The Oculus Rift team announced yesterday that they have just closed on $16 million in Series A venture capital to allow them to continue development on their virtual reality headset

We were fortunate enough to be able to pick investors who we thought would be a great fit. They really believe in our vision for the future of VR. These are people who have taken companies from startup to mass market many times, entrepreneurs who have a ton of meaningful experience building hardware and software consumer technology.

As I mentioned before, the funding opens up all sorts of doors for Oculus. It helps us hire the best and brightest minds in VR from around the world. It lets us experiment and prototype with more cutting-edge tech. And it allows us to build a badass, consumer VR gaming platform, the likes of which the world has never seen.

After sourcing almost $2.5 million in their Kickstarter and selling many thousands of units to eager developers, the VC funding will no doubt really help the Oculus team along their way to building the first truly usable consumer-ready virtual reality device.

We've had a Rift dev kit in our office for a couple of weeks now and have just been tinkering with it - we'll have more coverage soon, but even after a brief play it looks like it has the potential to really shake up the video gaming landscape. The fact that venture capital is now being plunged into it is a good sign that they think it has explosive growth potential as a device, so we're really looking forward to seeing what comes out of this.

I really, really want this to be a thing. Have been dreaming about it since I was a tacker.

Excellent!

Sweet. Hope the retail unit happens sooner rather than later.

same here. i really, really want one.

i've read very good things about the HD version they showed at E3.

Add me to the list. Looks awesome.

Has anyone every tried Vuziz glasses?

Resolution was always the issue and their marketing page is very misleading saying 1280x720 (WVGA) now but if you dig deeper into the specs the native LCD res is actually 852 x 480 @ 60Hz for $500.

I really, really want this to be a thing. Have been dreaming about it since I was a tacker.

hell yeah, i remember lawnmower man

Pinky, you sure they're not showing total res VS actual screen res?

From what I remember, there was a big kerfuffel about the screen res being really tiny on the Rift, but they responded saying that when the screen was less than an inch from your eyes and with the 2 screens, it ended up being more like 1280x720 combined or something.

Has anyone every tried Vuziz glasses?

I tried them maybe 3-4 years ago at GDC. They were neat but it was more like having a big screen suspended in front of your face - nothing at all like what Rift is like.