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Oculus VR Wants a Rift Headset In Every Home

Oculus VR, maker of the popular Oculus Rift headset, is not shying away from boasting about its plans for the virtual reality device. Creator Palmer Luckey says in a new interview with Kotaku UK that Oculus VR’s hope is for “one in every home.” At the same time, however, he admitted that he doesn’t expect the device to immediately reach ubiquity.

“Just at launch we need to be realistic,” Luckey said. “The people who are going to be buying this initially are going to be gamers, probably hardcore gamers, and they’re going to be the ones with PCs most capable of running it. As time goes on it’ll become more and more mainstream, but at launch we’re going to be targeting that core. Basically let’s target it to the people whom we know are going to be buying and then let’s go for the people who are going to take some convincing.”

This isn’t the first time an Oculus VR employee has boasted about the market opportunity for virtual reality technology devices like Oculus Rift. In June, Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe said about VR: “There is no holding this back.” He went on to say at the time that once VR takes off, it will “spread like wildfire.”

A non-final version of Oculus Rift is currently available to developers, but Oculus VR has yet to announce details about the consumer model. Luckey did tease, however, that the final form of the Oculus Rift headset is “higher frame rate, higher resolution, smaller, lighter, cheaper.” He also said that you shouldn’t expect to be able to buy the device in brick-and-mortar stores.

“We’ll definitely be selling it on our website but I don’t know about retail,” Luckey said. “Retail is kind of pointless for certain products, especially ones that are targeting hardcore gamers used to buying things online.”

Luckey also teased Oculus VR has a “vague idea” of when it plans to ship the consumer version of Oculus Rift, adding that he would be personally disappointed if this version is not available by the end of 2015.

Oculus VR is not the only high-profile player in the VR market that is catering to gamers. In March–just a week before Facebook’s $2 billion acquisition of Oculus VR–Sony announced its own headset, Project Morpheus. The headset definitely won’t be out this year, and when it is released, you can expect that it will sell for less than $1000.

Eddie Makuch is a news editor at GameSpot, and you can follow him on Twitter @EddieMakuch
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