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Oculus Rift: Available for pre-order

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Re: Oculus Rift: Available for pre-order

#311

Post by jfoutz »

lionleaf wrote: post #300
jfoutz wrote: post #297

Gaming will be neat and all, but how is reading? I'd really like the infinite space for terminals and docs. Maybe turning my head to look over at stackoverflow would suck, but my glasses are thick, so even through the lens vision is blurry at the edges. I can imagine a goofy hackers style 3d world would be amusing for a while. Even a really pedestrian window manager would be nice. terminals could be very tall, so i c…

At the moment the resolution simply isn't there for multiple virtual high resolution displays. I did some math a while back, and if I wanted the 1080 display I had at work at the same distance from my eyes in virtual space, I would need 5k by 5k pixels per eye. Add a high refresh rate and that's far higher datarate than we can handle right now. And you'd need display tech that's pretty insane. While it's not a replac…

Interesting. i use small fonts just so i can pack more stuff on the screen. doubling the font size seems like i'd need 4x the area, eyeballing my current monitor setup, seems like it'd be a wash. Might be worth trying out just for the novelty though.

Re: Oculus Rift: Available for pre-order

#312

Post by georgemcbay »

bowmessage wrote: post #2

Going to have to pass on $599. More than I was expecting.

Ditto. $600 is well outside of the impulse buy range for me that this would have had to be priced at ($350 would be an automatic buy, $400 I'd consider, $600 no), and I bought a DK1 (though through Oculus, not through Kickstarter) and have a pretty substantial amount of expendable spending money.

It is interesting to me that the first impulse of so many people in this thread is to try to logically justify the price in the face of people saying they won't buy it -- I'm not saying those people are wrong when comparing the price to a high end monitor or graphics cards, it just isn't relevant to whether or not I'm willing to buy this at $600.

My decision not to buy this doesn't mean I don't think the device is worth the money being asked for everyone, nor do I think Oculus/FB is wrong for pricing it thusly, it is just more than I am personally willing to pay for something that is a fairly niche novelty at this point.

At the current asking price it is very easy for me to justify waiting until gen 2 or gen 3 when things are much cheaper and there's even more support out there.

Re: Oculus Rift: Available for pre-order

#313

Post by bryanlarsen »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #278
paulmd wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the $599 price is close to double their "ballpark price" of $350. It also comes just days after they announced they're giving away ~7,000 free Rift units as a special thank-you to those who Kickstarted the devkits. Right now they have a serious expectation management problem with their price - they're turning off customers because they nearly doubled their asking price overnight. Those free units would translat…

I dunno, it looks like the system requirements implies a not more than 1 year old gaming computer costing at least $1000 (e.g. this one [1]). They're hardly targeting casual gamers, they're targeting people who are accustomed to dropping $600 on gaming hardware to have the "latest and greatest". See the GTX 980 Ti, any 27" 4K monitor, etc. none of which have exactly flopped. Even slightly ridiculously priced products…

The AMD 290 is 2.5 years old. The NVidia 680 & 780 are also acceptable cards, and they're over 2.5 years old (although considerably more expensive than the 970). So you need a top-of-the-line gaming computer from 2.5 years ago, or a high-end gaming computer from 1 year ago.

Re: Oculus Rift: Available for pre-order

#314

Post by chipsy »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #246
aresant wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I literally feel sorry for you, not in an unfriendly way, that you haven't seen the right demo yet and can't share the insane excitement that I have for this technology. This is the FIRST consumer release! This is the Palm Pilot 1 of VR. Yes most of the content right now is mediocre but there are some mindblowing experiences too. For instance Elite Dangerous + DK2 + Motion Sim. It literally feels like you are pilotin…

>This is the FIRST consumer release! This is the Palm Pilot 1 of VR. Actually, there were multiple VR technologies released in the 90s and 2000s. This isn't like being on the groundfloor of some new concept, its like a revival of something old. I wish Oculus all the luck in the world, but this technology has failed in the market many times. Yes, maybe more FPS and higher resolutions is what was needed, but I guess we…

In support of your comment, I would point out that gaming has become progressively less interesting for its technical developments over time. The first videogames really were revolutionary, even as they were derided for being crude, inauthentic, or simple transcriptions of games already playable with cards, pen and paper. The improvements from there have made them more accessible and appealing, but the forms and meanings of computer-driven interactivity haven't fundamentally changed - more realistic 3D just isn't as impressive as the first real-time 3D. We already passed the tipping point in terms of cultural impact, and VR is superfluous to that. It'll make its way into the world eventually, but not with the flash and bang that this generation is banking on.

Now, if we were talking about neural interfaces, that would be a more interesting discussion.

Re: Oculus Rift: Available for pre-order

#315

Post by [deleted] »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #313
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, it looks like the system requirements implies a not more than 1 year old gaming computer costing at least $1000 (e.g. this one [1]). They're hardly targeting casual gamers, they're targeting people who are accustomed to dropping $600 on gaming hardware to have the "latest and greatest". See the GTX 980 Ti, any 27" 4K monitor, etc. none of which have exactly flopped. Even slightly ridiculously priced products…

The AMD 290 is 2.5 years old. The NVidia 680 & 780 are also acceptable cards, and they're over 2.5 years old (although considerably more expensive than the 970). So you need a top-of-the-line gaming computer from 2.5 years ago, or a high-end gaming computer from 1 year ago.

[deleted]

Re: Oculus Rift: Available for pre-order

#316

Post by wmil »

What's really interesting is that studios may be able to make the first round of oculus games very cheaply.

The resolution is lower than typical on PC games, framerate is important, and the experience is very different.

So I bet they could get away with repurposing a lot of old content into new oculus games.

Re: Oculus Rift: Available for pre-order

#317

Post by rconti »

jblow wrote: post #197
awurts wrote: post #46

599... not to mention I have a very high end computer by today's standard but it still needs upgrades. I have one of the better AMD processors but it tells me I need an Intel, which means I will have to buy a new board and rebuild the entire thing, as well as replace the GPU... right.

Kids today. In the late 1990s-early 2000s a decent gaming PC would cost you between $2500 and $3500, and those numbers represented more money than they do today. A "very high end computer by today's standard", when it comes to games, would have a GPU that's substantially faster than what Oculus is requiring ... I find their requirement shockingly low and wonder if that is a tactical mistake.

I'm not a gamer, but I still get a kick out of people complaining about how expensive $45 or $50 games are.

Get off my damn lawn, when I was a wee lad, I reserved my copy of Super Mario 3 and was HAPPY to find a store to hold a copy for me on release, of course full retail price of $65. That's $130 in today's dollars!

Re: Oculus Rift: Available for pre-order

#318

Post by Animats »

It's been available as a "development version" for almost two years.[1] The price was $1000, and anyone could buy it on Amazon. This is a 40% price cut, which is nice, but not a mainstream price.

Is there a killer app for this yet? The roller coaster simulators are fun for about ten minutes. Second Life now works with the Oculus Rift [3] but few people care.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGIIQf3krMM [2] http://www.amazon.com/Oculus-Rift-Developers-Kit-Dk2/dp/B00F... [3] http://secondlife.com/destinations/oculus

Re: Oculus Rift: Available for pre-order

#319

Post by draugadrotten »

serge2k wrote: post #47

599 is more than I am willing to pay right now, maybe once both it and the vive are out. The part that really pisses me off is the 30 dollars for shipping. What a joke.

44 euro shipping in Europe. I could literally get Ryanair flight tickets cheaper, to pick it up in person.

Re: Oculus Rift: Available for pre-order

#320

Post by sytelus »

moistgorilla wrote: post #309
sytelus wrote: post #298

Pricing and strategy of expensive desktop dependency now looks like a huge mistake. My guess here is that Apple or Google is going to come up with VR enhanced phones + cardboard like cheap device that has experience pretty close to Rift before the end of the year. If that happens, their VR devices would be under $200 which would be just accessories for the new phones. That would be far more acceptable to most people…

Samsung Gear VR already exists and the difference between the experiences is night and day. As for Google Cardboard, the experience is just bad.

Yes, but I think experience can be improved dramatically if industrial design teams gets on the mission and if phones can have targeted improvements. For example, iPhone 7 is rumored to have massive increase in resolution which could be boon for VR. Add on to this a dedicated chip for generating stereo graphics that stays offline except during VR session to save power. Phones can also get two cameras to support AR scenarios as well as 3D photo/video recording. The headset can be equipped with eye gaze and depth sensors with easy way to slide phones in and out.
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