Oculus secures $75 million more in funding, new Rift on the way

Oculus VR receives $75 million more in funding, teases a new Rift headset for CES 2014.

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Oculus VR has just secured itself $75 million in Series B funding, with a new lead investor: Andreessen Horowitz. Marc Andreessen is now stepping up to the Oculus board, as well as his partner, Chris Dixon.

Oculus secures $75 million more in funding, new Rift on the way | TweakTown.com

What coerced them into investing into virtual reality? Well, Oculus has shown off a new Rift headset, which is said to have solved a lot of the problems that the original Rift headset included. What Andreeseen and Dixon saw, is what the world will see at CES 2014 in just a few weeks time: a brand-new Rift headset, which has a higher resolution, lower latency, and takes away the motion blue of the original Developer Kit.

Over the past year, Oculus has seen John Carmack of id Software, Doom and Quake fame join the team as its Chief Technology Officer, and now this additional funding, virtual reality is ready to be propelled into the hands of consumers across the world in 2014.

Palmer Luckey, Oculus VR's founder and VR genius, has said: "[Full positional tracking is] one of the things that's really going to help with the motion sicknes. Right now we're basically faking head translation ... it only really works if you sit in a chair, hold your back completely still, and just move your neck around. You never have a mismatch between what you're doing in real life and what our sensors think you're doing."

Better yet, it looks like Rift won't just be a device that requires something to drive it, with Luckey stating: "The long-term goal is for the Rift to have some brains of its own." Carmack is working on pulling the Oculus experience over to Android, by building out the Android SDK, so we should eventually see a standalone Oculus Rift, powered by Google's mobile OS.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: virtual reality, and more precisely, Oculus VR is the future.

NEWS SOURCE:theverge.com

Anthony joined the TweakTown team in 2010 and has since reviewed 100s of graphics cards. Anthony is a long time PC enthusiast with a passion of hate for games built around consoles. FPS gaming since the pre-Quake days, where you were insulted if you used a mouse to aim, he has been addicted to gaming and hardware ever since. Working in IT retail for 10 years gave him great experience with custom-built PCs. His addiction to GPU tech is unwavering and has recently taken a keen interest in artificial intelligence (AI) hardware.

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