Oculus Rift Now Available for Pre-Order for $599

Pre-orders began Wednesday morning for the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset.

The company announced in their official blog that the pre-orders for Rift will open on Oculus.com at 8am Pacific Time on January 6. “And before we open Rift pre-orders to the world, we wanted to share one more special update with you, our Kickstarter community”, reads an update on the Kickstarter page. Right now, you’ll need to live in one of the 20 launch countries, but if you don’t you can still claim for it, and Oculus is working on additional shipping options. “People ask about Touch+Rift discount – Everyone with Touch needs a Rift, consider discount built into price of the subsidized Rift hardware”.

It said the firm’s founder, Palmer Luckey, would be answering questions about the Rift on a Reddit Q&A session on Wednesday at 18:00 PCT (02:00 GMT).

Oculus is not the only company that will release a VR headset in 2016.

But many were annoyed by the price of the headset.

Pre-ordered devices will come bundled with video games Lucky’s Tale and Eve: Valkyrie, free of charge.

“Future advancements and high volume will make VR available to everyone eventually, but 1st gen will be mostly early adopters”, he said.

Previous reports had suggested that the headset could ship with the Oculus Touch motion control.

The VR headsets are to be released in waves.

Since Oculus’s Kickstarter beginnings, the company received several major rounds of funding before being acquired by Facebook in March 2014 for $2 billion. The setup of the Rift system includes a headset with detachable headphones, an external camera for tracking users’ head movement, an Xbox One wireless controller, and an input device which enables users to manipulate objects.