Oculus VR said that it will start shipping its flagship Rift virtual reality headgear in the first quarter of next year, the New York Times reported. Pre-orders will be accepted during the holidays.
The company declined to release the sales price or technical details of the Rift, which has been available in a rough version for software developers for several years. The device will need to be used with a personal computer, which will handle the bulk of the computing necessary to create the illusion of another world that users can explore when wearing the headset. The release date is a bit later than both Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus, and parent Facebook had hoped for.
Virtual reality gear will mostly be used for games at first, but Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes people will eventually have virtual social encounters and share experiences like watching a movie or traveling in real time. Architects are already using the technology to show people how new buildings will look, and it has wide applications in medicine and the military.
Oculus’s first consumer product, the Gear VR, pairs with Samsung’s tablets and high-end phones to deliver a mobile virtual reality experience. The USD 200 Gear VR is available now but won’t be shipped in large quantities until the fall.
