time about what a metaverse would look like.”

“As I was playing these games… I realized we were really close,” he added. “That’s really guided a lot of what we’ve thought about at Oculus, what it means to build online virtual worlds.”

Competition

While it’s great to see Minecraft coming to the Oculus Rift, should the latter ever actually come to market, the announcement is also reflective of what you might call Microsoft 3.0, that is the tech giant under Satya Nadella in that Microsoft would have once have strongly guarded exclusive rights to software such as Minecraft, but is now more about caring and sharing.

If that doesn’t immediately make sense, Minecraft is also coming to Microsoft’s augmented reality platform HoloLens, and as we noted at the time not only was its application on the HoloLens seriously cool, it may have been a killer app for the HoloLens as well; today though we see Minecraft coming to Oculus Rift as well with the same conclusion: could it be a killer app?

Like the Oculus Rift, there’s no date on when Minecraft will be available for the platform, other than it will be available for purchase in the Oculus store.

Image credit: uriel1998/Flickr/CC by 2.0