By Brandon Griggs, CNN
(CNN)After almost three years of hype, trade-show demos and breathless reviews from tech journalists, the long-awaited Oculus Rift finally has a release date. Sort of.
Its makers say the virtual-reality headset will ship to consumers in the first quarter of 2016, and they will begin taking pre-orders later this year. No price was announced.
"In the weeks ahead, we'll be revealing the details around hardware, software, input, and many of our unannounced made-for-VR games and experiences coming to the Rift," said a post early Wednesday on Oculus VR's site. "Next week, we'll share more of the technical specifications here on the Oculus blog."
Of course, Oculus fans have heard promises like this before.
After debuting in 2012 as a blockbuster Kickstarter project, the device was initially expected to hit the market in 2014. In June 2014 CEO Brendan Iribe told Ars Technica, "If we haven't shipped by the end of 2015, that's a problem."
Now, 2016. Although developer versions of the headsets have been available for a while, some consumers have grown impatient with the delays.
"Just release the damned thing already," said one commenter, Paul Lopez, on Wednesday's Oculus blog post. "You guys have been dragging on this marketing hype for years and your competitors are getting to market well ahead of you."
Full article here Oculus Rift
Comments
That Hololens immediately appeals to me. I have a cardboard knock off, a Durvois Dive and I love it but don't like looking a clown wearing it. That is the biggest barrier IMHO. As a method of flight control just running the google earth demo says it all.
Next 2013 year? Old news... =)
Hi Jack,
What is interesting to me is the impending reality check between the Oculus and Microsoft's Hololens.
https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-hololens/en-us
Two distinctly different but potentially huge markets and much crossover.
The collision ought to be interesting.
What is their valuation now? $50 trillion?
I have a DK2 and I am a virtual reality fan left over from the first time it went by in the early 1980s.
The stuff back then was unaffordable, very clunky and underperformed at every imaginable level.
Among other things support for real time 3D graphics was really not computationally feasible.
Fortunately all that has changed.
Our PCs and the latest Nvidia 970 and 980 graphics chips with umpteen GPUs provide incredibly detailed 3D graphics and even have the massive 3D update capability to support "looking around" in real time.
The Oculus Rift DK2 actually performs superbly and is almost good enough.
The reason I say almost isn't because of the somewhat clunky headset and support cables, that would be OK.
The problem is simply motion sickness. At this level of immersion even the tiniest disconnect between head movement speed and stereo video update can (and does) produce very unpleasant and immediate effects in your head and stomach.
I'm a private pilot and have a strong stomach, but the Oculus can immediately surpass my capability if everything is not just right.
The minimum you need to make this thing work in a non nausea producing mode is a 4 core I7 PC and a maxed out Nvidia 970 video card.
That is just barely good enough.
Even if you think this wouldn't be a problem for you, I absolutely guarantee you, you are wrong.
I think one of the things that is taking the consumer model Oculus so long is that they are waiting for the computers to catch up.
The stereo 3D itself isn't really the problem, it is the massive computational load added by head tracking that produces the extremely unpleasant lag.
Used without head tracking (as in many FPV situations), this isn't so much of a problem.
Although there of course you can run into the problem of RC video lag.
Still, I love my DK2 and eagerly await the release version.
Thanks for bringing this to us Thomas.
Best regards,
Gary
We are so close that we are really close. We are getting closer.:-)
Regards,
TCIII AVD