Oculus Rift – a highly immersive, consumer-priced, virtual reality headset

28th September 2012

Pre-orders for Oculus Rift developer kits were announced this week, following a highly successful Kickstarter campaign.

The Oculus Rift is designed by Palmer Luckey, founder of California-based Oculus LLC, who claims it will offer a "truly immersive experience" for video gaming and simulations. Following a demonstration of the prototype at E3, a Kickstarter campaign was launched in August. Within four hours of the announcement, Oculus had raised the $250,000 needed to further develop the headset. By the end of the campaign, it had surpassed $2.4 million in funding.

Several prominent figures from the games industry – including John Carmack, the co-founder of Id Software; Gabe Newell, the co-founder of Valve; and Cliff Bleszinski, design director at Epic Games – have publicly endorsed the project.

According to Oculus, game integration will begin with PCs and smartphones and be followed by consoles. Doom 3: BFG Edition is the first game to officially support the Oculus Rift. This will be followed at some point by Doom 4, and by many other games over the coming years.

The device will feature an incredibly wide field of view (110° diagonal), high resolution (1280 x 800 pixels), and ultra-low latency head tracking, as explained in the video below. These specifications may be improved when the consumer version is eventually launched.

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