Oculus Rift Kickstarter 230% Funded Before Day 1 Ends, Well on the way to $1 Million; Minecraft Support Coming

We knew that the Oculus Rift was going to be big… but this big?! After only 3 hours or so Kickstarter contributors had backed about $130,000, about 56% of the $250,000 goal. At the time of writing (8:28pm EST), the Oculus Rift Kickstarter has been live for around 10 hours and is currently sitting at $580,000 which is 230% of the goal.

Palmer and friends must be smiling right about now. Not even a day since launch and the Oculus Rift Kickstarter already has “success” written all over it. Very exciting stuff. I’ve added a widget for the Kickstarter on the right side of my site so you can easily keep track of the funding status.

Right now the campaign has 2400+ backers. Of those 2400, 1744 (72%) have paid for a tier that will get them the Oculus Rift. If this trend continues and the campaign hits $1 million (which I predict that it will, and then some), that means the demand will be approximately 3000 Oculus Rift units. Fortunately, as I noted the other day, Luckey says that production capacity for the Oculus Rift can scale between 100 and “tens of thousands”.

Notch, the mind behind the indie blockbuster Minecraft and founder of Mojang has backed $10,000 toward the project and says support for the Oculus Rift is likely:

Yeah, upgraded my backer level to 10k for the Oculus Rift. High odds our games will support it, assuming we can get it to work. ;D

— Markus Persson (@notch) August 1, 2012

Minecraft with the Oculus Rift? I can’t wait.

The Kickstarter page has been updated since it went live this morning to include some really basic Oculus Rift specs. Nothing major, but this is the first time I’ve seen confirmation of inputs and weight:

Technical specs of the Dev Kit (subject to change)
Head tracking: 6 degrees of freedom (DOF) ultra low latency
Field of view: 110 degrees diagonal / 90 degrees horizontal
Resolution: 1280×800 (640×800 per eye)
Inputs: DVI/HDMI and USB
Platforms: PC and mobile
Weight: ~0.22 kilograms [half the weight of the HMZ-T1 — Ben]

The official site for the Oculus Rift, OculusVR.com, is live again after having gone dark for two weeks or so. The site has been completely overhauled and (not surprisingly) features the Kickstarter front and center. Look beyond the obvious and you’ll see “Oculus LLC” tag at the bottom indicating that Luckey has officially registered ‘Oculus’ as a limited liability company.

The website also put forth a press release today. There’s not a whole lot we didn’t know included in the release, but the about section lists the following as comprising Oculus LLC: “veterans of RedOctane” (best known for creating the Guitar Hero series, closed in 2010), ScaleForm (who are most likely going to be the brains behind the SDK), and Gaikai (a cloud-gaming service like OnLive) which is interesting because they were acquired by Sony earlier this month.

That’s pretty much all the extra bits from today’s excitement. There’s also an official twitter for Oculus which you can find right here. And while you’re at it, you might want to follow the very site you’re reading @RtoVR or me @benz145 (if Google+ is more your thing you can find me here). Until next time!