Oculus Rift release date update: Shipment back-ordered to July

oculus.com

The shipping out of the VR headset, the Oculus Rift, is now four months backdated as a hugh influx of orders have come in after Oculus announced the pre-ordering back in Jan. 6, 2015.

On the ordering page of the Oculus Rift, it is stated that anticipating Oculus Rift owners who placed orders shouldn't get too excited as they will have to wait an additional four months after the launch of the Oculus Rift to receive their VR systems. The Facebook-owned company announced a few weeks back that the shipment of pre-ordered Rifts would receive their VR consoles on March 28, 2016.

Oculus announced that ordering would start in Jan. 6, 2016, and the volume of orders may have been more that the company could handle. Now it seems that any orders made in the coming days will have to wait until July to receive their Rift.

The Oculus Rift currently sells for $599, with the package including a headset, sensors, remote, cables, an Xbox One controller and a free copy of two games: "EVE: Valkyrie" and "Lucky's Tale." In a move to compete with PlayStation's VR headset, Microsoft's Xbox One has partnered with Oculus to bring more accessories and titles to the virtual reality gaming console.

For the Oculus Rift to run, a NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD R9 290 video card equivalent or greater is required. The system also needs at least 8G of RAM and a HDMI 1.3 video output.

For those who don't want the hassle of looking for a PC that will meet the Oculus' specification requirements, Oculus will also be selling Oculus Ready PCs, which will be available for pre-order in February starting at $1,499.

Those who were some of the first to pre-order the Oculus Rift will still be receiving their VR headsets on March 28, 2016. 

Virtual reality has been the highlight for tech and gaming in the past months as other players have entered into the VR industry. HTC is coming up with the HTC Vive, PlayStation is working on the Playstation VR (previously known as Project Morpheus) and Samsung has the Gear VR that is also done side-by-side with Oculus.