It seems as if those VR pioneers that were part of the revolution prior to Oculus forming and starting their successful campaign to bring the Rift to life, may also now receive a consumer Oculus Rift.
The Rift VR headset, existed of course before Oculus the company was formed and the company’s Kickstarter to bring an accessible virtual reality headset to developers everywhere with the DK1.
Before the Oculus Rift appeared at E3 in 2012, under the guise of one John Carmack’s ‘magic hat’, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey had shared his thoughts and designs for a new, low cost, high-performance virtual reality headset on the forums at MTBS3D.com, the most popular destination at that time for tinkerers and enthusiasts in the stereoscopic 3D and virtual reality space to come together and share ideas.
Luckey, whose ambitions at that time extended only as far as sharing his prototype work with the community, offered up his early work to community members who offered to support the project by sending Luckey money for the parts (totalling some $500 at that time) in exchange for access to early prototypes.
As a point of interest, the below video, was taken by MTBS3D veteran and now Oculus Community Manager Andres Hernandez (aka cyberreality) and shows Luckey’s pre-Rift PR4 prototype in action.
According to a post on /r/oculus, it now seems that Luckey is to honour those early community pioneers by sending them the first consumer ancestor of the work discussed on MTBS3D for free. recoilfx writes:
For the longest time, I wasn’t sure if us pre-kickstarter backer would get a free CV1 since the offer was only for Kickstarters.
But today, I just got an email from Oculus support saying that we would indeed get one. Palmer came through! Yay!
We’ve yet to confirm officially that this is indeed the case, but it fits alongside Oculus’ announcement at CES that original Kickstarter DK1 backers would also receive a special Kickstarter Edition consumer Oculus Rift for free.
We’ll report back when we know more.