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Facebook has cut the price of the Oculus Rift for the second time this year. It debuted at $800, was cut to $600 in March, and is now $400. Is there real trouble in the virtual reality market, or is it just a normal price correction now that early adopters have been served?
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. A year ago, our own Rachel Metz predicted that the Rift would struggle against Sony's offering because the former requires a powerful (and expensive) gaming computer to run, while the latter needs just a $350 PlayStation 4 game console.
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. Don't believe it: this is the latest in a string of bad news for the firm, which has also shut down its nascent film studio, shuttered in-store demo stations of its hardware, and stumped up $250 million as part of a painful intellectual property lawsuit in the last six months.
Here's a February story about the Oculus demo stations at Best Buy stores being shut down.
Previously: Facebook/Oculus Ordered to pay $500 Million to ZeniMax
Google Partnering With HTC and Lenovo for Standalone VR Headsets
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday July 11 2017, @12:07PM
Tethered VR is bad. Unless you want to sit in front of your gaming PC for hours, untethered VR lets you lay down, walk around, and possibly get some exercise, although that might require blowing more money for an Omni treadmill for gaming.
Resolution, refresh rate, latency, processing/graphics power where applicable, etc. will all improve in newer generations. VR has benefited from the development of display panels for smartphones, and we now have 4K smartphones [cnbc.com]. I will laugh if I ever hear of a 5K smartphone, but VR may become the main selling point for screens with such a high PPI. Google seems to be making a good effort to target both tethered and untethered/smartphone VR with Daydream.
The VR market is not kind to early adopters. Both the hardware and software (various graphics [soylentnews.org] algorithms [soylentnews.org]) will improve significantly. The prices (like $800) are crazy and that doesn't count the cost of a good gaming PC that can run high resolutions at better than 60-90 FPS.
I'm not so worried about content. Existing games can be adapted to VR (like... Skyrim!). It seems that content will be much easier to come by than a similar previous fad: 3D. YouTube's 360 degree content is growing, and Google's VR180 concept could make the hardware much more accessible, especially if smartphones implement it. If you look at the mockup [google.com], you'll see two lenses on one device. That reminds me of the dual camera smartphones [theverge.com] that are appearing, although maybe the camera placement and thickness of the phones need to be altered in order to capture a full 180 degrees FOV. On that Google page, you can see that Lenovo and LG are listed as partners, and LG already has a dual camera phone according to The Verge.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]