It has been a number of years now since Oculus Rift began its journey down crowdfunding lane, but after all the time they have spent tweaking and enhancing it, they are now finally ready to launch it to the market. Oculus will start landing in mailboxes around the country beginning next Monday (March 28th, 2016), to the very first buyers to ever get on the waiting list (Kickstarter supporters).
Pre-orders are still hot and available via their website if you want to be able to get one for yourself sometime this summer (it’s a long waiting list).
I remember our first impression of the Rift at a conference event was while it was still in its standard definition phase. Due to the poor resolution it resulted in some horrible motion sickness in a few of us and a headache with the rest. Since then, they seem to have come a very long ways. Only two people within the team risked waiting in the incredibly long line to experience the Rift‘s current progress this January at CES (the rest of us backed away and ran). Their opinions of the Rift were completely 180 (deg) as they had nothing but compliments for it (not so much the line though).
We haven’t gotten much out of the Rift outside of that since Oculus has been very tight-lipped with us over the last 4 years . Once even responding to one of our emails with quite the sarcastic response that caused us to cancel progress on a story we were writing and move to another topic (and redirect a team we were sending to one of their events). We were hoping to get a more detailed road map in most of our conversations and most were met with silence. Here’s hoping all of the dramatic effect actually pans out to something.
I personally have my money just as much bet on the HoloLens since the applications of it crosses between both worlds so well. The Oculus seems as though it is going to make a pretty big splash. However, there is also a lot of competing solutions also preparing to launch or in the works that could very easily stir that water up.
