Future of Oculus

[Jeniczech]

Guys, without any hard feeling to dev team, price will doom this best shoot at VR. It is not about if you will to pay 600 dollars or not, it is about how many of us is crazy enough to spend this amount of money. What do you think will developers of games say, if there is 10 000 000 crazy customers with Rift. Is it really worth a effort to customize their code for 10 000 000 of chosen ones? Guys - Oculus get together with Facebook if I am not wrong - it you ever meant this seriously, you must knew that price around 300 dollars is maximum - and either donate this for 1-2 years for a sake of your future - like Sony and MS did with PS3 and X360 - or even in case of sacrifing quallity. I really like the way product looks, yet there was no chance to even try it in Prague. Even without try I was willing to pay 300. 600 I would pay only in case, that there is some simple version of this product, which would cost 200 dollars. In that case I know, that this product have future regarding to developers and finally, price for Europe and Rest of the world??

There are two paths from now on - someone is happy, that he is only one around to have Oculus, to have it in his collection of unsuccsessful toys. Me personally - more people have this, bigger chance it will be around in two years - and that is what we all want right???? Or not????

[McTurbo]

"Jeniczech" wrote:
Guys, without any hard feeling to dev team, price will doom this best shoot at VR. It is not about if you will to pay 600 dollars or not, it is about how many of us is crazy enough to spend this amount of money. What do you think will developers of games say, if there is 10 000 000 crazy customers with Rift. Is it really worth a effort to customize their code for 10 000 000 of chosen ones? Guys - Oculus get together with Facebook if I am not wrong - it you ever meant this seriously, you must knew that price around 300 dollars is maximum - and either donate this for 1-2 years for a sake of your future - like Sony and MS did with PS3 and X360 - or even in case of sacrifing quallity. I really like the way product looks, yet there was no chance to even try it in Prague. Even without try I was willing to pay 300. 600 I would pay only in case, that there is some simple version of this product, which would cost 200 dollars. In that case I know, that this product have future regarding to developers and finally, price for Europe and Rest of the world??

There are two paths from now on - someone is happy, that he is only one around to have Oculus, to have it in his collection of unsuccsessful toys. Me personally - more people have this, bigger chance it will be around in two years - and that is what we all want right???? Or not????

Unfortunately you are wrong. i had my resentment for the first day at what i thought was a slap in the face too.. but what it really was .. was a knee jerk reaction to my own disappointment at not being able to aford it right away..VR was always going to be expensive.. they warned us that sub standard vr could hurt the industry since its in the early stages.. thier goal is to sell 100,000 units the first year.. i think they may have passed that already the first month.. with that in mind.. VR will start out as a few games made for it natively and other games having VR as an option... slowly as it improves and becomes cheaper.. as we see where the development goes.. we will get more and more Native VR games.

yea. .its disappointing we are not seeing hte 10 million player base we all dream of.. but then you gotta realize.. the games, hardware, and support for that many people is not here yet.. let it grow.. let us learn.. its gonna happen.. just not overnight.

[willste]

VR has a similar price point do adoption will be slow and limited. But it hasn't yet gotten the negative stigma that 3d has.

I feel like VR is being poised much more like a console launch, having special and a distinct piece of hardware needed to run it.

Also VR has a lot of room to grow and get better as well as cheaper. Where as 3d is kind of a static experience.

[Crazyjay4207]

http://youtu.be/CAwXhbYM-UE a bit long but sums it up pretty well

[chtan]

The price is ok to me however the tech. seems a bit more rigid compare to lighthouse system. Dump lighthouse is always better than you need to cable the sensors to PC directly for processing. Go here to see the comparison.
https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comment ... ighthouse/
Software support can be a problem also. No developers are going to develop their game based on how many unit of sensor you have. While you can just setup as many light house as you want with no impact on software side. It just improve the coverage and accuracy.

[davidbollman]

I think I want to echo some of the opinions on here on concerns of the VR pricing. I can promise you this, if you can't sell VR to me, you can't sell it to the mass market. Early adopter, VR evangelist, that is me - I have DK1 sitting on my desk to prove it.

There I am 10am @ work in Canada watching the timer tick down to purchase time. I had talked myself into buying it the night before, opened a fair bit on room on the Credit Card just in case.
The page opens, $599 is displayed, I swallow hard and am struck dumbfounded, expecting to see $399, $450, $499 @ the worst all of those #'s I had predetermined as acceptable even with the $0.70 dollar we currently have.
$599, I crunch the numbers... $843 @ a 0.71 cent dollar, that there was probably too much, but add taxes (84.00) & shipping (unknown), it definitely pushed it to the point where I decided that not only could I afford to wait and see HTC's offering, but that it may not be in my future as the hand controls will likely be $200 at the current pricing, (in my estimate), and the content available will be much sparser at that price.

I recommend Oculus to look at the XBox one release experience, when they originally bundled the Kinect with it, time passes, they did everything they could to force it on consumers. They lost serious market share to ps4, they had no choice but to unbundle it; why because gaming is worth about 300-400 for a consumer, $500 is too much, $600 is way too much. I think the vr price point is very similar (see also ps3 original price, also had to drop).

I actually think Lucky did VR both a huge service & a bit of a disservice by misrepresenting the price, because for the last year or 2 everyone happily developed stuff to forward the VR evolution (because $350 and in that ballpark was an acceptable price for VR). This I don't believe would have happened if the 600 value came out at the start. Let me rephrase that, In no world would that have happened because although Oculus may not realize it, the rest of the gaming world does.

I'd say you have an early adopter price max of $499(this year), and then $399 (next year) for significant main stream adoption. To do this I'd recommend the following, drop the packaging of the xbox one controller and other stuff, get the basics as cheap as possible (I have 2 xbox one controllers already as do lots of others, and it doesn't work on windows 7(to my knowledge anyways))...this will avoid Oculus only supports windows 10 flamers.... Do this fast, before VR interest wanes much, it will be tough to recover from. To prove to you I'm right have one of your server guys figure this out - how many unique ip's were on your site in the first 5-10 mins of launch date, and then how many placed an order in the first 20 mins, that difference is the number of lost sales/percentage that was lost due to the price. If it wasn't 80% or higher I would be surprised.

The next year or so will be the early adopter window, after that, depending on what the early adopters say to their friends and the # of games on the market and a $399 price point I really do believe it will determine it's broad acceptance level to the mass market whether it's .05% or 15%. The next step will be to upgrade the xbox to have support for it :D. A $299 vr dk2 level vr experience for the xbox would sell crazy amounts (but I digress).

I really do truly hope someone there reads this and comes around to this understanding while Oculus still has the opportunity to make the changes it's been dreaming of to the world of computing it's been dreaming of. Lots of people share that dream I implore you to let it happen, it requires an affordable price point though to let it happen.

Be the Hero's of the Kickstarter revolution you started, make the VR dream truly come true!

David B.

[obzen]

"nosys70" wrote:
copy paste that for VR....

I think we're done here.

[shadowfrogger]

"davidbollman" wrote:


Be the Hero's of the Kickstarter revolution you started, make the VR dream truly come true!

David B.

"Twitchmonkey" wrote:
PC VR is saved you guys, OSVR did it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbiIy4_6lMM

Seriously though, except for the fact that it's not low persistence and might be a problem for those prone to VR sickness, this seems like a solid Gear VR for the PC. It's upgradeable and open source, it has positional tracking, and they're at least looking to support Lighthouse and Steam VR, all for $299 and because it's 60 Hz, it can run on PCs that you can barely call gaming rigs. Aside from the potential VR sickness problems. there is also a lack of software available currently, but if they can support Steam VR, I think there is some real potential for OSVR to appeal to PC gamers that want to try VR but aren't sure if it's worth upgrading to a top of the line PC for it yet. Ideally once OSVR can get more hardware developers, you will have the option to upgrade to better components to have a more polished experience, but I think this is a promising start.

inb4 not 90 Hz low persistence, pure trash

There you go OSVR is your saint of VR

[davidbollman]

Very interesting, thanks for sharing the link, I don't think I've come across them previously. I'll have to check out their engine integration, thanks for sharing the link. I think they may run into the same issue that various open source projects run into, good product, but very fractured and no champion to push it to the masses. I think it will make good headway in a lot of niche markets however, who knows one may even end up here :).

Many Thanks,
Dave

[drmrw2]

Yeah it's expensive when comparing it to normal gaming devices, but it's also apples and oranges. One of the problems is that if you've never experienced really good VR then how can you get motivated to buy it? Even the Gear VR is fairly mind blowing for what it is and it is not even close to the experience of a high end VR system. If the experience is stunning, and enough people can sample the experience, I think nature will take its course. I firmly believe that if there is an oculus kiosk in every BestBuy in the country that more people will be motivated to purchase one. Other devoted gaming devices have kiosks for a reason, you can see what you're missing out on. Also, you can't just go on you tube and experience VR. When the average person sees VR being demonstrated on video you often see the side by side images, not great for trying to sell a new entertainment technology.