Oh crap, usually when we write about Kickstarter products we have to persuade gamers to want to throw money at the project, but in the case of the Oculus Rift 3D Headset the darn thing already met its goal and then some, shortly after it launched today on Kickstarter.
We briefly wrote about the 3D headset when John Carmack was trying to push for it at this year's E3, but this time the product is a lot more realized and way closer to becoming an actual consumer product thanks to the Kickstarter.
However, the Kickstarter itself is not about bringing Oculus' Rift 3D headset to the consumer market it's about getting devkits made so developers can start design integration for upcoming games. In my opinion that's a brilliant way to use Kickstarter and much, much, much better than trying to go for the endgame of a consumer product right out of the gate.
Anyway, check out Oculus' Kickstarter video below, even though the team already met its $250,000 goal and is now edging close to $415,000 as of the writing of this article. Is it possible the product hit its goal so fast because Gabe Newell, Cliffy B., the rest of Epic, Valve and Unity are all behind it? Well, I doubt that has anything to do with anything...it's not like PC fanboys really like Valve all that much...right?
I'm partially convinced. I wasn't very convinced in the original article I wrote a short while back, but the design looks a lot cleaner and the functionality seems much more realized than before...or maybe the demo video just made it look a lot more realized. Anyway, the Kickstarter is already a success and this means that any extra funds will just help get the project finished and out the door a lot faster.
I'm somewhat excited to see how this will turn out because this really is the next generation of gaming...full, stereoscopic 3D visualization. That's the sort of stuff we always dreamed about but figured it would always stay relegated to cheesy sci-fi movies like The Lawnmower Man (Jeff Fahey for the win).
You can learn more about the Oculus Rift by heading on over to the Official Kickstarter Page or the Oculus Rift Website.
