As expected Facebook owned Oculus opened up pre-orders for their much anticipated virtual reality headset this morning. No one knew what the price point of the fledgling technology was going to be before the pre-order page went live. Potential Oculus Rift owners were greeted with a $599 USD (849.99 CDN) price point and of course there was so much traffic going to Oculus’ servers that at times the page wouldn’t load.
So what does almost a thousand dollars Canadian get you? There’s the Oculus headset of course but the slickly packaged virtual reality headset also includes several other items in its’ stylish black case. You’ll also get an Xbox One controller for Windows, the Oculus Remote which the company says “”is a new input device we designed to make it simple and intuitive to navigate VR experiences.” Also included in the $599 USD package are redeemable codes for EVE: Valkyrie and Lucky’s Tale – two of the games available for the platform at launch.
The Rift will ship to 20 countries initially starting on March 28th and of press time pre-orders placed today are expected to ship sometime in June of this year. Oculus has also announced that they will have a “limited retail presence” launching in April.
Are you excited for the prospect of Virtual Reality? Let us know in the comments section. If you’re wondering if your PC is up to snuff to run Oculus Rift here are the minimum specs as released:
- graphics card: NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD R9 290 equivalent or greater
- processor: Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
- memory: 8GB+ RAM
- output: Compatible HDMI 1.3 video output
- input: 3x USB 3.0 ports plus 1x USB 2.0 port
- operating system: Windows 7 SP1 64 bit or newer