Shipping Update

Since our last update (May 1st), we’ve shipped roughly 2,500 dev kits, bringing the total number of dev kits in the wild to just over 6,000. We’re on track to ship the remaining 1,500 Kickstarter kits before the end of May.

Palmer, Nate, Michael and Brendan signing Rift dev kits for backers.

To everyone who’s still waiting for their Rift: Thank you for your patience! We’re almost there.

To everyone who’s already received their Rift: Thank you for your patience! We hope you’re enjoying it.

If you’re developing samples, demos or full ‘Made for VR’ games, please share them with the community on the Oculus Forums.

Replacement Rewards

The replacement rewards for Kickstarter development kits are available now via the Oculus Order Manager. If you’re eligible for a replacement reward, just login to the Oculus Order Manager and click the “Claim Code” button.

If you claim your Oculus Store Credit code today, it can be applied to purchases in the Oculus Store (including the upcoming Latency Tester) starting June 1.

Oculus SDK Update – v0.2.2

We just released Oculus SDK v0.2.2 on the Oculus Developer Center. Highlights of the release include:

- Added magnetometer drift correction support to Unity integration.
- The Unity sample’s HUD is now rendered in 3D with proper distortion.
- Added gamepad support and OculusWorldTiny sample on Mac OSX.

If you’re interested, you can read the full build notes for the release here.

Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Meet Up

The Silicon Valley Virtual Reality (SVVR) meet up held their first meeting last night, featuring organizers Karl Krantz, Cymatic Bruce, and the Sixense team. We snuck in to join the crowd of over 60 VR enthusiasts at the Computer History Museum in San Jose (which includes one of Ivan Sutherland’s original experimental 3D headsets from 1968) to check out a few of the community’s latest projects.

Photo by MarinoAlperon from www.reddit.com/r/oculus

It was awesome to see developers sharing their demos (and their Rift dev kits), discussing their work, and providing feedback to one another. A huge thank you to Karl and Bruce for organizing the event. We look forward to hearing about other meet ups around the world!

Half Life 2 (VR Beta) Officially in the Rift

Joe Ludwig dropped into the Oculus Forum to share the news — Valve has officially released beta Oculus support for their groundbreaking classic, Half Life 2 (including Episode 1, Episode 2 and OSX support)!

Just like Team Fortress 2, this port is intended as a testbed for Valve’s future VR projects. Joe mentioned that it’s “…a bit more raw than TF2,” but we’ve been having a blast playing it around the office.

If you’ve never played Half Life 2, or maybe it’s just been awhile since your last go, now’s your chance to step inside Ravenholm like never before. It’s pretty incredible to have Dr. Gordon Freeman’s story, arguably one of the best interactive experiences ever made, as a VR developer showcase. We can’t thank the team at Valve enough (again).

We have more good news queued up for next week, so stay tuned!

– Palmer and the Oculus Team

Team Fortress 2 is one of our absolute favorite games (it’s Palmer’s most-played game on Steam!), and we’re really looking forward to playing it in VR with you. We couldn’t ask for a better developer showcase.

Engadget has all the details, including a great interview with Joe Ludwig, one of the engineers at Valve who led TF2′s VR implementation. You can check out a video of the interview here: http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/18/valve-joe-ludwig-interview/

Exclusive Rift Dev Kit Hat for TF2

The icing on the cake? To commemorate this momentous occasion, Valve created an exclusive new TF2 hat: the Oculus Rift development kit.

Now you may be saying: “Wow. Could this possibly get any better?” The answer: A resounding “Yes”.

Valve has generously donated these fashionable Rift hats to the Oculus developer community. If you backed the Kickstarter campaign at any level, or if you pre-ordered a Rift development kit from our website before April 1, 2013, (and haven’t refunded/canceled your pledge/order) you’ll receive a code to redeem your very own TF2 Oculus dev kit hat.

Wear it with pride. You earned it.

Team Fortressing in VR

Soon you’ll be cruising around in Team Fortress 2, wearing your dapper, limited edition dev kit hat, stealing intel, capping points, and fragging fellow Oculus developers.

“…it’s really impressive and easily the best use of 3D technology I’ve ever seen… At one point I shotgun a demoman in the motor pool of Badwater, then switch to my pistol whip a volley of shots over my left shoulder (yes, it really felt that way) to drop a soldier coming down the ramp. Watching him fall, I start to feel like VR is something I could get used to.”- PCGamerN

Valve has done an incredible job bringing TF2 to virtual reality. That said, it’s a fast paced, intense experience. TF2 wasn’t originally designed for virtual reality and skirting around the map at super-speed in VR isn’t for everyone. You’re going to want to ease yourself in and acclimate over time.

Valve is also planning on sharing what they learned bringing TF2 to VR in two GDC talks:

• Why Virtual Reality is Hard (And Where it Might be Going) presented by Michael Abrash.
• What We Learned Porting Team Fortress 2 to Virtual Reality presented by Joe Ludwig.

We’d like to thank everyone at Valve for their hard work and generosity. We appreciate it!

This Week

We apologize in advance for the oncoming torrent of Oculus news. This week is stacked with exciting announcements, including news about Unity, Unreal, and the Oculus SDK, so stay tuned.

We’re looking forward to playing TF2 with you soon!

– Palmer and the Oculus team

Check out our announcement video for the all details from Mark Long, CEO of Meteor, and Khang Le, creative director of Adhesive!

We’re huge fans of the mech genre and we couldn’t be happier to announce that the best-looking mech game in years will be running inside the Rift. Even more exciting is that Oculus developers will be able to experience Hawken in virtual reality from day one.

Now, with Doom 3 BFG Edition and Hawken, Oculus VR™ developers will have two incredible showcases demonstrating well-designed VR gameplay on the Rift right when they receive their developer kits.

Hawken in Virtual Reality

• Everyone with a Rift will be able to pilot their Hawken mech in completely immersive, stereo 3D virtual reality.
• An entirely new way to play Hawken which includes updates to gameplay, input, the cockpit, and the heads-up-display.
• Hawken will feature an exclusive Oculus VR cockpit that let’s the player look around inside the mech, independant of the mech’s direction, in full stereoscopic 3D.
• Hawken is free-to-play, which means that anyone with a Rift can try Hawken in virtual reality on 12.12.12.

As big fans of Hawken, it means a lot to us that Hawken will be the very first original new IP inside the Rift, especially as a great example of what’s possible when developers combine the power of Unreal Engine 3 (UE3) and the Oculus SDK.

Developing with the Rift

Since our Kickstarter is all about developers building great games for the Rift, we’ll be sharing details with the Oculus VR™ developer community throughout Hawken’s VR development. This may include extra notes on the initial integration in UE3, virtual reality gameplay design improvements, or general suggestions for making the best-possible VR game, all based on our experience with Hawken.

Thank you!

We want to really thank everyone who’s supported this Kickstarter so far. You’re the ones making all this happen. And special thanks to Mark, Khang, and the entire crew at Meteor and Adhesive for being some of the first to help us change gaming forever.

Only 4 days left… Talk to you soon, Kickstarter!

– Palmer

P.S. Don’t forget: I’ll be doing an AMA on Reddit tomorrow, Aug 28th, at 10am PST. Hope to talk to some of you then!