Oculus Rift

Oculus Rift is a discontinued line of virtual reality (VR) headsets. It was first released in March 2016 and priced at $599 and was one of the first modern consumer VR headsets. The device is a fabric-covered headset with flip-down headphones, an external sensor, a remote, and initially an Xbox controller. Oculus Touch, the company's positionally-tracked motion controller compatible with Oculus Rift, shipped in December 2016 at a $199 price.

The headset was designed to be connected to a high-powered PC enabling advanced graphics rendering and computations. Users needed to install Oculus software on their PC and connect the headset into a USB port, an HDMI port, and the camera sensor connection into a second USB port. The camera sensor is pointed at where the user intends to sit or stand. When using the Xbox controller, users must connect a wireless controller dongle into their PC as well. Oculus Touch controllers are powered by a single AA battery.

Oculus rift headset, external sensor, remote, and Xbox controller.

Meta has discontinued production of the Oculus Rift, given the release of newer VR headsets, such as Oculus Go (May 2018), Oculus Quest and Rift S (May 2019), Meta Quest 2 (October 2020), and Meta Quest Pro (October 2022). Three months after its release, the Meta had sold 145,000 Oculus Rift units. This figure increased to 243,000 units after six months and 494,000 after a year. Oculus Touch, bringing hand presence through positionally tracked controllers, was released nine months after the headset.

Oculus Touch controllers.

Palmer Luckey created the original prototype of the Oculus Rift in 2011. At the time, Luckey was eighteen years old and working in his parent's garage in Long Beach, California. Founder of 3D gaming company iD Software, he took the prototype to an E3 trade event demonstrating the Doom 3 BFG Edition game. The prototype headset had a motion sensor to track head movements with a single, smartphone-style 6" LED screen displaying two images seen through two lenses (which Carmack had masked off with black tape) to provide a stereoscopic 3D view. The headset was held together by a ski goggle strap and some gaffer tape.

John Carmack at E3 with the prototype Oculus Rift device.

In the fall of 2012, Oculus raised over two million dollars through Kickstarter. After the successful crowdfunding campaign, Luckey cofounded Oculus VR with Brendan Iribe with headquarters based in Irvine, California. Oculus VR was acquired by Facebook (now Meta) in July 2014 for $2 billion.

Oculus Rift VR headset launched on March 28, 2016. Games released alongside the headset included Edge of Nowhere, EVE Valkyrie, Chronos, and Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. On December 6, 2016, almost nine months after the headset launched, Facebook began shipping the Oculus Touch motion controllers. The controllers introduced the ability to positionally track the user's hands. The controllers' launch was accompanied by new games Robo Recall, Superhot VR, Arizona Sunshine, The Unspoken, and The Gallery.

Oculus Rift's positioning system, known as Constellation, uses gaze tracking and infrared LED sensors to identify the user's position as they interact with the virtual environment. The headset includes an OLED display with 2060 x 1200 resolution (two 1080x1200 screens, one for each eye) and a 90Hz refresh rate. The system enables 360-degree positional tracking with a field of view of 110 degrees and a tracking area size of 5 feet by 11 feet. The headset sensors include accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers, and users can adjust the distance between the lenses to match the distance between their eyes using a slider switch on the device's underside. The Oculus Rift headset weighs just over a pound, although that doesn't include the four-meter (13.2 foot) cord containing both the HDMI and USB connectors.

Oculus Rift requires a high-performance computer with recommended specifications:

• Video card—NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD R9 290 equivalent or greater
• CPU—Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
• Memory—8GB+ RAM
• Video output—Compatible HDMI 1.3 video output
• USB ports—3x USB 3.0 ports plus 1x USB 2.0 port
• Operating system—Windows 7 SP1 64-bit or newer