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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.