Don't expect to see the Oculus Rift on Xbox One anytime soon

Oculus has been pretty cozy with Microsoft lately. The companies announced that the retail Oculus Rift will ship with an Xbox One controller in the box. You'll be able to stream Xbox One games in virtual reality. Minecraft, a game owned by Microsoft, will offer official support for the Oculus Rift this spring.

The companies are working together rather closely on a number of projects and partnerships ... so what are the chances of seeing the Oculus Rift become a peripheral for the Xbox One?

"It has been a conversation, but I can say we're not so close," Nate Mitchell, the vice president of product at Oculus, told Polygon.

Oculus has released the recommended spec for systems running the Rift, and during that announcement the company also stated that it was focusing on supporting Windows. "What we were finding is that it's hard enough to deliver a great experience reliably on Windows, never mind adding OS X and Linux to that, which are different beasts entirely," Mitchell explained.

"Because of that, we've been laser focused on getting Windows in awesome shape. No one is really thinking right now about bringing the Rift to a console, especially when the spec is so different from what we're targeting right now."

Microsoft is certainly at least flirting with virtual reality and Oculus, as evidenced by the number of things the two companies are working on together. The other question is the hardware: Is the Xbox One powerful enough to do VR well?

Remember that the Gear VR has any number of great VR experiences, and that's powered by a phone. It's just a matter of designing for your target platform.

"That's the thing, you can absolutely deliver a great VR experience on Xbox One, what I should say is with the hardware that's in the Xbox One," Mitchell said. "We're not really focused on it right now. It really depends on the content you want to put there."

Things may change in the future, but for now the Xbox One doesn't have a response to Sony's PlayStation VR push. "We'll see. It's not out of the question, but it's not something we're actively working on right now," Mitchell said.