fascinating stuff... we are looking at flat displays, aren't we? and here I was thinking that we were looking at curved lenses.
Look, the idea was simple. Commiting to a sub $1000 price point for a high-end VR HMD by a trusted name/company to show that there was demand. That would make the big names like Oculus reconsider having a high-end line, akin to Geforce - Titan branding.
1. Sony has built 0.7" 720p oled screens, making it 2,098 ppi, with great image quality, for a HMD that cost around $800... 3 years ago.
2. Claire 22M, an upcoming 170° HMD with 5120 x 1440 OLED has the target price set at $400-600.
3. A mobile SOC can drive 2560×1440 @60hz for VR if the app is optimized. Desktop GPUs coming in 2016 are revolutionary. They only have to be 6.75 times as fast as the mobile SOCs to drive 4K per eye at 90hz and you can bet they are. Talking about a single one of them, not 4 in SLI, not 8 in SLI as stated possible.
4. Virtual desktop would look so beautiful.
5. Movie/image viewing would benefit from it right away
6. Games could have upscaling or mixed resolution, at the very least for text with layers.
7. Cutting edge tech for gamers always required non-standard solutions, like dual link dvi to drive nvidia 3d vision at 60 per eye at 1080p. 2 displayports can easily be the solution to drive a high end hmd, nobody would mind.
If people can buy 2 Titan X cards now, they can buy up to 8 Pascals with up to 32 GB of HBM2 memory each to run VR next year and it would drive upcoming games with the best visuals at 4K per eye at 90hz. Yes only a limited few can buy an expensive product like this and the PC required to drive it. That limited few would be enough to launch a high end, high prestige product. It's not aimed at billions, that's the point. Remember how Oculus was supposed to be fast, lean and mean because it was small, not clumsy like the giants? Well it's not that small anymore.
Kids in the 90s bought Voodoo cards in SLI for a peek at the universes built by men led by Carmack. They bought cards with premium prices, derived from products aimed at the pro CAD/CAM market, to see the next big thing by the man in action. Those kids are grown ups with paychecks now, waiting to feel the rush they only dreamed about having, by getting in the next game led by the man, instead of staring at it. Those inner childs would drop their tax returns into a high-end VR product and the GPUs required to power it, if those came to the market around Q1 2016 too. I think that potential, that could drive high end VR, is overlooked.
