Rift, Vive, and Virtual Reality

Waiting for the European price announcement. With everything included, it might actually be the same price as the rift and even lower if we include the shipping cost of touch (assuming they haven't shorted their shipping when touch actually becomes available).
Either way, it is a lot of money
And a far cry from where we started, with the promise of "affordable" (in the 350-400$ range) VR.

Luckily for me, neither one ships to my country for now, so I'll be forced to make a more educated decision, after reading many, many, reviews and comparisons

 

Personally I think for VR to be really immersive it has to get rid of those cables. There're two different approaches: the first one is real standalone, similar to Gear VR; the second one is to transmit images wirelessly.

For now, it seems to be difficult to make a real standalone solution effectively. It's not impossible to make a real powerful standalone device, but battery life will suffer. So I think a wireless solution seems more likely in near future. 60GHz WiFi might be able to provide sufficient bandwidth.

Another possibility is to do VR in the cloud. It's impossible to reduce latency to level adequate for VR applications (like 3ms), but if the cloud sends two spherical images instead of a two flat images, then only control latency is relevant and that's a lot less sensitive. If public wireless network is fast enough (could be another 10 years away though), such solution can be used anywhere.

 

http://vrfocus.com/archives/29935/vives-uk-price-revealed/

£689 for UK, which is 880€.
If true then Vive will be, in Europe, cheaper than Rift despite being a complete package.


EDIT: and with great timing, Occulus just started to randomly cancel some Rift preorders. People who were expecting the thing in March/April, pre-ordered again and will only get their headset in July.
https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/46zxie/order_cancelled/

 

From that Reddit it seems to be due to customer shipping address shenanigans, not random.

 

Then you'd be increasing the rendering requirement to renderer the entire spherical environment per frame! That's got to be ~5x more rendering. While a lot of us are pinning our hopes on foveated rendering to get the rendering requirements significantly down so we can improve quality.

 

Well it's probably not that bad, if your frame rate is fast enough, you probably don't need to render anything directly behind the user (at least not as frequently, or at full resolution).
Of course, this is still something that's probably at least 5 years away. By then cloud gaming servers might be able to render very realistic 3D scenes

 

Not sure why Oculus is so expensive in Europe. It's only £500 in the UK which is obviously a lot cheaper than Vive.

Vive still looks like a decent deal given you get the controllers and base stations but those games.... ugh.

 

I think the list prices on Oculus's store tend to be misleading in many cases because they're including regional sales taxes rather than just the base MSRP adjusted by the appropriate exchange rate. I'm happy that I didn't have to deal with any of the pre-order stuff. Never a very comforting experience trying to jockey for position in a lineup of tens of thousands of people where screwing up your order can result in a 3-4 month delay.

 

Dunno if you guys saw but IBM announced a game called Sword Art Online which is a manga/anime and its going to use Watson in some manner. Really excited

The Manga is about a VR game

 

Videos, videos, videos

http://www.engadget.com/2016/02/23/facebook-vr-adaptive-streaming/

 

That's the winner there, no matter how much we want games to be it.

 

https://twitter.com/palmerluckey/status/702602710818762753

Palmer is teasing an arc in Yu-GI-Oh when they battled with virtual card monsters. That could be pretty cool although hopefully its more adult than yugioh

 

http://www.htc.com/managed-assets/shared/desktop/vive/Vive_PRE_User_Guide.pdf interesting info on the setup

 

I like the concpet and the content of the video since it really contains a lot of ideas about virtual reality.

 

Vive is 899e in europe. Price includes sales tax and doesn't include any shipping costs.

http://blog.htcvive.com/us/2016/02/international-pricing-for-vive-pre-order/

http://www.roadtovr.com/htc-vive-pr...dly-leaked-e899-in-europe/?platform=hootsuite

 

So

Occulus - 699 Euro + 42 Euro shipping.
VIVE - 899 Euro + X Euro shipping.

About what I was expecting for the Vive. Somewhere between 900-1000 Euro shipped. Of course, if they can get it into any stores, maybe some fortunate people might be able to get it for only 899 Euro.

Regards,
SB

 

Everything is so expensive and limited

 

Some reports were saying Vive was out of stock in 10 minutes, that was actually a glitch. If you had an "out of stock" message at check out, it's worth trying again. (you have to restart the checkout process)

Anyway, in canada my preorder totaled $1395 with all the hidden cost included. This is insane.

 

Glad you were able to get your order. I'm jut sticking with the rift since I have a preorder on it.

 

Final shipping packaging it seems like