Oculus Rift will be in European stores from September 20

The Oculus Rift will be available on September 20 at retail outlets in Europe and no longer just from Oculus itself. Interested parties should be able to place their orders immediately at the stores for the virtual reality headset of the Facebook subsidiary.

Oculus will announce the news on Tuesday. The suggested retail price that the American developer gives for the headset is 699 euros. At that price, however, users will not get the corresponding Oculus Touch controllers, as they are not yet on the market. They may come in December, but there is no certainty about that yet. The company will announce more about the availability of the controllers at the Oculus Connect show, which starts on October 5.

In addition to a release on September 20, Oculus is announcing demo stations. In the coming weeks, the company will install it at 600 locations across the US, Canada and Europe. It is not known how many of these will soon be found in the Benelux. On the demonstration Rifts, players can try The Climb, Henry, Farlands and Oculus Dreamdeck. From October, the Touch controllers can also be tried at these demo locations. So perhaps certain parts of the demos are not interactive or are limitedly interactive, until the Touch controllers are added.

The Oculus Rift comes with Lucky’s Tale 3d platformer and ‘hundreds of free 3d 360 videos and vr movies’. In addition, each Rift offers access to the Oculus Store, where users can find even more apps, games and visuals. European users can also pay with euros in the Oculus Store.

For the Oculus Rift, users need a pretty powerful computer. The recommended specs come down to a Core i5-4590 with Nvidia GTX 970 or AMD 290, or hardware that offers comparable performance. In addition, 8GB of RAM is recommended. Furthermore, two USB 3.0 ports are required and HDMI 1.3 with a minimum pixel clock speed of 297MHz must be supported. Due to the latter, many laptops are excluded from the boat. According to Oculus, such system requirements are necessary to run the VR content smoothly. For example, the Rift has a resolution of 2160×1200 pixels, spread over two screens, and the image is refreshed at 90Hz, so that a lot of graphical power is required.