Kickstarter of the Week: Oculus Rift

"We're extremely excited here at Epic Games to get the Unreal Engine integrated with Oculus." —Cliff Bleszinski, Epic Games.

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ith 24 days left to go, the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset Kickstarter has already earned $1.4 million—and its original goal was just $250,000. And with 5,840 backers, we'd be a little silly to skip over this one, as its generated so much buzz.

This Kickstarter is for the Oculus Rift developer kit—that is, you aren't funding the development of the actual virtual-reality headset, but the means to get more headsets into the hands of game developers to engineer technology so there can be more virtual-reality-compatible games out there.

The Oculus Rift headset in action..

The Oculus Rift headset boasts a wide field of view, a high-res display, and ultra-low latency head tracking (in other words, there's little-to-no lag on the machine to catch up to your movements). Developers who have already worked on the project have nothing short of glowing reviews. For example, John Carmack of id Software says, "What I've got now is, I honestly think, the best VR demo probably the world has ever seen."

The Design Director of Epic Games, Cliff Bleszinski, agrees. "Needless to say, I'm a believer...We're extremely excited here at Epic Games to get the Unreal Engine integrated with Oculus."

In order to help developers along, the Oculus Rift team is including a copy of DOOM 3 BFG Edition, the first Oculus-ready game, with every developer kit on Kickstarter.  Further, the team is working on methods that will make Rift easily integrated with new and existing games, including well-documented code, samples, and tutorials for integration.

The Kickstarter developer kit is for PC only, but the team hopes to make the headset compatible with many different consoles, including mobile, as soon as they can.

And if you were wondering just how intense the interest in this project is? It launched just six days ago, and as previously mentioned, has already attained 567 percent of its funding.

Check out more about the Oculus Rift in this video: