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Oculus Rift Development Kit 1 plans are now open source, go “make something awesome” say devs

Oculus Rift DK1

VR sensation Oculus Rift is two years into development now and is, what some would say, a ‘pretty big deal’. From a Facebook takeover to a deal with Samsung, Oculus has sprouted from the mind of a 19-year-old Palmer Luckey and bloomed into the biggest thing in consumer electronics. 

Whilst Oculus are proud of that progress, they acknowledge that none of it would be possible if not for their fans and supporters.  As a thank you, Oculus are making the hardware and software details for Development Kit 1 of the Oculus Rift open source. 

Talking at the Oculus Connect Keynote, CEO Brendan Iribe explained the company’s decision to publicly publish the design documents behind their first success. “We decided to give back to the community and fully open-source DK1. All the hardware design, firmware, tracker, the PCB. I can’t wait to see all the Chinese knock-offs. God help us all.”

“We do believe this is important. It’s important for the hackers and makers out there to be able to pick this up, take that tracker, glue it on to different things. Take some source code, change it, modify it. Ship it. Make something awesome.”

The documents can be found on GitHub, and provided you’re skilled enough in the word of hardware engineering, you could well build yourself a functioning VR machine over the weekend (heh). Even better, you could develop a wholly new concept with a VR heart and become the next big thing in PC gaming.