WHEN in August 2012 Palmer Luckey, the inventor of the Oculus Rift, a virtual-reality gaming peripheral, asked for financing on Kickstarter, a crowdfunding website, he was hoping to raise just $250,000. Instead, nearly 10,000 people gave him a total of $2.4m to get his device ready for the mass market. Now Mr Luckey has even more cash to play with: his company recently announced it had raised a further $16m of funding from venture capitalists. That money will allow Mr Luckey to hire more engineers to work on the Rift, which not only avid gamers have welcomed as a potentially transformative technology. From the outside the peripheral does not look like much: a set of thick black goggles attached to a headband. Yet slip the Rift over your head and effect is rather impressive: you become immersed in virtual reality.

The device will not only be used to play games. Mr Luckey has long held that virtual reality “can—and will—be as widely used as Facebook and Twitter.” Surgeon Simulator 2013, an enjoyably silly application, for instance, already allows simulating heart and brain surgery (after a fashion). If more serious simulation software were to be developed, medical students could train on virtual patients.

The venture capital was raised because the Kickstarter campaign allowed Oculus to develop a “proof of concept” (a stripped-down device to show what is possible) that was shipped to 7,500 backers. Without the positive feedback investors would probably have balked at funding such a risky technology.

The Rift seems to do a good job immersing players in a game. But it would not be the first time that a promising 3D technology falls flat. 3D television, for instance, has failed to ignite consumer demand. After many false starts, 3D movies have only recently become the norm in cinemas.

The cash injection will certainly help avoid such a fate. Brendan Iribe, Oculus's chief executive, says that his firm is focused on producing a Rift “as close to a consumer product as possible.” A high-definition version for personal-computers, a prototype of which was shown at E3, a video game exhibition, will reach gamers in months, he says.

When the device arrives, it will be entering a buoyant market of game peripherals. Thanks to devices such as Rock Band's plastic drums or the Xbox’s Kinect motion tracking system, add-on gear has become a multi-billion dollar industry. Since 2005 sales have doubled to $2.5bn in America alone, according to NPD Group, a market research firm.



The Rift is different, though, Oculus's boss insists. For one thing, he says, it is not a simple peripheral, but a platform: developers will write games and applications for it, just as they do for Apple’s iPhone. More important, it will change the nature of gaming by making it much more realistic: with the Rift gamers will be right in the middle of the action.