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Oculus has announced that it will be shipping a consumer version of Oculus Rift in Q1 2016, and taking pre-orders later this year. It has also released images of the final design.
Ars Technica has attempted to quantify the market for Oculus. Facebook's vision for Oculus appears rosy:
No specific price has been announced for the first consumer version of the Rift, but Oculus executives have said they expect the final headset to fall in the $200 to $400 range, roughly in line with the $300 to $350 price charged for existing development kits. HTC, on the other hand, has warned consumers to "expect a higher price point" for the first edition of the Vive.
Last June, Iribe told Ars they expect to sell "north of a million units" for the first consumer Rift headset. Oculus doesn't expect a wider "console-style" market of "many millions" of Rift users to become a reality until the second version of the headset comes one or two years after the first, Iribe said at the time. Facebook founder (and Oculus owner) and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is certainly looking forward to that wider market, saying last October that he envisioned sales of "50 to 100 million" Rift units within a decade.
[More after the break...]
Nate Mitchell from Oculus shared additional details and plans at TechCrunch Disrupt. Oculus plans to publish its own games for the device, to beef up adoption among consumers and third-party developers. One such title is HeroBound, a third-person dungeon crawler that is already available for the Samsung Gear VR. Oculus has a "diverse input strategy" and doesn't expect initial variations (for example, a gamepad that may ship with the Rift) to remain static.
Users will also need a gaming PC (the Oculus Rift is essentially a mega-peripheral), but it only needs to be able to run newer titles reasonably well. He said that users won't need an exceptionally high-end PC.
Finally, although the Rift will be available to buy directly from Oculus, Mitchell hinted that there will be a second retail experience, possibly in-store.
More of the same at El Reg, Tom's Hardware, and AnandTech.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by kaszz on Friday May 08 2015, @10:03AM
What could possibly go wrong with people immersed in celebrity babbling automatons where ever you look without your control (on a desktop) and at the same time ads being streamed directly to your visual cortex. People that lack proper brainwashing will be barred from the economy.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday May 08 2015, @05:49PM
Just don't launch the Oculus Facebook app.
This is a gaming peripheral.
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(Score: 3, Informative) by kaszz on Friday May 08 2015, @11:59PM
You really think this will be a voluntarily choice?
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday May 08 2015, @06:10PM
There is always a Star Trek Episode Relevant [memory-alpha.org] to the discussion.
The funny thing is, in that episode, the babbling Automaton Data was the one who saved the crew from The Game.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday May 09 2015, @12:06AM
Real world automatons don't save anything. They just consume resources.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2015, @11:43AM
Yeah, remember it's Zuckerberg's crack you're staring at.