First-Run Oculus Rift Developer Kit Coming to a Close
Oculus VR's first-generation development kit is almost sold out.
Oculus VR recently updated its blog with news that the company's stock of the original Rift development kit is running out. The company has shut down sales in most regions, and is currently ramping down production and distribution of the original kit. Why? Because some of the hardware components are no longer being manufactured.
"We never expected to sell so many Rift development kits and the fact that we’re close to being sold out after 60,000 kits is nothing short of incredible — Thank you for your support! We’ll have more news on this soon, so stay tuned!"
Now that's a definite tease. The company may be gearing up to announce the next development kit at GDC next week or at E3 2014 in June. There's still no sign of a release date or price although Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey said that Rift will be affordable for mostly anyone.
"You can't sell an expensive piece of hardware and expect tons of content to show up," he said in an interview. "We're not doing market research around what's the breaking point for people to buy a VR headset; we're just trying to sell it as cheap as we can while still existing as a company."
If Oculus sold 60,000 Rift development kits at $300 apiece, then the company has thus far reeled in around $18 million USD. Just months ago, the company also raised $75 million in Series B funding to finalize development of Rift and the ecosystem. Before that, Oculus raised $16 million in Series A and $2.4 million through its Kickstarter campaign.
The first-run development kit, which launched back in December 2012 as part of the Kickstarter project, predates the HD version and the most recent Crystal Cove model the company showcased at CES 2014 back in January.
Well I know that, what's your point? You should state clearly if you just want to add information.
You're thinking of Google Glass.
No excuses for Oculus. They made promises on deadlines for releasing a product to their investors and to the general consumer. Those promises have been broken - plain and simple. Your rhetoric is at best immature and misplaced. Think again.
I do agree with you that the Oculus Rift should be a near perfect product when it is finally released (hopefully sometime within the next decade). However, my agrument is that the Oculus team has run into a great many issues throughout their progress, and have shown that the issues are more of a dev team problem and NOT limitations of technlology. Hence the reason why John Carmack was brought onboard to 'rescue' the Kickstart effort. The 2nd gen development kit is up for pre-order now, yet they have already stated that another version is in the works that uses a 4K type of resolution in order to get rid of the pixellation that is visible even with the new 1080P 2nd gen dev kit. My point is that 4K has been out since last year. Why has it taken so long for Oculus to integrate it then? Now we'll have to wait for a 3rd gen dev kit and testing and so on. Now, it will probably be at least holiday season 2015 before we see any final consumer level product from Oculus. I suppose late is better than never, but not by much!
I've seen no talk of them using 4k screens. Can you please show an example of ANY panel maker that has a 5" 4K screen? Who's got their head up their ass?