Oculus Rift pre-orders are live at a $599 price point
No one ever expected high-end virtual reality to come cheap, and Oculus VR has certainly proven that fact today by finally revealing that the price point for Oculus Rift will be $599.
While that does seem a bit pricey for the average non-hardcore gaming consumer, the Rift will come with a few extra goodies aside from the VR headset itself. The full kit includes an Xbox One controller (typically retails for $59.99), a sensor and a remote, which Oculus says is designed to “make it simple and intuitive to navigate VR experiences.”
The device will also be shipping with two free games: Playful Corp’s Lucky’s Tale, a cartoony 3D platformer in the same vein as Banjo-Kazooie or Mario 64, and CCP Games’ Eve: Valkyrie, a dog-fighting space sim set in the Eve Online universe.
Minimum requirements
Of course, while the Rift may come with a few extra goodies, the price is made a little more difficult to swallow by the beefy system requirements for a PC capable of actually running VR programs.
Here’s what you’ll need for “the full Rift experience”:
- Graphics card: NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD R9 290 equivalent or greater
- Processor: Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
- Memory: 8GB+ RAM
- Output: Compatible HDMI 1.3 video output
- Input: 3x USB 3.0 ports plus 1x USB 2.0 port
- Operating system: Windows 7 SP1 64 bit or newer
For those of you who don’t have a high-end gaming PC, Oculus has tried to make it easy to jump on the VR bandwagon by partnering with hardware companies to create an “Oculus-Ready” certification for PCs. In theory, you will be able to buy any system with that logo and take full advantage of the Rift.
According to Oculus, there will be Oculus-Ready PC bundles that come with a Rift headset that will be available for pre-order in February starting at $1,499.
Unfortunately, these prices do not include the recently delayed Oculus Touch motion controllers, but Oculus notes that pre-ordering the Rift will “secure your place in line” to pre-order Touch.
Image courtesy of Oculus VR
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