Oculus Rift CEO: 'We'd love it to be free'

The team behind the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset is looking to find ways to make the hardware free of charge at the point of purchase.

Speaking with Edge, CEO Brendan Iribe admitted that the lack of a price tag wouldn't happen for a while but that the team were investigating different business models with a view to lowering the price as much as possible. The dream scenario would be "free".

"The lower the price point, the wider the audience," said Iribe. "We have all kinds of fantasy ideas. We'd love it to be free one day, so how do we get it as close to free as possible? Obviously it won't be that in the beginning. We're targeting the $300 [£200] price point right now but there's the potential that it could get much less expensive with a few different relationships and strategies."

$300 is the current price of a devkit but no pricing structure has been announced for the consumer version. From Iribe's comments it seems the Oculus team is considering different options. One is having the hardware sell at a loss, as consoles have done, then make up the shortfall with software licensing and so on. So, with the right IP costs could plummet.

"Let's say there was some game you played in VR that everybody loved and everybody played and we made $100 (£66) a month -- or even $10 (£6) a month -- at some point the hardware's cheap enough and we're making enough that we could be giving away the headset."

To get an idea of the level of enthusiasm from potential consumers and from business investors, the company recently raised $16 million (just over £10 million) in venture capital funding to add to the $2.4 million (£1.5 million) it raised via donations on Kickstarter.

"Virtual reality will be one of the most significant technologies of the 21st century," said company founder, Palmer Luckey at the time. "It has the potential to drastically alter the way we play, communicate, and learn. I think that VR can (and will) be as widely used as Facebook or Twitter, and the societal implications will be far greater!"

Aiming for such a large potential userbase it makes sense to lower the initial cost as much as possible. The focus, then, will be on choosing the right business model with which to achieve that.