Oculus Rift Pre-Orders To Open 'Soon After The New Year'
Good news for those waiting to get their hands on VR headsets: the Oculus Rift will soon be available for pre-orders, with a commercial release set sometime within the first quarter of 2016. According to a report in IGN, the founder of Oculus VR, Palmer Luckey, used Twitter to announce that they are "on-target" for a Q1 release and that they will be accepting pre-orders "soon after the new year."
In his tweet, Luckey said, "Thrilled to share some news: manufacturing continues to go well, and we are still on target for an awesome Rift launch in Q1."
He also promised that they will be launching pre-orders with enough "fair warning" so that those who want to buy will not be worrying about not being able to get on the pre-order list immediately.
Those who will pre-order the VR headset will also be getting a copy of EVE Valkyrie, a first-person space dogfighting game which was also created by the makers of EVE Online. This will be available with their VR headset when it is launched.
In May, the company made available developer kits for the Oculus Rift so that developers and designers can get a head start in developing games, applications and other content for virtual reality, according to another report in the Inquirer.
Aside from third-party developers, Oculus has also partnered with other developers such as the makers of EVE Online and Harmonix. During the E3 2015, Oculus announced a partnership with Harmonix to develop a VR version of Rock Band. The game is set to be released after the release of the headset.
VR games are among the most-anticipated games today, according to another report in The Verge. When EVE Valkyrie was first demonstrated, it was praised for being a "potentially real" VR game. The game was initially set to be exclusive to Oculus Rift, but was later on announced to be part of Sony's Project Morpheus.