a 599 PC is not going to have a GPU strong enough to give you any decent VR, 599 is about the starting point for the GPU only, I would honestly not go with anything less than a 980ti for a minimum of future-proofing, and unless you already have one I would wait for a Pascal card, which in any case will cost at least that much.
in VR dropping frames / latency directly maps to motion sickness, so it's not a case of "eh, I can deal with the framerate not being super solid" like it can be on normal gaming.
This costs less than some flagship cellphones, 599 is definitely not that much all things considered.
> in VR dropping frames / latency directly maps to motion sickness, so it's not a case of "eh, I can deal with the framerate not being super solid" like it can be on normal gaming.
Do you have any articles/papers about this? I'm not doubting you, just curious!
Except you'll also need a killer desktop PC that can run it [1]:
- NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater
- Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
- 8GB+ RAM
- Compatible HDMI 1.3 video output
- 2x USB 3.0 ports
- Windows 7 SP1 or newer
The Oculus Touch is stated to need 4 USB ports [2], not just two, so better plan for that as well
So in total you are probably looking at close to $2,000 [3] to use the Rift not including whatever games or applications cost - of which there are not yet a lot of titles (I'm sure that will change in short order though).
My (older) home PC pretty much hits the minimum (GTX 970 and the 4590 processor, but 16GB RAM). Honestly I couldn't tell you how many USB ports it has, I only use two.
Looks like I'll be holding off consideration until I upgrade :)
Kind of like saying to buy a car you need a $300k house with a garage, when in fact many of the people buying a car already have a house with a garage.
That's also not a "killer" desktop. The 290 is a a 2.5 year old card. The GTX 970 is equivalent to a 680 or 780. The 680 came out almost four years ago. If you had no computer at all, you could build that system for ~$700 - $750 ($200 CPU, $100 Mobo, $200 Used GPU, $50 RAM, $75 SSD, $100 Tower+PSU).
But that's immaterial, as most early buyers of the Rift have hardware that meets the requirements above. And four USB ports? A $10-$20 powered USB hub solves that. Wouldn't surprise me if it came with one.
It's "killer" compared to 99% of all personal computers.
~$700 - $750
For casual gamers and the general public it's a non-starter.
Ok, you say, well it's not for them yet. Actually that's the whole point. In every article and everything that people are talking about in and around VR the whole discussion is how it transforms everything. You think Netflix is on-board so they can cater to PC Master Race people?
I'm bullish on VR (moreso AR actually) but lets not pretend that the next few years will see your average consumer using VR like this. More likely, they will be using something like the GearVR, which I think has a much brighter future.
The "n USB ports" is truly weird, considering that separate ports more often than not share controllers, so the bandwidth would be shared anyways (correct me if i'm wrong).
Maybe the number of ports is for power, obviating the need to bundle a region-specific mains adapter? In that case, a powered USB hub would be fine, a passive one wouldn't.
Sure, and I do think the Tesla analogy is accurate. This is a first-gen device aimed towards early adopters who are willing to pay more. Next generations will be progressively cheaper.
There are quite a few Tesla owners who don't own houses, actually. It's definitely more convenient to have charging in your garage / your apartment's garage. So it's a big consideration, but not an absolute rule.
That price includes VAT. According to google 599 USD is 557 EUR. Add VAT to that, e.g. Finnish 24%, and you get 691 EUR. Not that far from the 699 EUR listed price.
You don't add Finnish 24% VAT but the VAT of the country where the EU branch of the company is based - most likely Luxembourg with its 15% VAT rate. (All Amazon deliveries to the Eurozone come from Amazon EU SARL in Luxembourg, for instance).
Which means the fair price would be EUR 640, almost 10% lower.
VAT is based on the buyer's country for digital goods/services [1], and in other cases (such as this) if the sales exceed 100 000 EUR per year. [2][3] In some countries, like Finland, the limit is even lower at 35 000 EUR per year. [4] So if Oculus expects to sell more than 50 copies of the Rift to Finland, it will have to pay the Finnish VAT.
I thought I had heard in the $200-$300 range expected for the final product. I'd jump at the lower end of that range, but there's no way I'm paying $600.
Eh, 24 inches, no *-sync, 144hz refresh, 1080p, 1ms "grey-to-grey", and it's TN not IPS.
More on the high-end is Acer Predator X34: [0]
34" cinema 21:9, g-sync, 100hz refresh, 1440p, and IPS (also full 100% sRGB coverage). This thing retails for ~$1300 and is sold-out almost everywhere.
If we're talking pro-gamers, they probably don't want a 34 21:9 cinema display either. While I haven't tried it, I'm guessing g-sync @ 100hz makes having a insane refresh rate unnecessary. But at $300-400, I'm guessing most progamers will go with the minimum necessary to get their frame rate optimal.
In reflex based games, given two otherwise equal setups with players having equal reflexes, the one who gets the stimulus first due to higher refresh rate will win. The standard 60 Hz means new data is sent every 17ms. With 144 Hz you cut it down to 7ms. With equal reflexes, the player who receives the stimulus 10ms earlier will execute the necessary actions 10ms earlier.
In practice no two players are that equal, but it's still beneficial to accumulate every advantage you can.
Ditto. $600 is well outside of the impulse buy range for me that this would have had to be priced at ($350 would be an automatic buy, $400 I'd consider, $600 no), and I bought a DK1 (though through Oculus, not through Kickstarter) and have a pretty substantial amount of expendable spending money.
It is interesting to me that the first impulse of so many people in this thread is to try to logically justify the price in the face of people saying they won't buy it -- I'm not saying those people are wrong when comparing the price to a high end monitor or graphics cards, it just isn't relevant to whether or not I'm willing to buy this at $600.
My decision not to buy this doesn't mean I don't think the device is worth the money being asked for everyone, nor do I think Oculus/FB is wrong for pricing it thusly, it is just more than I am personally willing to pay for something that is a fairly niche novelty at this point.
At the current asking price it is very easy for me to justify waiting until gen 2 or gen 3 when things are much cheaper and there's even more support out there.
The site seems to autocorrect it to MM/YYYY if you enter MM/YY. At least, when it works. Even when I entered the information in manually I got the same vague errors.
I wonder what the purpose of collecting at as MM/YYYY even is given that everyone will have an expiration date of 20YY for a long time; and that when they don't, the ones collected now will be expired so not an issue. Even if they store it locally as 20YY to avoid some bug in 2100 (which would be rather long term thinking at this point), it still makes no sense to collect it that way and to autocorrect. Why not just append the digits on the back end?
Paypal and credit cards are both declined with "Something went wrong", console shows "Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 500 (Internal Server Error)"
Watching my ship date go from March to April and now probably May was a bit disheartening.
It finally went through although no confirmation email or any trace of the payment on my paypal account (or confirmation email from paypal which is usually immediate). So not sure if it actually went through...
It isn't blank anymore, but it was nearly impossible to place an order.
I kept getting vague "Something went wrong. Please try again." messages on both the Payment Method and (when I finally got there) the Review and Complete Order pages. Meanwhile, my expected ship date went from March to April. It wouldn't accept my AMEX at all, for some reason.
I stand corrected. I just got a $1 authorization charge placed against my AMEX even though it never once even got to the point of storing my AMEX information as my "Credit Card" in their system.
I guess I should be happy it was only a single authorization charge?
VR is the real thing. You still throw the football. You just get to see exactly what you did, and how it compares with the throws before and after. And you can get things like realtime audio feedback while you move to give you information about where your body is relative to where you're trying to train to. The possibilities are infinite.
True, but pro athletes have already had other proprietary technology for the past year. Oculus might not even be the best solution currently for athletic performance. A cool read on Stanford Football's use of Virtual Reality in practice settings [0]
If you're a 3D artist or programmer you'll probably find uses for it soon enough. Either making 3D art in it (something I've already done at a simple level, and will do more of once more tools are compatible) or making VR applications for other people.
Same here. I like to play around in Cinema4D and I've started to learn the basics of UE with my DK2. Even just making neat environments to walk around in is a load of fun and the applications will reach far beyond video games as the tech matures.
Still gonna hold off on this and thankfully I can still do stuff with the DK2 until future runtimes stop supporting it in newer applications. I'm mostly just looking forward to watching the whole platform (VR in general) evolve past the initial "make Fallout/Minecraft/CoD in VR" phase and get into more immersive movies, VR telepresence, and new ways to communicate and create stuff.
Stop with "Virtual Reality" hype. People feel dizzy after trying this out. You will see how this hype will decline after the product launch. We see hype because big companies bet on this product and now want to get their millions back...
I have the dev kit from the first Kickstarter (and will get this one apparently for free because of it); never felt dizzy at all nor anything else negative besides getting sweaty in my face after a while of playing. It might be a hype and it might decline but not because 'people feel dizzy' in general.
Different VR devices are different. The GearVR for example has no positional tracking, which can make people very sick. Oculus has been focused almost entirely on fixing nausea issues one by one for the last 4 years. In addition game design choices have a huge effect. Games will be rated on a scale of how nauseating they can be. The most accessible experiences will be no more nauseating than sitting at the bus stop.
This is a l10n problem. This happened to me when I was set to Spanish (Latin America) and Russian, but it's correct with English. Some xenophobe must have stripped out the commas...
It seems like you can't take that out of the bundle if you have one yourself, possibly a modified version? Otherwise that seems like a major disappointment for those already own an xbox controller, and force them to pay additional $$.
Palmer said that they get the controllers for next to nothing (remember the deal they made with Microsoft?). If you don't want it you can sell it and come out ahead of where you would be if they had never included it.
It's probably also helpful that most PC games that were ported from console support DirectInput/XInput. Getting the PC users set up with controllers will make it easier to pitch developers on porting from console VR (Sony) -> PC VR.
I thought Samsung has been doing a pretty decent job of integrating VR into their smartphones. Will there be a substantial improvement to the VR experiences using Oculus?
Just comparing my DK2 to stuff like GearVR (or Cardboard at the low end) it really does make a difference. Without the smoothest of framerates or positional tracking, it really limits the useful applications of VR. It's OK for watching a movie on a virtual giant screen or some more limited experiences but for a real sense of immersion, you really need some level of positional tracking.
When I got the DK2 I spent way more time grinning that I could stand up and look around behind my flight chair and around my cockpit in Elite Dangerous than I'd like to admit. Just having a 3d "surround" image to look around is cool but positional tracking makes you feel like you're really "there".
"Too much money" ... "It's all hype". Can we take the whiny asshole shit to Reddit? It's ok if you're not interested. Check back in 5 years. Everyone doesn't need to be an early adopter.
599... not to mention I have a very high end computer by today's standard but it still needs upgrades. I have one of the better AMD processors but it tells me I need an Intel, which means I will have to buy a new board and rebuild the entire thing, as well as replace the GPU... right.
Not to mention that whole promise that Facebook is going to make it so much easier for them...and they can't even provider proper support for all mainstream chips.
In the late 1990s-early 2000s a decent gaming PC would cost you between $2500 and $3500, and those numbers represented more money than they do today.
A "very high end computer by today's standard", when it comes to games, would have a GPU that's substantially faster than what Oculus is requiring ... I find their requirement shockingly low and wonder if that is a tactical mistake.
I'm not a gamer, but I still get a kick out of people complaining about how expensive $45 or $50 games are.
Get off my damn lawn, when I was a wee lad, I reserved my copy of Super Mario 3 and was HAPPY to find a store to hold a copy for me on release, of course full retail price of $65. That's $130 in today's dollars!
$599 may seem like a perilously steep price to debut at, but right now, Oculus faces a much bigger risk than low sales volume: Poor reception. If this was the MSRP required to ensure a comfortable, nausea-free experience, it's far better to have a killer product at a high price point than a "don't buy the first generation" product at the price point people were expecting. The former can lead to a cheaper gen 2, but the latter can lead to ruin.
My thoughts as well. Plus the price is roughly comparable to a higher end smartphone. Given the hardware and software involved, it's not terribly far off for a gen 1 device.
I think of the Palm and WinMo phones I paid $500+ for during the early generations of smartphones and it starts to make more sense. And just as I'm sure those devices from Palm and HTC could've been a lot nicer even with the tech of the day, the price would've pushed into the $1000 range. Gen 1 is always gonna be fairly expensive and still not quite as good as you wish it was. With later revisions, price drops and capabilities go up.
The only issue I see here is that rather than looking at relative openness and ability to run in-development software on something like the Vive or the Rift, many people are going to look only at price and wait for something like a $300 Playstation VR headset that's limited to whatever can be sold and approved for a game console.
As I see it, it's still an early-adopter techie toy/luxury so whether it costs $399 or $599, I'd only really buy it if I had that sort of dough in my "fun stuff I don't need" budget. Even as someone who bought a Rift DK2 at launch, I'm both waiting on buying any consumer device and not too concerned with the price difference between a $400 device and a $600 device. If anything ends up striking me as really worth buying, I won't just buy a lesser device to save a couple hundred bucks. I'd rather wait until I see something I really want and will use and not buy anything at all until then.
> Plus the price is roughly comparable to a higher end smartphone.
Interesting comparison, but most people are able to finance phones through their carrier (although I haven't looked into that for a bleeding edge new phone model).
Back before smartphones were the norm, if you wanted a high end phone, you had to buy it on your own. I remember purchasing my first high-end Sony Ericsson for something like $600. It wouldn't be stretch to believe that after a few years of production, the price of the Oculus will be under $200.
Unfortunately this is socially positioned more like a TV or a games console, rather than a smartphone (used every day all day), which have much longer lifespans than a smartphone (5-10 years vs 2-5 years).
The interesting question is how long before this version of the Rift becomes obsolete, or will Oculus provide a contract-based upgrade plan (like for phones).
No one in their right mind would expect this hardware to stay relevant for more than 1-2 years.
If you can't afford to spend $600 once a year, get a better job, or stop buying expensive toys.
I'd be totally OK with it costing $1000 if it could really provide a great VR experience.
>many people are going to look only at price and wait for something like a $300 Playstation VR headset
This is what I imagine will be the most common outcome here. Sure the Rift is 'only' $600, but you need a $400 video card to make it work on top of a decent rig, so a minimum $1500 investment?
Meanwhile, millions of kids with Xboxes and PS4's already have everything they need for a perhaps lesser experience, but come xmas that $299 console headset is going to be crazy attractive. The hands on reviews I've read with Morpheus compared it to a later model Rift. No idea how it stacks to this new consumer model, but if Sony can sell that level of resolution and performance on consoles, then its going to hurt Oculus severely. As someone who owns both I'm leaning on wating for the consoles to ante up. I think the PC end of VR is going to be a lot of half assed indie games, non-VR games tied to some crappy driver that makes them 'VR' but with a very poor experience, general steam shovelware/paid beta's, and demos masquerading as "games" while the consoles will only allow polished AAA products on their VR platform.
I dunno...I'd prefer being able to download and run every cool virtual meeting space or VR movie theater that plays my own movies or in-development 3d telepresence project or interactive projection visual plugin that comes out (in addition to games and stuff that are fully and officially supported).
Later on, sure, there will be plenty of fully commercialized and polished software on every VR platform that's still around but right now this is inherently an early-adopter platform. Sony will offer a handful of launch titles that work with Morpheus and maybe let you rent VR movies for $20 a pop. But when the HMD is just a peripheral, you'll get the polished stuff as well as the beta stuff and honestly that's where all of the cool software and applications are gonna be for a little while still.
I can't imagine Sony allowing something like Riftmax Theater or letting you use something like VorpX to simulate playing your games on a giant 3D IMAX screen. I'll never get to enable beta VR support in a game like I can with Steam and I'll never get to fire up Unreal Engine and model out some neat stuff, hit "play", and then walk around it in VR.
Basically if AAA games are your priority, Sony and other console-type platforms will be more polished but probably more limited. If you're here as an early adopter with enthusiasm for VR as a platform and eager to try out every new concept or application, you're better off with a more open platform for creation and distribution.
And as for the cost, needing a $400 video card only applies to some people. Since I already need and use a computer for lots of things, I tend to spend the extra money on a nice GPU instead of a gaming console for roughly the same cost. This won't apply to everyone but it's the market that PC-based VR is after at the moment. My GPU cost me $100 more than the launch price of a PS4 with no additional peripherals and lets me play any new games (as well as my huge library of older ones) at 2560x1440 with all the bells and whistles. I think for a lot of people who enjoy gaming and multimedia work/hobby, it's a solid way to go.
Either way, in 5-10 years it'll go the way of much other consumer tech and you'll be able to get top performance at mainstream, affordable prices. The high costs and tradeoffs on various platforms right now will become less of an issue with volume sales and mature hardware/software.
The parts are swappable. Going to a different headset isn't going to make you less prone to nausea if the software is no good. And if the software is good, you'd not get nausea even on a lesser headset. The headset is not the determining factor of nausea. Even the DK2 did its job and did it well enough.
I don't think consumers will care who is really to blame, they'll only come away with a bad experience, word will spread, and demand will drop.
To use a food analogy: You sell pizza, it is the best pizza in town, but the delivery driver sucks and food is constantly arriving cold or smashed. Your patrons aren't going to care that you always blame the delivery driver for the problems, or that the pizza COULD be good if not ruined, they're going to either shop somewhere else or quit buying delivered pizza. Same thing here, regardless who ruined the thing, the experience is still the same.
Except in this shitty analogy, I hire the driver, so if the pizza is bad because of the driver, it is my fault. Oculus doesn't hire most of the VR game developers in the world.
I absolutely would not blame the restaurant if my GrubHub delivery guy ruined the order.
And regardless, what the mythical "average consumer" does or doesn't do is immaterial. You should know better.
Except in that shitty analogy, the way I understood it, Ocolus is the delivery guy. The Rift is not the product, its just the delivery mechanism: the games are the product.
Nausea, headaches, (and a bad experience) can be caused by things like low resolution and low (max) framerates, for example. Software cannot do anything about those issues.
Totally correct. As someone who has been using the Oculus DK2 since it's release, I can personally state that nausea can have many underlying sources, but the most frequent is the conflicting information your vestibular system is receiving: equilibrium vs. vision.
The Rift itself, in conjunction with good software, is excellent at tracking both rotation and translation motion and keeping the display in sync. More often than not, the nausea one experiences has to do with locomotion within the game. Spinning your character around with your mouse, for example, produces a spinning sensation with no corresponding input from your equilibrium, resulting in a sick feeling in some people.
The good news is: Many people are able to "get their VR legs" by starting with simple experiences and slowing introducing more complex ones.
I wouldn't say it never shipped to consumers. It was available for purchase on the Play Store alongside their other consumer products, and billed as an 'explorer edition'. If it was only intended for devs it should have been available for purchase on the dev site and billed as a developer edition.
I'd say you're getting a lot more at a much cheaper price with Occulus Rift than you did with Glass. I think the point is charge more if that's what it takes to create a good experience. Google charged a lot more and the experience was awful. I used it for 1 week and to me Glass seemed like something that was a year or two from being ready for release. The extra expense didn't get you a killer experience.
Glass in mass production was supposed to be a $200 - $299 device from industry estimates at the time. One report claimed it contained $80 in parts. That's a lot of leeway to push itself into the low end of the tech enthusiast market, if Google ever really wants to make it a consumer item.
The Oculus is an amazing and wholly novel experience, the Glass is a completely underwhelming one. I don't think Google could sell many of them, even at a much lower price point.
People know exactly how much or little they will use a conventional display, that makes it easy to decide on a quality/price range. With a VR headset, it's like buying a guitar without ever having played a musical instrument. Most people prefer to start with the cheapest model in a situation like that and only get a better one once they know they will stick with the instrument. Actually it's even worse than that with the rift, because right now we don't even know if anyone would stick with a VR headset once the novelty effect wears off and all bets are off about social conventions regarding rift usage.
Of course we all understand why Oculus does not want to offer cheaper, low spec models that might fill the "beginner model" gap. In that kind of situation, maybe Oculus would do well offering franchise kits for rent-a-rift shops. The last remaining video stores might be a good match, the audience is open for technological home entertainment and their economic situation is likely to be desperate enough to try new side lines.
Well, that price does include HiFi headphones with a built-in DAC, an Xbox One controller, a small hand-held controller, and two games. Retail prices on those bought separately? Easily 1/3rd the price.
This doesn't include their touch controller, if that's what you mean. If it did I'd consider buying it (I'm still annoyed by 30 dollar shipping costs).
Yeah, that's what I meant. Honestly, for casual experiences, I expect this is going to be very nice. I can imagine sitting away from my desk in my swivel chair, using that controller instead of the gamepad, to do stuff like organize photo collages, watch videos, do teleconferencing, maybe even just meditate.
Personally, I don't mind the lack of touch controllers. I'm more interested in flying spaceships which is going to mean buying separate hardware regardless.
I do wish they'd sell it without the Xbox One controller since I already have 2x wireless 360 controllers. Nothing in the new one sounds particular worth re-buying.
I might be priced out this generation regardless. Ah well.
I hate when marketing tries to add value or justify cost with bundles, add-ons or promotional items. None of those items appeal to me and I'd rather buy a barebones kit and save $50.
I don't need a wireless xbox controller, I have 2 sitting right next to me.
I have no interest in those two games, they'll be thrown on the stack of AOL floppies, Colin McRae: Dirt download codes, and McAfee CDs I have gathering dust in the corner.
The headphones are nice I guess if you don't have wireless ones but I do so they'll be relegated to the bin.
The Oculus Remote doesn't appear to be integral, it just looks like an optional accessory you could use instead of another input means.
One of the reasons I think Oculus went with an onboard DAC is to precisely sync audio, visuals, and head tracking. Using a non-Oculus audio pipeline could introduce unpredictable timing and a worse experience.
That's an interesting thought but I'm not sure that's the case. Everything I've read about VR indicates that latency capturing and interpreting input are the biggest factors in the VR experience. If output latency were a major concern then I'm not sure they'd have chosen standard HDMI to carry the audio/video signals. The DAC on the Rift is simply to take the HDMI audio and output it.
I would argue that price (and this being a high one) could just as easily lead to ruin.
The quality of a user's experience with the Oculus is going to be directly correlated to the quantity and quality of games/experiences available for the device. Even if it's silky smooth and you can use it for hours on end without issue if you run out of quality content in two hours there's a problem. Quantity/quality are even more important to the user after making such a significant investment.
The problem here is if developers will be able to make money creating quality experiences for Oculus if the userbase is tiny because no one can afford one. The user market is already being fractured by the different units available - if I develop a game for the HTC Vive (which supports room tracking) is it easy or even possible to port the experience to the Oculus?
Developing a high quality gaming experience is EXPENSIVE, and AAA regularly do not recoup their costs even when they're being offered to a huge user base (XBOX/PS4/PC/etc). Due to the nature of VR a quality experience is going to require a significant investment to build. If companies can't recoup that cost they'll stop developing and if there aren't any killer experiences people will stop buying the Rift.
For Oculus (or any of the upcoming units) to be successful they need to walk the line between quality and price, and I'm not sure they've done it.
I'm starting to think Sony is in a better position even though it's looking like they have inferior hardware.
> Developing a high quality gaming experience is EXPENSIVE, and AAA regularly do not recoup their costs even when they're being offered to a huge user base
The problem is that you're associating quality with only AAA titles. There are have been plenty of quality indie titles for years now.
> Even if it's silky smooth and you can use it for hours on end without issue if you run out of quality content in two hours there's a problem.
I don't know about the oculus store, but there's already enough content with existing titles on Steam.
I agree that there have been plenty of quality indie titles but I think the 3D / recreating reality aspects of VR are somewhat limiting here. 2D games (some of my favorite recent indies) are out of the question in VR. A major goal of VR is to recreate reality or some "reality", which requires well designed 3D models and animations. That being said I think there will be great indie experiences available, but they'll also be up against a limited user base when it comes to making money.
Another way to look at it is that the Oculus isn't just a peripheral, it's a platform. Console makers have learned how important it is to either keep console costs down or subsidize in order to reach the largest user base, which in turn draws developers and subsequently a larger library which leads to more platform purchases.
Most titles aren't going to work with the Oculus out of the box. Even for a standard FPS you can't just check box and enable VR. The best experiences, and the ones that will drive sales will be designed specifically for VR.
Think about 3D movies and the difference between seeing something like Avatar that was created with 3D in mind and some of the terrible 3D addition cash grabs that have come out. A lot of those poor post 3D additions have turned people off to 3D movies altogether.
I don't think that even AAA level models are good enough for VR. They have the "uncanny valley" effect -- they're close enough to looking good that they just creep you out and throw of that "presence" feel you're looking for. I think it's going to be a long time before you see human faces in VR.
So everybody, even the AAA guys, are going to be putting you into environments like cartoons, space and buildings rather than natural environments, and the people you interact with are going to be in vehicles or space suits or avatars or anything to avoid having to model a human face.
So, ironically, AAA budgets probably aren't going to be a hugely limiting factor, at least in the first wave of VR games, in my opinion.
Neither do. Good games sell platforms. Even better if they're exclusive and you can't find that experience any place else. Basically, you need a killer app. Who makes it is irrelevant.
I agree that AAA games have the marketing power to broaden appeal. However, indie gaming is becoming a powerhouse of sorts. Look at the Steam Top Sellers list at any time, and you'll usually see at least half the games listed there being indies. Currently, it looks to be a solid 50/50, although I'm sure the residual affects of the last Steam sale are there.
Something with the viral appeal of Minecraft, released for the Oculus, would be a massive draw.
> the 3D / recreating reality aspects of VR are somewhat limiting here. 2D games (some of my favorite recent indies) are out of the question in VR
Well there are plenty of great 3D indie games as well, so it's a moot point.
> Console makers have learned how important it is to either keep console costs down or subsidize in order to reach the largest user base
That happened generations ago. With the growth of the internet, now they're inefficient gatekeepers compared to the app stores, notably Steam. It's much easier and cheaper for developers of all sizes to make a release on an App Store. How this translates to gamers is that they get a lot more variety of quality content that risk averse giant publishers would never approve for release, let alone development.
> Most titles aren't going to work with the Oculus out of the box. Even for a standard FPS you can't just check box and enable VR
Yes, but this is a PC release with an audience that's accustomed to tinkering (mods, custom desktops, ...)
> Think about 3D movies and the difference between seeing something like Avatar that was created with 3D in mind and some of the terrible 3D addition cash grabs that have come out. A lot of those poor post 3D additions have turned people off to 3D movies altogether.
When consoles like the NES, Genesis, PS One, Xbox, and the Wii were first released, you can say the same thing about plenty of 3rd party titles. That didn't turn off consumers from video games altogether.
You make some solid points, the key is the successful consoles had killer titles that provided awesome experiences and pushed the technology early (Sonic, Tomb Raider, Halo, Wii Sports, etc.) Also those consoles launched at (relatively) consumer friendly prices.
You can also adapt many AAA games to 3d glasses with minimal issues. The physics and models are unchanged just a 'minor' change to the UI and renderer.
Oculus claims that the point of the Facebook acquisition was that they'd have infinity money. As both Oculus and Facebook assert that there's a blank check there, one would hope they've already also heavily invested in a high-quality software library. If not, they need to quickly start doing so. They could start a developer program where devs qualify for free or discounted hardware. They could even start their own game studio. Most other gaming hardware manufacturers do have their own studios and release their own games for exactly the reason you stated (ensuring that there are killer apps on their platform). Oculus has got to put that Facebook money to work!
I agree 1000%, at $600 we need to see some killer early titles and Facebook is absolutely in a position to finance them. Let's just hope they're NOTHING like farmville ;)
They have already started their own studios called Oculus Studios and Oculus Story Studio. There will be at least 20 Oculus Studios games released this year.
> The problem here is if developers will be able to make money creating quality experiences for Oculus if the userbase is tiny because no one can afford one. The user market is already being fractured by the different units available - if I develop a game for the HTC Vive (which supports room tracking) is it easy or even possible to port the experience to the Oculus?
The Vive will be as expensive and likely more expensive than the Rift.
> Developing a high quality gaming experience is EXPENSIVE, and AAA regularly do not recoup their costs even when they're being offered to a huge user base
Oculus has already paid for a number of Rift exclusive games. Expect them to keep doing that.
Companies have been developing content for Oculus for years now, with basically 0 market outside of the dev kits. The immersion of the experience alone makes fairly simple indie titles much more profound on the Rift than say a $200 million 3D movie, much less a big budget game.
As someone that plays Star Citizen regularly with my Oculus Rift (that I got as a backer in the original Kickstarter, with an SDK), the one thing they won't need to worry about is the games/experiences available for the device.
Yes, I believe for a certain kind of player, the SC experience is enough to sell a lot of Oculus Rift CV1 units. Obviously, this price point is above what most people would spend on a computer, let alone a peripheral. With respect to FPS, I don't know. I don't play FPS. :P
Star Citizen is of limited appeal, isn't a "AAA" title, and won't sell a platform.
Not to mention, it's only 1 game... for this to work, pretty much 99% of AAA titles need to be designed for VR (not just the "enable VR" checkbox).
Call of Duty Black Ops III was just released... no VR support. Battlefront was just released, same thing. These are the AAA titles that would bring support... but they aren't. (it also shows Facebook et al did a terrible job of convincing AAA studios to think towards VR... which could be a nail in the VR coffin in they don't come around on their own).
(and yes, I know there are ways to get both games to work with VR... but it's not native, and the game wasn't designed with VR in mind).
Given it can take 1-2 years to develop a AAA title, it could be a long while before we see it becoming the "norm". In the meantime, all of Oculus' competitors will be on the market, probably cheaper and better (due to learning from the first-to-market's mistakes).
While budget does play into what makes a AAA title, it's not the only factor. Star Citizen is Cloud Imperium Games' first game... and it's still not a final release. They are an "indie" shop for all intents and purposes.
AAA status is usually reserved for big studios that produce many games of high quality(ish), and yes, with big budgets (GTA5 cost over $265 MM to create).
A parallel would be a big budget movie produced by Sony vs. Veronica Mars. Veronica Mars was produced by successful people within the film industry, but it's not on the same level as a full production.
> $105 million (and counting) in dev costs
Well, that's not in dev costs... that's money raised... and they're trying to bootstrap a company at the same time, so not all of that money will even go to the game development (unlike a big budget big studio development where literally every penny of their quoted budget is in development cost as the business is already established and earning on it's own).
While Halo was not Bungie's first game, Bungie was not at all a well-known developer at the time. But I think Halo on the original Xbox was very much a AAA game.
First person shooters probably won't make the transition to VR. Not without basically being redesigned from the ground up. The control scheme is just barf city.
(Although expect to see people playing FPSs on virtual IMAX-like screens in VR. A little bit of stable context can mitigate the nausea.)
But why are you counting the titles available today? The Rift hasn't even been released yet. Even if they are planning to adapt those titles,
there's not much incentive for EA and Activision to rush their ports out.
> But why are you counting the titles available today? The Rift hasn't even been released yet
The development kits have been out for years. The failure to bring big AAA titles to the Rift at launch clearly shows one of two things:
1) Facebook et all were unsuccessful in persuading AAA studios to work with them on VR for relative lined-up launches.
2) Facebook et all did not try to persuade AAA studios to work with them on VR, instead opting for it to grow "organically".
Both are total failures for the Rift, and may spell disaster. For an expensive device like this, it needs several AAA titles featuring full support... they don't exist.
Part of this miraculous unplanned and very sudden firesale to Facebook was so that Oculus could have "virtually unlimited funds", which would be used to further the platform... Facebook could have easily subsidized AAA studios to produce full Oculus/VR support on their next title... but that clearly didn't happen.
Right now they are limited by supply not demand. If they sold them at $1 there would be the same number in the hands of consumers at the end of the year. So I don't see how the high price could be resulting in not enough developer interest. If the VR experience can be something everyone want to try if they get a chance Oculus isn;t going to have any problems.
Well, the $599 price is close to double their "ballpark price" of $350. It also comes just days after they announced they're giving away ~7,000 free Rift units as a special thank-you to those who Kickstarted the devkits.
Right now they have a serious expectation management problem with their price - they're turning off customers because they nearly doubled their asking price overnight. Those free units would translate into a sizeable discount for their paying retail customers, so I argue that the problem here is both real and self-inflicted.
> Those free units would translate into a sizeable discount for their paying retail customers
I doubt it. Initial runs are always more expensive because you're paying for the initial tooling and investment, not necessarily because of the actual raw price of the unit. Depending on minimum size commitments and the like with the manufacturers, the 7k "free" units may even be netting a discount on the remaining unit costs.
I dunno, it looks like the system requirements implies a not more than 1 year old gaming computer costing at least $1000 (e.g. this one [1]). They're hardly targeting casual gamers, they're targeting people who are accustomed to dropping $600 on gaming hardware to have the "latest and greatest". See the GTX 980 Ti, any 27" 4K monitor, etc. none of which have exactly flopped. Even slightly ridiculously priced products like the GTX Titan X seem to sell OK, or NVidia wouldn't keep releasing $1000 gaming GPUs year after year.
There's a world of difference between a general-purpose computer and a specialized device like the Rift. The computer has its own independent utility and stands on its own merit, the Rift is an entirely optional upgrade that nobody has to purchase. To make a car analogy, most people are going to buy a car to get to work. But you should still evaluate all the optional extras on their own merits, unless you're just too rich to care. The proper way to evaluate a lift kit is not "well it's twice what it was advertised as, but that's still only 25% over the base cost of the vehicle".
Regarding the other things - the fact that nice components exist is entirely irrelevant to the failures of expectation management here. If NVIDIA spent 2 years marketing the Titan X as the best GPU to have at the $1k price point, and then on launch day it's suddenly $2k - their customers would very justifiably be pissed and it would certainly affect sales.
It's neither here nor there, but you can also cut build costs quite a bit further than they did in that article. You can bring it down to about $800 for the same set of core components. Buy the CPU at MicroCenter, use the stock CPU fan instead of a cooler, buy a refurb 970 from EVGA, look for a 750W Gold PSU around the $50 mark, buy a cheaper mobo, buy cheaper memory. You can even go cheaper if you make some minor compromises - use a 2500k and overclock, get a refurb 780 Ti from EVGA B-stock (same performance as a 970), and you can also drop the HDD until you really need more space. That lets you squeeze at least another $200 out of it pretty easily without affecting performance, which would get you down to around $600.
The AMD 290 is 2.5 years old. The NVidia 680 & 780 are also acceptable cards, and they're over 2.5 years old (although considerably more expensive than the 970). So you need a top-of-the-line gaming computer from 2.5 years ago, or a high-end gaming computer from 1 year ago.
> sizeable discount for their paying retail customers
I think you are wrong on that. I honestly doubt the 6500 free units they are giving out would actually affect the price at all. Think about this, what would have been worse, your 6500 most loyal and vocal customers being pissed because the price of an oculus rift was doubled overnight or goodwill from dropping the price of a rift 10 dollars?
We need to consider how many Rifts are actually going to be sold at this price point. It's surely many, but it's not going to be millions of devices (this is a very expensive niche product being marketed to a relatively small slice of the market with even fewer supporting games to use it with).
With that in mind, 7k free units may very well indeed be sizable.
Regardless, they already pissed off most of their original backers during the sudden-no-forementioned sale to Facebook (which to this day remains a bizarre marriage). Sure, it may make some folks feel better, but it's unlikely to tip the scales in any sizable manner (or effect the eventual outcome of bringing this product to market).
>>$599 may seem like a perilously steep price to debut
Just wondering if we would think the same way if Apple had launched this even for something as high as $1000.
Perception matters. The apple watch is median $500. And its not even something novel. Watches have existed since hundreds of years.
I think Apple will come to launch VR sometime in the future and it will be ~$1000, and people will buy without blinking, because people will think it's Apple, and a expensive product means a good product.
Apple has made special efforts to distance itself from PC gaming, doesn't court publishers/devs, and is otherwise a troublesome platform for gaming entirely. Why would they get into gaming peripherals? What version of OpenGL does OSX ship with now anyway? What milquetoast videocard is shipping with the current gen of devices? Things like the Rift require something on the level, on a MINIMUM of the Nvidia 370, which is a near $400 card that eats up watts like no one's business.
The few OSX gamers I know just gave up and run parallels or bootcamp.
VR could be the next paradigm shift, but it might not be.
If it is then the transformation could arguably be bigger than mobile was and the hardware/software companies can't ignore it. Games may just be the first obvious application.
While autonomous cars have been more obviously coming since 2012, VR is more uncertain. I'd imagine Apple is doing some work here though or at least watching it closely.
People buy Apple products because they have a history of making great products, and so they don't mind that they are expensive.
You have to be really rich, and have the right attitude to think that just cause something is expensive it is good.
I spend a lot of money with Apple, but I'm always paying attention to cost-- I count every penny, and if I could get comparable quality elsewhere I would certainly consider it.
The thing is, nobody is making decent laptops, or mobile phones or watches to compete with Apple, certainly not at Apple's price points. Those who think Apple is expensive have a much lower threshold for what is "Good" -- which is fine, they are not using the items in the same way I am.
Unlike a "gaming" monitor (don't buy the hype), the Rift can only be used for a few tasks (namely, gaming)... the monitor is a general purpose product and will get a lot more mileage out of it for the price. It's an "apples and oranges" thing.
Things like G-sync really are specifically for gaming and they inflate the price significantly. A very high refresh rate is also not useful for most users outside of gaming. In other words, a lot of the value of these monitors really is in features that are only useful in gaming and not general purpose use.
In reality, most of these "features" aren't very noticeable to the average gamer. In the case where it is a noticeable, a little screen tearing really isn't a huge deal (not to mention G-sync requires an Nvidia GPU, which not everyone has nor will have).
Avid gamers do have a habit of going overboard on things, such as buying 64GB+ of RAM even though they never use it (and wont unless they run VM's, or huge services/server software, etc...).
It's easy to spend $2,000-$4,000+ on a super high end gaming rig, but in reality the $1,000 rig will game just fine for a long while before mandating upgrades.
A non gaming screen with similar specs is around $160. Gamers are willing to pay $540 more just because they want a better gaming experience, that's why $599 is totally ok for a device like the Oculus.
Or we simply get this chicken-egg problem where people don't want to develop, market and release games for platform, that is just an addon for PC, that doesn't actually sell well since the price point is so high and there is no games to play with it.
I'm very interested to try Oculus, but not until the price is around other gaming accessories (i.e. south of 200€). Unless someone comes out with game or app that completely revolutionalizes the way we use computers I'm not forking over 750€ for a fad
Good to see the Oculus Rift is on its way. Early tech will always have nosebleed prices and growing pains, but after a generation or two we'll be able to experience high-quality VR without getting a headache or our cars repossessed for nonpayment.
And it means we will have decent competition to the Rift, for those who don't want Facebook monitoring our every glance and gesture.
I regretted cancelling my devkit in righteous rage after the facebook sellout, but the somewhat tepid uptake of VR2.0 the last 18 months or so sadly makes it seem like the right decision, if maybe for the wrong reasons.
I kinda hoped that the other vendors would have had something remarkable by now.
Graphics card question: If I wanted to run my own software on this (ie. I don't care about AAA games), would any old graphics card do, as long as I'm only rendering very simple, low polygon scenes? Or is there something inherent in the high end graphics cards that makes them essential?
I'm not an expert -- but I have heard the number 3.5x thrown around, i.e., the basic point is that a VR-rendered scene is 3.5x as computationally expensive as a standard scene.
With weaker hardware, it may be possible to run very graphically simplistic content like virtual desktop, virtual cinema (for watching movies), and 360 videos, however you will be totally on your own without support if you choose to do this, and it is unlikely that there will be many (or any) games that support lower specs.
If you do wish to take this non-recommended path, your PC must at least meet the absolute minimum requirements:
Video Card: GTX 650 / AMD 7750 desktop GPU or better and newer
USB Ports: 2x USB 3.0 ports
Video Output: free HDMI 1.3 output
OS: Windows 7 SP1 64 bit or newer
> The Rift will not run on your laptop, this rule does not change!
IMHO, this is the biggest issue. The computer landscape has shifted towards laptops/mobile and now this device requires a device whose marketshare is shrinking.
Not so much among PC gamers, from what I've seen. And that's really the market that matters. Not many other segments are still buying high power desktops, but they certainly are.
With a Gen1 release, Oculus is trying to build its "core audience" which will be the PC Gamer. Any serious PC gamer will have built their own custom rig to play games. As long as they can nail this audience, they'll be able to grow from there with more "mass consumer" equipment to target lower capability computers.
Yes, it feels like a big mistake. An external box containing the necessary graphics hardware should probably be a part of the Oculus package - it seems to be setting itself up for failure by pretending to be a display, rather than a graphics pipeline.
Lots of their target market already has suitable video cards, and don't want to pay $400 extra for a downgrade. And what would you plug the box into? I've read that there are specs for external PCIe x16 ports and enclosures but I've literally never seen one.
Assuming that box would add 300$ more to the package price, you would be close to sinking four digits when it turns out that VR is more immersion than you like. In that case, a regular GPU upgrade will happily drive your conventional screens, whereas an Oculus box would likely be dead weight causing or at least cause all kinds of compatibility headaches when repurposed for conventional display use.
You're fortunate. Yes, there are some laptops that can do it, but most have NVidia Optimus getting in the way, and it's nearly impossible to tell which ones are okay and which are not just from spec sheets, so I can see why they just say "no laptops".
I used Windows, because the rest of the hackathon team I was on was using Windows. We were using Unity, but we didn't want there to be any problems getting the code to run on multiple OSs. I know that Unity makes it easy to do that, but we didn't want to risk it.
Edit: Also remembered that we used as Kinect, which requires Windows
Sadly, this is what stopped me from considering the Oculus Rift. My expectations were wrong in thinking this would be more of a mass-consumer oriented product instead of targeting VR hobbyists'*
Basically, forcing people to shell out ATLEAST 1600$ to be able to use it (not to mention making them buy a desktop).
Aside: I was always more interested in the potential of Gear VR. Thanks for the info.
You don't need to spend anywhere close to $1600. I just put together http://pcpartpicker.com/p/p8MjmG with only a little consideration for price and it's less than $900 while exceeding the requirements.
Unfortunately this is the way it will be for the immediate future - the combination of high resolution requirements and high refresh rate requirements means that any VR application will have to render a lot more pixels than "typical" games on phones/PCs.
You can for example get away with rendering at 30Hz for a typical game, but that's a recipe for nausea in VR - where you'd want 90-120Hz instead. That's a lot of extra pixels immediately.
Even something as simple as a virtual desktop is going to be pretty performance intensive if only because of how many pixels your hardware has to push around.
There's not really a good way to make a mass-consumer (i.e., low-end PC, mid-end phone) version of this tech yet, and probably not in the near future either since any hardware gains we make (either in mobile or desktop) will be poured into visual fidelity.
It's in between right now. It's not just targeted at 'VR hobbyists', but it IS targeted at tech early adopters/hardcore gamers. Give it a few more years and I'm sure the price will slowly come down.
Apart from the recommended spec, the Rift will require:
*Windows 7 SP1 or newer
*2x USB 3.0 ports
*HDMI 1.3 video output supporting a 297MHz clock via a direct output architecture
It sounds like being able to pump out 2160×1200 at 90Hz is a fixed requirement, and not all videos cards can even do that based on the connectors available
I for one is super excited that the Rift consumer version is finally released!
I experIenced a lot of overload issues: "Something went wrong. Please try again." in red when I try to pay. I solved it by just keeping on trying. Issue was oveload, not my credit cards. See followup too.
Ok, I finally got my order through. (If anybody had the same issue: Don't think I did anything differently than before though so it's probably just some part of Oculus' payment system that is under dimensioned...)
$600 is a bit more than people expected, but it doesn't seem "unreasonable" for a high-end consumer product. When Apple's first computer (the Apple II) came out, the launch price was ~$5,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars. The TRS-80 was the "cheap" computer, and it cost ~$2,300.
Unlike a lot of people, I don't think $600 is an insane price to pay for a good piece of good VR kit... The insane part is the fact that they don't even list basic technical specs on the marketing site?! Am I missing something obvious? I'm supposed to drop $600 on a piece of hardware that relies on a high-resolution screen to work well, without knowing the screen's resolution? They know they're selling mostly to nerds at first, right?
As I said, I don't see a documentation link with specs anywhere, can you link us to it? Are you talking about this docs site: https://developer.oculus.com/documentation ? Because I don't see any hardware specs on there either. Are you saying I have to run the validation tool (.exe) to get it?
Parent is looking for the technical specs of the rift itself, not the pc specs required to power the rift. As far as I'm aware, those specs are not available.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 253 ms ] threadhttps://twitter.com/PalmerLuckey/status/684511706677030912
in VR dropping frames / latency directly maps to motion sickness, so it's not a case of "eh, I can deal with the framerate not being super solid" like it can be on normal gaming.
This costs less than some flagship cellphones, 599 is definitely not that much all things considered.
Do you have any articles/papers about this? I'm not doubting you, just curious!
http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/down-the-vr-rabbit-hol...
as somebody who has major issues with their inner ear I can guarantee that you really do NOT want to get vertigo if you can at all help it
Except you'll also need a killer desktop PC that can run it [1]:
The Oculus Touch is stated to need 4 USB ports [2], not just two, so better plan for that as wellSo in total you are probably looking at close to $2,000 [3] to use the Rift not including whatever games or applications cost - of which there are not yet a lot of titles (I'm sure that will change in short order though).
[1]http://www.pcgamer.com/oculus-rift-pc-requirements-revealed/
[2]http://www.techtimes.com/articles/118068/20151219/excited-fo...
[3]https://www.oculus.com/en-us/oculus-ready-pcs/
Looks like I'll be holding off consideration until I upgrade :)
That's also not a "killer" desktop. The 290 is a a 2.5 year old card. The GTX 970 is equivalent to a 680 or 780. The 680 came out almost four years ago. If you had no computer at all, you could build that system for ~$700 - $750 ($200 CPU, $100 Mobo, $200 Used GPU, $50 RAM, $75 SSD, $100 Tower+PSU).
But that's immaterial, as most early buyers of the Rift have hardware that meets the requirements above. And four USB ports? A $10-$20 powered USB hub solves that. Wouldn't surprise me if it came with one.
~$700 - $750
For casual gamers and the general public it's a non-starter.
Ok, you say, well it's not for them yet. Actually that's the whole point. In every article and everything that people are talking about in and around VR the whole discussion is how it transforms everything. You think Netflix is on-board so they can cater to PC Master Race people?
I'm bullish on VR (moreso AR actually) but lets not pretend that the next few years will see your average consumer using VR like this. More likely, they will be using something like the GearVR, which I think has a much brighter future.
The AMD 290 is a sub 200$ graphics card and an i5-4590 is a 200$ CPU. More importantly this is a 600$ display, and it's not aimed at poor people.
Maybe the number of ports is for power, obviating the need to bundle a region-specific mains adapter? In that case, a powered USB hub would be fine, a passive one wouldn't.
You have to have a house that you can add a charging station to, in order to buy it, which most people don't have.
(edit: This price does not include shipping.)
Which means the fair price would be EUR 640, almost 10% lower.
Also, Luxembourg's VAT is 17% nowadays. [5]
[1] https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A30464Q6OVH578
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_value_added_tax...
[3] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/vat-what-to-do-if-youre-an-overs...
[4] http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/resources/documents/tax...
[5] http://www.vatlive.com/european-news/luxembourg-vat-rise-17-...
I was going to preorder one but that's £100-£150 too much for me to justify spending on it for now to be honest.
Perhaps after the first reviews and supported games start to arrive I'll reconsider.
Edit: and on Chrome mobile
More on the high-end is Acer Predator X34: [0] 34" cinema 21:9, g-sync, 100hz refresh, 1440p, and IPS (also full 100% sRGB coverage). This thing retails for ~$1300 and is sold-out almost everywhere.
[0] http://us.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/predator-x34-series
In practice no two players are that equal, but it's still beneficial to accumulate every advantage you can.
It is interesting to me that the first impulse of so many people in this thread is to try to logically justify the price in the face of people saying they won't buy it -- I'm not saying those people are wrong when comparing the price to a high end monitor or graphics cards, it just isn't relevant to whether or not I'm willing to buy this at $600.
My decision not to buy this doesn't mean I don't think the device is worth the money being asked for everyone, nor do I think Oculus/FB is wrong for pricing it thusly, it is just more than I am personally willing to pay for something that is a fairly niche novelty at this point.
At the current asking price it is very easy for me to justify waiting until gen 2 or gen 3 when things are much cheaper and there's even more support out there.
Some great QA went into this release.
I wonder what the purpose of collecting at as MM/YYYY even is given that everyone will have an expiration date of 20YY for a long time; and that when they don't, the ones collected now will be expired so not an issue. Even if they store it locally as 20YY to avoid some bug in 2100 (which would be rather long term thinking at this point), it still makes no sense to collect it that way and to autocorrect. Why not just append the digits on the back end?
Watching my ship date go from March to April and now probably May was a bit disheartening.
Still no success.
So it isn't just one problem...
I kept getting vague "Something went wrong. Please try again." messages on both the Payment Method and (when I finally got there) the Review and Complete Order pages. Meanwhile, my expected ship date went from March to April. It wouldn't accept my AMEX at all, for some reason.
I guess I should be happy it was only a single authorization charge?
Palmer's thread on twitter "insanely high load": https://twitter.com/PalmerLuckey/status/684772857625231360
http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/13328295/minnesota-vikings...
[0]: http://www.mercurynews.com/49ers/ci_28784441/virtual-reality...
Still gonna hold off on this and thankfully I can still do stuff with the DK2 until future runtimes stop supporting it in newer applications. I'm mostly just looking forward to watching the whole platform (VR in general) evolve past the initial "make Fallout/Minecraft/CoD in VR" phase and get into more immersive movies, VR telepresence, and new ways to communicate and create stuff.
Its no Virtual Boy, but its the best substitute I can find. :)
The $600 price point is not targeting average consumers -- this is a PC enthusiast product.
Expect the next generation of VR -- one with a clearer set of best-practices -- to hit mainstream.
O_O
Oh well, maybe they forgot to look at it on retina.
I will have to wait for retail demo units or something.
Sony (PS4) has their own VR tech.
The Xbox controller ensures all Rift users have the same hardware, which is especially important with VR experiences.
When I got the DK2 I spent way more time grinning that I could stand up and look around behind my flight chair and around my cockpit in Elite Dangerous than I'd like to admit. Just having a 3d "surround" image to look around is cool but positional tracking makes you feel like you're really "there".
Linux support is slightly sadder.
Maybe one day!
A Mac Pro is theoretically fast enough but only in games set up to leverage both GPUs - one of them alone doesn't meet the minimum spec either.
In the late 1990s-early 2000s a decent gaming PC would cost you between $2500 and $3500, and those numbers represented more money than they do today.
A "very high end computer by today's standard", when it comes to games, would have a GPU that's substantially faster than what Oculus is requiring ... I find their requirement shockingly low and wonder if that is a tactical mistake.
Get off my damn lawn, when I was a wee lad, I reserved my copy of Super Mario 3 and was HAPPY to find a store to hold a copy for me on release, of course full retail price of $65. That's $130 in today's dollars!
The part that really pisses me off is the 30 dollars for shipping. What a joke.
I think of the Palm and WinMo phones I paid $500+ for during the early generations of smartphones and it starts to make more sense. And just as I'm sure those devices from Palm and HTC could've been a lot nicer even with the tech of the day, the price would've pushed into the $1000 range. Gen 1 is always gonna be fairly expensive and still not quite as good as you wish it was. With later revisions, price drops and capabilities go up.
The only issue I see here is that rather than looking at relative openness and ability to run in-development software on something like the Vive or the Rift, many people are going to look only at price and wait for something like a $300 Playstation VR headset that's limited to whatever can be sold and approved for a game console.
As I see it, it's still an early-adopter techie toy/luxury so whether it costs $399 or $599, I'd only really buy it if I had that sort of dough in my "fun stuff I don't need" budget. Even as someone who bought a Rift DK2 at launch, I'm both waiting on buying any consumer device and not too concerned with the price difference between a $400 device and a $600 device. If anything ends up striking me as really worth buying, I won't just buy a lesser device to save a couple hundred bucks. I'd rather wait until I see something I really want and will use and not buy anything at all until then.
Interesting comparison, but most people are able to finance phones through their carrier (although I haven't looked into that for a bleeding edge new phone model).
The interesting question is how long before this version of the Rift becomes obsolete, or will Oculus provide a contract-based upgrade plan (like for phones).
I'd be totally OK with it costing $1000 if it could really provide a great VR experience.
This is what I imagine will be the most common outcome here. Sure the Rift is 'only' $600, but you need a $400 video card to make it work on top of a decent rig, so a minimum $1500 investment?
Meanwhile, millions of kids with Xboxes and PS4's already have everything they need for a perhaps lesser experience, but come xmas that $299 console headset is going to be crazy attractive. The hands on reviews I've read with Morpheus compared it to a later model Rift. No idea how it stacks to this new consumer model, but if Sony can sell that level of resolution and performance on consoles, then its going to hurt Oculus severely. As someone who owns both I'm leaning on wating for the consoles to ante up. I think the PC end of VR is going to be a lot of half assed indie games, non-VR games tied to some crappy driver that makes them 'VR' but with a very poor experience, general steam shovelware/paid beta's, and demos masquerading as "games" while the consoles will only allow polished AAA products on their VR platform.
Later on, sure, there will be plenty of fully commercialized and polished software on every VR platform that's still around but right now this is inherently an early-adopter platform. Sony will offer a handful of launch titles that work with Morpheus and maybe let you rent VR movies for $20 a pop. But when the HMD is just a peripheral, you'll get the polished stuff as well as the beta stuff and honestly that's where all of the cool software and applications are gonna be for a little while still.
I can't imagine Sony allowing something like Riftmax Theater or letting you use something like VorpX to simulate playing your games on a giant 3D IMAX screen. I'll never get to enable beta VR support in a game like I can with Steam and I'll never get to fire up Unreal Engine and model out some neat stuff, hit "play", and then walk around it in VR.
Basically if AAA games are your priority, Sony and other console-type platforms will be more polished but probably more limited. If you're here as an early adopter with enthusiasm for VR as a platform and eager to try out every new concept or application, you're better off with a more open platform for creation and distribution.
And as for the cost, needing a $400 video card only applies to some people. Since I already need and use a computer for lots of things, I tend to spend the extra money on a nice GPU instead of a gaming console for roughly the same cost. This won't apply to everyone but it's the market that PC-based VR is after at the moment. My GPU cost me $100 more than the launch price of a PS4 with no additional peripherals and lets me play any new games (as well as my huge library of older ones) at 2560x1440 with all the bells and whistles. I think for a lot of people who enjoy gaming and multimedia work/hobby, it's a solid way to go.
Either way, in 5-10 years it'll go the way of much other consumer tech and you'll be able to get top performance at mainstream, affordable prices. The high costs and tradeoffs on various platforms right now will become less of an issue with volume sales and mature hardware/software.
It's like blaming the plate for overeating.
To use a food analogy: You sell pizza, it is the best pizza in town, but the delivery driver sucks and food is constantly arriving cold or smashed. Your patrons aren't going to care that you always blame the delivery driver for the problems, or that the pizza COULD be good if not ruined, they're going to either shop somewhere else or quit buying delivered pizza. Same thing here, regardless who ruined the thing, the experience is still the same.
I absolutely would not blame the restaurant if my GrubHub delivery guy ruined the order.
And regardless, what the mythical "average consumer" does or doesn't do is immaterial. You should know better.
I don't know if "blame" is the right word, but eating off a large plate does make you more prone to overeating.
http://www.tomsguide.com/faq/id-2355037/minimize-oculus-rift...
The Rift itself, in conjunction with good software, is excellent at tracking both rotation and translation motion and keeping the display in sync. More often than not, the nausea one experiences has to do with locomotion within the game. Spinning your character around with your mouse, for example, produces a spinning sensation with no corresponding input from your equilibrium, resulting in a sick feeling in some people.
The good news is: Many people are able to "get their VR legs" by starting with simple experiences and slowing introducing more complex ones.
They did charge a relative high amount for the dev' kits and made wishy washy claims that they could produce the consumer version for less.
really? seems fine to me. this is cheaper than most high end tv / monitors.
tech early adopters and taste makers have six figure incomes, many are just straight up rich.
Of course we all understand why Oculus does not want to offer cheaper, low spec models that might fill the "beginner model" gap. In that kind of situation, maybe Oculus would do well offering franchise kits for rent-a-rift shops. The last remaining video stores might be a good match, the audience is open for technological home entertainment and their economic situation is likely to be desperate enough to try new side lines.
This doesn't include their touch controller, if that's what you mean. If it did I'd consider buying it (I'm still annoyed by 30 dollar shipping costs).
http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/6/10723568/oculus-rift-remote...
I do wish they'd sell it without the Xbox One controller since I already have 2x wireless 360 controllers. Nothing in the new one sounds particular worth re-buying.
I might be priced out this generation regardless. Ah well.
I don't need a wireless xbox controller, I have 2 sitting right next to me.
I have no interest in those two games, they'll be thrown on the stack of AOL floppies, Colin McRae: Dirt download codes, and McAfee CDs I have gathering dust in the corner.
The headphones are nice I guess if you don't have wireless ones but I do so they'll be relegated to the bin.
The Oculus Remote doesn't appear to be integral, it just looks like an optional accessory you could use instead of another input means.
One of the reasons I think Oculus went with an onboard DAC is to precisely sync audio, visuals, and head tracking. Using a non-Oculus audio pipeline could introduce unpredictable timing and a worse experience.
The quality of a user's experience with the Oculus is going to be directly correlated to the quantity and quality of games/experiences available for the device. Even if it's silky smooth and you can use it for hours on end without issue if you run out of quality content in two hours there's a problem. Quantity/quality are even more important to the user after making such a significant investment.
The problem here is if developers will be able to make money creating quality experiences for Oculus if the userbase is tiny because no one can afford one. The user market is already being fractured by the different units available - if I develop a game for the HTC Vive (which supports room tracking) is it easy or even possible to port the experience to the Oculus?
Developing a high quality gaming experience is EXPENSIVE, and AAA regularly do not recoup their costs even when they're being offered to a huge user base (XBOX/PS4/PC/etc). Due to the nature of VR a quality experience is going to require a significant investment to build. If companies can't recoup that cost they'll stop developing and if there aren't any killer experiences people will stop buying the Rift.
For Oculus (or any of the upcoming units) to be successful they need to walk the line between quality and price, and I'm not sure they've done it.
I'm starting to think Sony is in a better position even though it's looking like they have inferior hardware.
The problem is that you're associating quality with only AAA titles. There are have been plenty of quality indie titles for years now.
> Even if it's silky smooth and you can use it for hours on end without issue if you run out of quality content in two hours there's a problem.
I don't know about the oculus store, but there's already enough content with existing titles on Steam.
Another way to look at it is that the Oculus isn't just a peripheral, it's a platform. Console makers have learned how important it is to either keep console costs down or subsidize in order to reach the largest user base, which in turn draws developers and subsequently a larger library which leads to more platform purchases.
Most titles aren't going to work with the Oculus out of the box. Even for a standard FPS you can't just check box and enable VR. The best experiences, and the ones that will drive sales will be designed specifically for VR.
Think about 3D movies and the difference between seeing something like Avatar that was created with 3D in mind and some of the terrible 3D addition cash grabs that have come out. A lot of those poor post 3D additions have turned people off to 3D movies altogether.
So everybody, even the AAA guys, are going to be putting you into environments like cartoons, space and buildings rather than natural environments, and the people you interact with are going to be in vehicles or space suits or avatars or anything to avoid having to model a human face.
So, ironically, AAA budgets probably aren't going to be a hugely limiting factor, at least in the first wave of VR games, in my opinion.
I agree that AAA games have the marketing power to broaden appeal. However, indie gaming is becoming a powerhouse of sorts. Look at the Steam Top Sellers list at any time, and you'll usually see at least half the games listed there being indies. Currently, it looks to be a solid 50/50, although I'm sure the residual affects of the last Steam sale are there.
Something with the viral appeal of Minecraft, released for the Oculus, would be a massive draw.
Well there are plenty of great 3D indie games as well, so it's a moot point.
> Console makers have learned how important it is to either keep console costs down or subsidize in order to reach the largest user base
That happened generations ago. With the growth of the internet, now they're inefficient gatekeepers compared to the app stores, notably Steam. It's much easier and cheaper for developers of all sizes to make a release on an App Store. How this translates to gamers is that they get a lot more variety of quality content that risk averse giant publishers would never approve for release, let alone development.
> Most titles aren't going to work with the Oculus out of the box. Even for a standard FPS you can't just check box and enable VR
Yes, but this is a PC release with an audience that's accustomed to tinkering (mods, custom desktops, ...)
> Think about 3D movies and the difference between seeing something like Avatar that was created with 3D in mind and some of the terrible 3D addition cash grabs that have come out. A lot of those poor post 3D additions have turned people off to 3D movies altogether.
When consoles like the NES, Genesis, PS One, Xbox, and the Wii were first released, you can say the same thing about plenty of 3rd party titles. That didn't turn off consumers from video games altogether.
EX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Naruto_video_games
You can also adapt many AAA games to 3d glasses with minimal issues. The physics and models are unchanged just a 'minor' change to the UI and renderer.
The Vive will be as expensive and likely more expensive than the Rift.
> Developing a high quality gaming experience is EXPENSIVE, and AAA regularly do not recoup their costs even when they're being offered to a huge user base
Oculus has already paid for a number of Rift exclusive games. Expect them to keep doing that.
Not to mention, it's only 1 game... for this to work, pretty much 99% of AAA titles need to be designed for VR (not just the "enable VR" checkbox).
Call of Duty Black Ops III was just released... no VR support. Battlefront was just released, same thing. These are the AAA titles that would bring support... but they aren't. (it also shows Facebook et al did a terrible job of convincing AAA studios to think towards VR... which could be a nail in the VR coffin in they don't come around on their own).
(and yes, I know there are ways to get both games to work with VR... but it's not native, and the game wasn't designed with VR in mind).
Given it can take 1-2 years to develop a AAA title, it could be a long while before we see it becoming the "norm". In the meantime, all of Oculus' competitors will be on the market, probably cheaper and better (due to learning from the first-to-market's mistakes).
AAA status is usually reserved for big studios that produce many games of high quality(ish), and yes, with big budgets (GTA5 cost over $265 MM to create).
A parallel would be a big budget movie produced by Sony vs. Veronica Mars. Veronica Mars was produced by successful people within the film industry, but it's not on the same level as a full production.
> $105 million (and counting) in dev costs
Well, that's not in dev costs... that's money raised... and they're trying to bootstrap a company at the same time, so not all of that money will even go to the game development (unlike a big budget big studio development where literally every penny of their quoted budget is in development cost as the business is already established and earning on it's own).
(Although expect to see people playing FPSs on virtual IMAX-like screens in VR. A little bit of stable context can mitigate the nausea.)
But why are you counting the titles available today? The Rift hasn't even been released yet. Even if they are planning to adapt those titles, there's not much incentive for EA and Activision to rush their ports out.
The development kits have been out for years. The failure to bring big AAA titles to the Rift at launch clearly shows one of two things:
1) Facebook et all were unsuccessful in persuading AAA studios to work with them on VR for relative lined-up launches.
2) Facebook et all did not try to persuade AAA studios to work with them on VR, instead opting for it to grow "organically".
Both are total failures for the Rift, and may spell disaster. For an expensive device like this, it needs several AAA titles featuring full support... they don't exist.
Part of this miraculous unplanned and very sudden firesale to Facebook was so that Oculus could have "virtually unlimited funds", which would be used to further the platform... Facebook could have easily subsidized AAA studios to produce full Oculus/VR support on their next title... but that clearly didn't happen.
Right now they have a serious expectation management problem with their price - they're turning off customers because they nearly doubled their asking price overnight. Those free units would translate into a sizeable discount for their paying retail customers, so I argue that the problem here is both real and self-inflicted.
I doubt it. Initial runs are always more expensive because you're paying for the initial tooling and investment, not necessarily because of the actual raw price of the unit. Depending on minimum size commitments and the like with the manufacturers, the 7k "free" units may even be netting a discount on the remaining unit costs.
[1] http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/guides/build-an-amazing-gef...
Regarding the other things - the fact that nice components exist is entirely irrelevant to the failures of expectation management here. If NVIDIA spent 2 years marketing the Titan X as the best GPU to have at the $1k price point, and then on launch day it's suddenly $2k - their customers would very justifiably be pissed and it would certainly affect sales.
It's neither here nor there, but you can also cut build costs quite a bit further than they did in that article. You can bring it down to about $800 for the same set of core components. Buy the CPU at MicroCenter, use the stock CPU fan instead of a cooler, buy a refurb 970 from EVGA, look for a 750W Gold PSU around the $50 mark, buy a cheaper mobo, buy cheaper memory. You can even go cheaper if you make some minor compromises - use a 2500k and overclock, get a refurb 780 Ti from EVGA B-stock (same performance as a 970), and you can also drop the HDD until you really need more space. That lets you squeeze at least another $200 out of it pretty easily without affecting performance, which would get you down to around $600.
I think you are wrong on that. I honestly doubt the 6500 free units they are giving out would actually affect the price at all. Think about this, what would have been worse, your 6500 most loyal and vocal customers being pissed because the price of an oculus rift was doubled overnight or goodwill from dropping the price of a rift 10 dollars?
With that in mind, 7k free units may very well indeed be sizable.
Regardless, they already pissed off most of their original backers during the sudden-no-forementioned sale to Facebook (which to this day remains a bizarre marriage). Sure, it may make some folks feel better, but it's unlikely to tip the scales in any sizable manner (or effect the eventual outcome of bringing this product to market).
Just wondering if we would think the same way if Apple had launched this even for something as high as $1000.
Perception matters. The apple watch is median $500. And its not even something novel. Watches have existed since hundreds of years.
I think Apple will come to launch VR sometime in the future and it will be ~$1000, and people will buy without blinking, because people will think it's Apple, and a expensive product means a good product.
The few OSX gamers I know just gave up and run parallels or bootcamp.
VR could be the next paradigm shift, but it might not be.
If it is then the transformation could arguably be bigger than mobile was and the hardware/software companies can't ignore it. Games may just be the first obvious application.
While autonomous cars have been more obviously coming since 2012, VR is more uncertain. I'd imagine Apple is doing some work here though or at least watching it closely.
You have to be really rich, and have the right attitude to think that just cause something is expensive it is good.
I spend a lot of money with Apple, but I'm always paying attention to cost-- I count every penny, and if I could get comparable quality elsewhere I would certainly consider it.
The thing is, nobody is making decent laptops, or mobile phones or watches to compete with Apple, certainly not at Apple's price points. Those who think Apple is expensive have a much lower threshold for what is "Good" -- which is fine, they are not using the items in the same way I am.
$599 is nothing for their target: a Dell "Gaming Monitor" is $699.99 (S2716DG) for instance.
Avid gamers do have a habit of going overboard on things, such as buying 64GB+ of RAM even though they never use it (and wont unless they run VM's, or huge services/server software, etc...).
It's easy to spend $2,000-$4,000+ on a super high end gaming rig, but in reality the $1,000 rig will game just fine for a long while before mandating upgrades.
The monitor will last you for at least five years, the Rift will be outdated within the year.
I'm very interested to try Oculus, but not until the price is around other gaming accessories (i.e. south of 200€). Unless someone comes out with game or app that completely revolutionalizes the way we use computers I'm not forking over 750€ for a fad
And it means we will have decent competition to the Rift, for those who don't want Facebook monitoring our every glance and gesture.
Howso? I was super interested in the Rift, until it was acquired. Now I have absolutely no interest in it.
I kinda hoped that the other vendors would have had something remarkable by now.
You would probably need a card that supported DX11 or equivalent and possibly DX12 - not sure about the CV1 spec on that.
"Can I use a weaker PC for basic content?
With weaker hardware, it may be possible to run very graphically simplistic content like virtual desktop, virtual cinema (for watching movies), and 360 videos, however you will be totally on your own without support if you choose to do this, and it is unlikely that there will be many (or any) games that support lower specs.
If you do wish to take this non-recommended path, your PC must at least meet the absolute minimum requirements:
Remember: The Rift will not run on your laptop, this rule does not change!" https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/wiki/requirementsIMHO, this is the biggest issue. The computer landscape has shifted towards laptops/mobile and now this device requires a device whose marketshare is shrinking.
(Although it's quite a beefy laptop, optimised for 3D work.)
Edit: Also remembered that we used as Kinect, which requires Windows
Basically, forcing people to shell out ATLEAST 1600$ to be able to use it (not to mention making them buy a desktop).
Aside: I was always more interested in the potential of Gear VR. Thanks for the info.
That's pretty close.
You can for example get away with rendering at 30Hz for a typical game, but that's a recipe for nausea in VR - where you'd want 90-120Hz instead. That's a lot of extra pixels immediately.
Even something as simple as a virtual desktop is going to be pretty performance intensive if only because of how many pixels your hardware has to push around.
There's not really a good way to make a mass-consumer (i.e., low-end PC, mid-end phone) version of this tech yet, and probably not in the near future either since any hardware gains we make (either in mobile or desktop) will be poured into visual fidelity.
I experIenced a lot of overload issues: "Something went wrong. Please try again." in red when I try to pay. I solved it by just keeping on trying. Issue was oveload, not my credit cards. See followup too.