It has been a long road from Oculus VR’s initial Kickstarter campaign in 2012 to its $2 billion acquisition by Facebook, Inc. and eventual partnership with Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. Now, after nearly three years, the company has finally announced that the consumer version of its Oculus Rift virtual reality headset will be hitting the market in early 2016.

“Since the earliest days of the Oculus Kickstarter, the Rift has been shaped by gamers, backers, developers and enthusiasts around the world,” Oculus said in an announcement on its blog. “Today, we’re incredibly excited to announce that the Oculus Rift will be shipping to consumers in Q1 2016, with pre-orders later this year.”

Oculus renewed interest in the niche market of VR gaming, which had faded from the public consciousness after a series of failed VR companies in the late 1990s.

At GDC 2015, Oculus CTO John Carmack referred to these companies as “huge smoking craters in the landscape,” and he said that Oculus VR’s greatest fear is releasing an inferior product that “poisons the well” for VR technology and sets the industry back by decades.

“We can’t get everything that we want”

While Oculus still has another year to improve the technology in Oculus Rift before its consumer release, Carmack had hinted just last month that the device still had a lot of room for improvement.

During a talk given to students at the University of Texas at Dallas last month, Carmack emphasized the current limitations of VR hardware, saying that tradeoffs have to be made between resolution, stereoscopy (3D), frame rate and so on. “We can’t get everything that we want,” Carmack told the students.

Carmack has also stated that he believes high-end, niche market devices like Oculus Rift will not be what turns virtual reality into a massive industry. Instead, he believes that virtual reality could potentially reach 1 billion users through mobile VR devices like Gear VR, which is produced by Oculus through a partnership with Samsung.

Oculus hasn’t said much about the details of the consumer version of Oculus Rift, but in the coming weeks, the company will be releasing details about the hardware, software, input, and “unannounced made-for-VR games and experiences.”

Image credit: Oculus VR