Excitement levels were raised just a couple of days ago when Oculus announced that pre-orders for the Rift were coming. The company has made good on that promise and is now accepting pre-release orders for its revolutionary VR contraption with immediate effect in 20 countries. In addition to being able to order gadget, the immediate pre-order availability has also revealed some additional information about the hardware that will keep potential consumers excited until its eventual shipping date.
Those interested in obtaining the first publicly available version of the Oculus Rift will need to part with $599. That outlay will not only secure the actual Rift hardware itself, but will also include a sensor, Oculus Remote, all associated cabling, and an Xbox One controller. Devices of this nature are of course no good without some content to go with it, so you’ll also find a copy of EVE: Valkyrie and Lucky’s Tale in the box. Pre-orders that are taken right now through the official Rift shop website are expected to ship sometime in “April 2016”, a time when the VR contraption would also be available in a select few retail stores in some countries.
So where does that leave those early backers who put their money behind the project when it was just a lowly Kickstarter campaign? Well, if you were one of the many who backed the crowdsourced campaign with a donation large enough to obtain an Oculus Rift development kit then you’re in luck. The company will be issuing a free-of-charge Oculus Rift headset and all associated goodies to those people who believed in the project before it made it into the mainstream through a high-profile Facebook acquisition. Oculus is calling it the ‘Kickstarter Edition’ and will be the first units to ship out in March.
Oculus will be following up the initial launch of the Rift with availability of the Oculus Touch controller later in the year. There’s no official date on when this will be available, or a price associated with it either for that matter, but Oculus CEO Palmer Luckey has stipulated on record that anyone pre-ordering a Rift gets an instant first come first served option on the Oculus Touch controller when it launches later in 2016. The even better news is that pre-ordering a Rift won’t require any immediate payment, allowing that order to be canceled right up until shipping, without any financial penalty. Do note that shipping will cost an extra $30 as well.
Oculus has issued the following, as the minimum requirement for being compatible with the Rift, but an Oculus compatibility tool is also available on the website for download.
- NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD R9 290 equivalent or greater
- An Intel Core i5-4590 equivalent or greater
- 8GB RAM or above
- HDMI 1.3 output compatible machine
- Three USB 3.0 ports + one USB 2.0 port
- Windows 7 64-bit with Service Pack 1 or above
If you are excited about pre-ordering the Rift right now, see if your country is in the list of officially supported countries below. However, if you do not see your country in the list, no need to be dismayed as these are simply part of Oculus’ initial rollout.
- Australia
- Belgium
- Canada
- Denmark
- Finland
- France
- Germany
- Japan
- Iceland
- Ireland
- Italy
- Netherlands
- New Zealand
- Norway
- Poland
- Spain
- Sweden
- Taiwan
- United Kingdom
- United States
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