As Oculus Rift CEO Brendan Iribe announces the company is 'months, not years' away from releasing it's first consumer virtual reality headset, we take a closer look at the company and its meteoric rise to fame.
Why would a company like Facebook pay $2 billion to acquire a company that has never sold a single unit to the general public, and who’s library of products starts and ends with just one device? The answer is the future.
What started out as an 18 year old experimenting in his parent's garage in Long Beach, California is now the most eagerly awaited tech release of 2015 - if not all time.
The Oculus Rift is as virtual reality headset that lets players step inside their favourite games and virtual worlds, and take control.
Having been a fan of VR since an early age Palmer Luckey was fed up that there was no reasonably cheap, but high quality headsets available on the market. He put together what he thought was the answer and released it in a video demonstration on YouTube. As a follow up he launched a Kickstarter page in the hope of raising $250’000 to further develop it. The general public shared his enthusiasm and the target (which normally has a month to be achieved) was reached in a mere 4 hours! At the end of the month 9522 ‘Backers’ had pledged almost $2.5 million. Needless to say the tech world stood up and took notice.
Three years on the company that made the Rift, Oculus VR, was purchased by Mark Zuckerberg’s group with the vision of making it the must have piece of computing equipment for many years to come with its capabilities to cater for much more than gaming, such as communication, watching films and television shows and even browsing the web.
There was hope that the Oculus Rift would be made available for general release this Christmas but with that time rapidly approaching a spring 2015 release looks much more realistic. But after all what’s another few months to wait for something that could change the whole landscape of gaming forever?!