At the price of $650 USD (for Australia) with an additional $130 USD in shipping costs. Which, may be a lot steeper than what you were expecting but this gets you the Rift headset, Oculus remote, cables, Xbox One controller, and a sensor. Plus two games. EVE: Valkyrie and Lucky's Tail. If you're interested in the Rift you may want to get in quick because the initial shipments have already sold out. Which took roughly 14 minutes or so. Pre-orders as of now are expected to ship sometime in May this year.

Those who pre-order won't be charged until their unit ships, and for Australians that basically puts you at the mercy of the exchange rate at that particular point in time. In addition to online pre-orders, Rift units will also be available in select retailers sometime in April.



As to the question of what sort of rig is required the following recommended specs have also been announced:

• Graphics Card:: NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD R9 290 equivalent or greater
  
• Processor: Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
  
• Memory: 8GB+ RAM
  
• Output: Compatible HDMI 1.3 video output
  
• Input: 3x USB 3.0 ports plus 1x USB 2.0 port
  
• Operating system: Windows 7 SP1 64 bit or newer
  

To see if your PC can handle the power of VR, you can also use the handy Oculus compatibility tool (direct link).

So there you have it, the retail Oculus Rift is mere months away. In terms of price and PC requirements it certainly doesn't seem like a mainstream device (well, initially at least), but anticipation for the unit is still riding high. And with the ship date changing from March to April and now May, the demand is certainly there.

UPDATE: With the internet naturally reacting to the Oculus Rift price-point, which came in the flavour of "By Jove! It's just too gosh darn expensive" Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey took to Twitter to respond the concerns.

To reiterate, we are not making money on Rift hardware. High end VR is expensive, but Rift is obscenely cheap for what it is.

— Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) January 6, 2016