Slashdot Mirror
Oculus Founder Explains Why the Rift VR Headset Will Cost "More Than $350"
An anonymous reader writes: When Oculus took to Kickstarter in 2012, the company sought to create the 'DK1', a development kit of the Rift which the company wanted to eventually become an affordable VR headset that they would eventually take to market as a consumer product. At the time, the company was aiming for a target price around $350, but since then the company, and the scope of the Rift headset, has grown considerably. That's one reason why Oculus Founder Palmer Luckey says that the consumer Rift headset, launching in Q1 2016, will cost more than $350. '...the reason for that is that we've added a lot of technology to this thing beyond what existed in the DK1 and DK2 days,' says Luckey.
VR is dead, sorry. Early adopters might pay 350$ for the headset, if only they have the necessary 4000$ PC to run it. This thing is not going to be usable on a a 300$ PC/Console anytime soon. It requires 120fps per eye to not make people sick. Current mid-range video cards don't even do 60fps on a single card. So either people are going to get a poor experience because they have poor hardware, or they're going to get a visit to the hospital because the headset physically makes them sick if they make it run at anything less than 120fps.
This sounds like a classic case of feature creep. Good luck to them, but at this point, things look very bleak. This team is lacking strong management that can throw the bullshit flag on the field and rein them in.
The parts of cheap. Make 100 Million headsets and you could sell them profitably for $150. They've got a mountain of engineering debt to pay off, though, and they're sure as hell not going to sell 100 million.
People (and research) are expensive. That's why it's going to cost so much.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
"added a lot of technology " but fails to mention what they added. Yup lenses. Expensive display. "sensors". Yes, and a lot of small parts add up quickly. If you need to add a high end pc as well, they better heve some steaming content!
Perhaps it's just one of those inflation controversies?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Like with most technology, VR will become a success thanks to how it can help improve self-pleasure.
The digital tablet, the smart phone, the World Wide Web, the PC, the VCR, cable/satellite television, the telephone, ham radio, and even the printing press became popular, despite being expensive technologies in their early days, because they could deliver erotica in one form or another to people, who then used it to arouse and stimulate themselves while they were self-pleasuring (aka masturbating).
VR has real potential here. Take your fantasy, for example. Although you're white, you've always wished that you had a large, black member to play with. When you're wearing VR goggles, they could give you the perception that the cock you're fondling is darker, thicker, and about three times as big as it actually is.
Expand these possibilities to all genital fondlers and all of their fantasies, and suddenly this technology starts looking better and better, even if it is expensive in the near term. The early, passionate adopters will help advance the state of the art, and soon enough this technology will come down in cost, while increasing significantly in terms of its feature set.
You'll feel like a real dork, I hope, in three or four years when VR headsets retail for less than $100, and have an FPS rate over 1000.
3D printing means we are in the post-economy economy of virtual digital downloadable matter?
They also removed linux support though, so that's a saving
You just charged $5 for the perfect glass of lemonade. Your total profits for the week are down. Would you like to alter your lemonade recipe and pricing scheme?
I've been a huge supporter of Oculus since the Kickstarter. When people complained about the Facebook buyout, I tried to point out that a major player in the tech industry (like them or not, they are a major player) just dropped a massive investment in VR. When people complained about how long it was taking, I argued that doing something like this, and doing it well, has to take time - an inferior product could be a major issue for VR adoption. When they balked at releasing specs, I reminded myself that it's probably best, they wanted to make sure they had it right before they committed to something.
My first doubts started when they finally released the specs. I was really hoping for a 4K screen. After all the time and money, it seemed logical - come out of the gate with something really great or stay home. Sure, 4K isn't necessary, but there are applications for VR that would really benefit from it. Game will be the vehicle that carries the initial adoption of VR, but there are a ton of real-world applications waiting to be discovered. Personally, I want to throw out my monitors and use a VR headset to create a virtual workspace. But, anything less than 4K isn't going to give me the detail I need to write code on a virtual monitor "floating" a few feet in front of me.
My next doubts came when I started looking at the amount of "executives" and "directors" and people who stand up and do a lot of talking. I've noticed a trend (it's not new, it's always been there, I just finally noticed) - the more talking heads you have in a company, the longer, more expensive, more feature bloated (and never the features we actually want), more disappointing a product becomes. All these people swooped in and promptly buried something really cool in all the typical corporate ("we're not corporate, man! we're a startup that just happens to look like a bloated corporate monstrosity) BS.
Then this. After all the talk keeping it affordable, then they pull this crap.
I get that things add up, but I'll put this in perspective - I work for a company that is supplying them, and I know what we're charging (very low piece prices, and we're expensive compared to our competitors that do larger volumes). I also have access to price sheets from the kinds of suppliers that they're working with. Let's put it this way - there's no legitimate reason that they can't make a 4K rift with all the sensors they have, sell it for $200-$250, and still make a profit. So, either they've gotten a little top-heavy in the salary department, or they're getting greedy. Or both.
Either way, I'm done offering my (measly, not-reall-worth-much) support. My money is on Valve now (we're supplying them too, I've gotten to see some pretty cool stuff)
Why should a company have to explain this at all? For things that aren't a public good it's morally a company's right to charge what the market will bear. Obviously charging $30 for a surgical mask after 9/11 or $750 for an AIDS pill that costs $1 to make is immoral, but we're talking about a new, innovative product used for entertainment. They don't owe it to the public to charge as little as possible.
If another company can make one just as good for a cheaper price, that's awesome. Until then this is a luxury item with the price of a luxury item and that's okay.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
For once, you are 100% on topic.
Oh no... it's the future.
First off, games that are optimized for pure eye candy strain current cards, yes. But you don't have to have teh bezt pozzible grafix for everything. Take Alien: Isolation - looked really good, but ran at excellent framerates even on older cards. And even has some vr support. Tradeoffs can be made to crank framerate, and not horrible tradeoffs. I can handle 2010 graphics on VR, it's not like those games looked bad.
And no, a $4000 PC isn't necessary. The official specs are more like $1K these days. In fact, definitely $1K.
And no, 120fps/eye isn't necessary. You need low latency, definitely, but not that low. The DK2 peaks at 76fps, and yet few people report sickness at that rate.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Content / Experience. Go back to the early flip phone days and ask if anyone could ever see paying $700 for a mobile phone (!). They would have you committed (or give you millions in VC money, because, insanity). "Surely not more than a few thousand die-hard fanboys will shell out that kind of money for a phone"
The content / experience has helped drive mobile phones to be valued so highly, and VR will likewise be dependent. If it becomes the Must See TV of 2017 then all projections are out the window. And there are a lot of content creators anxious to get in early. Many app developers, meet many VR experience developers.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
Oculus Rift was dead to me the instant Facebook bought it.
If Occulus were still a pure engineer led company, I would bite, but knowing my money would be supporting the nasty Facebook empire, I will pass.
RIP Occulus and your sell out.
Quite frankly, wearing and using this thing in public makes one look like a complete jerk. Well, since porn is likely to be one if its first targets, that may not be such a big problem anyway.
Well, they just lost another day-1 purchaser.
$350 is that "sweet spot" where it can be justified as an "early adopter tech toy" purchase. Past that is just too much. This entire time they've been talking up the $350 or lower pricepoint for their consumer release version 1. Hopefully this will cause a massive backlash and cancellation of preorders to knock them straight.
F*ck them.
I would not want my worst enemy to experience VR with a cheap headset. It takes precision, quality materials, high resolution low latency display panels, tracking, etc. I don't even know why this is a conversation at 350$ .. $850? Yes, then I would say hmm. But I'd almost expect even an $850 unit. You're talking about state of the art VR technology that you would not want to put down and it could transform how you even use computers. Let the knockoffs with poor quality components cater to the cheaper crowd. $350 folks! Not $3,500.. Geez
...in the pan, pan, pan.
Why is it any thread about 3d or VR brings the party poopers out in force? We get it already. Really. You don't like 3d or VR. You got a tummy ache when you tried it or maybe your widdle noggin hurt. The idea is completely without merit and just a way to scam people out of their money, therefore no one should make or use these technologies. You point to the numerous failures to deliver, but decade after decade, someone tries to do it. It's just a matter of time before the killer app and the technology finally converge.
If the product is not for you, move along. I swear, sometimes this place is just filled with people that seem to WANT things to fail.
But I find that a headphone cable with AWG12 solid wire is a bit, shall we say, stiff
You were cool when you were cool. Now, I don't recognize you anymore. I don't like your new friends, either.
Remember what we used to love about one another? You were innovative - a few years ago. You raised hopes. Now, you're not new anymore and other people are taking up where you left off with less baggage.
You didn't really lose your way, I get that. You were misled. In the end, it all goes to the same place.
"No good deed goes unpunished"
You got me.
why would anyone want a scammer to succeed? The sooner that they fail, the sooner we can have a legit VR pioneer step forward and innovate.
I'm sorry. If you want a brick to the face so bad, I'm sure we can work something out...
But for other kinds of game I really don't see the benefit. Yeah it could be used for first person shooters (for example) but then the game has to somehow reconcile a person running, spinning, jumping, aiming, shooting, standing, crouching and throwing stuff to someone in real life sat on a couch. It's likely that it will be extremely disorientating and puke inducing.
And aside from FPSs what can we expect? Probably some lame jump scare horror games. Probably some table top style games. But nothing that particularly justifies the experience. I bet most games will work as well if not better in 2D.
The strange part is there are at least 3 major efforts to do VR plus a number of smaller ones and they'll end up cannibalizing the market for what it is. It's going to be a bloodbath.
Everyone said the same thing about the original Voodoo 3D card. But after the Voodoo 2 came out, even graphic card venders were jumping on the bandwagon. Yea this is going to be expensive, but if its good enough to see the future thats coming, it will be enough to jump start VR even at that price point.
The increased price will not affect adoption rates in any measurable way. That's because pronVR will swamp over any demand (or lack of) from gamers, if VR makes it at all. Just like pron has driven previous technology adoptions: VHS, DVD and ??
At work they had an Oculus VR demo this past week and I got the chance to test one (I don't know the full specs of that particular unit). My experience and comments from the 5 min demo:
- Very first thing I noticed when I wore the headset was that the resolution seemed low, and the screen wasn't that bright.
- I had no control over the motion of the demo; as a result during panning, I could feel a twinge of motion sickness. Don't know what the framerate/latency was.
- It is a bit disconcerting to look at your virtual self, and while you move your real legs/arms, you don't see your virtual legs/arm move.
- The overall experience is very interesting and I think VR could be quite an enjoyable entertainment medium, but it definitely needs some work.
Ok. So it's going to be more than $350. Personally, I found it a pretty low price to start with. Now the question is how much more? $400? $500? $750? Everything up to $500 would be ok, I guess. If you are willing to spend $350, then $500 isn't a real dealbreaker. Anything more than that and it's a different ball game. Of course, there is always the HTC Vive ( Playstation VR as well, but I'm not a console person.) so we can always see what those will cost. As for games, enough people have said that sims will be very nice with this ( Space, car, plane,...) it's a best fit were games are concerned. Some immersive horror games à la Alien: Isolation will work as well. But nothing with harsh, sudden movement like the FPSes we know today. I'm sure they'll come up with some variation of it though... For me, immersive landscapes would be nice as well. Something like the aquarium simulators, but you're sitting right in them. Oceans, lakes, great Barrier Reef, but also a pleasing meadow. You're sitting by the tree line, there are rabbits playing around your feet, squirels coming up to you, some deer pass a couple of dozen feet from where you are, a bear lumbers towards you, has a sniff and crashes in the underbrush behind you etc. Old peoples homes would be ideal for those experiences. Same with guided tours of famous places. More Grand Canyon than the Louvre because detail will be less then current crop of games at the start. And that is just the first version. Once we get a kinect-like camera on it so our hands/arms/bodies will be imported in the game at the same time enabling a form of AR, once we go wireless, higher resolution, eye-tracking for better detail i'm pretty confident ( well, ok, I hope....) that in 5 years we won't be able to imagine entertainment/ infotainment/edutainment without it.
VR is not dead, and you guys are forgetting the most important thing. Vulkan/Dx12 Do you know what impact these bare metals will have with performance for VR?
All cows are lawnmowers but not all lawnmowers are cows.
TMYK~
I've tried the Occulus Rift DK1, DK2, and Crystal Cove. I've also tried the Samsung GearVR. Here's my experience. DK2/Crystal/GearVR fixed the latency/movement issues. The problem is the resolution is too low. Now the Gear VR was the highest resolution headset. It is 2560x1440 so the resolution is 1280x1440 per eye. A 4K screen is 3840x2160 so 1920x2160 per eye. This resolution will be quite good, I don't think it will give you full presence however. But it will look a lot better than a 1990s DOS game. I suspect that VR will deliver presence at 7680x4320 aka 8K where each eye will have 3840x4320 pixels per eye. This is probably 2-3 years away, based on the current 4K screen technology. I'm not excited for the rift's release, but I don't think a flop would be fatal to VR. I do however think it's a bit premature to release it now. My guess is the early adopters are going to get burned, but the tech itself will be pretty good.
consumer Rift headset, launching in Q1 2016
i just don't think this will happen
Thank you Dave Raggett
VR is "Dead on Arrival"
It is DOA because the demand is mostly hype.
Also, the technology is at a level where things are either too easy to copy (every other company could bring one to market quickly, most have VR prototypes now) -or- it is too expensive and requires too much adaptation to get anyone interested.
Part of the hype comes from the sheer number of hobbyist/techies out there now willing to throw down on a Kickstarter for something like this. That's not good or bad that's just a fact...there are just more potential "early adopters" who will use things like Occulus on just a few games/applications after much tinkering and be happy.
Google's Cardboard is good example at the zero sum economic forces making this whole "VR revolution" thing essentially 'DOA': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Thank you Dave Raggett
why would you need 120fps per eye when the human eye isn't really capable of seeing that much?
Actually it's much more complicated.
Depending on several factor, humans might notice 120fps.
(Mainly "dotted path" type of artefacts).
(The situation is different than audiophile's obsession with 192KHz which CAN'T be heard)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I got one of the first e-ink devices. It is now terribly out of date and it cost me 600 euros when I bought it.
You can now get a comparable device that performs even better for around 100-150 euros. Or even a budget version for less than 100 (with a much smaller screen).
Just reading through this SD I just thought of another big potential problem with these displays. We are talking about people wearing headsets that put fully 100% of their vision a few mm from video displays potentially for hours at a time. There must be considered the quality of the light that these displays emit - it needs a good spectrum but even more importantly it needs to be non-polarised. In short over-exposure to highly polarised light is a strong contender as one of the causes of 'sickness' people often get if they persistently use ordinary LCD displays too closely and for too long. - The same effect could be a prime cause of the 'motion sickness' that still seems to be associated with using VR for extended periods of more than a few minutes.
A basic solution and researching it should be easy - do tests comparing displays using LED light, verses LCDs.
(However even the light from most LEDs is still quite coherent and sometimes partly polarised.)
A more complete & better experiment would be to extend the test to also include other plasma displays or even CRT types if they can be found or built. Both plasma displays and CRTs can solve partly the persistence issue using tuned phosphors.
An even better further extension might be to include DLP mirror type projection displays - they avoid the polarization problem and can use incandescent lights that can produce extremely good colour temperatures, or even RGB lasers.. Even DLP’s using white LED light could be used as long as the light is produced indirectly by a white phosphor.
Another Great potential Future Solution Brought to you by - Robert Lucien & Tech ONE Research.. :)
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..