Oculus Rift Release Date Archives

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 28^th 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

The HTC Vive – a new virtual reality headset spearheaded by hardware manufacturer HTC and software behemoth Valve won’t see a limited release this year as expected. Instead of getting a “limited number” of headsets into the hands of consumers this winter HTC will launch the commercial version of the headset next April the company announced via their Facebook page today.

Over 7000 additional development kits for the HTC Vive are expected to be in the hands of developers by the beginning of next year.

Will this additional time give HTC & Valve enough breathing room to best the folks at Oculus? Expect to hear a lot more about VR as the commercial release of both products inches ever closer. It might not seem like it now but it’s starting to feel like Virtual Reality is going to make a huge wave in 2016 – here’s hoping you can see it coming.

Part of the statement HTC issued is as follows:

“In collaboration with Valve, we have been distributing the HTC Vive Developer Kits to developers and content creators, and are continuing to work with many other innovative companies to create content that spans gaming, entertainment, medical, education and retail.”

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Oculus Rift Pre-Orders Open, Servers Crash Despite $600 USD Price Point

HTC Vive Will Officially Launch In April 2016