In an interview with Tested.com’s Norm Chan, Nate Mitchell, VP of Product at Oculus VR, has stated that production is ramping up well for the company’s 2nd developer kit (DK2) and in fact they expect to ship 20-30,000 units in July.
The 2nd developer kit from Oculus was announced back at GDC with pre-orders shortly opening up after the announcement. At the time, demand was so high it brought Oculus’ order pages to their knees. As of now, the company estimates they’ve received circa 40,000 orders for the DK2 since it went on sale. To put that into perspective, throughout the entire run of production for Oculus’ DK1, they shipped around 60,000. That’s a great validation of Oculus’ vision and a real marker to their successful reboot of virtual reality.
Elsewhere, Nate also stated that their original pilot run which included some 100 developers has gone well, bearing fruits that are being shown at E3 this year. Nate said that their experience with their original Kickstarter funded DK1 production run has meant they’ve been able to speedily complete tooling and production for the DK2. And, as we’ve heard from Palmer Luckey, Founder of Oculus VR, elsewhere – when they’re consumer edition finally ships it will be as close to ‘cost’ as possible.
DK2 begins shipping in July and we’re on the pre-order list and will excitedly report on what it’s like as soon as we receive ours.