Oculus Rift VR headset nets $1 million on Kickstarter
The Kickstarter campaign for a John Carmack-backed VR headset has raised nearly $1 million in its first day.
If you were following the news coverage of E3 this year, you may have spotted the id Software co-founder talking up the possibilities of virtual reality gaming.
(If not, PC Gamer has a 20-minute video interview on its site.)
Oculus, the start-up behind the goggles Carmack was demonstrating, has now launched a crowd-funding campaign to build dev kits for its Oculus Rift VR headset.
The campaign reached its $250,000 target within hours: at the time of posting, the total stood at over $900,000.
Updated: It’s now gone over $1 million.
Backed by Valve, Epic and Unity
In addition to Carmack, industry figures lending their support to the Oculus Rift include Valve’s Gabe Newell and Michael Abrash; Unity Technologies CEO David Helgason; and Epic Games’ Cliff Bleszinski, who said that the developer was “excited” to get the Unreal Engine integrated with the headset.
According to the specs posted on Kickstarter, the Oculus Rift will have a 90-degree horizontal field of view and a resolution of 640×800 per eye: not enormous, but significantly more immersive than existing alternatives.
The headset weighs in at around 220g – the weight of a standard jar of Vegemite, Google helpfully informs us.
Try it for yourself for $300
If you want to try it for yourself, $300 gets you a copy of the Rift dev kit on its release, plus a copy of id Software’s upcoming Doom 3 BFG Edition: the first game to support the hardware.
At the time of posting, over 2,000 people had taken Oculus up on the offer.
The dev kits are expected to ship in December. If you can’t wait that long, you can see Oculus in person at Siggraph 2012 next week.