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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.
It's like 3D TV... an expensive and largely useless toy that really only irrationally exuberant developers and people with more money than common sense will buy.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
If the VR gear is expensive and a high-end computer system is needed to run the VR gear, it's a niche market. Mass market VR gear is where everyone can afford it to run with their existing computer system. Not quite there yet.
They could offer it to me for free and I still wouldn't take it because of the FB affiliation.
I'm waiting out for my hardware to catch up and the Vive II.
And to top it off none of the offerings can beat the screen door effect.
I love my Rift but I'll be the first to admit it's still a compromised experience. It's too blurry and causes eye strain. And it needs a stupidly powerful PC to have a great experience. Everyone I know with a high-end gaming PC capable of running VR either already has a headset or has decided to wait for next-gen headsets -- exciting things like eye tracking, improved depth of field, and simply higher res are all on the horizon *if* VR can survive long enough to give us the 2nd gen it needs.
The Rift has had substantially lower sales than the competing Vive, which is a major reason they've been having more sales and price cuts. It was expected that over time the manufacturing costs would go down, so they're just passing the savings along to the consumer, as opposed to Vive which is keeping their headset's cost constant for now with plans to add new tech as it arrives (although they haven't really done this yet, aside from weight reductions).
The Samsung Galaxy Gear VR and Playstation VR have each sold over a million units, their lower price suggesting that a high price is the main barrier to adoption at this point. Personally I'm probably going to wait for the 2nd-gen headsets, since they will be substantially better in every way; my game backlog is long enough I will hardly be bored before that point; I've waited 5 years since the Rift was first announced, I think I can wait a bit longer (not that this helps VR sales at all...)
Windows Holographic VR headsets are coming in a few months, that will be $300-$400 and have better resolution and (arguably) tracking than existing headsets; they only work on Windows 10 and it's unknown if they'll ever work with existing (SteamVR) games, but if so, they could be a hit this holiday. Wireless headsets are coming in the near future, and that could be the difference that makes VR take off.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
"Expensive" gear?
Back when I bought my Apple IIe in 1983, it cost $2400 with a floppy drive and a color monitor.
That's about $5900 in today's dollars. You can buy a Vive with a reasonably overbuilt desktop to run it for about half that (I did).
A "cheap" Commodore 64 with a floppy drive in 1984 was about $1000.
That's $2300 today - about the cost of a decent Vive headset and a basic VR computer.
How niche was my Apple IIe? Or the Commodore 64?
I guess the whole "computer revolution" never happened then, right?
I know a lot of people who spent a couple of thousand dollars, just a few years ago, for a big-screen TV. Niche? Yet they still make large, expensive sets - and that ubiquitous iPhone is basically a thousand bucks, replaced every couple of years...
Is it possible it's just being out competed by the Vive? I hardly hear anyone mentioning Oculus anymore ever since Facebook bought Oculus and the Vive hit the market.
You need decent VR developed before you can have AR, it's a prerequisite. And AR is the original long-term goal of the Oculus project.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Try $500 for that required PC.
Games have to be built from the ground up for VR or else you get a poor experience; it's better that games don't slap on 'support' for VR. Given the install base of consoles and gaming PCs is far higher than that of VR headsets, it should be no surprise that only a small proportion of games are for VR.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Yes, once you play a flight sim game in VR, you do NOT want to EVER go back to non-VR. It really makes that big of a difference. (I now play Elite Dangerous pretty much exclusively in VR, which makes looking up out-of-game reference materials a little annoying, but I'm willing to put up with that.) Realistic head-tracking and UI focus really does make that big of a difference. Plus, games like Elite are able to design their UI to work really well with VR. (Good distance-positioning of HUD elements really helps a lot.)
DCS, unfortunately, really needs VR resolution to increase a bit more. Its kinda hard to read the labels on all those real-world cockpit controls with the current generation.
Non-sim VR games still mostly feel like gimicky tech demos to me, unfortunately. Though that'll eventually change.
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.
There aren't a lot of apps yet, but Oculus Rift really is fantastic. It runs OK on relatively old gaming hardware... I have both the DK2 and the consumer release version with touch controllers. It certainly runs better on a NVidia 1070 (or better), but it ran just fine on my previous card, a GTX480, which is below minimum requirements technically. It also runs pretty well on a gx980(which is a mobile gpu for laptops). Everyone whom I have demonstrated my rigs to wants one (and my gaming rig is a 4 year old i7 box, outside of having a 1070 recently upgraded). Given that the Rift is mostly cell phone screen, plus a few electronics, and some cameras, $400 is what the price point should have been at launch. You need a beefy system, but it definitely doesn't have to be a crazy rig.
Having tried the HTC Vive, and owning some older VR equipment (Vuzix stuff), it's pretty clear to me that the Rift is the best VR equipment I've used. It's more responsive, and looks better (higher res screens). Other stuff I've tried tends to be kind of laggy with respect to head tracking and motion controllers, but not the Rift.
Elite Dangerous in VR is a fantastic experience, as is In Medium (3d sculpting). I've also run a fair number of older titles through VireioX with good success; Skyrim is pretty cool in VR. Even my 80 year old parents like many of the experiences. Viewing 360 degree photos of sites in Egypt in VR is amazing.
VR games are _different_ from existing games though.. the VR experience is more intense, and more immersive, and some things that worked on 2D screens don't work well in VR... for example, the speed you run at in most FPS games can be 50-70 MPH, which in VR makes you want to hurl, because running that fast through corridors is kind of disorienting. I also tend to be sated with VR after a much shorter gaming period...the experience is just more intense. I believe VR is here to stay, but it will take a while for developers to discover what works well in game experiences.
My brother owns the HTC Vive. He didn't buy it for the games, though they can be kind of fun. Rather he bought it to visualize in full immersion home renovations and let him play with house plans. Even using a simple tool like Sketchup, the results in VR are very good. I'm in the process of remodeling my living room and kitchen, and so far it's turning out exactly as it did in the VR model. No surprises and everything is proportioned as I want. To me this is the killer app for VR. To design in 3D (just using Sketchup at the moment) and visualize it in 3D VR and walk through it, look around. Not sure if the bathroom is going to be big enough? Just walk into it and take a look. Not sure if it's going to be easy to reach a wrench around a corner to access a part on a machine? Go into VR and check it. Being able to move around, change perspective, look over, under and around things is very powerful.
Another very interesting application of VR is simulations such as flight simulators. Except for the low resolution of modern VR systems making it hard to read digital instrument panels in aircraft, VR does make flight simulation incredibly realistic, as far as an experience goes.
These are the killer apps for VR to me, but that's not a mass market appeal thing. If you're into architecture and design, take a look at VR.
As for the games, honestly the funnest game in the Vive comes with the Vive in the "The Lab" and it's just a simple game where you shoot arrows at little black stick figures attacking your gate. Great fun! The other more complicated games are, well, meh, once you see all the fancy graphics.
Even the current moviehouse 3D technology isn't all that great if you ask me.
Also like cinema 3D the Occulus Rift does not work well with glasses (it's possible but a major pain to put it on and take it off). That's about 42% of men and over half of women so you have almost halved your potential market before you even start.
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.
"Few people actually gain much from the added immersion of VR over playing a game through a monitor."
Boy are people going to lack back and laugh at these kinds of Luddite posts in ten years.
What we're seeing right now is 2D platform gamers telling everyone that 3D graphics is just a fad that will never take off.
Umm.. that's not free you gave them money.....
Which was for Dev Kit 1, which I received. That was not free, no.
Nor was Dev Kit 2, which I was able to buy at a reduced price...
But the final Oculus, that was free because I was never told I would get one as part of the Kickstarter, nor did I have any expectation I would receive the final unit without paying anything. I assumed I would have to buy one at a discount. That was an extra step obviously made possible by Facebook money, which they did not have to do and was very kind to their supporters.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Never required a $2500 PC (more like $500-$1000, you know, like any decent gaming PC). Tons of available games. I love watching all the old slashdot luddites shit on VR, most of whom have never experienced it.
VR on PC suffers from the same issue that most things on PC suffer from, too much complexity, which is why the PSVR has been outselling all the PC VR platforms. They have sold over 1 Million units so far with no signs of slowing down. The PSVR offers the best of both worlds: online VR content as well as a huge library of 100% compatible games that you can play, without all the headaches of PC. The other barrier to entry on PC is the rig that you have to have. If you already have a PS4, you are good to go, if you are hardcore, you can drop $400 for the PS4 pro. On PC you are looking at at least a $1200 PC. If Zuck were smart, he would partner with Microsoft and tailor Occulus for the Xbox Scorpion (or whatever they are calling it these days). Most people who would buy and use VR aren't willing to put up with the hassle or price of PC (as evidenced by their falling numbers).
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
For the moment, it's pretty closely tied. But both OSVR and SteamVR do function on GNU/Linux, and if I recall correctly nvidia recently added the direct mode (after a few mishaps including a driver release that simply refused to let us access VR headsets it recognized. OpenHMD works on VR device drivers that are properly free software. There's lots of work to be done still.
Some notes on e.g. https://github.com/ValveSoftwa... and https://www.reddit.com/r/OSVR/...