Oculus Rift team receives an additional $75M in funding

Oculus VR, the company behind the upcoming Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, has raised a whopping $75 million in a new round of funding, on top of the $16 million it already received earlier this year. This round of financing came primarily from investment company Andreessen Horowitz, with venture capital entrepreneurs Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon joining the Oculus board. According to The Verge, it was a new version of the Oculus Rift technology that convinced Andreessen Horowitz to invest, with Dixon commenting that the Oculus team has managed to heavily improve the latency, resolution and head-tracking on the device. With this new investment, the Oculus team plans to continue production of the headset, while also supporting software developers "who are risking their time and money developing games for the Oculus Rift instead of more established platforms." "They're not just betting that their game will be successful, they're also betting that Oculus will sell enough units to make their game profitable, and that's a really big bet for a developer to make," Oculus founder Palmer Luckey told The Verge. "If a company is going to take out a lot of time from their development schedule to build a game in VR, we don't want them to have to shoulder all of that risk themselves." Update: In an interview with AllThingsD, Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe claimed that a portion of the newfound funding will go towards ensuring that there are great games available for the Rift when it launches, as well as in the months that follow. Presumably this involves some developer outreach on Oculus' part, and we've reached out to the company for further details. There's still no word on when a consumer version of the Oculus Rift hardware will be released to the public.