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HTC Vive Is $799, Ships From April 1st (arstechnica.com)
New submitter mobby_6kl writes: The HTC Vive VR headset, developed in partnership with Valve, has been announced ahead of schedule today to cost $799, with pre-orders opening on February 29th and shipping from April 1st. The Vive will ship with two games that take advantage of the system's two motion controllers and "room scale" capabilities, Job Simulator and Fantastic Contraption. The HTC Vive is $200 more expensive than its main competitor, Oculus Rift, but does include the two motion controllers as well as Bluetooth for smartphone connectivity. However, detailed specifications for either system are not yet known. When it's available for pre-order, it will launch in no less than 24 different markets on that day including the U.S., Canada, U.K., Germany, France, Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, Ireland, Sweden, Taiwan, China, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand.
I was pleasantly surprised, actually.
I thought this would be a slashvertisement for a smartphone when I saw it in my RSS feed.
Discussion of new VR gear is a little bit different. Maybe once VR is a common thing on the market I'll agree this is is just an ad, but for right now it's still News for Nerds.
Not to mention the excellent backpack (TM) airflow.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Exactly. What nerd isn't interested in virtual-reality? A 'nerd' who was fond of the idea before it was all over the press? There's another name for that.
Submitter here. I am extremely disturbed by all the accusations that this is a paid advertisement. Because I have not yet received my cut.
Who do I talk to in order to escalate this issue?!?
I appreciate that HTC is selling a complete VR product, including hand controls.
They're making the right decision. If they deliver a solid experience for $800, they'll succeed as a high-end toy, and the price will eventually drop.
By contrast, Oculus reached a lower price by leaving out hand controls. That was a mistake. A complete VR kit for $800 is a better proposition than an incomplete kit for $600.
For everything in this package and the technology involved, I'm blown away by this price point. My original guess was that the HTC Vive was going to cost $1000 at launch. The lighthouses are a particularly complicated and likely expensive piece of hardware. From what I could gather from releases, they are using similar Laser mapping technology as can be seen on the Google Car. Because of this I was suspecting each lighthouse to cost at least $100-150 each.
If anything, this makes Oculus look really bad. The Rift is launching with a controller, built in headphones, a basic IR tracker (not laser), the HMD, and a dinky remote. The CV1 isn't even going to have the Touch controllers for a better experience included and those have to be purchased separately which I'm expecting to cost in the range of $50-100 which puts the Rift CV1 at a price around $700.
If we're talking about who we think might come out on top though. I think the Touch controllers on the Oculus are a better overall form factor and will fit better with the kind of games that benefit from a VR experience. The Vive controllers just seem about as clunky as the Playstation Move controllers. I think the HMD are probably going to be fairly similar in quality but I have a sinking suspicion that the Oculus might turn out better simply because of how much time they've put into the process. In terms of games, I think the Vive has a chance to come out way ahead since they have Valve's backing and because SteamVR is integrated right into Steam. Steam is going to provide a huge platform for indie devs looking to build experiences for VR. The big worry for anyone looking at getting the Oculus though will be whether Valve makes it a point to make sure the SteamVR releases are always up to date with the Oculus SDK or not. If they aren't, then the Vive will always be ahead of the Oculus and that's going to lock a lot of people out of potential games. The best example to date is Elite: Dangerous, which in terms of most up to date VR versions, only works on SteamVR with Frontier stating that they plan to support V1.0 of Oculus sometime in the future.
Taking all of this into consideration, I think overall Oculus stands the best chance of claiming VR on the PC. The Vive can do more I think, but the "more" that it can do seems almost "gimmicky" and not in tune with how I think most games will probably use VR (ie: sitting down). If we can get access to the camera on the Vive though, there are some potentially huge AR applications that the Vive can tap into that the Oculus just can't. All of the worries about the drivers/SDK will probably clear up after a year or two, and the Oculus has more room to come down in their price point as time goes on compared to the Vive which is probably tied down by the complicated lighthouse units.
Yes. A killing of $0 since this was not a paid submission.