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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.
And to top it off none of the offerings can beat the screen door effect.
People still don't want to pay $400 for a gimmicky motion sickness simulator?...
It's worse where I live. It looks like the Oculus costs something like $900 of my local money, plus an import duty, so something like $1200 I would think.
What I have done is spent $18 on a Google Cardboard type VR box I can put my phone in. It is actually made out of a sort of padded material that is comfortable to wear, and better quality than an actual cardboard box, but based on that design.
The reason for only spending that much money is that I have no real idea what VR is good for, but wanted to have a play to see if I might be missing out.
Turns out I'm not really.
There's one claim that comes up every time VR is mentioned on Slashdot - that VR is overrated, people don't actually like it, everyone gets eyestrain and nausea, etc.
I run a museum that has Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear headsets. I'm writing this at work and right now I'm looking at a queue of people waiting to use VR. It's the most popular attraction at our museum. Many of my customers come only for the VR because their friends raved about how awesome it is. Our feedback form and letters from school students consistently rate VR as the best thing here. I'm actually worried that the VR is so successful that it's threatening our physical displays - our "real" hands-on activities have become less popular since I introduced VR. Instead of investing in tactile displays I'm being forced to buy more VR headsets because my customers are demanding it.
Every day I hear people talking about how they have to get one of these things at home. What stops them is the price - *not* any disappointment with the technology itself. If I was looking for something to blame for slow sales it would be the cost of the computer, not anything at all to do with the technology or the experience it offers.
Any product that makes at least 30% of it's owners physically sick is probably not a great investment.
Anyone who didn't read the MANY studies from NASA and the Flight Simulation world pointing out this fact - along with the fact that it can't be fixed - probably deserves to have lost their investment.
And if these contraptions every HAD become popular - we'd be worrying about the US Navy study that shows that driving your car within 24 hours of a long VR session is more dangerous than drunk driving. The US military won't allow pilots for fly within 24 hours of being in any immersive simulation.
We KNEW these things were going to be useless right back when Oculus did their original Kickstarter. Those in the know commented, posted, blogged - but did anyone listen? Nooooo! They said: "We can reduce lag, increase frame rate, improve FOV and resolution, we can add the missing 3 degrees of freedom"....yeah - but NONE of those are the problem. It's all about depth of focus - and that can't be fixed...period.
www.sjbaker.org
Sadly, this is completely wrong.
There may not be a lot of retail market where margins are thin and development costs are exorbitant, but industrial market for VR is booming. We are literally turning down projects, because we have enough work.
Oculus' mistake is in focusing purely on the consumer retail - where $800 + $2000 for a PC is a tough sell, no matter what they do. For an industrial client used to pay $20-40k for an HMD *without* tracking it is an absolute steal, allowing a company to equip their worker training center for peanuts.
Valve & HTC understood this and are developing special business-oriented offers.
And I am not speaking about high end stuff like flight simulators or military (those rarely use HMDs anyway). I am speaking about blue collar workers training to operate machinery making car tires, making engine blocks or windshields - all for household brand companies I cannot name, unfortunately.
Or psychologists treating various phobias and anxieties. And those were examples only from a few of our recent projects.
Actually, even 3D TVs are useful for this - if we could actually find one that is actually sold with the glasses! Most stores don't stock and don't order them anymore, so we have to work with projectors instead.
We have the HTC Vive and to us it's actually a very useful tool, and it's already paid for itself in my opinion. Doing my kitchen renovation and could only determine so much with tape on the floor to try to figure out if there was enough practical space between the counter, the island, and where the table would go. Even tried mocking it with cardboard boxes. I just don't have a good enough imagination.
With VR we took a model of the design, done in Sketchup, and placed ourselves right in the model and in just a few minutes we could determine it would be a great layout and the spacing was just right. VR showed us the design with the right proportions, scale, and everything (actual size). Given that materials cost many thousands of dollars, the cost of the HTC was more than justified, and even in a way paid for with this one job. Anyone designing a house themselves should think about VR as a tool. It's cheap compared to what you'll sink into a house.
I'm not a gamer so all I use VR for is walking through house designs and other forms of architecture, a bit of flight simulation, and for fun once in a blue moon, Google Earth.
Gaming in VR isn't really that exciting, but the immersion offered by Oculus Rift and Vive is real, I assure you. It's very striking. It may indeed be an expensive toy, but it's actually not useless, and it works much better than you make it out to be.