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.

Comments

Why is this surprising?

[gfxguy]

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.

Re:Why is this surprising?

[Rick Schumann]

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.

Re:Why is this surprising?

[Frobnicator]

It's like 3D TV... an expensive and largely useless toy that...

It is like many things, not just that. You are right that it is a luxury device, and a toy. But the same can be said of your PlayStation and XBox, your television, and your smart phone.

The luxury device is part of the reason they're lowering the price. You still need a high-end computer, something around $1500 and far beyond what most people have. They lowered the price from about $800 at launch to $400, but by the time you get a few games and the computer you are still paying two grand. If you already own the high end computer that meets the hardware requirements --- a luxury -- then the extra $400 won't be a painful addition.

Stereoscopic displays are a product that has been tried with many options over the years. None have taken off yet, but eventually it is one will. It may not be this generation of 3D devices, or next generation, or the generation after that. Or it may be this set, as the latest round are quite impressive.

For another thing, it is a technology that has a chicken-and-egg problem. There needs to be enough good products (in this field it is generally games and porn) to encourage hardware sales. And there needs to be enough hardware out there to ensure products get built. Without good products the hardware doesn't sell, and without enough devices the software cannot generate a profit.

Eventually stereoscopic tech will take off, there is little doubt of that. I've used many of the devices, including Oculus, Vive, PSVR, all the way down to Cardboard. I've tried 3D games all the way back to the VirtualBoy, and enjoyed trying Vectrex 3D with a game collector friend who could probably start a museum. I played a few shutter glasses games and stereoscopic arcade games back in the 80's. With all of that, I know that sooner or later the tech will take off eventually. Most failed because of the chicken-and-egg problem of needing both hardware and software. 3D TV never had any must-have products. 3DS has a good set of games and is still viable for steroscopic 3D. Both Oculus and Vive have some amazing position tracking hardware and have an ever-expanding library of software. They're gaining must-have products as AAA games are starting to include options for 3D play; Bethesda and EA have talked about several, such as Fallout and The Sims. Even existing games like Minecraft, GTA V, Half Life 2, Doom 3, people are creating 3D mods for Vive and Oculus.

I think this is the generation of hardware that will bring stereoscopic 3D to the masses, but if it isn't, we are extremely close to that critical tipping point.

Re:Why is this surprising?

[janoc]

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.

Re:Why is this surprising?

[caseih]

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.

Free as in beer

[Jamlad]

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.

Everyone who wants it has it

[PhrostyMcByte]

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.

Not so niche, honestly...

[cirby]

"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...

HTC Vive

[ProzacPatient]

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.

People do like it

[SpaceDave]

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.

Re:Ehem: I told you so!

[SpaceDave]

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.