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Oculus Rift: Available for pre-order

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Re: Oculus Rift: Available for pre-order

#381

Post by Swannie »

Wohlf wrote: post #251
darkxanthos wrote: post #205

In a world where hard core gamers will pay >$500 for a graphics card, this price will work fine for a 1st gen. It'll be a smaller audience at first but that will also help them out as they need to focus on their customer support for issues they find in the wild.

Except a high quality graphics card will last for years, and has lots of games that will benefit from it.

I've seen this idea expressed multiple times in this thread, and wonder how it is that HN users' are so out of touch with the gaming crowd.

Almost all serious PC gamers I've ever known upgrade their graphics cards every 9 - 18months. Very few serious gamers keep a gaming rig untouched for 2 years.

Also the comments about a screen or a graphics card being used for more than gaming. Again, sorry, but most hardcore gamers have a gaming rig for gaming, and will use a phone/tablet/laptop for their more casual usage. They generally dislike cluttering up their primary machine with office productivity apps, etc.

It's a false comparison. It's like someone owning a car for track racing, and saying: "yeah, the seats are expensive, but they will be useful when driving down to the shops to pick up some milk". Absurd. Sure, people might drive their road legal track car to a car show, or a garage, or a parts shop, or their friends, from time to time, but that's part of the hobby experience - not used as a justification for the parts/modification.

Re: Oculus Rift: Available for pre-order

#383

Post by erikpukinskis »

ceejayoz wrote: post #24
Sven7 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are a pro athlete it allows you to practice your swing or your serve.

If you're a pro athlete you're going to use the real thing.

VR is the real thing. You still throw the football. You just get to see exactly what you did, and how it compares with the throws before and after. And you can get things like realtime audio feedback while you move to give you information about where your body is relative to where you're trying to train to. The possibilities are infinite.

Re: Oculus Rift: Available for pre-order

#384

Post by erikpukinskis »

cookiecaper wrote: post #361
namuol wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a PC peripheral, and always has been. Sony (PS4) has their own VR tech. The Xbox controller ensures all Rift users have the same hardware, which is especially important with VR experiences.

Does it include a wireless dongle for the PC? afaik wireless support doesn't exist yet for Linux. Wish they had included the Steam Controller instead.

Yes

Re: Oculus Rift: Available for pre-order

#385

Post by erikpukinskis »

yeukhon wrote: post #95
namuol wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a PC peripheral, and always has been. Sony (PS4) has their own VR tech. The Xbox controller ensures all Rift users have the same hardware, which is especially important with VR experiences.

It seems like you can't take that out of the bundle if you have one yourself, possibly a modified version? Otherwise that seems like a major disappointment for those already own an xbox controller, and force them to pay additional $$.

Palmer said that they get the controllers for next to nothing (remember the deal they made with Microsoft?). If you don't want it you can sell it and come out ahead of where you would be if they had never included it.

Re: Oculus Rift: Available for pre-order

#386

Post by erikpukinskis »

lossolo wrote: post #9

Stop with "Virtual Reality" hype. People feel dizzy after trying this out. You will see how this hype will decline after the product launch. We see hype because big companies bet on this product and now want to get their millions back...

Different VR devices are different. The GearVR for example has no positional tracking, which can make people very sick. Oculus has been focused almost entirely on fixing nausea issues one by one for the last 4 years. In addition game design choices have a huge effect. Games will be rated on a scale of how nauseating they can be. The most accessible experiences will be no more nauseating than sitting at the bus stop.

Re: Oculus Rift: Available for pre-order

#387

Post by erikpukinskis »

Alupis wrote: post #373
erikpukinskis wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First person shooters probably won't make the transition to VR. Not without basically being redesigned from the ground up. The control scheme is just barf city. (Although expect to see people playing FPSs on virtual IMAX-like screens in VR. A little bit of stable context can mitigate the nausea.) But why are you counting the titles available today? The Rift hasn't even been released yet. Even if they are planning to…

> But why are you counting the titles available today? The Rift hasn't even been released yet The development kits have been out for years. The failure to bring big AAA titles to the Rift at launch clearly shows one of two things: 1) Facebook et all were unsuccessful in persuading AAA studios to work with them on VR for relative lined-up launches. 2) Facebook et all did not try to persuade AAA studios to work with th…

You're assuming that all of the titles that will be available at launch have already been released. I think that's a bad assumption.

Re: Oculus Rift: Available for pre-order

#388

Post by nilkn »

Alupis wrote: post #357
pera wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>$599 may seem like a perilously steep price to debut at $599 is nothing for their target: a Dell "Gaming Monitor" is $699.99 (S2716DG) for instance.

Unlike a "gaming" monitor (don't buy the hype), the Rift can only be used for a few tasks (namely, gaming)... the monitor is a general purpose product and will get a lot more mileage out of it for the price. It's an "apples and oranges" thing.

Things like G-sync really are specifically for gaming and they inflate the price significantly. A very high refresh rate is also not useful for most users outside of gaming. In other words, a lot of the value of these monitors really is in features that are only useful in gaming and not general purpose use.

Re: Oculus Rift: Available for pre-order

#389

Post by Alupis »

nilkn wrote: post #388
Alupis wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike a "gaming" monitor (don't buy the hype), the Rift can only be used for a few tasks (namely, gaming)... the monitor is a general purpose product and will get a lot more mileage out of it for the price. It's an "apples and oranges" thing.

Things like G-sync really are specifically for gaming and they inflate the price significantly. A very high refresh rate is also not useful for most users outside of gaming. In other words, a lot of the value of these monitors really is in features that are only useful in gaming and not general purpose use.

In reality, most of these "features" aren't very noticeable to the average gamer. In the case where it is a noticeable, a little screen tearing really isn't a huge deal (not to mention G-sync requires an Nvidia GPU, which not everyone has nor will have).

Avid gamers do have a habit of going overboard on things, such as buying 64GB+ of RAM even though they never use it (and wont unless they run VM's, or huge services/server software, etc...).

It's easy to spend $2,000-$4,000+ on a super high end gaming rig, but in reality the $1,000 rig will game just fine for a long while before mandating upgrades.

Re: Oculus Rift: Available for pre-order

#390

Post by soylentcola »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #256
soylentcola wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thoughts as well. Plus the price is roughly comparable to a higher end smartphone. Given the hardware and software involved, it's not terribly far off for a gen 1 device. I think of the Palm and WinMo phones I paid $500+ for during the early generations of smartphones and it starts to make more sense. And just as I'm sure those devices from Palm and HTC could've been a lot nicer even with the tech of the day, the…

>many people are going to look only at price and wait for something like a $300 Playstation VR headset This is what I imagine will be the most common outcome here. Sure the Rift is 'only' $600, but you need a $400 video card to make it work on top of a decent rig, so a minimum $1500 investment? Meanwhile, millions of kids with Xboxes and PS4's already have everything they need for a perhaps lesser experience, but com…

I dunno...I'd prefer being able to download and run every cool virtual meeting space or VR movie theater that plays my own movies or in-development 3d telepresence project or interactive projection visual plugin that comes out (in addition to games and stuff that are fully and officially supported).

Later on, sure, there will be plenty of fully commercialized and polished software on every VR platform that's still around but right now this is inherently an early-adopter platform. Sony will offer a handful of launch titles that work with Morpheus and maybe let you rent VR movies for $20 a pop. But when the HMD is just a peripheral, you'll get the polished stuff as well as the beta stuff and honestly that's where all of the cool software and applications are gonna be for a little while still.

I can't imagine Sony allowing something like Riftmax Theater or letting you use something like VorpX to simulate playing your games on a giant 3D IMAX screen. I'll never get to enable beta VR support in a game like I can with Steam and I'll never get to fire up Unreal Engine and model out some neat stuff, hit "play", and then walk around it in VR.

Basically if AAA games are your priority, Sony and other console-type platforms will be more polished but probably more limited. If you're here as an early adopter with enthusiasm for VR as a platform and eager to try out every new concept or application, you're better off with a more open platform for creation and distribution.

And as for the cost, needing a $400 video card only applies to some people. Since I already need and use a computer for lots of things, I tend to spend the extra money on a nice GPU instead of a gaming console for roughly the same cost. This won't apply to everyone but it's the market that PC-based VR is after at the moment. My GPU cost me $100 more than the launch price of a PS4 with no additional peripherals and lets me play any new games (as well as my huge library of older ones) at 2560x1440 with all the bells and whistles. I think for a lot of people who enjoy gaming and multimedia work/hobby, it's a solid way to go.

Either way, in 5-10 years it'll go the way of much other consumer tech and you'll be able to get top performance at mainstream, affordable prices. The high costs and tradeoffs on various platforms right now will become less of an issue with volume sales and mature hardware/software.

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