MENLO PARK -- Virtual reality firm Oculus got a big thumbs up from the public when it raised $2.5 million in a 2012 crowdfunding campaign, but the fanfare didn't stop there.

Two years later, Facebook bought the company for $2 billion, investors poured money into virtual reality startups, and media buzz about an industry that stumbled in the 1990s heightened.

On Wednesday, Oculus hit another milestone by putting a consumer version of its virtual reality headset Rift on sale for $599, with deliveries scheduled in March.

"I believe virtual reality has the potential to change the way we live, work and communicate in many ways. Today is an important step towards that future," wrote Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a social media post Wednesday.

Jack McCauley, one of the founders of Oculus VR, has his photo taken wearing one of their virtual reality units in Livermore, Calif., on Wednesday, June 3,

Jack McCauley, one of the founders of Oculus VR, has his photo taken wearing one of their virtual reality units in Livermore, Calif., on Wednesday, June 3, 2015. (Doug Duran/Bay Area News Group) ( Doug Duran )

With Sony and HTC also expected to release virtual reality headsets this year, analysts predict that 2016 will be a breakout year for VR, though tech firms will still face an uphill battle to reach the masses. Google has developed a low-cost headset made of cardboard, allowing people to experience a computer-generated world using their smartphones.

"It's the foundational, watershed year," said J.P. Gownder, an analyst for Forrester Research. "But there will be a strong need for market education to convince people to make this the next big platform." Aside from avid gamers, he noted, many people don't have a computer fast enough or with enough memory to work with an Oculus Rift, which could bring up the price tag to more than $1,000.

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The technology has the potential to go beyond gaming, transforming the way athletes train in professional sports, how people tell stories or even how students attend field trips. Facebook thinks that virtual reality will play a big role in social networking, too, allowing friends and families to experience a birthday celebration or a child's first bike ride as if they were there in person.

"There's a lot of physical behaviors we have today that can be translated into the virtual world and it's hard to make a list because there's so many different markets," said Brian Blau, research director at Gartner. "We're going to find a lot of scenarios that fit well for VR and some that don't. This is the year we're going to start to figure that out."

Virtual reality headset shipments will grow from more than 3 million this year to 30 million globally by 2020, according to estimates from Juniper Research.

Blau noted that while the enthusiasm for virtual reality hasn't changed since the 1990s, when Virtual IO's iGlasses and virtual reality gaming products launched, advancements in technology and the rise of smartphones reinvigorated the industry.

In 2012, the same year that Oculus started its Kickstarter campaign, Google also announced the release of a computer that was built into the frame of a pair of glasses called Google Glass.

"All of a sudden you had two very different but interesting head-mounted displays," Blau said. "Everyone was talking about the virtual world and augmented reality and those are the two events that got people really excited in that time frame."

The number of new U.S. virtual reality startups has also surged since 2012, growing to more than 160 in 2015, according to a report by Touchstone Research and Greenlight VR, a business intelligence service for the VR industry.

Still, the industry is not without its concerns, including cost and health effects such as motion sickness, losing touch with the real world and addiction, according to a consumer survey conducted by the two firms.

"Oculus still has an incredibly important role to play in educating people who don't know very much about VR and what it means it to experience truly immersive environments," said Clifton Dawson, CEO of Greenlight VR. "They have an important part in educating large swaths of people about the benefits and why they should care."

Oculus VR was co-founded in 2012 by game programmer Brendan Iribe and Palmer Luckey, who started building the prototype for the Rift in his parents' garage in Long Beach.

"High end VR is expensive, but Rift is obscenely cheap for what it is," Luckey, 23, tweeted on Wednesday. He said on Twitter that the company's website was experiencing a "high load" though Oculus didn't release data about the numbers of pre-orders that were placed.

San Jose resident Kiyoshi Okuma said that the Rift's price is on the high end, but that didn't deter him from pre-ordering the headset Wednesday.

"I'm a game developer doing an indie game that is well-suited for VR, so for me, buying the Oculus Rift is an investment that will hopefully pay off later when our game ships," he said. "It's also just a cool piece of tech that would be fun to experience and play with."

But the price tag is still making some people cringe.

Stanford University Professor Jeremy Bailenson, who is also director of the university's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, said he asked 120 students on Wednesday who were taking a class on VR if they would pay $600 for a Rift headset in addition to the cost for a high-end computer.

Only one woman raised her hand.

Contact Queenie Wong at 408-920-2706. Follow her at Twitter.com/QwongSJ.

Oculus rift

Facebook-owned Oculus started accepting pre-orders for its virtual reality headsets on Wednesday, setting a price of $599. The headsets, which are called the Oculus Rift, are scheduled to be shipped starting on March 28. The price includes a headset, sensor, Oculus Remote, cables, Xbox One Controller and the games "EVE: Valkyrie," and "Lucky's Tale," according to Oculus' website. A bundle that includes an Oculus-ready PC and a headset will cost $1499 with pre-orders for that package starting in February.