Oculus Rift officially launching in Q1 2016

Oculus VR has announced its Oculus Rift is finally shipping to consumers in Q1 2016 with pre-orders available later this year.

Today’s announcement didn’t come with a price or exact release date for the consumer version of the Oculus Rift, but Oculus VR promises it will ship with compelling content, a full ecosystem, and a fully-integrated hardware/software tech stack that’s been specifically designed for virtual reality.

The Oculus Rift launched as a Kickstarter project back in August 2012 and was able to raise over $2.4 million by offering $300 developer kits for those who were interested in its promise of virtual reality. Since then, Oculus VR received some serious funding and was acquired by Facebook for $2 billion in March 2014 and has even started to receive some stiff competition from HTC and Samsung.

Today’s announcement gives regular consumers an actual timeline of when they can get a final version of the Oculus Rift without having to shell out $300 for a developer kit. Let’s just hope the consumer version of the Oculus Rift is priced reasonably, although we wouldn’t complain too much if it was priced around $200 considering what’s possible from the product.

Oculus Rift officially launching in Q1 2016