Oculus Rift developers gain $75 million in funding ahead of release

The Oculus Rift has been in development before the Kickstarter project landed last year, but it is still not available to the public and the only place to really check the virtual reality headset out is at various trade shows and gaming events where it is likely to be available to try.

In many ways the Oculus Rift shares the same story as Google Glass, two companies trying to reinvent how we consume media – on the Oculus Rift side, you have games and on the Google Glass side, you have social networking and other features a smartphone may use.

This is not the first time the Oculus Rift developers have asked for funding, recently grabbing $100 million on top of the funding from Kickstarter. They have now grabbed $75 million, apparently to fund the launch of the Oculus Rift and to market it out to gamers.

Users of the Oculus Rift say it is an immersive experience, better than anything on VR headset previously. The development team have put a lot into making the SDK and hardware feel right and work incredibly well and soon it may be in the hands of game developers to make great games.

Oculus Rift is running on open source software and it should be easy for developers to get into the swing of things – perhaps it will take a little bit of time before any developers brings out a truly immersive game that feels better on the Oculus Rift than any other platform, simply due to the immersion.

We still have no clear date on when the Oculus Rift will be available to buy, without any restrictions and “beta” words being thrown about – like Google Glass it shares a unique goal of becoming as great as possible before being unleashed on the public, for better or worse.