24 Facts About Oculus Rift

In 2012 Oculus initiated a Kickstarter campaign to fund the Rift's development, after being founded as an independent company two months prior.

Oculus Rift went through various pre-production models since the Kickstarter campaign, around five of which were demonstrated to the public before reaching its commercial release.

The main purpose of the Kickstarter was to get an Oculus Rift prototype—now referred to as DK1 —into the hands of developers to begin integration of the device into their games.

Entire source for the Oculus Rift DK1 was released to the public in September 2014, including the firmware, schematics, and mechanicals for the device.

In June 2013, a prototype of the Oculus Rift that used a 1080p LCD panel was shown at Electronic Entertainment Expo.

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In September 2014, Oculus presented an updated version of the Rift, codenamed Crescent Bay.

However, Oculus Rift VR stated that they planned to support the CV1 with software updates for "the foreseeable future".

Oculus Rift maintains a market place for applications for the headsets.

Oculus Rift SDK is directly integrated with the popular game engines Unity 5, Unreal Engine 4, and Cryengine.

Oculus Rift is an open platform, and thus developers do not need any approval or verification to develop, distribute, or sell content for it, and do not have to pay any licensing fees.

Oculus Rift VR stated that these requirements would remain in force for the life of the first consumer model.

Hardware testing application is available, and Oculus Rift VR has certified and promoted specific models of pre-built computers that meet these recommendations, from vendors such as Asus, Alienware and Dell Inc, as being "Oculus Rift Ready".

Oculus has stated that the Rift is primarily a gaming device and that their main content focus is gaming.

However, Oculus has stated that the best virtual reality experiences are those that are designed, from the beginning, for the Rift.

At the release event for the Rift in June 2015, Oculus announced 9 launch titles for the Rift, including EVE: Valkyrie by CCP and Edge of Nowhere by Insomniac Games.

In July 2015, Oculus revealed that it was fully funding more than 20 second party high production value games made exclusively for the Rift, one of these being Insomniac's Edge of Nowhere.

Oculus Rift offers the opportunity to view new types of media that are impossible to view on regular monitors; 360° 3D videos and 'virtual reality movies' .

Spherical videos can be viewed simply by the user moving their head around, and the Oculus Rift opens up the possibility for stereoscopic spherical videos .

Oculus Rift believes that social applications will be the most popular virtual reality experiences in the long term.

In 2013, Philip Rosedale, the founder of Second Life, left Linden Lab to work on a new virtual world designed for the Oculus Rift, called High Fidelity, which will link thousands of user-hosted virtual environments together into a consistent virtual world.

Oculus Rift is increasingly used in universities and schools as an educational tool.

Some online casinos have started using Oculus Rift to provide a unique online casino experience, allowing the user to play slots and experience the lobby of a casino through their VR headset.

ZeniMax Media, the parent company of Bethesda Softworks, which in turn owns Id Software, presented a lawsuit against Facebook, claiming the Oculus Rift was the product of intellectual property owned by ZeniMax, developed by John Carmack during his time working for Id Software.

Oculus Rift received generally positive reviews from gaming and tech websites.