Oculus Rift Shipping to Developers; Founder Provides Update on Pre-Orders

Founder and inventor of Oculus VR and Rift respectively - 23-year-old Palmer Luckey - took to Twitter on Tuesday night to reassure eager buyers that they were on course for the promised launch of Q1 2016 for the Oculus Rift.

And with the holiday season in full swing, Luckey also wanted to dispel any fears that pre-orders would begin for the Rift "without warning".

Oculus has begun shipping early versions of the final Rift hardware for developers who are planning to release their Oculus-enabled experience in Q1 2016, it announced in a blog post on Monday. The company will continue to send out Rift hardware every week till the public launch so developers can "finalise [their] game or application".

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The video game lineup for Oculus continues to get bigger by the day. EVE: Valkyrie - a multiplayer dogfighting shooter - is being developed by Icelandic studio CCP Games and will be a launch title for the Rift. At the Game Awards this month, Harmonix announced that it has been busy creating a VR version of Rock Band.

Oculus is far from the only VR maker with video gaming as its primary motive. However, it was one of the first to arrive on the scene - in 2012 via Kickstarter - and certainly made headlines when Facebook acquired it for $2 billion.

Sony has its own plans with PlayStation VR, which is due next year and will market itself to an established video gaming base of 30 million. Valve meanwhile has partnered with HTC for the latter's HTC Vive which will be ready for pre-orders come February.