Oculus Rift Virtual Reality Headset Early Final Hardware Shipping To Developers

The Oculus Rift is now lined up for an early 2016 release, with the expectation that it will be launched within next year’s first quarter.

If you’ve been waiting for Oculus Rift pre-orders to open up, your wait may soon come to an end.

Others would have to depend upon the Development Kit 2 (DK2) and SDK 0.8 for the creating titles but they would not be able to have them ready during the Oculus rift launch. Developers need to test games on the final hardware, and the Rift SDK 1.0 that’s shipping with it, to make sure their games run smoothly on launch day.

A man uses the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset at the 2014 Electronic Entertainment Expo, known as E3, in Los Angeles, California June 10, 2014.

That means PC-based VR will be here no later than the end of March, and that the Rift will enter market at least slightly earlier than the (also PC-based) HTC Vive, which is scheduled for an April launch. It’s not the only major release Oculus VR has planned for next year, however, as it’s also set to release its position tracked controllers, Oculus Touch, in Q2.

Oculus didn’t elaborate on what’s included in SDK 1.0, but the changes could be substantial. Of course, we still don’t have the price details, but those should be coming soon, according to another tweet by Luckey.

Players looking forward to using the Oculus Rift now have a list of system requirements they will need to fulfill if they want to enjoy the virtual reality (VR) headset to its fullest potential. Our hardware teams are pouring our hearts and souls to get it just right for the experience and for manufacturability so that we can get this out to as many people as possible.