Oculus Rift Pre-Orders to Open on January 6

VR is not comparable to 3D TV because it's not TV. It's fundamentally an interactive medium over which the user has complete narrative control, yet one that doesn't feel like you're interacting with something, so much as wearing a piece of clothing. 3D TV is burdensome for very little benefit. VR is freeing for significantly greater benefit.

If you haven't tried it, you don't understand the difference between head tracking and moving a mouse around in an FPS game. They are not just different ways to move a pointer around. They are fundamentally different. They are so fundamentally different that it's actually difficult to combine the two concepts.

VR is not comparable to the Wii or the Xbox 360 with the Kinect (which were massively successful products, so I don't know what the point of comparing them is), because there is zero disconnect between motion and reaction. You aren't looking at a mirror version of yourself moving around. You're just moving around.

If you haven't tried it, you don't understand the difference between waving your hand around at the Kinect, trying to line up hits with no depth perception, and using VR with even a relatively low-res positional tracker like the Leap Motion.

If you haven't tried it, you just don't know what you're talking about. You have nothing in your life from which to draw a conclusion. That includes anyone talking about the systems from the 1990s. I can, today, in a weekend, create a full VR experience that would blow Dactyl Nightmare out of the water, and give it to you for a handful of dollars. The order of magnitude difference in realism and price is staggering. It's the between a real car and one of those RC cars that only turns when you put it in reverse, and then only in one direction. Except the real car is the one that costs $50, and the RC car was $20k.

VR is going to fulfill the promise of teleconferencing. If VR was a "flop" in the 90s, then teleconferencing definitely was, too. Talking to people face-to-face in VR is night-and-day better than using Skype or FaceTime. There is barely any comparison to be made. You forget you're using technology when having a f2f with a person in VR. And this isn't a prediction. This is available today.

The product development lifecycle is going to speed up, as VR is going to give us a new, virtualized testing cycle that isn't bottle-necked by physical prototypes just to check look-and-feel.

Architects are going to make better pitches. Universities and hospitals are going to sell more buildings and research wings to big-ticket donors. Other universities will do away with their physical presence entirely. Doctors will be able to share life-saving techniques and train other doctors across the world in the fine-motor skill to perform it. Museums are going to be able to record exhibits in full detail, into perpetuity, and provide patrons unprecedented access to artifacts that would otherwise be too sensitive to put on display in public, relatively uncontrolled environments. Psychiatrists are going to be able to treat more patients. Data scientists are going to be able to recall and organize more information.

All of these things are doable on a smartphone in a cardboard box, say nothing about the rapidly developing market of purpose-built devices. Have you not been paying attention? Technological advancement has only been accelerating. It's not going to be "many years" before these devices are any good. It's going to be two. It's going to be less time than it took the iPhone to get any good. Remember that original iPhone? That no-app-store-having, no-3G-having, no-GPS-having, no-speech-recognition-having iPhone? That glorified iPod with a relatively crappy phone crammed in it?

To quote Tom Hardy's character Eames, speaking to Joseph Gordon Levitt's character Arthur in the Christopher Nolan film INCEPTION: "You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling."

Even with DK1, a single 1 minute demo was enough to hook me. It works.

The hardware requirements are a marketing gimmick. They aren't "requirements". What works in AAA games to make "good" looking graphics often fundamentally breaks down in VR anyway. It's no different of an equation than we've ever had: set your polygon budget and stick to it. Compelling experiences will be had on lesser hardware. There is a lot more to the world than Call of Halo 15.

Or not. Give it a year and it won't matter. Today's top-of-the-line tech is tomorrows middle-of-the-road. And if you saturate the market in the first year, who will you sell to then?

There are a lot more tech geeks on Windows than you think. Get out of your bubble sometime and you might see that there are probably more of us than there are of you.

The games aren't there? The games aren't where? Where is this "there" you're talking about? I keep hearing people talk about this "there", but I've been playing games in VR for over a year now and been enjoying the heck out of myself. I think you mean to say "the games are here already, and only going to get better".

In the DK2, my glasses don't fit. Which completely ruined the experience for me. Additionally, the output appeared calibrated to the lenses to avoid color shifting, but to me that ended up causing little halos of colors at the edges of objects. Hard to say for sure why it happened, but because it was so "smart", I found the 3D much less realistic than Playstation VR, which has a simpler, more permissive headset that worked better with my glasses on, with no color shifting that I could notice at the time. It was lower quality, but better, because of it.

I look forward to seeing reviews on the Oculus Rift from those with glasses ;-)

If they're shipping by Q1, then they know exactly what the details / specs are.

If they haven't released the price, it's more likely because FB wants to throw some serious money behind the marketing push. Which either means they were going to anyway, or the price is going to shock people.