This week, Oculus VR, the virtual reality company acquired by Facebook, announced that the consumer version of their highly anticipated Oculus Rift virtual reality headset is now open to pre-orders at a price tag of $599.
The Rift has come a long ways since its days as an ambitious Kickstarter project. The high tech headset has gone through several prototypes, a couple of developer kits, and a high profile acquisition by Facebook. Now that technology will finally be in the hands of early adopters this March.
For $599, the Oculus Rift package will include the VR headset, a sensor, two games, the Oculus Remote, and a wireless Xbox One controller. The first lot of pre-orders will ship on March 28, and they’ve already sold out of the initial shipment. Pre-ordering the product now has an expected ship date of June 2016.
The Rift headset itself features dual 1080 x 1200 OLED 90 Hz displays, one for each eye. The lenses are adjustable to accommodate glasses wearers and a variety of different facial shapes. The built-in headphones provide full 3D audio, and a microphone is also integrated into the device. The external sensor communicates with the headset to provide full rotational and positional tracking of the user’s head.
The games included are Lucky’s Tale, a third-person cartoon style platformer, and EVE Valkyrie, a multiplayer first-person space combat game set in the EVE universe. Additional games will see release in 2016, including Rockband VR from Harmonix and Edge of Nowhere, an action-adventure game, from Insomniac Games.
The Oculus Touch controller will not be included at launch, but it is expected to ship separately in the second half of 2016. The Oculus Touch is a pair of handheld controllers that will provide further immersion in VR by tracking your hand movements and gestures in three-dimensional space.
The high price of the Rift has been met with much criticism from potential buyers. In addition to the pricy headset, users will also need to have a powerful enough computer capable enough to run the device and its software. The minimum specs for a Rift-compatible PC is an nVidia GTX 970 or equivalent graphics card, an Intel i5-4590 CPU, 8 GB of RAM, an HDMI 1.3 compatible video out, 3 USB 3.0 ports, 1 USB 2.0 port, and Windows 7 SP1 64-bit or newer. A system of this caliber can range anywhere from $500 to $1000. Oculus has released a tool, available on their website, to check your current PC for compatibility with the Rift.
Oculus will also be selling a bundle that includes the Rift and a compatible PC for $1499, with pre-orders starting in February.
The future of VR and its staying power is up in the air, but we’re one step closer into stepping into a Virtual Reality reality. The technology has been met with incredible praise from those who have already experience VR through Oculus’s headset. However, it’s an incredible leap in technology that must be seen to believe, so hopefully demos will be more readily available to potential buyers now that the first headsets are beginning to hit the consumer market.
2016 will the debut year of VR. The PlayStation VR, which functions in conjunction with the PlayStation 4, is planned for a release in early 2016. The HTC Vive, a device that is capable of simulating a virtual environment that can be physically explored through a dedicated room equipped with sensor units, is also planned for 2016.
By Alfredo Dizon, eParisExtra