Following an announcement on Monday, pre-orders for the Oculus Rift VR headset have opened this morning in 20 countries around the world. Oculus says that the device will start shipping March 28.
All great news, yes? However, if you were keen to grab yourself one of these bad boys but aren’t the most monied individual, you may need to temper that excitement.
The Oculus Rift will run you a whopping US$599 if you live in the US. For those of you here in Australia looking to pick one up, at the time of writing, the Oculus will set you back AU$920. Ouch.
But what do you get for your not-insignificant amount of money? You get the headset, which comes with built-in headphones, there’s a mic and sensor and all the cables you’ll need. You also get an Xbox One controller and an Oculus Remote. Finally, you’ll also get a copy of Lucky’s Tale and EVE Valkyrie. Whether the recently delayed Oculus Touch controller would have made an impact on the total price is up for debate.
Oculus also released their recommended spec for PC’s about to find themselves running an Oculus Rift and, as you might expect, most of the heavy lifting is left to the graphics card. Here’s what you’ll need, straight from the press release:
- graphics card: NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD R9 290 equivalent or greater
- processor: Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
- memory: 8GB+ RAM
- output: Compatible HDMI 1.3 video output
- input: 3x USB 3.0 ports plus 1x USB 2.0 port
- operating system: Windows 7 SP1 64 bit or newer
Oculus have also built a little app that will assess whether your PC is Oculus-ready for you and you can download it here.
When I began writing this news piece, the Oculus store page was reading that expected shipping would begin in March, and it will, but refreshing the page has revealed the expected ship date has now changed to May 2016. Preorders must be coming in hot.
So if you have 850 clams lying around and would like to grab yourself a high tech stack hat, not only am I jealous as hell, here’s where you can do so.
A previous version of this article listed the Australian price of the Oculus Rift as AU$850. We have since received the correct price and the article has been updated to reflect that.
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