Oculus Rift sells out in 14 minutes after $599 price announced

Pre-orders for Facebook-owned virtual reality headset have opened, though it's already sold out

Photo: © 2015 Bloomberg Finance LP

Oculus Rift will finally go on sale for $599 (£499), and is expected to ship from March, the company confirmed.

Earlier this week the company confirmed it would start taking pre-orders for the virtual reality headset from Wednesday, and that orders would ship with with Lucky's Tale game and CCP's EVE: Valkyrie. Those who backed the headset in its early developmental years will receive a free headset, it added.

The headsets sold out just 14 minutes after being made available.

However, initial orders will not come with the system's Touch controllers after the company decided to redesign them, containing an Xbox One wireless controller instead. the new models will become available in the second half of the year, Oculus said in a blog post.

Luckey, 23, started developing the idea for a VR head-mounted display when he was 16. He eventually launched a developer kit on crowdfunding site Kickstarter in 2012, where it swiftly became the most successful campaign of all time, raising close to $2.5 million.

 
 Photo: © 2015 Bloomberg Finance LP
The first developer kit was released to the public in late 2012, with the second kit following in mid 2014. In March that year Facebook purchased Oculus VR for $2bn, with chief executive Mark Zuckerberg saying he believed that one day, "this kind of immersive, augmented reality will become a part of daily life for billions of people."
By February 2015, the company had shipped more than 100,000 second-generation kits to its growing fanbase
.

Less than one per cent of the world's computers are powerful enough to run VR headsets, graphics chip maker Nvidia has speculated.
Powerful graphics cards such as the Nvidia GeForce 970 or AMD Radeon 290 are needed to display images on the headsets clearly at around 90 frames per second, when standard laptops run ar around 30 frames per second