About Oculus Rift Headset
Oculus Rift headset developed by Oculus VR company. Started as a Kickstarter campaign and now a very popular consumer virtual-reality headset for passionate PC gamers. The Oculus Rift VR headset was scheduled to be released in Q1 2016. The Rift employs a state-of-the-art innovative hardware and software technologies. This HMD features a 2160x1200 pixel total resolution employing Dual OLED displays (1080x1200 for each eye), 3-axis position and rotation tracking system and 90 Hz refresh rate.
The Oculus Rift has begun its way with two prototypes, the DK1 (2012) and DK2 (2014) giving developers type to come up with some games for those who purchase the dev kit and while Gamers waiting for the official consumer product to be released to the market. Those gamers were able to choose among hundreds of VR gamer which were already released for those pre-released headsets and for those who have purchased the Developer Kit previously.
The consumer version of Oculus Rift has an integrated HRTF audio to give a better surround sound presence that perfectly fits the objective of playing in 3D space and a built-in spatialised binaural audio based headphones which are specialized for virtual reality audio applications.
Oculus Rift is transforming the gaming industry and granting developers with a new hardware and set of tools to allow them to develop games which are more fun, immersive and engaging to play than ever before. The 3D stereoscopic view will bring you straight into the 3D realm and make game environments come to life right in front of your eyes.
If you love playing games on your PC, you should definitely buy the Oculus Rift headset in order to elevate your gaming experience to a whole new level with better immersion, sense of presence and unique gameplay experiences.
The Oculus Rift is owned by Facebook, and although this is not the main reason why you might opt to buy the Rift over the Vive, Facebook might show up with its own exclusive titles that tightly integrate with its Facebook social platform - but that yet to be seen.
The Oculus Rift is smaller in size compared to the Vive, it looks really nice and has a great industrial design. The Oculus Rift will undoubtedly give players one of the best possible virtual reality experiences. That being said the Oculus Rift was released without motion controllers; those planned to be released in the 2nd quarter of 2016. As for now, most of the games are aimed at a seated experience than for a room-scale standing area. Once the motion controllers are released, we'll see more titles that which are designed to take advantage of this hardware, which will, therefore, lead to more immersive virtual reality experiences.
Oculus Rift has received mixed bag reviews upon launch. Some mentioned Oculus Home lack of functionality, the fact the bundled Xbox One controller isn't suited for VR and also the lack of compelling games among the other cons. In my opinion, its way to early to judge it. In time and once its motion controllers are released, we are going to see much better games that are optimized for VR and ones that bring much better immersion, with less motion sickness involved and overall significantly better gaming experience.
Oculus Rift is directly compared to the HTC Vive as expected. As of the time of writing, Vive is crowned by many reviewers as the winner, at least for now. As The Rift gets more room-scale titles, reviewers can me a more fair comparison. We'll also get to see more titles developed for room-scale, and many of them are still either under development or waiting to be announced as we get closer to the Touch VR controllers release date. No doubt that it's going to be a long and ongoing fight between these two competing virtual reality headsets.
By the way, to enjoy the full Rift experience, Oculus recommend running games on the following hardware: NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD R9 290 equivalent or greater, Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater, 8GB+ RAM, Compatible HDMI 1.3 video output, 3x USB 3.0 ports plus 1x USB 2.0 port and Windows 7 SP1 64 bit or newer. Using less powerful specs means that your VR experience will be less immersive, less enjoyable and even not playable, for example, due to very slow framerates, but it depends on the specific title. This is why it's recommended that you buy a system with at least this hardware specifications because the Oculus Rift games are optimized for those.
Regarding the price, Oculus Rift initial price was set to $599.99 and the HTC Vive priced at $799. However, keep in mind that the Vive headset comes bundled with the Vive controllers. We can expect the Rift controllers to shrink the price difference between the two (because you have to buy them separately) making the price difference between this two headset bundles negligible.
In this page, you can find all the latest and upcoming virtual reality games compatible with the Oculus Rift headset. The list is updated on a regular basis alongside preview, ratings, reviews and user comments that will help you discover the best Rift games and help you make a smarter buying decision.