Let the VR craze of 2016 begin.
Starting on Monday, consumers can strap on a pair of futuristic Oculus “ski goggles” and head face-first into the world of virtual reality. That is, as long as they’re first-up in line for Oculus Rift pre-orders.
The highly-anticipated Oculus Rift VR headsets are scheduled to finally arrive on the first batch of customer doorsteps next week. Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe heralded the news with a Tweet:
The first Oculus Rift has shipped, deliveries begin Monday 3.28.2016. Pic.twitter.com/C0MMKmezun
— Brendan Iribe (@brendaniribe) March 24, 2016
The headsets will be closely followed by others this year. The new HTC Vive is set to debut this spring on April 5, while Playstation’s new VR headset is expected to drop in October.
Coins2Day writer Chris Morris, who’s been something of an Oculus buff from the get-go, has been following the company since 2012 when they first started tinkering with duct-taped prototypes of the goggles.
Morris even caught a sneak peek of this year’s new Rift back in January, and he’s pretty much a fan of the tech—if not the Rift’s $600 price tag. Morris described playing around with painting, hiking, and shooting games in this year’s new headset as “thrilling.”
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But it’s taken the hardware maker some time to go from duct-tape to doorstep. The Southern California-based company launched its Kickstarter back in 2012, and it was then bought up by Facebook for a cool $2 billion in 2014. Now, after the pre-order site crashed under heavy demand earlier this year, the sets are finally moving into eager customer hands.
Oculus CEO Overwhelmed By Pre-Orders. Watch:
Whether or not consumer PC machines will be powerful enough to run the headsets is still an open question. Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey has already pointed out this is why the headsets won’t work with Macs. Apple’s machines are just not powerful enough to deal with the Rift’s graphical needs, Luckey insists.
The new Rift, which ships with an XBox One controller, will come with two games pre-installed. The space game Eve: Valkyrie and Lucky’s Tale, which Morris has quipped is a bit like Nintendo’s most famous character, Super Mario. 30 more games will be available for the set. Oculus promises that number is set to grow to more than 100 VR games by the end of 2016.
