With 3 days left, the Oculus Rift Kickstarter has passed the $2 million funding threshold. This is a huge landmark for the campaign which originally sought to raise $250 thousand in funding. Sitting pretty at 803% of its funding goal, the Oculus Rift Kickstarter is likely to end as the 6th highest grossing Kickstarter campaign of all time. Palmer Luckey, the mind behind the Oculus Rift, has shared some behind-the-scenes data about the funding.
Kickstarter Funding Graph
A few days ago I whipped up a little infographic which compiled all of the public information available from the Kickstarter. Some of the interesting numbers that came out of that (now a few days out of date):
- Total Units Backed: 5,402
- Funding From Most Popular Tier: $1,312,800 (total: $1.8 million)
- Average Funding Per Day: $81,451
- Linear Proiected Funding: $2,443,554
Palmer Luckey AMAA
If you’re a reddit user, you likely know what an AMAA is. Well, Luckey is doing one today (August 28th) at 1PM EST (10AM PST).
For non-reddit users, AMAA stands for Ask Me Almost Anything. Basically Luckey will take a few hours to answer community questions in a reddit thread. I’ll update this post when it starts with a link to the thread for anyone that wants to follow along.
Update: Here’s a link to Palmer Luckey / Oculus Rift AMA on reddit.
South Korean Office
Oculus wants to reach out to a broad range of international developers and has opened an office in South Korea as a base of operations for this task. From the press release:
…Oculus, a developer of virtual reality technology, announced that it had hired Dillon Seo to direct its business operations in South Korea. Seo, a 7-year industry veteran and former Business Director for Scaleform, will lead the launch of the Oculus Korea office and spearhead collaboration with Korean game studios that are developing innovative video game experiences with the company’s new virtual reality headset, the Oculus Rift.
“South Korea is home to some of the world’s most talented game developers who are consistently innovating across genres,” said Brendan Iribe, CEO at Oculus. “Dillon, along with our new team based in Seoul, will allow Oculus to collaborate closely with top Korean developers to create completely new and totally immersive virtual reality experiences with the Rift. I’m thrilled to see what they make.”
New Oculus Team Members
As a startup, Oculus LLC is still getting its feet firmly planted as a functional business entity. As such they’ve been bringing employees on board. Most recently, former Gaikai chief product officer and Scaleform CEO, Brendan Iribe, has joined Oculus as CEO. This is a good hire for Oculus as Iribe’s prior positions mean that he’s got to have an excellent technical and production background. Two other hires were announced as well, from the press release:
Joining Brendan are two other veterans of the game technology space. Michael Antonov was CTO at Scaleform and software architect at Autodesk, and now comes on board as chief software architect, responsible for the Oculus SDK. Jack McCauley comes to Oculus from R0R3 Devices, a product engineering company, where he led the development and manufacturing of numerous popular video game peripherals including Activision’s highly acclaimed guitar and drum controllers, which shipped millions of units worldwide.
