My point is frog, most gamers I know love the idea of VR but they just don’t have the amount of money that it currently costs laying on the side. Perhaps for most of us in here its not a problem but the reality is is that its damn expansive for what you get out of it if you are not into simulators.
Plenty of friends love gaming but do it on a string budget, where the prive of a VR goggle is already the limit of what they spend on new equipment every 5 years or so. There’s a lot of people like that out there.
They are still hard to find in stores since Resident Evil 7. The secret sauce seems to be killing zombies with shotguns. $399, although $499 including the rest of the stuff if you don’t have Move controllers etc. Some bundles with PS4s are coming out soon too.
Just for comparison’s sake, how much stuff cost when it came out
VCR - $1300 in 1976 ($5500 in 2017 dollars) and in 1985 the cheapest ones were still $250 ($565 today) or in other words, about the same as an Oculus as was the original ipod $400 in 2001 ($550)
DVD player - $1000 in 1997 ($1513)
DVR - $800 in 1999 ($1166)
Blu-Ray player- $1000 in 2006 ($1204)
It is a good bit of money, don’t get me wrong, but if you need a reason, well comparatively to most other major electronic when they came out, it’s cheaper
Eye tracking is important because it eventually leads to foveated rendering. The eye works in a way that it doesn’t need so much detail/pixel density other than where you are exactly focused on, so if the rendering needs change to just exactly where you need it then it will unlock a huge leap in resolutions and performance. Exciting stuff.
For all you guys playing those fantasy sword and dragon games - they can already probably just render the middle part of the screen and forget the upper and lower extremes…amiright?
Yep the fovea of the human eye is only typically about 2 degrees field of view. The trick is capturing the ‘which way are the eyes pointing’ info fast enough to do something about it.
Well, if you are are on the fence about buying a Rift, Oculus just slashed $100 off the price of the headset, and also $100 off the Touch Controllers. It will be interesting to see how HTC responds to that. This makes the Rift + Touch controllers $200 cheaper than the Vive. I am sure that will change quickly if HTC wants to stay competitive in the market.
I am a little surprised that they dropped the price so quickly. Especially when it comes to the controllers, which were $200 on release just a few months ago.
Another reason to feel good about buying a Rift CV1 headset is that Brendan Iribe has said gen 2 is at least a couple of years away…
Man, to have some of that Facebook money to subsidize new things…
$99 for the Touch controllers is a really good deal, basically getting closer to cost considering they come with a tracking camera. It’s good because it’ll raise the ‘base controller profile’ of VR to include motion controllers, meaning more new VR games will be OpenVR/XR compatible.
Oculus store (and Amazon etc) have updated already with the new prices.
You have to wonder if this is a move to grab a bigger chunk of the market share before too many other players enter the market with new headsets. Although Gen 2 for Oculus is at least 2 years away, we are already seeing smaller companies working on 4K headsets etc.
In any case, Now is a great time to pick up a CV1 for simming. The experience is outstanding in DCS World.
So I just ordered Touch (for $99) - I understand that comes with one sensor that will give me a total of two (correct?). Is that all I need - and I won’t have a room scale VR space, all I’ll have is a standing area about 5 x 5’ near my desk. Where should I mount the second sensor? Gonna have to research this one. Might have to pull the trigger on The Climb now too…
The rumor is that it’ll be a higher resolution panel at a higher price than the Rift / Vive. LG have their own display panel tech, so it might put pressure on HTC to at least reduce price on the Vive. It’ll be interesting on what they do with controllers as well, as in just ship the Vive shaped ones or do their own thing.