Oculus Rift preorders kick off breakout year for virtual reality

Oculus Ready PCs with Rifts will be available for pre-order in February starting at $1499 however those who pre-order the Oculus now will be eligible to receive an Oculus Ready PC at the special bundle price.

On top of that, Oculus VR has gone the extra mile and have tied up with PC manufacturers like Alienware and ASUS to create their own Oculus Ready label, to signify that the machine carrying the label is adequate to run the Oculus Rift headset and games.

In a sign that the young inventor is a quick learner, Luckey declined to offer an approximate price for the company’s forthcoming Touch controllers: “No more ballparks for now”.

Oculus Rift is just a couple of months away, the highly anticipated virtual reality head mounted display is expected to hit shelves in March.

Digging further on the official Oculus Rift site, we can see that the developers have also revealed the Oculus Rift recommended PC specs. Due to extensive usage of parts that are not mass-produced today, the cost of each Oculus Rift should be rather high, which is one of the reasons why the headset is priced at $599. There’s the necessary sensor and cables, bundled Oculus Remote, an Xbox One Controller for playing EVE: Valkyrie (video above) and Lucky’s Tale, both titles also bundled alongside the headset.

Of those familiar, 25 percent were able to name the Oculus Rift, 21 percent named the Samsung Gear VR and 20 percent named the PlayStation VR. “He added that VR headsets should be no more than “$200-ish”. What would a made-for-virtual-reality panel look like?

You’ll need S$1,050, and that doesn’t include shipping from the U.S., which is a fair bit more than the $350 (S$500) originally suggested by Oculus founder Palmer Luckey. “People will always come out against any price point”, Luckey said. “There are a lot of mainstream devices in that price-range, so as you have said, our failing was in communication, not just price”. Gamers are not known to be the most affluent population of people.

Indeed. It’s not illogical that the Oculus Rift costs $600, but between mismanaged expectations and, you know, $600 being a lot of money to basically anyone other than Donald Trump, the first Oculus Rift may be a hard sell.