Oculus Rift production suspended due to components shortage

Oculus Rift will temporarily refuse new orders of its VR headset after running short on the required components.

Although a consumer version is not yet available, developers and users have until now been able to purchase an Oculus Rift development kit. According to an announcement on the Oculus Rift sub-reddit, thanks to a lack of required components, these sales are about to dry up.

“Certain components used in the Oculus Rift developer kit are no longer being manufactured, meaning they are no longer available to us for production. As a result, we don’t have the necessary materials to produce additional kits,” community manager Andres Hernandez wrote.

“We still have some stock available, but we’re quickly running out. We are looking into alternate sources for the needed components, and we don’t yet have a timeline for when additional units will be available. We’ll be sure to keep everyone posted.”

Until Oculus Rift can source new components, it will halt sales in regions as they run out of stock.

“We never expected to sell so many development kits and VR only made this much progress with the community’s support and enthusiasm. Even though we never wanted to sell out, it’s a good problem to have. Thank you,” Hernandez concluded.

Over 50,000 Oculus Rift dev kits have been shipped to early backers and later buy-ins. The company recently secured $16 million in funding to help deliver a consumer model, and managed to snag John Carmack.

Source: vg247.com

More reasons to push the new Cristal Cove headset among devs...

And in case you're wondering what components are causing this, sources say it's the screens: no one makes such low size and low res screens anymore, at least in such small quantities.

A good sign.

That they will sell better prototypes?

That there is demand. From both Devs and consumers.

They have sold 50k devices, not bad for sure, but until they finally launch a comercial version we won't know how big is the demand.

And if they keep delaying it, someone else may launch a comparable device earlier and blow them out of the market.

Kind of. If they cant source the parts though who says if more will come? this seems pretty bad to me at least. They are going to have to find a different part to replace what they cant get.

What's the parts commonality between Crystal Cove and the current headset? From what it looks like, this is only affecting the older dev units. If anyone was looking to save their pennies to get a dev kit and they're not a developer I'd recommend waiting for CC anyway, the current version needs a lot of work.

I don't know which parts are shared between both units, but the main difference and what is supposedly causing the halt in production are the screens.

The Crystal Cove unit uses a 1080p OLED screen while the original had a 1280x800 LCD screen.

i spent the past 2 hours playing metro last light on my oculus rift, going to sleep off the nauseating feeling its left me with.

^That's one of the things that worries me about these devices, I can already get sick playing FPSs with a regular monitor!