Some info from Phil Spencer -
On future Xbox upgrades:
“Consumer expectation is that, if you wanted to, you could go buy a new cell phone every year. I don’t want to get into that mode with a console,” Spencer says. “I see the next inflection point as 4K, and I want to make sure we have a console there to support that, and Scorpio will do that. We’re not on a hardware tick-tock that says I need to put out a console every two years or every one year to get people to upgrade. That’s not the console model.”
Xbox One not powerful enough to do VR well:
“When we went out and talked to VR developers,” Spencer says, “the capability and the hardware spec that they need to deliver a console-like experience to VR was a requirement of 6 teraflops, which clearly, today’s consoles—PlayStation 4 and Xbox One—don’t have.” This is something of a shot across the bow at Xbox’s chief rival, whose forthcoming Playstation VR headset will work with its standard PlayStation 4.
Spencer maintains, though, that the VR experiences on today’s consoles won’t look as good as standard games. “The truth is, a console that can run a 2-D version of Doom or Fallout today, which a PS4 and Xbox One can, is not going to be able to do a stereoscopic, high-framerate version of those games,” he says. “We don’t want to force VR into a middle ground between the scale that we see in mobile, and what our customers [expect].” So even though future Xbox games will be compatible with all the Xbox One systems, the VR games will likely be Scorpio-exclusive.
No Microsoft VR headset:
When you do play VR on Project Scorpio, what exactly will you be putting on your head? Spencer isn’t saying, but it won’t be made by Microsoft. “Right now we are not focused on a first-party VR hardware device,” he says. He didn’t call out any particular headset that might plug into Scorpio, but noted that Microsoft hoped to “enable many hardware manufacturers to make progress there.” So it might be a BYOHMD situation. Maybe you even already own your Xbox VR headset.
I think that's great TBH, no need for another expensive headset fighting for exclusives - they can support multiple headsets on the Xbox this way and get plenty of 3rd party games.
On more backwards compatibility:
Microsoft has been working hard to make more and more Xbox 360 games backward compatible with Xbox One — Spencer calls out the 360-exclusive Japanese role-playing games Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey as his most-wanted games, and says the team is working on getting them running on Xbox One as we speak — and those backward compatible games, too, will work on Scorpio.
“I’ve talked about a desire to do the original Xbox backward compatibility,” he says—he’s wearing a shirt with the original Bill Gates-era Xbox logo on it. “We’re not working on that right now, but it’s theoretically very possible. On the CPU side, we could figure it out. I think people should have access to the games that they love”
http://www.wired.com/2016/06/xbox-vr-sc ... al_twitter
