The Oculus Rift DK2 became available pre-order back in March. The first units began shipping at the end of July, Road to VR was among the first to receive a DK2 from the production batch on July 25th.
See Also: Oculus Rift DK2 Unboxing Video
Oculus VR’s VP of Product, Nate Mitchell, told Road to VR this week that more than 20,000 DK2 units have been shipped thus far, among more than 60,000 total orders.
Recently, Oculus VR has updated their Oculus Rift DK2 order page to indicate that new orders are expected to begin shipping in October, 2014.
The Oculus Rift DK2 is the company’s second development kit which offers a number of major improvements over the original kit, called the DK1, which was the result of a successful Kickstarter back in August, 2012. Although the DK2 is intended for developers, the company openly offers the VR headset up for sale to anyone interested for $350.
The Oculus Rift DK2′s most notable enhancements are a higher resolution display and positional tracking capability. The new screen is 1920×1080, resulting in a resolution of 960×1080 per eye, compared to the 1280×800 (640×800 per eye) resolution of the DK1. The DK2 features an IR camera which faces the user to detect translational (up/down/left/right/forward/back) movements in addition to rotational movements. The Oculus Rift DK1 could only track rotational movements.
In addition to resolution and positional tracking, a number of other under-the-hood enhancements make the DK2 a huge improvement over its predecessor.