Oculus VR to open Rift pre-orders tomorrow

Facebook owned virtual reality giant Oculus VR has announced that it is to take one step closer to actually launching a commercial product, with pre-orders for its headset to open on the 6th of January - but for an as-yet undisclosed price.

While virtual reality has been around for a number of decades, the technology got a major shot in the arm in recent years thanks to the staggering success of Oculus VR. A crowd-funding campaign for its first developer kit became one of the most-funded Kickstarter projects in history, attracting millions in venture capital before social networking behemoth Facebook stepped in and acquired the company for a whopping $2 billion. Since then, though, the company has singularly failed to actually launch its much-anticipated commercial VR headset, instead concentrating on its developer kit hardware.

That is set to change, however, when Oculus VR opens Rift consumer sales for the first time on Wednesday. According to the company's announcement, the pre-order hardware will be consumer-ready and include a free copy of platformer Lucky's Tale and space shooter EVE: Valkyrie. What the company has not yet confirmed, however, is the price, with hints suggesting that the consumer hardware will be considerably more expensive than the developer kits - an interesting inversion of the norm, where limited-distribution development kits cost many times more than mass-produced consumer hardware.

The pre-orders will also not include the company's Oculus Touch controller, which has been pushed back to the second half of 2016 while the company polishes the hardware and irons out the kinks.