Oculus Rift VR Headset Said To Ship in Q1 2016

When Legit Reviews went to Quakecon 2012 we ran across this little company called Oculus that launched a campaign on Kickstarter the day before for a VR headset. They had a small vendor booth on the side of the expo hall and there wasn’t a line to demo their prototype VR headset. You could walk right up and strap the funny looking cardboard contraption on your head and check out Doom 3 BFG virtually for the very first time. It only took us a couple minutes to see the potential and we rushed back to our hotel room to type up a story for our readers about what we had just experienced. We spent a couple days at the show talking with Nate Mitchell (Now Oculus’ vice president of product) and ended up asking about investing in Oculus, but the Angel investment round was long over and by that time the Kickstarter project was already founded. It took less than 24 hours for the project to reach their funding goal!

Here we are three years later and Oculus has finally announced that the retail version of the Oculus Rift will be released in the first quarter of 2016. Pricing has not been released, but Oculus did say that you’ll be able to pre-order it later this year on their website. You’ll need a decent gaming PC to run the Oculus Rift, but other than that everything else needed to use the Oculus Rift will come with the VR headset. The original price goal for the Oculus Rift when we talked with Nate Mitchell in 2012 was to have it around $275. It appears that will be close to the price as Oculus recently stated that it will be a bit more expensive than the Samsung Gear VR that runs $199.99.

Here are some teaser images of what the final retail version of the Oculus Rift will look like.

We hope that Oculus doesn’t have any further delays as it has been pushed a number times! They used to be the only VR gaming headset around, but now the market is getting rather crowded. Now we have the Samsung Galaxy-powered Gear VR headset, Sony’s Project Morpheus Headset and HTC’s Vive headset that is powered by SteamVR technology that are all fighting for a slice of the VR market.