For those that absolultely can’t wait to get to experience the Oculus Rift, you can follow these plans to build your own.

MTBS3D forum user [Rfurlan] pledged in the oculus rift kickstarter (which concluded last night), but simply couldn’t wait till November/December to get his developer kit. That, and he’s probably only getting one, and who can live with only one? Since [Palmer], the creator of the oculus rift has been very open about parts, [Rfurlan] was able to compile build instructions for your very own Oculus Rift! Keep in mind though, this is only the immersive display, not the tracking component. It is also, possibly not exactly the same as the oculus, but rather the same as a recent prototype.

At one point he was having issues finding the correct lenses and [Palmer] jumped in to make some suggestions to keep things going. That’s the kind of enthusiasm that we love to see from an innovator, even when he’s in the middle of a kickstarted for the very item that [Rfurlan] is creating. This is a testament to the VR community.

Lets take a look at what makes this thing tick, and why it is such a big deal.

Many of you, after a quick look at the specs will notice this is just a single, not excessively high resolution, display with a couple wide FOV lenses in front of it. This is absolutely true. What makes this a big deal isn’t the paper specs in terms of resolution or complicated optics.

The thing that makes the rift stand out is that [Palmer] and the other people helping him work on it, like [John Carmack] have been striving to find the key items that allow your brain to be tricked for the sake of immersion. Mainly, the latency between action and display. Since the initial push to Virtual Reality, latency has plagued the experience. Even the slitest disconnect between head movement and environment response can snap your brain into “I’m looking at a display” instead of “i’m looking through a portal”.

The Rift team have found latency sources in every step of the equation. From the input device tracking your movement to the rendering system adding a slight delay when warping the image appropriately for the extremely wide FOV lenses, to displays having their own latency. They’ve managed to just barely scrape into a sweet spot that allows for you to feel as though you’re actually looking around when you move your head (so we’ve heard), and that’s a pretty big deal.

This DIY oculus prototype, and the Oculus Rift themselves aren’t meant to be the final solution. [Palmer] has actually stated that consumers should wait for their next model. This model is going to go out into the world and all of the wonderful people in the VR community, as well as all the game studios, are going to start working on making this better. The consumer version shouldn’t be far behind and will probably boast higher resolutions and even lower latency. We can’t wait.