Oculus Rift preorders & pricing

[Joeri]

I don't really agree with the post in the announcement section so I'm posting a reply here.

I agree that the price is higher than anticipated, but they sold like hot cakes in about 60minutes flat.
If you order now you have to wait 6 months to get one.  The problem is nobody knows how many preorders they have now.  It could be more than you think.  In any case price is not the problem at the moment, the supply is too low hence the high price.  Prices will drop like they always do when demand decreases or a competitor shows up with better or equal product.

I would make 180 or 360 video's for GearVR and Cardboard of your experiences.  I know it's not really the same, but when you are strapped in a chair or on the ground you still get 80% of the experience. 
Positional tracking is not possible with these devices, but some interactivity should be possible if you shoot short scenes and stitch them together based on user feedback.

I hope you continue with the main project, that is PC VR, since that remains the best experience.

[beachguy101]

I don't really agree with the post in the announcement section so I'm posting a reply here.

I agree that the price is higher than anticipated, but they sold like hot cakes in about 60minutes flat.
If you order now you have to wait 6 months to get one.  The problem is nobody knows how many preorders they have now.  It could be more than you think.  In any case price is not the problem at the moment, the supply is too low hence the high price.  Prices will drop like they always do when demand decreases or a competitor shows up with better or equal product.

I would make 180 or 360 video's for GearVR and Cardboard of your experiences.  I know it's not really the same, but when you are strapped in a chair or on the ground you still get 80% of the experience. 
Positional tracking is not possible with these devices, but some interactivity should be possible if you shoot short scenes and stitch them together based on user feedback.

I hope you continue with the main project, that is PC VR, since that remains the best experience.

Couldn't agree more with sticking with the high end PC approach.  This project is absolutely my front runner for erotic VR experiences.  No-one else seems to have even thought to add hypnosis and binaural beats.  Just great ideas.  Not to mention as you say positional tracking.  (....Waits patiently to throw money at screen )

[testease]

My order was placed within the first 6 minutes and the site was down for 5 minutes when sales opened! I can't wait until I can say "that was the best money I've ever spent". DK1, DK2, and now CV1, and I plan to grab the vive, no regrets yet.

[JacobVR]

mmm..The competing HTC Vive headset, which ships in April, will also require a high-end PC; while it hasn't released exact requirements, we've been told they're roughly comparable to the Rift. Preorders for the Vive will open on February 29th, with the price still unknown.

[JasmineJasmine]

A new computer for this thing? When I paid over 4k for my top shelf laptop a couple of years ago? Gee, I play The Witcher 3 on close to max settings and my laptop doesn't meet their requirements? Well, have fun with it. I ain't shelling out my hard earned cash for a new computer to be able to run this thing. FU Oculus.

[Support]

Couldn't agree more. Get Vive, so do we

[psuedonymous]

A new computer for this thing? When I paid over 4k for my top shelf laptop a couple of years ago?

A laptop a couple of years old, no matter how much you paid for it at the time, will be using an incredibly underpowered laptop GPU. This is not suitable for VR, neither on the Rift nor the Vive.

[goon_pig_nw]

In many cases, it isn't the power that is an issue with laptops, but rather the way the systems are wired. NVidia Optimus enabled cards are generally wired into the integrated graphics system, rather than directly to a connector. This adds a small, but noticeable bit of lag that can destroy the VR experience (which is very latency sensitive).

[psuedonymous]

That too, but even without Optimus, a laptop several years old will be limited to mobile chips (the desktop 980-on-an-MXM-module option only became available VERY recently). A 780M, for example, sits below even a desktop GTX 950 in terms of actual performance (and as a rouc=gh approximation, is about half the performance of a desktop GTX 970, the minimum recommended card). For the time being, SLI is meaningless for VR as nobody has implemented either vendor's VR multi-GPU solution, so laptops with multiple mobile GPUs are no faster than those with single GPUs.

Unless you happen to have a recent laptop with a 980 MXM module, AND keep it connected to wall power (due to the cards clocking down on battery only), a laptop is not even worth considering for VR.

[Support]

One of our development machines is ASUS G751J laptop running SDK 1.3 and Rift DK2. Everything is supersmooth with that machine. We haven't tested Vive or CV1 with it, as it's not the primary machine.

[JasmineJasmine]

You can make due with a gaming laptop. The problem is minimum specs is AMD 290 or GTX 970. To get that performance you need to get GTX 980M SLI laptop at this point. Next generation GPUs will probably hit specs without SLI. So I’d wait till then. Getting SLI on a notebook is expensive as hell.

[neon_noodle]

I can forsee the whole VR headset thing stalling. Without a ton of support,  games, apps and media that are genuinely augmented by VR headsets, they could go the way of 3D TV; impractical and forgotten. Or Pogs.

I don't really game at all, but if VR porn gets good enough, I'll buy an Oculus Rift for the porn alone. I'm not convinced it's going to happen any time soon though, and it's an awful lot of money to waste. A few years ago I considered buying a 3D monitor to watch 3D porn, but then I looked a the price of the 3D monitor + glasses + new graphics card, and I was put off. Then the Oculus Rift came along and I've been waiting for the technology to improve and the price to come down. The OR by itself is expensive, and my PC would need at minimum a new graphics card and a new PSU to power the graphics card.

I suspect that the gamers who have rigs powerful enough to support a VR headset are buying them for that reason; they have no extra outlay to worry about, but it may be that everyone who can afford an OR or a Vive has already bought one, and the rest would like one but aren't willing to spend that much more buying a new high-spec computer to run it.