Besides presenting the latest version of the notorious VR headset, Oculus used its own event, Oculus Connect, to announce to the world that they are giving away for free the plans for the first version of the headset, the Rift DK1.

Oculus VR is giving away for free the plans and the firmware for the Oculus Rift DK1. Everything is covered by the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY 4.0), which allows everybody to use, modify and sell the product, as long as the original author is named.

Despite the acquisition by Facebook, it looks like the internal policies of Oculus VR, about the liberalization of the knowledge, have not been changed. Even though you can find the original plans for the Rift DK1, it's not that easy to find the actual hardware, or even tune the software to work with it, and even if you managed to do so, you'll end up using a Rift DK1, which is a device far from being comfortable to use.

It's highly unlikely that a normal user will go through such a path, but we are certain that a few enthusiasts will try to do that, and Oculus VR will monitor their activity to see what they develop with its creature, which is just another way to see its own product under a differen point of view, before the final version comes to the market.





GitHub

Source: Gamasutra
via Le Comptoir du Hardware.