Oculus announces “Q1 2016” release for first consumer Oculus Rift

Announcement seemingly cedes “first mover” advantage to Valve and the HTC Vive.

Kyle Orland – May 6, 2015 6:55 am | 78

Oculus promises this will be in consumers' hands by the end of next March.

As of this writing, it has been over 1,000 days since Oculus launched its very successful Kickstarter for the Rift virtual reality headset, and even longer since the company first made a splash at E3 2012. Back then the creators said a consumer release was “still a ways down the road,” and they’ve been equally vague about an actual release target for the nearly three years since.

Today, the company is finally ready to at least give a solid seasonal target for that first consumer headset. The Rift will be available to consumers in “Q1 2016,” Oculus announced this morning.

The announcement is light on details, save for a couple of promotional images of the final consumer unit seen in this post. Preorders will be offered “later this year,” and more information about the system’s final technical specifications will be announced next week, Oculus said. That means the Crescent Bay prototype that’s been shown at trade shows since last September is still our current best-guess benchmark for a consumer unit, at least for the time being. More information about “hardware, software, input, and many of our unannounced made-for-VR games and experiences coming to the Rift,” is promised for “the weeks ahead.”

Readers may remember that Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe told Ars last June that “if we haven’t shipped by the end of 2015, that’s a problem. At least we would be disappointed.” Oculus cofounder Palmer Luckey seemed to walk back that statement at an SXSW panel in March, saying that vague gestures toward a 2015 release were made “before we made a lot of changes to our roadmap, and we’ve expanded a lot of the ambition we had around the product and what we wanted to do.” That said, Luckey assured the audience that “nothing is going horribly wrong. Everything is going horribly right.”

While Oculus hasn’t made any official comments on consumer Rift release plans before this, the press and Oculus executives have dropped a lot of hints that ended up being incorrect. Back in 2013, Iribe told Edge that he would “love [the release date] to be next year [in 2014].” Then in 2014, numerous sources suggested a “strictly limited” public beta for the consumer version would start in the summer of 2015. And earlier this year, Luckey reportedly told The Telegraph to expect a winter 2015 release date for the long-expected consumer unit.

Oculus has managed to ship two well-received Rift development kits since that first Kickstarter, but now seems an apt time to remember that the first Rift development kits were delayed by three months at the last minute and didn’t make their initial promised December 2012 ship date. Samsung’s Gear VR, created in partnership with Oculus, launched in an early “innovator edition” late last year and is set for a full consumer roll out this year, Oculus announced in March.

With Oculus now looking at early 2016 for the Rift’s consumer release, the first-mover advantage in the new, PC-based virtual reality hardware race surprisingly shifts to Valve and HTC, which publicly announced the Vive headset and controller just over two months ago. That device is still being promised to be in consumers’ hands “by the end of 2015.” With development kits just starting to go out to most studios, though, that launch may be light on tailored content—and that’s if the Vive doesn’t end up seeing a Steam Machines-style delay itself.

Sony’s PS4-based Project Morpheus is also targeting an early 2016 release, a timeframe the company announced in March.

No specific price has been announced for the first consumer version of the Rift, but Oculus executives have said they expect the final headset to fall in the $200 to $400 range, roughly in line with the $300 to $350 price charged for existing development kits. HTC, on the other hand, has warned consumers to “expect a higher price point” for the first edition of the Vive.

Last June, Iribe told Ars they expect to sell “north of a million units” for the first consumer Rift headset. Oculus doesn’t expect a wider “console-style” market of “many millions” of Rift users to become a reality until the second version of the headset comes one or two years after the first, Iribe said at the time. Facebook founder (and Oculus owner) and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is certainly looking forward to that wider market, saying last October that he envisioned sales of “50 to 100 million” Rift units within a decade.