Oculus Rift Virtual Reality Headset Release Date Delayed Again; Launch Won't Arrive Until 2016

The launch of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, which was earlier scheduled later this year, has apparently been pushed to 2016 following statements made by Oculus founder Palmer Luckey and Facebook chief financial officer Dave Wehner.

Speaking at a panel discussion during the South by Southwest, or SXSW, festival in Austin, Texas, last month, Luckey said "the company has made a lot of changes to our roadmap and we've expanded a lot of the ambition we had around the product."

Althnough Luckey said "he could not comment about the launch date even though nothing had gone horribly wrong with the project," sources said a 2015 release date appeared unlikely.

Indications of trouble in the development of the Oculus Rift VR headset surfaced when the quarterly earnings call of social media giant Facebook was announced recently. Last year, Facebook agreed to buy Oculus VR.

In his statement, Facebook's Wehner said Oculus Rift VR headset is still in development stage.

Other companies have made giant strides in developing their own virtual reality headsets. They include Valve and HTC which created and launched the Vive this year.

Samsung already has a virtual reality headset in the market, the Samsung Gear VR, which recently brought out an Innovator edition. There is also going to be a major launch in the middle of next year when Project Morpheus from Sony is released.

Oculus worked along with Samsung on the development of the Gear VR. However, the Oculus Rift has been hit by a number of delays. In 2014, Oculus was taken over by Facebook in a $2 billion dollar deal. That was when Luckey stated that a release in 2015 was on the cards.