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A campaign aimed at developers rather than consumers funded a rough head-mounted display built from inexpensive phone parts. It brought money, talent and attention back to a field the industry had written off.
A dormant field restarted from a hobbyist prototype rather than a corporate research program. Putting cheap kits in the hands of thousands of developers simultaneously established shared technical standards for comfort and presence that shaped every headset built afterward.
Facebook agreed to purchase Oculus for roughly two billion dollars, describing headsets as a future computing platform rather than a game accessory. The deal transformed the field's funding and unsettled many of its early supporters.
Virtual reality was reclassified from gaming peripheral to potential computing platform, and funded accordingly. The acquisition set the pattern for the following decade, in which headset development was driven mainly by very large technology companies pursuing platform positions rather than by game hardware makers.
The first consumer Oculus Rift shipped in late March 2016 and the HTC Vive, with room-scale tracking and motion controllers, arrived days later. Working virtual reality was on sale after decades of false starts.
The technical argument about whether comfortable consumer virtual reality was possible ended, and the commercial argument began. Room-scale tracking with hand controllers, introduced here, became the standard interface for the medium and remains the layout every subsequent headset has followed.
PlayStation VR worked with an ordinary PlayStation 4 and a camera instead of a high-end computer. It became the best-selling headset of its generation and reached households with no interest in gaming computers.
Deliberately lowering specifications to reach an existing installed base outsold technically superior headsets. That result shaped the field's direction, pushing later hardware toward self-contained devices at consumer prices rather than premium equipment for enthusiasts with powerful computers.
