First 10K units of Oculus Rift DK2 should be arriving week of July 14
With 45,000 Pre-Orders, The New Oculus Rift Will Start Arriving Around July 14th — Back in March, the second generation of Oculus' work-in-progress virtual reality headset went up for pre-order for $350.
Context & Ripple Effects
Oculus put the $350 second-generation Rift up for pre-order in March and has been sitting on a 45,000-unit backlog since; this week's update narrows the wait to weeks, with the first 10,000 units landing during the week of July 14. The story travelled unusually wide on pickup day alone — PC World, Engadget, The Verge, SlashGear and Electronista all ran it — a sign of how much attention a developer-kit shipment now commands.
The shipment lands into a market Oculus's head-mounted display work has already pulled Sony, Samsung, and Valve into virtual reality, per coverage from June 2014, so every DK2 that reaches a developer is hardware for an ecosystem competitors are also racing to seed.
First-order effects
- Roughly 10,000 developers and early backers move from waiting list to hands-on hardware the week of July 14, while about 35,000 of the 45,000 pre-order customers remain queued behind them.
- Demand still outruns supply by more than four to one against the March backlog, putting immediate resale pressure on the first units to arrive.
Second-order effects
- With DK2s spreading through developer hands, Sony, Samsung, and Valve face pressure to match Oculus's cadence with their own virtual reality programs rather than cede the developer mindshare the kit distribution buys.
- A thin aftermarket premium on early units gives Oculus a direct incentive to police its own order queue, since every resold kit undercuts the developer-first positioning of the program.
Third-order effects
- If developer kits keep functioning as the de facto standards race for virtual reality, whoever ships the most units into developer hands earliest shapes the content library the eventual consumer launch will depend on — the dynamic that drew the platform giants in through mid-2014.
The trend: Virtual reality is crossing from prototype demos to scaled developer distribution, with Oculus's shipment pace setting the tempo its large-platform rivals now have to answer.