Having been teased as early as E3 2012, the Oculus Rift has been in development for quite some time, and in and out of the news for other reasons, the least of which being that Facebook bought Oculus VR (the company) to the tune of at least 2 billion USD. It's undergone a series of transformations and developmental updates, but there was still no indication of when it would be released for wider consumer use. Today, however, that has changed. Owing to a blog post on Oculus's website, general consumer release is slated for Q1 of 2016, with preorders happening sometime this year.

Of course, some information still remains hidden to the public. We know that it will support resolutions of at least 1920 x 1080 at a 90 Hz refresh rate, but no one can say for sure how far beyond that. The FOV in the consumer version is also unknown, but the latest development version had FOV set at 100 degrees. The retail version will also support six degrees of freedom, that is, all three movement axes, and the three rotational axes.

There's also no information on pricing yet, but the blog post does promise more news “around hardware, software, input, and many of our unannounced made-for-VR games and experiences coming to the Rift.” Technical specifications are promised for next week, and that's all we've been told for now. Of course, development still continues on the Rift, with the developer page keeping the SDKs all up to date, more or less. With E3 about a month away, we'll likely see many games made to support the Oculus show up before long.