When we were at Quakecon, we were lucky enough to get an interview with Palmer Luckey, creator of the Oculus Rift Virtual Reality Head Mounted Display. In the interview he discusses why the Rift is special and how you can support this bleeding edge technology.
You can listen to it all the way at the bottom of this post.
While you listen to it, you can support the Rift Kickstarter during its last few hours. The Kickstarter ends on September 1st. If you’re a game developer, by all means check out the Rift SDK. If you’re an eager gamer, you might also like to get the dev kit, but be aware it won’t be the final version. Finally, if you’d like to show your support of the Rift, support Oculus by getting an accessory such as a shirt.
Brendan Iribe, CEO of Oculus said in an interview today with The Examiner that “Once you look through the lenses, you really feel as if you’re inside of another world. It’s like the dream we all have had of being inside of a video game world.”
He went on to say, “There’s some balance we need to have, which is, let’s get to the finish line smoothly. Let’s make sure those few select games have experiences that are the best they can be. When 2013 rolls around and thousands of developers have this in their hands, then you will start to see production increase.”
“There are about six to seven thousand developers who want to get their hands on this device. That’s a lot of dev kits. We really need the community to help solve the issues that still remain though. There are a lot of expectations coming with all of the demand. We are definitely feeling the pressure. We’ll go dark between the end of Kickstarter and when it ships in December.” Iribe said.
Iribe continued, “There are obvious dates we’re looking [to ship on a massive scale], but there’s nothing to confirm yet because we want to make sure its great for consumers.”
So there you have it. While there is no official release date for the Oculus Rift, it looks they’re planning on releasing it sometime in December 2012. So far, the Rift has official support from 2 big games, Doom 3: BFG Edition by id Software and HAWKEN by Adhesive Games. It’s compatible with various game engines including Unity 3D, Unreal Engine, id Tech 5 and possibly more (and even more depending how good of a programmer you are!)
Still not convinced about the Rift?
Check out our previous posts about the Oculus Rift.
Support The Rift on Kickstarter
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