Oculus wireless standalone Santa Cruz prototype.
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Hands-on with the Oculus Santa Cruz standalone VR prototype

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 3 min

The future of virtual reality is the standalone wireless VR headset. Oculus showed off that future today with a prototype of a standalone version of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, with no wires and no connection to a PC.

I got to try it hands-on today, and it was liberating. I didn’t have to worry about tripping over a wire, and I could walk around in a sizable area without worrying about going out of the range of a PC. Shockingly, I was able to use something today that I thought was pretty far off in the future.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.