The Oculus Rift Team

Oculus VR took an important step in the long way to reach a commercial version by introducing a new prototype of virtual reality headset called Crescent Bay and making the Oculus Rift developer kit (DK1) open source. The announcement came during the Oculus Connect, the first developer conference held in in Los Angeles.

All mechanical plans (to build the VR), electrical diagrams and even the firmware is available on Github. Anyone can therefore set up their own DK1, the only requirement is to have the skills necessary to understand the files.

Oculus’s Nirav Patel said anyone would be able to download Oculus VR’s full list of specs on the device and use all the information in ways that they see fit. We can likely expect to see a number of side projects on Kickstarter or Indiegogo hatch and others.

“We don’t want everyone to have the same risks we took. We just want to share the things we learned so you don’t have to do that. We’re all in this to build virtual reality together,” said Patel. “We found just about the roughest and quickest contract manufacturer we could find in China. We were a ragtag group of 10 people nobody had ever heard of trying to create a product nobody thought was possible.”

By making the kit as open source, Oculus is promoting the emergence of a complete ecosystem of games with virtual reality applications in mind. The Oculus Rift DK1 hardware is released under the creative commons 4 license while the software is released under a custom license so all can use the kit for further development.

Meanwhile, the company said it had already distributed more than 100,000 development kit in over 130 countries around the globe. There was therefore a rapid positive response from developers, who are already creating an ecosystem of devices and content dedicated at viewer for virtual reality.

This isn’t the first time that Oculus VR has made something open source. In July 2014 the company purchased C++ videogame networking engine RakNet and immediately released it for all to use.

Taking virtual reality to next step

With virtual reality’s momentum at an all-time high, this is a unique moment for the developer community to come together to take the virtual reality to the next level. Earlier this year, the company introduced the second version of a virtual reality Oculus Rift Development Kit 2. A prototype of a new version of the VR called Crescent Bay is built with higher resolution and refresh rate and built-in display. The company also introduced a new set of developer tools, containing 3D-capable audio and video.

Oculus hopes to attract business and create an emulation around virtual reality. Just what the company plans to do with the technology is unknown, but the Oculus VR headset is not just about games or services. The services offer essentials for multiplayer features like voice chat and object replication.