Oculus Rift Virtual Reality Headset $600, Launches March 2016

The Oculus Rift, after years of development, is coming soon - in fact, in just about two months. The first consumer virtual reality headset from the company, thought to be the vanguard for modern virtual reality gaming and media experiences, will hit shelves in March 2016, and is available for pre-order today.

The headset, the first iteration of a new technology, is naturally somewhat pricey. At $600, it's comparable to the cost of a brand-new, just-launching game console (on the higher side of things, of course). That doesn't seem to be slowing sales, though, as Oculus's Website is having trouble fielding the high level of requests for pre-orders. In fact, at press time, the March 2016 pre-orders seem to have all been sold, with new shipping estimate dates of April 2016 showing on the site.

Pre-ordered Rift headsets come with two games, EVE: Valkyrie and Lucky's Tale. I've played Valkyrie, and the hype is real.

There's another part to all this, though, and that's a fairly high-end PC being needed in order to actually run the games compatible with the Rift. If you're buying a consumer model in stores, that means one in the neighborhood of $900-$1000 (for just the actual computer). If you're building one from scratch now, probably around $600-$700, according to estimates at GameInformer. Oculus has direct sales links to $1000 PCs that meet their recommended specifications, which follow:

Video Card NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD R9 290 equivalent or greater
CPU Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
Memory 8GB+ RAM
Video Output Compatible HDMI 1.3 video output
USB Ports 3x USB 3.0 ports plus 1x USB 2.0 port
OS Windows 7 SP1 64 bit or newer

So, who's getting in on some virtual reality?