The first Oculus Rift costs $599 and will start shipping in March

Oculus Rift will cost $599 / £499 and is due to roll out in a matter of months. The Facebook-owned company opened pre-orders for its virtual reality headset today, finally putting a price and a (narrower) release window on its very first consumer-ready product.

The first Oculus Rift package will come with the headset, a sensor for tracking your movement, an Xbox One controller, a wireless adapter for the controller, an "Oculus Remote," and a copy of 3D platforming adventure Lucky's Tale. You'll also get a copy of CCP's space battle game EVE: Valkyrie if you pre-order. Speaking of which, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey assured potential customers on Twitter that pre-orders won't sell out:

If enough people pre-order and somehow exhaust all the stock we are building up, later orders will just have a later ship date.January 4, 2016

The site said I should expect a ship date in March when I first loaded it up, and now it says April - Luckey's hypothetical situation may already be happening. Fortunately, Oculus won't charge customers for their pre-orders until they're ready to ship. On the other hand, locking in an early pre-order for a Rift will also guarantee you the same placement when Oculus Touch pre-orders begin later this year.

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I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and was formerly a staff writer at GamesRadar.