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.

Comments

Dead on Arrival

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Engineering is expensive

[Overzeetop]

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.

No, just limited audience

[Dr. Manhattan]

No wonder you're posting anonymously.

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.

VR is going to land with a thud

[DrXym]

There is no denying VR sounds cool. In some cases it might actually be cool - I'm thinking particularly of racing / flight / space sims where you sit in a cockpit and the range of movements in game roughly correspond to real life - you sit in the game, you sit in real life, you have buttons and controls in the game, you have buttons and controls in real life.

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.