2-4 day shipping from now. http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2016/07/13/oculus-rift-pre-orders-cleared/1
Yeah, Finally! So for those of you looking for a VR system that doesn't offer room scale tracking, Oculus can now ship you the display half of it pretty quickly. Shame there's bugger all firm info on the date and price for the controllers. It's ridiculous the Oculus had basically unlimited funds for this and yet they still created the inferior system... incomplete... and late.
They announced that Touch would be shipping 'in volume' in Q4 yesterday. The Rift is not inferior - in some areas, such as comfort, audio ease of use, ATW, it surpasses the Vive, in others, such as input it does not. Overall both have advantages and disadvantages, and the playing field will be much more level in December. The time it takes to create something compelling is irrelevant, it is the final products quality that you judge. GTA5 took 5 years to make, and was a great game because of it - I doubt there is one person that would rather it be a linear, bug laden mess, but released two years earlier. Sure, I would have liked Touch today, but Oculus choose to release their hardware alongside significant, compelling, first and third party content, whereas Valve tend to thrown the hardware out there and see what devs do (The fact that there are still no first party games from Valve is an example of this exact mentality). Both methods have their merits, but just a different way of doing things. The 6 months or so difference between the Rift release and Touch release will look like nothing in five years time.
Of course, the other perhaps bigger issue is Oculus's lack of quality control and appalling support. Mine has been flawless (and Dirt Rally this week is absolutely amazing) however the support forum is full of people with DOA units and display issues and waiting weeks on end for a reply from support when they clearly need a RMA.
they probably had a lot of cancelled orders thus freeing up the queue, and this is spinning it in a positive light
Turns out 'room scale' tracking works just fine. With one camera for the HMD alone, and with two cameras for the HMD plus controllers (with Touch including the extra camera). This is patently obvious from the fact that Lighthouse works, as both use line-of-sight outside-in* optical tracking with IMU sensor fusion. There's the usually waffle about "but Oculus only support the adjacent camera setup, not opposing camera!". They've demonstrated with adjacent-camera, because they've been emphasizing close-hand interactions in their demos along with finger-tracking (as a differentiator from the Vive, which cannot do the same close-hand interactions due to the tracking rings hitting each other and the lack of finger tracking). However, that have yet to make any sort of official announcement on what setup or setups will be the default. Developers working closely with Oculus have said that the recommended setup has yet to be decided, and that they are free to work on games that assume all-round tracking will be available. Personally, I suspect that Touch will ship with the adjacent-camera setup as the recommended layout (with games released for sale in the Oculus store obligated to support it) but with opposing-camera a supported configuration via a flag (i.e. if you set up the camera in an opposed setup, or have a 3/4 camera setup, an alternate launch option will be exposed). As with the current state of OculusVR, anyone selling a game outside of Oculus home will be free to do whatever, same as SteamVR. Potentially the alternate option could be exposed in-game instead rather than s a launch option through Home, though this would be less elegant, and Oculus seem determined to make VR setup and operation as seamless as possible. It's the same for the Vive too: for any product, the people with faulty units will appear to outnumber those with working units, because nobody goes to a forum just to make a "it works OK" post. *That the photons fly the other way is a common mistake people make with Lighthouse thinking that makes it an inside-out system. It uses stationary world-centric coordinates to locate moving markers, rather than a moving object-centric coorinate system to locate stationary world-centric markers, therefore it is outside-in mathematically and computationally.