Oculus starts shipping Rift VR headsets to customers

It’s finally happening. The headset that’s seen to have kicked off the resurgence of virtual reality is finally going to make it into the hands of the public. Oculus VR Chief Executive Brendan Iribe confirmed on Twitter that their company has started shipping the consumer version of the Rift to those who preordered the headset. It should arrive at customers’s doors by the March 28^th official launch date. It isn’t just a big moment for the company but for the industry as well as they are the first big VR company to release to the public. The HTC Vive is still up for preorder and coming out in May, while the PlayStation VR is coming out at the end of the year. Of course, you can argue for Google Cardboard and the Samsung Gear VR but these still lack the feature set the Rift has.

Source: The Independent

No Mac support coming until Apple has a ‘good’ system with better graphics, according to Oculus founder

The Oculus Rift won’t be Mac-friendly any time soon. According to Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, they are waiting for Apple to release a “good” Mac with a faster video card before they even plan to bring the virtual reality headset to OS X. "It just boils down to the fact that Apple doesn't prioritize high-end GPUs," he explained. "You can buy a $6,000 Mac Pro with the top of the line AMD FirePro D700, and it still doesn't match our recommended specs. So if they prioritize higher-end GPUs like they used to for a while back in the day, we'd love to support Mac. But right now, there's just not a single machine out there that supports it."

The Rift will be coming out on March 28 and its current version is already putting strain on the performance of mid- to high-level Windows PCs. It needs at least an Intel Core i5-4590 processor and either an NVIDIA GTX 970 or AMD R9 290 graphics card. The bundles with the headset have a starting price of $1,499 USD (about $2,000 CAD).

Source: Apple Insider

Oculus Touch controller release delayed to second half of 2016

Finally, the consumer-grade Oculus Rift virtual reality headset will be coming first quarter of this year. The bad news is the Oculus Touch controller won’t be arriving with it. The Oculus development team said in a blog post that they needed to finish work on the controller so they had to push it back to “some point” in the second half of the year. Initially, the release of the Touch was set for the second quarter of the year.

Based on the same blog post, Oculus hinted that they were working on additional tweaks to the controller: “On Touch hardware, we’ve made significant advances in ergonomics, and we’re implementing many changes that make Touch even more comfortable, reliable, and natural. We’re also implementing changes that improve hand pose recognition.” Oculus said they will start taking preorders for the controller several months before it hits the market but they still won’t say when this could be. At the moment though, they are said to be releasing more pre-production runs to developers who need it.

Source: Oculus via PCWorld

ASUS partners with Oculus, intros new gaming desktops

Here’s something gamers who’d love to dabble in virtual reality will find exciting. ASUS and Oculus partnered and introduced new Oculus-ready gaming rigs, the G11CD and Republic of Gamers G20CB. Both desktops are powered by the new 6^th-generation Intel Core processor and run NVIDIA GeForce GTX graphics. These gaming PCs support Oculus Rift VR headsets, all you need to do is plug in the headset, install the required drivers, and you’re good to go.

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