Oculus Founder: Rift Launch “On-Target” For Q1 2016

One of the most asked questions about the Oculus Rift is “when are we getting them?” and the founder of the company continues to update those who are waiting patiently.

According to a series of tweets from Palmer Luckey, the Rift is on-target to ship in Q1.

This comes after developers had a note in their inbox letting them know about early builds of the hardware being shipped out to them. So yes, it’s on like virtual Donkey Kong.

The updates are important, since there are literally markets, companies (Facebook!), fans, and those generally interested in virtual reality hinging their future plans on the availability of Oculus’ first consumer offering. The company continues to announce exclusive titles, which is exciting, but has the VR community fearful of Oculus going rogue and leaving them in the dust without an open platform to develop on. That won’t happen.

Recently, Luckey discussed the ramp-up of the Oculus with Gameinformer, and the founder said that gaming companies have been doing a lot of heavy lifting to move things forward:

The gaming industry, because it kind of stems out of some of the stuff that was done in VR first, has kind of been building all of the infrastructure needed for VR. We have game engines that run at high frame rate. We have game engines that are made to render tons of 3D objects that are very photorealistic as fast as possible. If we didn’t have those things and if we didn’t have the game industry, VR would never be able to work remotely as well as it does.

All of that hard work means that there’s way, way more to come. And it sounds like Oculus will handily beat HTC’s Vive to the consumer market. That would be a massive win for Facebook and Oculus.