Occulus Archives | Broken Joysticks

Begun the VR wars have.

Today HTC has announced their final consumer production model of their VR headset the Vive. In a blog post on their website, HTC announced that the Vive pre-orders will open Monday Feburay 29th (yes that’s leap day) at 10am eastern time. The price will be $799USD, the unit will ship in April of this year. Also important to note is that HTC’s post says

“Vive will be delivered as a complete kit allowing users to instantly jump into a fully immersive virtual environment using two wireless controllers, 360 degree tracking and room scale movement sensors”

This is different from the choice made by their nearest competitor Occulus whom chose to price their unit at $599 (200USD less), but with out the inbox sensors, and controllers. Getting the touch controllers for Occulus will set the consumer back another chunk of change(price has not yet been announced), probably bringing the prices for the two units closer together.

The HTC Vive will also ship with two VR games, Job Simulator and Fantastic Contraption, and with the recent addition of the front facing camera HTC is stressing that this is not just a gaming machine. They are targeting multiple sectors including entertainment, retail, education, design, healthcare and automotive that will ultimately transform people’s lives.

Cher Wang, chairwoman and CEO, HTC is quoted in the blog post as saying

“From the beginning, Vive has been at the forefront of virtual reality, with HTC pioneering several ground breaking technologies, Since announcing Vive this time last year, we have worked tirelessly with Valve to deliver the best VR experience on the market, winning multiple awards and receiving critical acclaim from media, consumers and the industry. With the Vive consumer edition we are now able to realize our ultimate vision; bringing Vive into homes around the globe so that people can experience immersive virtual reality in a away that fires the imagination and truly changes the world.”

So what do you think? Is HTC going to take down Occulus or vice versa? Hit the jump to see their intro video that was also in the blog post

So the Occulus Rift sold out at 600$. A price point that I belived would make it unobtainable for most average consumers. Way too much for me (I had budgeted for 450$), and 100$ more even than most industry estimates. Much more than what we heard in 2014 which was 200$-400$ and while this was in a European publication, its still fairly safe to say even in Euros that price does not match. Luckey tweeted “To reiterate, we are not making money on Rift hardware. High end VR is expensive, but Rift is obscenely cheap for what it is.”

The hole only goes farther down from there. Luckey defended the higher European prices as the result of being required to include various taxes that aren’t part of US pricing. “In fact, some countries are getting a slightly better deal than the US, all things considered—remember, we have per state sales tax,” he tweeted.tweeting at totalbiscut, he added, “European cost is because we are required to include taxes. We are not unfairly inflating the price like many consoles.”

Look I get it, this is the first VR headset, you need recoup hundreds if not thousands of hours of research and development, millions in sunk product costs and staff costs, and of course that Facebook investment. In and interview with Polygon Luckey also said that the Facebook buy out did not help with price at all in fact it may have made it worse. “What came out of that were the prototypes that became Crescent Bay [a prototype for the retail version of the hardware], and when we compared what we had to what we were making internally it was such a huge difference,” he said. “It was hard to look at what we had made before and say yeah, this is consumer ready, this is what everyone is going to want… We decided, in the end, to optimize quality over cost.”

The headset will cost 600USD$ and ship im March, the first batch of pre-orders is already sold out, and a second will ship later on. For my money, this is an expensive hack like a wraparound 4K monitor, and untill its price becomes viable I wont be buying one.

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HTC unveils Vive consume edition and pre-order info

Palmer Luckey insists “we are not making money on Rift”