Facebook-owned Oculus VR has just announced that its handheld motion controllers for the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset have been delayed until the second half of 2016.

The controllers, dubbed Oculus Touch, were first unveiled last summer and expected to released alongside the consumer version of Rift, which is slated to begin shipping in the first quarter of 2016. But, unsurprisingly, especially given the Rift's lengthy development, Oculus VR has revealed via a blog post that it needs "more time" before their release:

"On the path to perfecting Touch, we’ve decided that we need more time before release, and we’ll now be shipping Touch in the second half of 2016. Pre-orders will open a few months prior to launch. Rift remains on schedule to ship in Q1 with pre-orders launching very soon."

In an attempt to quell fans' distress over the delay, Oculus VR also detailed some of the significant improvements its made to the Touch hardware in recent months, which includes advances in ergonomics. It is implementing changes that make Touch more "comfortable, reliable, natural" as well as changes that improve hand-pose recognition.

On top of that, it is ramping up pre-production units, with the purpose of getting Touch to more developers so that they can create new content that works with Touch: "There will be a huge amount of ground-breaking new content launching alongside Touch," teased Oculus via a blog post.

Oculus VR will be at CES 2016 in Vegas next week, so we expect to hear more from the company at that time about how the Rift is coming along and maybe even preview it with the improved Touch controllers in person.

Stay tuned to Pocket-lint's CES 2016 hub for all the latest.