Oculus Rift Pre-Orders

My Rift is on the final leg of its journey...at last!

Well my Rift has finally arrive.

It seems almost surreal that as a certifiable VR nut I am not the least bit excited. I have closed the lid without even pulling the bits out of the box and I almost resent the time and resources being used to reinstall Oculus Home off the C Drive, as I am in the middle of doing some Vive dev work.

It is bizarre really, I and others had to fight to get Oculus to actually ship to Tasmania. Then there was the Oculus site crash for pre-orders, followed by the mysterious component shortage, then an information vacuum after funds went on hold for myself and other early Australian and NZ pre-orders, followed weeks later by the admission that Oculus failed to ensure shipping compliance.

Oculus then started shipping Australian pre-orders out of order while at the same time publicly trying to put a positive spin on retail sale options, though of course initially only in the US.

Even during these last few days I have been prodding the head of Oculus Help about there being no communication regarding shipping advice and more importantly keys for bundled games, with only radio silence in response.

I appreciate the Rift is a nice bit of VR engineering, though incomplete without Touch. But to call the launch a debacle actually underplays for me the systemic issues Oculus has as a business.

I know how you feel, the Rift is a very nice HMD, but it is about the equivalent to playing a race game with a controller compared to high end wheel, pedal and shifter, they may do the same thing but the immersion of room scale and tracked controllers is a whole other level.

Even for seated experiences room scale brings new elements, like in ED you can actually get up and walk around your ship, or Flyinside lets you walk around your plane.

You guessed right @SeatTime.

Even though Oculus had made the shipping free for the early pre-orders, as an apology for delays caused by not securing the supply chain that resulted in a component shortage, people still waiting see this as a downgrade of their compensation, particularly as they have waited the longest.

Jokes aside doing complicated things IRL while wearing a HMD is one of the benefits of having an inbuilt camera, which the Rift does not. It is incredibly handy to click a button and see the real world, like finbd your drink or keyboard, rather than constantly take the HMD on and off. Even more so if like me you spend a lot of time on carefully fitting the HMD for maximum vision clarity and comfort.

In addition room scale is far more than just being able to track a bigger volume, it is about making that practical as well. So far Oculus has not shown interest in the latter for hardware or software.