The Oculus Rift virtual reality headset is available starting today, but currently is limited to Kickstarter backers. Shipping for pre-orders begins mid-week.
Good news and bad news for Oculus Rift faithful, today. The good news is that the Oculus Rift officially launched today, with press embargoes dropping pertaining to the Oculus Rift hardware and its launch line-up of over 30 games. The bad news is, oddly enough, that despite the Rift launching today, shipments for pre-orderers have not yet begun and may not arrive until the end of this week at the earliest.
Oculus did begin shipping some Oculus Rift headsets last Friday, but those headsets were reserved for the original Oculus Kickstarter backers who were rewarded with a free headset. While it’s not clear how many Kickstarter headsets were sent out, it’s safe to assume at least several thousand are either in the mail or arrived at homes. Additionally, press have had access to headsets for some time now. Oculus is absolutely on top of headset manufacturing. The issue seems to be focused solely on shipping issues.
The first wave of Oculus Rift pre-orderers, the first paying customers for the Rift, were originally told that March 28 would be when shipping started for their VR headsets. In recent weeks that claim grew a tad untrustworthy, with Oculus reneging on providing granular shipping dates. It was only last night that Oculus CEO Palmer Luckey said the following:
