Oculus Rift and the unexplored territory of VR

Palmer Luckey's team are building a brave new world - but it's up to you to fill it
You don't usually find a queue at GDC Europe unless it's for the buffet, but Oculus VR's Rift headset had developers and executives queuing alongside its booth just to strap it on. Tucked away in a small office just metres away were Palmer Luckey, the intimidatingly young founder of the company, Nate Mitchell, the VP of product who was previously senior product developer at Gaikai, and COO Laird Malamed, an industry veteran with Activision, Sony, LucasFilm and a professorship on his CV.
The trio were at GDCE to talk to developers, share their latest HD headset prototype and launch a new sharing platform but ended up talking to GamesIndustry International about their new work colleagues, why they'd welcome competition (or a phone call) from Sony or Microsoft and jetlag.

Q: What's the latest update on the company?
Nate Mitchell: A lot of good things going on. We're working on the Oculus Rift, the consumer version. Other than that things are going really well, we continue to update the SDK, we've shipped over 20,000 development kits so far, 7,500 were ordered during Kickstarter, everything else was post. And those are shipped, not just ordered. We have over 25,000 people signed up for the developer centre, downloading, using the SDK which is super exciting. Integrations with Unreal Engine 4 now, Unreal Engine 3, Unity 3, Unity 4, all out of the box, so a lot of exciting stuff happening. Someone tried to count the number of Oculus Rift demos that were out there and there were like over 200 different demos that you could download and play.
"I would say that all the coolest demos we've seen in VR have been from indie developers, not established ones"
Palmer Luckey

And we're in the midst of a VR jam. We have over 300 teams signed up and we estimate it's between 900 and a thousand people participating, which is pretty awesome. We had milestone two on Friday where they had to submit gameplay videos, and we knew there was a question of 'so a thousand people signed up, how many people will actually finish?' and for milestone two we had 250 teams complete milestone two with video.

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