HTC Vive is $799, ships early April 2016

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KingSnake said:
I just finished reading the last pages. All this talk about mainstream when you need a $1000 PC for a proper VR experience is unbelievable. Like not understanding at all the subject at hand.

And the discussion about PSVR vs. Rift/Vive is as useless as the PS4 vs. PC discussion. Different markets, different expectations in terms of quality. Both can be successful on their own market segment.
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Wow someone with sense.
 
Crimsonclaw111 said:
Can't you simply play Oculus games on the Vive?

And also, the preorders aren't going to charge immediately right? I want one of these so badly.
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Developers need to add support for both headsets, for example Assetto Corsa currently has only Rift compatibility and Elite Dangerous will have only Vive compatibility (at first, but they're working on the Rift).

Some games are locked behind Oculus Store exclusivity, but will support SteamVR (Vive) too. Some games are plain and simply Oculus SDK locked (games developed / funded by Oculus).

SteamVR games will work also with Oculus.

No idea how HTC will handle preorders.
 
Enter the Dragon Punch said:
GO THE FUCK HOME VALVE

Ctr3GdU.png


RIFT WINS
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watching anything together with that awkward fuck.
 
hahahahaha @ that price.

first wave buyers = the real hardcore gamers that are into VR so bad and can afford it + people that buy for the intention of selling it on ebay for a profit.

second wave buyers =
empty-quarter-desert-dunes.jpg



to me till this point. the whole VR experience is nothing but either Tech demos or videos of roller coasters and stuff like that "ex owner of Dev kit 2 " and to be honest i can get that for a 100$ from Samsung VR or LG VR or whatever.

i will buy second or third gen of this when its 350$ Max with more advanced tech.

i mean, consoles Bombed at a price of 600$. and by miracle was it able to recover after price reductions and heavy exclusive hitters. anyone who think this will fly @ 700 $ is crazy.

i wonder if it will reach 1 million shipped by mid 2017 even.

Edit: i am also not very much into indie games to support this. i want some heavy hitter games like COD, BF and other big games to enjoy the 3D world in a fun experienced game. something at least like project cars and more.

PS VR @ 450$ and IF it can also work on a PC. they have won. nothing will beat a PS4 and a PC compatible VR combo. even if its somehow "less advanced "
 
travisbickle said:
Complete package (headset, tracking, wands)

HTC: $800

Oculus: ~$700

PSVR: ~$450


I think they should have aimed lower, for specs and price. I don't think the majority of people are willing to pay the extra, and they're really pandering to rich San-Fran tech crowd.

We'll see if it works out.
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I think they all set a sensible baseline experience. That just happens to be expensive right now. If they'd have cheaped out they would have risked damaging the initial VR experience for many people (lower refresh rates, lower resolution, worse tracking, no IPD adjustment for comfort etc)

As time goes on, the price will drop for this baseline, and high priced headsets will continue with technological advancements. But getting that baseline definition correct is critical to any longer term adoption and I think it is credit to all three major players that they are roughly in alignment on that area.
 
Mattenth said:
I think the big challenge that Sony and Valve both run up against in the long-run is content.

Content creators are going to go to the device with the largest market, and that's where Oculus is kicking ass right now. App stores effectively snowball. And two marketing moves combined to show that Oculus knows this is their advantage and pressing it:

First, bundling the Galaxy S7 with a Galaxy Gear VR is just an incredible marketing move. All of those early, non-enthusiast consumers are about to have an affordable and fun first VR experience. And in the process, Oculus gets them hooked on their app store and their content. The Gear VR might feel like a gimmick, but it is a great starting point for a brand relationship. For many people, it'll be a wonderful intro experience and simultaneously show the value of a more premium device.

For Enthusiasts, you probably already have a good brand relationship with Oculus. If you were an Oculus supporter in the kickstarter, odds are that Oculus has earned your respect. They successfully delivered a strong starting point, and they iterated to success. But the brilliant move is when Oculus announced its giveaway of a free launch headset to early supporters. Suddenly, all those enthusiasts are about to get the amazing headset free of charge. Which brand do you think those enthusiasts will be advocating for?

It's hard to overemphasize how powerful of an advantage this is - Oculus has a functional operating system and app store that will reach an order of magnitude more people than other devices. While those devices might not be as powerful, a lot of compelling media experiences won't need that extra power. Sure, they can't power amazing games, but they will power some fun novelty games in addition to media. And having that app store already in the hands of enthusiasts gives them a huge advocacy group ahead of their competitors. Giving away a free launch kit just solidifies their early support.

If you're a content creator, which App Store makes more sense to target first? The one that's being effectively targeted to gamers alone? Or the one that's already functional on several devices at multiple price points and is used by enthusiasts?

Oculus is winning the VR war hands down. I expect them to have a 90%+ market share in the VR space in 3 years, if not more (read: VR, not AR). Whoever is in charge of building the Oculus brand has done an absolutely phenomenal job, and even their moves in the last few months continue to create competitive distance and emphasize their first-mover advantage. I think the bigger question continues to be "how big is the VR market really?" I think some gaps in the experience might be harder to overcome at scale than we think, but innovation is unpredictable.
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oh dear.

You think those developers will be happy to limit their addressable market to OR owners? They can easily release with support for Vive with hardly any changes to their software - they can just require the use of a standard controller - no need to add motion control support in. Likewise with any Vive game that does use motion controls - I would expect most developers to want to port to oculus when touch is available.

Similarly, most developers will want to be on PSVR too - anything that is delivered to OR that isn't exclusive (eg funded by Oculus) should be portable to PSVR.
 
Stiler said:
Entirely different thing.

All I said was that the VB was a VR headset, I didn't say the vive/rift didn't have new/better technologies or capabilities.

It's like complaning that I called a old 90's cell phone a "phone" and an Iphone a "phone," because they are both you know..phones.
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your comparison with 90's arcade VR like Virtuality is flawed because the technology is orders of magnitude more capable, and massively more affordable. Taking existing advances in display technology from mobile phones, and combining with the power of modern consoles/PCs takes it so far beyond the horrible refresh rate and low poly count of virtuality that is isn't really funny
 
Just as expected. More worth it than the oculus.
Anything higher than 800 would have been suicide

Will probably buy one next year, this year I'm getting a good pascal GPU I think
 
KingSnake said:
I just finished reading the last pages. All this talk about mainstream when you need a $1000 PC for a proper VR experience is unbelievable. Like not understanding at all the subject at hand.

And the discussion about PSVR vs. Rift/Vive is as useless as the PS4 vs. PC discussion. Different markets, different expectations in terms of quality. Both can be successful on their own market segment.
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Well said. It's basically a replay of "PC gaming is dead". You'd think people would have learned by now.

Also, I'm always surprised at just how much parts of the (ostensibly enthusiast) neogaf community care about the mainstream.

backbreaker65 said:
How does Sony get left out of this listing is beyond me.
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Which hardware or software innovation pioneered by Sony is in this first generation of consumer VR devices?

I've followed the field extremely closely and can't think of anything significant.
  • The basic HW design is Luckey/Oculus (single screen) / Valve (dual screen)
  • Shader based reverse CA and reprojection are Carmack (first in his free time, then at Oculus)
  • Low-persistence display strobing is Abrash (at Valve)
  • Lighthouse room-scale tracking is Valve (I'm sorry I don't know the name of the inventor)
 
Durante said:
Well said. It's basically a replay of "PC gaming is dead". You'd think people would have learned by now.

Also, I'm always surprised at just how much parts of the (ostensibly enthusiast) neogaf community care about the mainstream.

Which hardware or software innovation pioneered by Sony is in this first generation of consumer VR devices?

I've followed the field extremely closely and can't think of anything significant.
  • The basic HW design is Luckey/Oculus (single screen) / Valve (dual screen)
  • Shader based reverse CA and reprojection are Carmack (first in his free time, then at Oculus)
  • Low-persistence display strobing is Abrash (at Valve)
  • Lighthouse room-scale tracking is Valve (I'm sorry I don't know the name of the inventor)
Click to expand...

we don't know what has been developed internally within Sony R&D over the past years.

Perhaps the simpler webcam tracking approach could be considered developed and refined by them? They've been doing basic webcam stuff since PS2 days, and move did the specific 'tracking LED light sources'. Although even that was done by Wii earlier.
 
Stiler said:
The VB was marketed as a VR device, from Nintendo saying "true 3d-graphics/true 3d worlds" in many of the ads/commericals portraying it as a VR device, etc.

Was it good? Heck no, the color choices sucked, the fact it sit on a stand sucked, but it was marketed as a VR device unless you were blind back in the day when it came out and didn't see any of the ads or write ups or commericals for it.

Basically you're saying it isn't VR because the graphics sucked?
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No, I'm saying it's not VR because it is not VR in ANY way. Are you saying the Nintendo 3DS is a VR device? That one even supports 3D-vector graphics, which the Virtual Boy did NOT. Nintendo never once said the Virtual Boy had true 3D worlds, show me the ad where they said that. Their tag line for a while was "a 3D game for a 3D world", because the whole point about Virtual Boy was it had stereoscopic 3D graphics, just like 3DS. I worked for Nintendo when the Virtual Boy came out, I answered their phones and answered questions about the Virtual Boy, there was nothing in our computers about virtual reality. We were supposed to tell parents it's like a 32-bit Super NES with stereoscopic 3D.

For something to be Virtual Reality, it has to be designed to make you think you are in another reality - it's there in the name. Virtual Boy was not designed to make you think you were in another reality, just like the 3DS isn't. I mean, did you even look at my screenshots? My point wasn't graphical quality, my point was 2D side scrolling is not VR, 2D overhead shooting is not VR, 2D match-3 games are not VR. At a minimum VR needs to have a 3D first-person point of view, whether that point of view is from a character in the game or from a camera in the world. VB behind a 2D tile based system had no built-in support for that.
 
Dreamwriter said:
No, I'm saying it's not VR because it is not VR in ANY way. Are you saying the Nintendo 3DS is a VR device? That one even supports 3D-vector graphics, which the Virtual Boy did NOT. Nintendo never once said the Virtual Boy had true 3D worlds, show me the ad where they said that. Their tag line for a while was "a 3D game for a 3D world", because the whole point about Virtual Boy was it had stereoscopic 3D graphics, just like 3DS. I worked for Nintendo when the Virtual Boy came out, I answered their phones and answered questions about the Virtual Boy, there was nothing in our computers about virtual reality. We were supposed to tell parents it's like a 32-bit Super NES with stereoscopic 3D.

For something to be Virtual Reality, it has to be designed to make you think you are in another reality - it's there in the name. Virtual Boy was not designed to make you think you were in another reality, just like the 3DS isn't.
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h6PVfvX.jpg


You don't think the point of it blocking out your peripheral vision + being 3d was not meant to immerse you more into the game? It was the technology they had at the time with the leds and color limitations/power requirements.
 
Durante said:
[*]Shader based reverse CA and reprojection are Carmack (first in his free time, then at Oculus)
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This is the problem with arguments like this... reprojection techniques go back decades.

How many of the technologies we're talking about here were truly first invented in the current VR circumstances by the people we're crediting? Maybe some, but I'm not sure about everything on this list.

If we're going to allow 'rediscoveries' and 'reinventions' and 'first commercialisations', we could throw Sony a bone or two also, probably!
 
gofreak said:
This is the problem with arguments like this... reprojection techniques go back decades.
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Asynchronous reprojection for VR viewport movement updates? Could you provide a citation on that?

gofreak said:
How many of the technologies we're talking about here were truly first invented in the current VR circumstances by the people we're crediting? Maybe some, but I'm not sure about everything on this list.

If we're going to allow 'rediscoveries' and 'reinventions' and 'first commercialisations', we could throw Sony a bone or two also, probably!
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I'm simply going by publicly available knowledge.

The last VR device/prototype Sony showed off (yes, I remember that one) before Palmer did his KS was still based on the completely-infeasible-for-consumer-VR HMZ design.

I'm sorry if this offends fans of one company or another.
 
Stiler said:
h6PVfvX.jpg


You don't think the point of it blocking out your peripheral vision + being 3d was not meant to immerse you more into the game? It was the technology they had at the time with the leds and color limitations/power requirements.
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No, it says it right there in the ad you posted, the point of blocking your peripheral vision was to remove distractions, keep other people from blocking your view, not make you think you were in another reality. Again, I'm not talking about graphic quality, maybe you don't understand what I mean by 2D tile-based graphics: those graphics are designed to make Super Mario Bros., not Super Mario Galaxy or Mario 64. The graphics have no changing perspective, aren't 3D in that sense. Again, do you consider the Nintendo 3DS a virtual reality device? If not, then you wouldn't consider the Virtual Boy one, because they are the same thing, devices meant to display 2D gaming in stereoscopic 3D, only more so in the case of VB because at least the 3DS is capable of 3D vector graphics with changing perspective as the camera moves.

Read that ad you posted, it's all about stereoscopic 3D, nothing about 3D worlds, virtual reality, thinking you are somewhere else or in the game. Virtual Boy is not a VR headset without tracking, that's just a moronic statement,
 
So if I understand correctly the current price for a complete VR experience, powerful rig and all, is around $2000. Quite fair compared to prices for first genetation HDTVs or similar home entertainment tech at the beginning of its life.

The real question is how fast will the price go down in the coming years.
 
mrklaw said:
oh dear.

You think those developers will be happy to limit their addressable market to OR owners? They can easily release with support for Vive with hardly any changes to their software - they can just require the use of a standard controller - no need to add motion control support in. Likewise with any Vive game that does use motion controls - I would expect most developers to want to port to oculus when touch is available.

Similarly, most developers will want to be on PSVR too - anything that is delivered to OR that isn't exclusive (eg funded by Oculus) should be portable to PSVR.
Click to expand...

I imagine the most PSVR devs will ported their games to the PC to cater to the combined install base (of Rift/Vive). It looks to be easier to port from PSVR to PC than downporting PC VR titles to the PS VR.
 
Durante said:
Asynchronous reprojection for VR viewport movement updates? Could you provide a citation on that?
Click to expand...

For the general case of viewport updates, there's stuff going back to the 90s. McMillan's warp is often cited as the first, but I'm fairly sure I might have read stuff from the 80s on that (although I may be confusing that with lightfield rendering).

A specialisation of that - a GPU based implementation for VR - that's a 'weaker' first, IMO. It's a context/implementation change rather than a 'strong' first.

I think if you look at a lot of what is being done in VR right now we'll probably find a lot of these 'weaker firsts'. If the barrier to credit is too weak we could find them everywhere right now. What's old is new again.

I'm not so much arguing a case for a particular company here so much as I'm arguing that there's probably a lot of non-commercial researchers looking at claims around VR 'firsts' now with a bit of a smile.
 
gofreak said:
For the general case of viewport updates, there's stuff going back to the 90s. McMillan's warp is often cited as the first, but I'm fairly sure I might have read stuff from the 80s on that (although I may be confusing that with lightfield rendering).
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Well, yes, that's why I specified VR.

I agree with you that if you generalize enough, then almost nothing is ever new.
 
Company launches product, with cutting edge technology at a high price.

Outrage.

I don´t think that the mass-market was their primary focus to begin with, at least not in the first stages of the product life cycle. For the early adopters, price doesn´t really matter.

And when it comes to gaming, VR will never be big, never was supposed to be.

I can see it as the next big thing in other industries; medicine, education, tourism.. but for gaming... nah.

No big developer is going to invest in it, mostly because there will never be a large enough user-base to justify it.

This is going to be one of those things that people regret buying after a few months, and then go to Internet and complain about why video game publishers don´t develop software for it, when they never where supposed to create shit for VR.

But I guess it´s fine if you´re into anime porn.
 
While not an unexpected price for what it does, it's just a little out of my price range. I might stick with PSVR for the first gen VR and get a PC one when second gen VR comes out.
 
bud23 said:
This is going to be one of those things that people regret buying after a few months
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I have both a DK1 and a DK2, and will get an Oculus CV1 (for free) and buy a Vive. I doubt I'll regret any of it :P

However, I'm not exactly expecting "AAA" games. (I don't even care for AAA games in traditional screen gaming, so that's not really a loss)
 
Durante said:
I have both a DK1 and a DK2, and will get an Oculus CV1 (for free) and buy a Vive. I doubt I'll regret any of it :P

However, I'm not exactly expecting "AAA" games. (I don't even care for AAA games in traditional screen gaming, so that's not really a loss)
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Triple AAA are coming, that's for sure.

But what i want is inovation, new gameplays, new ways to see the old games.

I cant wait to try HL2 on the Vive.
 
ArtHands said:
I imagine the most PSVR devs will ported their games to the PC to cater to the combined install base (of Rift/Vive). It looks to be easier to port from PSVR to PC than downporting PC VR titles to the PS VR.
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I'm really hoping Namco bring their PSVR titles to PC as well. Ace Combat could be great.
 
Stiler said:
You don't think the point of it blocking out your peripheral vision + being 3d was not meant to immerse you more into the game? It was the technology they had at the time with the leds and color limitations/power requirements.
Click to expand...

Going by your logic, Sony already had a VR headset back in 2011 with HMZ-T1.
 
Stiler said:
You don't think the point of it blocking out your peripheral vision + being 3d was not meant to immerse you more into the game? It was the technology they had at the time with the leds and color limitations/power requirements.
Click to expand...

you are seriously out of your depth here. just stop.
 
People spend more on their phones than that in general so I don't really see how it's that big of a deal. You want it, save up some cash or wait for the tech to get cheaper, it's as easy as that. More fun to be armchair analyst though, I guess.
 
I am ready to buy a Vive and ready to devote space for it.

Still, I do not think this is ready for mass penetration, and also ,the number of titles in dev is a lot for an unproven market.
 
Well so far, VR on PC is for the PC enthusiasts only.
Sony have a big opportunity here to take charge of VR, launch a well priced unit and have the install base and software to back it up.
If that doesn't happen, VR won't take off for years. The general public don't have the hardware to run it and certainly won't pay the price for both the required hardware and the VR unit itself. Having a good priced VR setup on a console that requires little to no additional effort will be the key I feel.
 
It's the beginning of a new product. As tech gets cheaper, VR will drop in price. This is an initiation price for the first generation of VR. In a few years, these sets will be discounted steeply as the new wave of hardware will likely be substantially lower.

VR isn't for me right now, though. It's a sizeable investment to those involved in this niche of gaming, though.
 
Durante said:
Well said. It's basically a replay of "PC gaming is dead". You'd think people would have learned by now.

Also, I'm always surprised at just how much parts of the (ostensibly enthusiast) neogaf community care about the mainstream.

Which hardware or software innovation pioneered by Sony is in this first generation of consumer VR devices?

I've followed the field extremely closely and can't think of anything significant.
  • The basic HW design is Luckey/Oculus (single screen) / Valve (dual screen)
  • Shader based reverse CA and reprojection are Carmack (first in his free time, then at Oculus)
  • Low-persistence display strobing is Abrash (at Valve)
  • Lighthouse room-scale tracking is Valve (I'm sorry I don't know the name of the inventor)
Click to expand...

Because Sony wasn't public with what they were doing, doesn't mean they didn't do it first.
 
800$
Announced at Mobile World Congress.
Valve seems to refuse to develop killer software in the same league as Portal and HL.
Needs a very powerful PC for a good experience.

I kinda do get the appeal but all those combined just makes it into a turd package.
 
I'm wondering how people will split their budgets this year between multiple available VR sets and a new GPU generation which I feel quite a lot of people are looking forward to.

Like, you could easily spend a couple thousand bucks on new exciting hardware this year but boy who has that kinda money just laying around...
 
Zojirushi said:
I'm wondering how people will split their budgets this year between multiple available VR sets and a new GPU generation which I feel quite a lot of people are looking forward to.

Like, you could easily spend a couple thousand bucks on new exciting hardware this year but boy who has that kinda money just laying around...
Click to expand...

I'm doing GPU this year and VR next year, seems more reasonable than the opposite
Also there will probably not be a lot of software for VR this year
 
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