“Those guys are tearing each other apart trying to get the next best thing,” he says. “That has basically driven the costs down to where they’re affordable: displays and sensors that used to be hundreds of dollars now cost pennies.” Oculus charges just $300 (£180) for a low resolution “developer kit” – a kit for companies interested in developing software for the device – and has shipped more than 40,000 worldwide, the biggest deployment of virtual reality headsets in history. It has raised $91million (£55.5 million) in investment funding and done this without actually having a product on the market: you can’t buy it in shops until next year.