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The Oculus Rift Still Isn't Selling, In a Worrying Sign For VR (technologyreview.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Despite Mark Zuckerberg's early enthusiasm for virtual reality, the technology has stubbornly remained a hard sell for Facebook. Now, in yet another sign that VR is failing to capture the imagination of the public, the company has just cut the price of its Oculus Rift hardware for the second time this year. For the next six weeks, the Oculus Rift headset and its matching controllers will cost just $399. That's $400 less than when it first hit the market, and $200 less than when its price was first slashed in March. It means that the Rift now costs less than the package offered by its cheapest rival, Sony, whose PlayStation VR currently totals $460 including headset and controllers. Even so, it's not clear that it will be enough to lure people into buying a Rift. Jason Rubin, vice president for content at Oculus, tells Reuters that the reduction isn't a sign of weak product sales, but rather a decision to give the headset more mass market appeal now that more games are available.
Even the current moviehouse 3D technology isn't all that great if you ask me. The last 3D movie I saw was Avatar, and my reaction to it was "..gee, that's kinda interesting" but nothing more enthusiastic than that; I'm not willing to pay the extra couple bucks to see a movie in 3D. I work somewhere where 3D TV was part of our graphics card driver validation process, and that was even worse: It was like cardboard cutouts being moved on top of or behind each other.
Any product that makes at least 30% of it's owners physically sick is probably not a great investment.
This is wrong and I'm getting really tired of people trotting out this un-fact. If you don't set up the comfort settings correctly it will make you sick but it's trivially easy to to get it right so that 99% of people will feel fine. I run public VR installations and it does *not* make people sick. Right now I'm looking at the 50th person today to try VR. Not a single complaint.