Oculus Starts Shipping Its Next-Gen Rift VR Headset A Bit Later Than Expected

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It’s a bit later than Oculus VR originally hoped, but the second pre-release version of its $350 Rift virtual reality headset is finally finding its way onto delivery trucks.

Oculus‘ community managers popped into a thread on reddit to confirm that units were indeed finally heading out.

While the company originally intended for the first shipments to start arriving about two weeks ago, they opted to hold the first batch of units at the starting line. Why? Because the software wasn’t quite done yet.

While most of the Rift DK2’s big changes (the higher-res display, the camera for positional head tracking) lay in its hardware, such things need to be accounted for in software. As of yesterday, Oculus felt their SDK wasn’t quite ready — and without the SDK, that DK2’s best features wouldn’t work. Rather than letting people unbox their new units only to find that it was temporarily busted, Oculus held the shipments until the SDK was closer to being finalized.

Does this mean it’s time to go order a Rift DK2? Nah — at least, not if you hope to get it any time soon. In that case, the time to order was… about three months ago. Although they received roughly 45,000 pre-orders, the company only expects around 10,000 units to ship in this first batch — so unless you got your order in early, you’ll be waiting a while. And before you say “eBay”

(For reference: I got my order in within 2 hours of pre-orders opening up, and it’s still marked as “awaiting inventory before it can be fulfilled.”)