After selling a virtual boatload of Oculus Rift units, Oculus VR has announced it's temporarily ending dev kit sales.
In a blog post, the company behind the virtual reality headset announced it was quickly running out of stock for Rift kits and is shutting down sales in most regions.
Oculus VR went on to state that "[a] handful of the hardware components are no longer being manufactured, and as a result, we're ramping down production and distribution of the original kits."
Oculus VR claims it has sold a whopping 60,000 VR headsets. At $300 (about £182,AU$333) each, video game developers and curious geeks have spent a collective $18 million (about £10m,US $19m) on development kits alone. This is without the headgear being on sale for the general public.
Next-gen VR
It's not surprising Oculus VR is cutting sales given that the first-run development kits have been on the market since December 2012 as part of the project's original Kickstarter campaign.
Since then the company has moved on to introduce a new HD 1080p Crystal Cove prototype, which also eliminated the headset's motion blur problem and added motion tracking
Whether this move is meant to pave the way to manufacturing production units or development kits of newer hardware prototypes remains to be seen. But the company teased there would be "more news coming soon."
With the Games Developer Conference happening next week and PAX East at the beginning of April, we're bound to hear what Oculus VR has planned any day now.
The company has also announced Atman Binstock, one of the lead engineers behind Valve's virtual reality project, is now chief architect at Oculus. Should make for interesting times ahead for both firms pioneer the VR gaming space.
- For the complete virtual experience grab a fake gun and run on the Virtuix Omni
