Sure, selling $2.4 million in development kits through a successful Kickstarter campaign is a good way to get started, but Oculus needs more funding than that to get its revolutionary virtual reality headset into shape for consumers. Today the company announced that it has been able to secure $16 million in Series A venture funding led by Spark Capital and Matrix Partners.

In a note on the Matrix Partners blog, funding lead Antonio Rodriguez said it was "inspiring and motivating to see how well the gaming community is reacting to the first dev kit" and said his first experience with the headset led to a "sense of wonder about just how much of science fiction is possible today." Rodriguez added that Oculus' use of low-cost cell phone components and exploitation of PC GPU power could lead to "hardware that can be sourced (and sold) by the millions."

In a follow-up interview with PandoDaily, Rodriguez said the nausea many players experience when using the Rift would diminish as the hardware gets upgraded to higher resolution screens. Indeed, the hi-res prototype Rift we tried at E3 was one of the biggest surprises of the show and seems to remedy the biggest problem with the initial developer units.

Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey, for his part, sees the $16 million investment as another step toward making VR "as widely used as Facebook or Twitter, and the societal implications will be far greater!"

It's a pretty bold vision, and we can't wait to see the Oculus team try to pull it off.