Oculus Rift Release Date Arrives; Shipping Begins

By Marijim D.

Mar 28, 2016 09:12 PM EDT

The Oculus Rift release date has arrived. Shipping for the device have already begun.

Tech Crunch reported that the first Oculus Rift headset has been delivered to a customer. Founder Palmer Luckey has personally brought the gear to Ross Martin, the first person who pre-ordered the device in early January.

Luckey flew all the way to Alaska to hand-deliver the Oculus Rift to Martin. He also took to Facebook Live to stream the transfer and unboxing.

"I've been working on this thing for so long, and you're the first person to actually get one," the Oculus Rift founder said in the video. "So it's kind of like me taking all of this work and handing it off to you so you've got to make sure you have fun with it or something."

This is the first device to be delivered in celebration of the Oculus Rift release date. Most deliveries happened last Monday, Mar. 28.

According to Forbes, the company seems to be using a "staggered pre-order system" when their site first went live. Oculus Rift sold waves of production and afterwards moved the expected ship date as new customers came along.

The Oculus Rift release date came as the first of its rivals. HTC Vive will follow on Apr. 5 while the PlayStation VR is believed to arrive by holiday season.

"The Oculus has some advantages here: first to market never hurts, and Oculus still seems to retain a significant mindshare advantage by being the first of these modern VR headsets to go public," the publication wrote. "It's not cheap, however: it's cheaper than the high end HTC Vive, but significantly more expensive (including the necessary computing hardware) than the more approachable Playstation VR."

With the Oculus Rift release date happening this Mar. 28, 2016, it is believed that the Facebook-owned VR headset is set to take the lead. However, R.W. Baird analyst Colin Sebastian does not think that being the first in the market will guarantee success for the device.

Gizmodo reported that Oculus Rift has already begun shipping the device. The deliveries are going to customers who pre-ordered first. The earliest expected delivery date for those who order today or tomorrow will be on July.