Pre-orders for Oculus Rift begin on 6 January

Oculus, the virtual reality company owned by Facebook, said it would take pre-orders for its much-awaited virtual reality headset, Rift, from January 6.

Last year, Oculus executives last year hinted that the Rift headset and a computer needed to run it will cost no more than $1,500 altogether.

As a small token of our appreciation for your support, all Kickstarter backers who pledged for a Rift development kit will get a free Kickstarter Edition Oculus Rift!

The company also said firm’s founder Luckey will be answering questions regarding the Oculus VR on RedditAMA session on Wednesday, January 6 at 6pm Pacific Time. Considering that they’ll also arrive with free copies of EVE: Valkyrie and VR platformer Lucky’s Tale, that’s a pretty damn good deal. “We can’t wait to see what you think”, said Nate Mitchell, VP of Product at Oculus VR.

Virtual reality is certainly the buzzword town with its vast potential on offer. So far we know that the Rift will be made available in Q1 2016 and will cost upwards of US$300. Back when Oculus announced it had been acquired by Facebook, many users were angry and felt they’d spent money to bring hardware to market, only to wind up fueling a Facebook acquisition. Oculus isn’t saying when the device will actually ship, and has yet to comment on price. HTC, Samsung and Sony may have announcements regarding their VR futures – with any new details regarding the latter’s PlayStation VR being highly anticipated. Games won’t be the only applications for virtual reality – Mark Zuckerberghas nodded to VR being the future of communication when explaining why Facebook dropped $2 billion to buy Oculus in 2014.

The Oculus Rift, one of the expected VR systems to be showcased at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show.