oculus rift diagram

Palmer Luckey, creator of the Rift and founder of Oculus VR Inc, stopped by reddit the other day to give an update on Oculus Rift shipping. According to Luckey, the company is on track to deliver all Kickstarter orders before the end of May.

Luckey said in a post on reddit that, “production is going well and getting faster as we go along.” Recently the company said that they had shipped 3,700 units and were sending out around 1,250 per week. As production continues to increase, the company hopes they’ll be able to ship out more units weekly.

Luckey wrote that, “we’re on track to deliver all the Kickstarter orders before the end of May.” The Kickstarter, which ran during August, 2012, raised 2.4 million dollars — 974% of its stated goal. 7,408 Oculus Rift VR headsets were ordered through the Kickstarter.

Oculus VR Inc opened pre-orders for the Oculus Rift on their website at the end of September, 2012. Around 10,000 total units are estimated to have been ordered through the Kickstarter and online pre-ordering before the Rift started to ship at the end of March, 2013.

“We’ll start fulfilling website pre-orders in late May / early June,” wrote Luckey. “It’s impossible to give exact dates/numbers when we’re dealing with so many moving parts, but if you ordered in 2012, we expect you’ll have your kit in June.”

With the VR headset popping up all over the web and in mainstream media, pre-orders continue to flow in through the site. “Our order rate keeps going up, we had a lot more orders last month than previous months,” Luckey wrote. If you are ordering today, Oculus says you should expect your developer kit to ship in August.

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Based on the available info, we recently put together this estimated Oculus Rift shipping schedule:

Unit # Shipment Date
3,700 – 4950 May 1- 7
4951 – 6201 May 8 – 14
6202 – 7452 May 15 – 21
7453 – 8703 May 22 – 28
8704 – 9954 May 29 – June 4
9955 – 11205 June 5 – 11
11206 – 12456 June 12 – 18

After 10,000 orders, the company changed their order number schema — if your order number is over 20,000, subtract 10,000 from it to find your unit number.

You can check on your Oculus Rift shipment status here.

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Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • eyeandeye

    I’ve been looking for an answer to the question of “how do I know what number I am in line?” for a while now. This article seems to answer that question, however I’m still confused. I ordered in March before they started shipping, but my order ID is in the high 40,000s. Using the rule in the article I subtract 10k from that and my unit number is now in the high 30,000s. Looking at that chart one would think my order isn’t going to arrive until October. So according to Oculus, I should get my rift between June and August, but according to the chart it could take much longer.

  • Paul James

    I believe they jumped another 10-20k in order numbering post the Pre-orders starting eyeandeye. Even Oculus admit that they’re order numbering system is a bit shambollic. :)

  • Sven

    There’s an error in your article, it says “1250 per month” but it is really “1250 per week”

    • Ben Lang

      Thanks, Sven, fixed it!