Carmack's VR gets Kickstarter

Oculus Rift for just $300.

At this year's E3 we took a good look at John Carmack's latest obsession, a fully immersive VR headset (you can read Gillen's thoughts and see him trying out the tech right here).

Now the unit has a name, Oculus Rift, and a Kickstarter page. Needless to say that the project has already made enough money to be funded, and now it's just a matter of how much money it will make (the current figure just surpassed the $750,000 mark).

The aim of the Kickstarter fund is to raise money "to build development kits of the Rift, so we can get them into the hands of developers faster."

As John Carmack recently revealed at E3, he thinks his headset represents "the best VR demo probably the world has ever seen".

Doom 3 BFG Edition will come with the kit, which will be made available to those pledge in excess of $300 USD, a bargain for anyone interested in VR as top-end units often cost thousands and thousands.

Specs for the unit have also been revealed:

Technical specs of the Dev Kit (subject to change)
Head tracking: 6 degrees of freedom (DOF) ultra low latency
Field of view: 110 degrees diagonal / 90 degrees horizontal
Resolution: 1280x800 (640x800 per eye)
Inputs: DVI/HDMI and USB
Platforms: PC and mobile
Weight: ~0.22 kilograms

The project is being led Palmer Luckey, who has been working with Carmack on a prototype headset. They're now taking it to Kickstarter to make sure developers can start working with the tech and making both old and new games compatible with the headset. A consumer version of the Oculus shouldn't be too far behind.

"All of us at Oculus are excited to bring truly immersive VR to people wholove video games like we do," said Luckey.

"Virtual reality has been the long sought after Holy Grail, which most people only ever dreamed of... until now. The Rift is a true game changer that will help make VR the standard for gameplay in the very near future."

There has been plenty of support for the project, with notable names Cliff Bleszinski and Gabe Newell getting behind the headset.

"I'm a believer," said Cliff Bleszinski, design director at Epic Games. "We're extremely excited here at Epic Games to get the Unreal Engine integrated with Oculus!"

"It looks incredibly exciting. If anybody's going to tackle this set of hard problems, we think that Palmer's going to do it. So we'd strongly encourage gamers to support this Kickstarter," added Valve boss Gabe Newell.