Ahead of Oculus Rift's consumer launch in 2016, Oculus VR has announced an "Oculus Ready" program for PCs. Essentially, this is a line of Oculus-branded PCs from big-name companies like Dell, Alienware, and Asus that are specifically designed to work right out of the box with the Oculus Rift VR headset.

These systems, described by Oculus as "high-performances PC optimized for the Rift," cover the headset's recommended system requirements. The cheapest model announced so far is from Asus, and starts at $949. The other systems, from Dell and Alienware, are offered at starting prices of $999.

As mentioned, these systems will come with special Oculus Ready branding (see below), and will ship when Rift's consumer model debuts in Q1 2016.

The full system specifications for these Oculus Ready PCs have not been announced. As announced previously, Oculus Rift's recommended PC specifications are as follows:

NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater

Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater

8GB+ RAM

Compatible HDMI 1.3 video output (required)

2x USB 3.0 ports (required)

Windows 7 SP1 or newer (required)

Oculus has not yet confirmed a price for the Rift headset, but the company has said you should expect to pay $1,500 for an "all-in" setup that includes a capable PC and the device itself. If $949-$999 is the baseline for Rift-compatible PCs, that would put the price of the headset itself (which comes with an Xbox One controller) at around $500, though of course this is not confirmed.

By comparison, the PlayStation 4 VR headset, formerly known as Project Morpheus, is expected to cost about as much as new gaming platform. The major difference between PlayStation VR and Rift, however, is that PlayStation VR will play directly off the PS4 you may already own without the need for extra hardware. PlayStation 4 VR launches in the first half of 2016, meaning it will be out before July.

The Oculus Ready program was announced this week during the Oculus Connect conference. For more from the event, check out the stories below.