The retail version of the Oculus Rift will be released in the first part of next year, Oculus VR revealed today.

Last year legendary game developer John Carmack left his position at id Software to pursue his passion for virtual reality as chief technology officer of Oculus VR. While Facebook's $US2 billion acquisition of Oculus came as a surprise to Carmack, he believes the company has what it takes to make his vision of the "Big Picture" happen.

Valve's Michael Abrash, who was just giving a talk about the wonders of virtual reality at the company's Steam Dev Days in January and has seemingly led the company's VR research, has taken a job as chief scientist at red-hot VR company Oculus. In announcing his move, Abrash also explained why Facebook's controversial $US2 billion purchase of Oculus is great news.

After news broke that the Oculus Rift version of Minecraft had been cancelled, many people couldn't help but wonder, just how much of the project was there to cancel, exactly? Was there something there to cancel, even?