OCULUS has raised another $75 MILLI in funding for the OCULUS RIFT.
Oculus continues to cobble together huge sums of money in order to fund their Oculus Rift gadget. That’s a serious amount of cash for a serious gadget that is giving serious dorks serious priapisms.
In June, Oculus raised $16 million to finish research and development on its critically acclaimed virtual-reality headgear, and today the company’s taking the next step. With a new lead investor, Andreessen Horowitz, the company has now secured another $75 million in Series B funding. Marc Andreessen himself is joining the Oculus board, along with fellow partner Chris Dixon, and it’s a brand-new version of the Oculus Rift headset that convinced them to join in.
“Virtual reality has been a long-standing dream in tech and sci-fi. To me it always felt kind of inevitable but it was one of those things, you never knew quite when it would become a reality,” Dixon tells The Verge. He was impressed with the first developer kit he saw last year, but not enough to invest. Now, however, he says that Oculus has achieved what he was looking for. “The dimensions where you need to improve this kind of VR are latency, resolution and head tracking, and they have really nailed those things.”
All of Oculus’ previous partners, including Matrix and Spark, are also increasing their investment. It’s a very sizable Series B round, a lot of money for a company that hasn’t released a consumer product yet.
However, Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe tells The Verge that his company needs the money to build that consumer product, plain and simple. “The reality is going into the consumer market with a full platform as expansive as this at high volume… really takes a significant investment,” says Iribe. “You look at the cost of goods at the hardware side, setting up the infrastructure… it’s pretty easy to do the math.”
“We always knew we needed a B round to get to the consumer market at volume. We didn’t know the scale we needed for V1 until recently,” Iribe says.
I’m going to level with you. I’m not particularly intrigued in the Oculus Rift as a mechanism for more immersive gaming. However if you notify me when they’ve got this baby hooked up to an force feedback Fleshlight and I’ll be all over this thing. All over! Like, fluids, get it? You see, teledildonics are where it is as. Not running around Team Fortress 2. At least in my household! We have standards. And mental problems.