Oculus Rift Catch-All

Gumbie wrote:
ukickmydog wrote:

http://fortune.com/2016/01/05/htc-in...

New details on the Vive today at CES. I'd been accumulating money in my steam wallet to get this and it appears it is going to be the most powerful of the VR competition, so good move by me selling off virtual TF2 items so I can buy this guy with "free" money.

What about the new pc hardware your going to need to run it?

I've been holding off on building a new PC for a year now. My current one is about 6 years old so it was time anyways.

Gumbie wrote:

Saw this on reddit earlier. Don't know how true it is but it sounds believable after seeing the $599 price tag

reddit post wrote:

Rift: 300 custom parts, all requiring molds, tooling, materials, created by external companies and assembled on a single line. Absurdly expensive packaging, matte black heavy box with custom molded casing. High Quality IR camera, look up how much it costs to manufacture a GoPro. Tack on an xbox controller (probably not much but it adds) and this little guy again not much but its something. Comes from silicon valley. Results in a cost higher than you're expecting.

Vive: Manufactured with cheaper parts, cheaper materials, manufacturing lines that are owned by the company making it in freaking Taiwan. The lighthouses are just two motors, two lasers, LED board, single photodiode, power cable... they cost almost nothing to make. Controllers are a bit expensive but since they're ambidextrous they only need one set of molds. They don't need to subsidize development costs since that has already been handled for them. They don't need to subsidize software since thats already been done for them. All they have to do is what valve says and what their industrial designers say.

Eh.

1. Both are made in China.
2. The Vive probably has as many custom parts as the Rift, because none of the plastic in either is something you'd get off the shelf. The screws, boards, and connectors are. Also, all of the parts that they're saying as "costing almost nothing"... is in both headsets.
3. Those 300 parts? Unless the run is like 10 total Rifts(which it's not), we're probably talking around a penny to 10 cents per part, delivered. The Rift people should be working with one company to produce those parts. If it's costing more than that, Rift's supply chain managers need to get their act together.
4. IR cameras, in the amounts that they're looking at, run around $10 each. GoPros probably cost under $50 to make, including packaging.
5. They're probably getting XBone controllers at cost, and I would wager that those run around $15 before packaging because MS is making a billion of them, and they have their sh*t together with that.
6. HTC's advantage is that they're already making electronics on a massive scale. They have the supply chain issues worked out, the contracts with their suppliers in place, and the engineering workflows to get products out to market. That's where the main cost reduction's going to be.
7. "Absurdly expensive packaging" is exactly that, and it's a waste to spend that much on the part that people are going to be throwing away.

#6 is the most important impact on price. People who do pure software tend to not have any idea on how much more complex it is to manufacture and sell a physical thing, especially when it's supposed to be a mass market device. There's a lot that needs to be in place when you start design to keep prices down.

EDIT: Yep. They basically said "we failed to keep costs down": http://www.polygon.com/2016/1/6/1072...

tuffalobuffalo wrote:

It should include a VR demo of jumping off a diving board into a vault full of money.

Scrooge McDuck Simulator 2016

Anyone who's been paying attention could have seen this coming. Oculus aren't making a huge profit off these, they're using high end components that are expensive. How is it any different then when blu ray players and HDTV's first hit the market?

Palmer was tweeting about this back in December.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/lOlUdnY.jpg)

Would love to have one but way too much for our household budget.

I would be very surprised if Vive can even be competitive on price. HTC is in big financial trouble and I doubt they can afford to subsidize their manufacturing cost at all, and will need to turn a profit on their units.

Just guessing, but I would predict that the Vive comes in at 750 or higher.

Oh well, I have waited these last three years, what's two more?

Welp, looks like I will be waiting for VR for a while longer.

The issue I have isn't with the price (I get it, bleeding edge technology, high end components etc.), the issue I have is with how Oculus handled everyone's expectations. Only last October Palmer said that the price of CV1 would be 'in the ballpark of DK2'.

If I had known the general price area around then (or even a few months ago) I would have been putting aside more money. Now I can't afford to get in on the first wave on consumer VR, and I've been looking forward to being there for years now.

Basically, I'm not pissed about the price, I'm pissed that I could have saved enough money to afford it and I didn't because we were told it would be around half the price.

That price point is an open door for the Vive.

$599 is too much for a 1st gen product that's going to look inferior compared to the inevitable updated ones a year later.

I assumed the first wave of VR products would be priced out of my range, so this isn't really a shock to me. I can wait.

*Legion* wrote:

That price point is an open door for the Vive.

Which they have no chance of walking through.

Maybe Sony can seize an advantage but if Palmer is not lying though his teeth when he says they are not making a profit on the Rift hardware, then there is no way HTC even comes close to the Rift's price.

How great would it be though, to be able to rent an Oculus or Vive for a weekend or a week? At this point, I'd be happy to pay BestBuy or someone 25-35 bucks for a few days to play with the headset and get a sense of the future.

pythagean wrote:

The issue I have isn't with the price (I get it, bleeding edge technology, high end components etc.), the issue I have is with how Oculus handled everyone's expectations. Only last October Palmer said that the price of CV1 would be 'in the ballpark of DK2'.

Yeah, they clearly messaged a 300-400 price. I could have gone 5 maybe, but not 6.

Also, check the buy page... it now says "shipping in may".. they've already sold through 2 month's supply. That makes it a bit better somehow, knowing that waiting 2 hours would have put me 2 months back in the delivery queue. $600 for VR in May isn't nearly is a good a deal as $600 for VR in March. It's like paying the "early adopter tax" and not getting it early.

That actually prompted me to preorder. Sue me, i'm weak.

I figure if reviews are good in March, it may be hard to get one at that point, and aftermarket prices will rise. If reviews are mediocre/bad, i can cancel.

Alz wrote:

How great would it be though, to be able to rent an Oculus or Vive for a weekend or a week? At this point, I'd be happy to pay BestBuy or someone 25-35 bucks for a few days to play with the headset and get a sense of the future.

Hell, I bet they could rent them at 50 bucks for a weekend. When Blockbusters were a thing, I clearly remember doing something similar with the PS2.

Badferret wrote:
Alz wrote:

How great would it be though, to be able to rent an Oculus or Vive for a weekend or a week? At this point, I'd be happy to pay BestBuy or someone 25-35 bucks for a few days to play with the headset and get a sense of the future.

Hell, I bet they could rent them at 50 bucks for a weekend. When Blockbusters were a thing, I clearly remember doing something similar with the PS2.

Oh yeah. I rented a Nintendo 64 for a weekend when I was a kid. That was a weekend in heaven for my 12 year old self back then.

Oh man. No one steal this idea. I'm incorporating right now!

Not really, but there probably is a market there, at least until the price comes down.

Rent an Oculus! The reality is virtual, but the pink eye is real!

Screw the Rift, let's just sell people pink eye for $35.

ChrisLTD wrote:

Screw the Rift, let's just have Apple sell people iPink for $350.

FTFY

I think Apple would call it "Rose Gold" eye.

You might reach a wider audience if you call it "salmon."

Bottle wrote:

You might reach a wider audience if you call it "salmon."

IMAGE(https://i.ytimg.com/vi/jaf6nx0Kfak/hqdefault.jpg)

The Rift's main obstacle to the mainstream is the cost of the PC that runs it

The Oculus Rift is available for pre-order now for $599, and that's not exactly an impulse purchase, but the real expense comes from the high-end PC needed to run the hardware.

“For most people it’s not a $599 headset, the real cost for a normie is this high-end PC," Oculus founder Palmer Luckey told Polygon.

Today the company has published its recommended specs for your virtual reality machine. They also shared some bad news about gaming laptops.

And here they are:

Nvidia GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater
Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
8 GB+ RAM
Compatible HDMI 1.3 video output
2x USB 3.0 ports
Windows 7 SP1 or newer
Yeah, you're likely going to need to upgrade. The GTX 970 starts at around $300 and goes up from there, and the Intel i5-4590 costs around $200. These aren't god-level parts, but they're certainly on the upper end of the "enthusiast" level of gaming PCs.

Badferret wrote:
*Legion* wrote:

That price point is an open door for the Vive.

Which they have no chance of walking through.

Maybe Sony can seize an advantage but if Palmer is not lying though his teeth when he says they are not making a profit on the Rift hardware, then there is no way HTC even comes close to the Rift's price.

This summary has been posted around a few places, not sure how much truth there is to it but it's interesting to consider:

Rift: 300 custom parts, all requiring molds, tooling, materials, created by external companies and assembled on a single line. Absurdly expensive packaging, matte black heavy box with custom molded casing. High Quality IR camera, look up how much it costs to manufacture a GoPro. Tack on an xbox controller (probably not much but it adds) and this little guy again not much but its something. Comes from silicon valley. Results in a cost higher than you're expecting.

Vive: Manufactured with cheaper parts, cheaper materials, manufacturing lines that are owned by the company making it in freaking Taiwan. The lighthouses are just two motors, two lasers, LED board, single photodiode, power cable... they cost almost nothing to make. Controllers are a bit expensive but since they're ambidextrous they only need one set of molds. They don't need to subsidize development costs since that has already been handled for them. They don't need to subsidize software since thats already been done for them. All they have to do is what valve says and what their industrial designers say.

pythagean wrote:

This summary has been posted around a few places

Including the previous page of this thread, and quoted on this very page. IMAGE(http://www.skype-emoticons.com/images/emoticon-00110-tongueout.png)

MeatMan wrote:
pythagean wrote:

This summary has been posted around a few places

Including the previous page of this thread, and quoted on this very page. IMAGE(http://www.skype-emoticons.com/images/emoticon-00110-tongueout.png)

Ahh my bad

I gotta buy a car, and then a new gpu, so I have to wait.
It's not a "being an adult" sucks moment, I just can't run it yet.
Also I may buy a another monitor.
Although, holy cripes, what if...the oculus could mimic being in an arcade machine?
That would be rad.

You can already do a Virtual Desktop with any VR headset, so even with no cool environment or anything else, you'd have any game your PC will play through emulation. You can make it huge, as if you were in front of a theater screen, or closer to a monitor.

It's a very small step from that to giving you an arcade-like environment to play those games in. They already have 'multiplayer' theaters where you and others can all watch the same video together. Someone will do it.

My machine would run the Rift okay, but one stumbling block I didn't foresee: I'd have to give my name, address, and payment info to Facebook. I've put a lot of effort into staying the hell away from that company, and I'm not willing to volunteer data into that vortex.

Maybe if it ever comes to resellers, and I get a clear picture of what software I'll have to install, I'd consider picking it up, but as is... probably not.

Malor,

You've offered lots of great technical advice in the past. How hard is it to add USB ports to a computer? I don't think my rig has enough.

Thanks.
Chad

If you have a PCI slot you can add USB that way or if your motherboard is from the past few years you may have some unused headers on it to give you one or two but you'd still need to buy the cable/hardware.