Following their hugely successful Kickstarter funding drive of the Rift head-mounted VR display, which promised to supply backers with developer kit hardware, the Oculus team has now opened up a public pre-order system on their official site.

As we've seen with that other popular crowd-funded games hardware project, the OUYA console, post-kickstarter pre-orders for a Rift developer kit are priced similarly to the original pledge tiers (US$300 + International shipping), but will be dispatched a little later in January 2013 --a month after the expected December 2012 delivery to Kickstarter backers. Reportedly however, only the first 1,000 pre-orders will receive the free copy of the Rift-compatible Doom 3: BFG Edition.

The initial developer kit of the Oculus Rift HMD is intended for game developers interested in adding virtual reality support to their products, with a consumer version with improved features planned to follow a year or so later, and the device's inventor Oculus' Palmer Luckey has repeatedly recommended that general gaming population hold on to their wallets for that one.