Wow, so much misinformation.

It's been three years because it came about as a group of guys on a forum all making their own hmds when one decided to run a kickstarter for his design;

http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=120&t=14777

You would never normally see a draft design concept for a commercial product. There would be a year or so of ramping up marketing by now if that.

The concept has been waiting for display technology to catch up, panels created for use in phones are not suitable for good VR. Certain panels are better than others but they all have issues. It's taken this long and an aquisition of Oculus by Facebook for big players (Samsung/HTC/Sony) to come on board and develop custom made panels for VR.

In the age of mobile technology people are used to Agile development and rapid release schedules. None of that applies to designing, manufactoring (building new facilities for a brand new type of hardware product!) and then figuring out how to distribute your hardware globally. I think they've done quite admirably to go from a guy (kid) in his garage three years ago to be on the cusp of the delivering a consumer product by a $290bn company.

This comment was edited on Nov 3, 2015, 10:00.

I understand the frustration. The tech has been ready for more than a year now when they showed off the consumer prototype (Jan 2014). It looked good, but it was sent back to the drawing board. No clear reason why, other than maybe deciding to add a headset? An input controller? It's feature creep but in hardware form. At this rate, it looks like HTC/Valve will beat them to the punch.

Flatline wrote on Nov 2, 2015, 19:54:
I was really excited and really playing with the idea of getting a dev kit for Occulus Rift but holy fuckballs this is a long-ass drawn out POS dev cycle.

I have lost all interest in it. In the 3 years I've been waiting for it to come out I've moved on to other stuff.

Boohoo, three years waiting, for this long-ass drawn out POS dev cycle....boohooo!

Your tears or frustration are sweet joy to my tongue. Seriously three years for a hardware solution that's practically never been done in this format before? Vacuum cleaners take longer to develop than that. Starcitizen will take 10-15 longer to develop than that. Par for the course for the entitled generation, I guess sheesh....

Squirmer wrote on Nov 2, 2015, 19:31:
Can't see how a technology that makes people uncomfortable for the first 50 hours is going to be popular.

Final Fantasy games are extremely popular.

Still waiting. It's not like there has been some other breakthrough that came and stole its thunder.

Moved on to other what, exactly? Was there some other paradigm-changing video games peripheral released during the interim that I'm not privy to?

I don't understand how any hardcore PC gamer can not be excited for a bona fide VR headset. Gamers have been dreaming of this shit for decades and now the tech is finally catching up.

I was really excited and really playing with the idea of getting a dev kit for Occulus Rift but holy fuckballs this is a long-ass drawn out POS dev cycle.

I have lost all interest in it. In the 3 years I've been waiting for it to come out I've moved on to other stuff.

Can't see how a technology that makes people uncomfortable for the first 50 hours is going to be popular.

The locomotion problem in VR is totally overblown.

First of all, locomotion isn't an issue with any kind of vehicle simulation. And plenty of people are going to want to use VR for that. It completely blows away using a monitor+TrackIR setup.

For first person movement, locomotion isn't something "they can't work out" just because some people are experimenting. Mouse and keyboard work just fine in VR after you've spent some time in VR giving your brain a chance to figure out what's going on. It wasn't a lot of time for me, maybe 10-20 hours before the discomfort was vastly reduced, and another 20-40 for it to be completely nonexistent except in rare circumstances.

There will also be plenty of VR applications where locomotion simply isn't required at all.

They can't work out the locomotion for VR, everywhere you look there are concepts of how to move people around in VR that feels more natural, it's going to either take some sort of radar motion tracking or some sort of affordable multi-touch remapable surface for your hands and feet.