The Oculus Rift is the leading device that could bring virtual reality – an immersive, three dimensional experience of a computer generated world – into living rooms across the world.

The Rift was invented by 21-year-old American tech entrepreneur Palmer Luckey, who built the prototypes when he was just 18. He hacked together two separate screens (one for each eye) with magnifying glasses that give the Rift a unique 90 degree field of vision. This capacity and the lack of lag (the effect when the image on the screen lags behind as you move your head, responsible for motion sickness in other VR headsets) impressed many.

In March 2014, Facebook acquired Oculus for $2 billion, shortly before Sony unveiled its own virtual reality headset, Project Morpheus. What began as a garage invention, then a successful Kickstarter campaign, could become a ubiquitous device of home entertainment in the near future.


The Oculus Rift Development Kit 1 is the first version of the headset that was sent out to software developers and programmers. It consists of a headset integrating two screens (one for each eye running at 640x800 ppi resolution per eye, adding up to an overall resolution of 1280x800), two aspheric lenses, 9-axis head tracking technology and a cable between the headset and the interface that connects the headset to the computer. The DK1 was released for sale on 26 September 2012. At Game Developer Conference in San Francisco in March 2014 Oculus announced the DK2, which added higher resolution screens, positional tracking and better refresh rates.