Facebook has finally unveiled the UK launch date and price for its Oculus Rift virtual reality headset
Oculus Rift, the Facebook-owned virtual reality headset for gamers, is finally coming to the UK next month.
After launching in the US in March , Oculus has announced the Rift will go on sale in Europe and Canada on 20 September.
The headset will sell at a recommended retail price of £549 – significantly more than the $599 (£461) it costs in the US.
It is available to pre-order today from a range of retailers, including Amazon.co.uk , John Lewis ,Curry’s PC World , GAME Digital Plc , and the London department store Harrods.
“We’ve seen interest in virtual reality rise dramatically in the last few months, with sales of the Samsung Gear VR, powered by Oculus, headset up 310% in the last six weeks alone,”said Will Jones, Head of Buying for Electricals at John Lewis.
“The Oculus Rift device is a significant progression in virtual reality technology, set to reinvent how we work and play, and we are proud to offer our customers the chance to experience it first.”
The Oculus Rift, which began life as a Kickstarter project in 2012, has been through several pre-production models before being released to the public.
The finished virtual reality headset has an OLED display with a 2,160 x 1,200 resolution and a 110-degree field of view, designed to fully immerse the wearer in whatever they are watching.
It is intended for use with a PC, but the headset requires a lot of processing and graphics power, meaning that not all computers are compatible.
If you want to use it for gaming you’ll need a PC with at least an Nvidia GTX 970 GPU, an Intel i5-4590 processor and 8GB of RAM.
If you want to try Oculus Rift for yourself before buying, there will be demo experiences rolling out across the UK in the coming weeks.
Every Oculus Rift purchased headset ships with a copy of the virtual reality game Lucky’s Tale , along with hundreds of free 3D 360 videos and VR movies.
Users can buy more VR games and films from the Oculus Store, with several new titles being unveiled the Gamescom video game conference in Cologne, Germany, this week – including Dead & Buried , The Unspoken and Ripcoil.
– Sophie Curtis
