Oculus Rift Release Date, Price And Features: Oculus Founder Palmer Luckey Pushing For Cheaper VR Experience; Will Oculus Be Sold at Cost?

by Stony Kool / Dec 30, 2015 09:08 AM EST

A gamer plays a game with the virtual reality head-mounted display 'Oculus Rift' during the International Games Week on October 29, 2014 in Paris, France.

Oculus Rift Release Date, Price And Features: Oculus founder Palmer Luckey took to Twitter to say the Virtual Reality experience might come cheaper than expected. Rumors on Oculus Rift have been growing as the release date looks like it is likely for January.

"I specifically said that even selling at cost is not enough to make VR as affordable as everyone wants - people who think we are going to come out ahead on hardware don't understand that our goal is to make the VR market as large as possible so developers (and Oculus) have a large enough addressable market to make VR content financially viable and self-sustaining," Luckey tweeted.

The Oculus Rift is still expected to be released in the first quarter of 2016. Oculus announced that it will begin shipping final, complete versions of its Oculus Rift VR headset to developers starting this week.

Consumer Oculus Rift will have built-in DAC and headphone amp. Binaural audio has been a big development for virtual reality game.

"We control the entire pipeline. The Rift has a built in DAC and amp. Everything is high quality, from the Audio SDK to DAC to amp to the driver modules themselves," Luckey posted to Reddit.

Samsung's Gear Virtual Reality is out in the U.S. and techies what to know what separates it from the Oculus Rift for PC.

The Oculus Rift commercial release date is coming and HTC Vive and PlayStation VR promise that this is the next evolution of entertainment and interaction.

Since it was first announced on Kickstarter three years ago, Oculus was acquired by Facebook and part of partnerships with Microsoft and Samsung. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg bought Oculus VR for $2 billion in March 2014.

In May, Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe said the full Oculus Rift experience will cost about $1,500, the headset sill cost about $500.

Oculus founder Palmer Luckey admitted that Oculus Rift could cost more than $350.

"I'm going to be perfectly honest with you. We're roughly in that ballpark, but it's going to cost more than that," said Luckey told Road to VR.

According to the Oculus developer blog, gamers will soon have access to finalized hardware. "We've currently limited the release to developers putting final touches on launch titles," reads the post.