Oculus Rift VR headset gets big name backing

Aaaand this week’s Kickstarter superstar is the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, which has already banked more than $780,000 in just over 24 hours, easily tripling the original target amount of $250,000.

The campaign is raising cash to build development kits for the “first truly immersive virtual reality headset for video games”, as well as continuing a general trend of giving gaming gear the worst imaginable names ever.

The project is already backed by some big names in the industry, including John “What I’ve got now, is, I honestly think the best VR demo probably the world has ever seen” Carmack, Cliff “Needless to say, I’m a believer” Bleszinski, and anybody else who saw Lawnmower Man and thought, “Hey, that’s something we should spend money on”.

Call of Duty: Future Warfare 6

The Oculus Rift virtual reality headset features an HD display and “ultra-low latency” head-tracking, and ships with a copy of Doom 3 BFG Edition so you can go to hell in first class.

The idea behind the Kickstater campaign is to basically make devkits available to developers as fast as possible, so there’s already support for the device when the headset launches to the public. That just makes sense.

“We have plenty of Rift prototypes internally – a few are even out in the wild, in the hands of developers like John Carmack,” reads the promo blurb over on the Oculus Rift Kickstarter page. “But we want to make the Rift available to all game developers, today, so they can be part of the development process. Kickstarter makes that possible. Your voice will be critical to making the Rift hardware and software as great as they can be.”

Much like any other Kickstarter project, you can donate as much as you’d like, but actually scoring a devkit will set you back $275 for an unassembled devkit, and $300 for a pre-assembled devkit. I’d rather save that sort of money for stroopwaffels, but I’m not a game developer.