For those of you that couldn’t make it to Palmer’s talk and Q&A session at GDC, “Virtual Reality – The Holy Grail of Gaming,” we’ve posted the recording for your viewing pleasure!

Team Fortress 2 in the Rift

The exclusive Team Fortress 2 Rift development kit hat (TF2VRH) is now available to Kickstarter backers via the Oculus Order Manager.

You can claim your hat right now by logging into www1.oculus.com/sales and following the instructions there. If you pre-ordered a development kit after the Kickstarter campaign but before April 1, 2013, you’ll be able to claim your hat as soon as your dev kit has shipped.

Now that Rift development kits are out in the wild, we thought it was time to bring Oculus developers together for a Team Fortress 2 VR throwdown. With that in mind, we’ve opened an official Oculus TF2 VR server!

You can connect to the Oculus server starting today using the address ‘tf2.oculus.com’, or by searching for “Oculus” in the TF2 Server Browser. You can also connect using the TF2 console with the command ‘connect tf2.oculus.com’.

We strongly encourage you to play using the Rift! The Oculus team will be in there from time to time to defend our VR turf. Palmer’s most-played Steam game is TF2, so be ready for some stiff competition.

To celebrate the Oculus server’s grand opening, we’re hosting the first (of many) Oculus VR Gaming Night this Friday, April 19th from 6 – 9pm PDT!

We’ll square off with the community in Capture/Payload gametypes, all in virtual reality using the Rift development kit. This could be your chance to blow up Palmer with a rocket launcher as a Soldier or save him from near-death as a Medic! We’ll also be streaming the event on TwitchTV so you can watch the mayhem live.

Even if you don’t have your dev kit yet (sorry!), don’t hesitate to jump in and show us what you’re made of!

“Holy Mackerel!”

And just in case you missed it, “My 90 year old grandmother tries the Oculus Rift.”

We’ll see you (and grandma) in the game!

— Palmer and the Oculus team