Sony VR Headset/Project Morpheus/PlayStation VR

[MrFox]

Aw crap.

The whole idea of VR making a comeback was the use of a smartphone type of display and a high volume production. The comparison at the time was sony's $800 HMZ headset being modified for VR, which was stupidly expensive, compared to oculus being $350. The enabler was price. Price meant market penetration. Cost was dominated by display+lenses+profit. They supposedly solved this and it was to be launched in 2014.

Now we have oculus expected around $750 with motion controllers (at the end of the year), and $800 comparable package for Vive. Plus $30 shipping because there is no retail presence. Polls are showing a very very small adoption at these prices. If you're not in the US it's much worse.

If it's true that they are not making money at these prices, there is something we are missing about the BOM of a VR headset. Sony have a few advantages, but nothing obvious that would allow half that price, considering they have a powerful external processor in addition.

 

[DieH@rd]

So PSVR up against $800 Vive and $600 OVR.

That's just the base price for Oculus. I expect hand tracked controllers [Palmer has said they will come bundled with additional 2nd camera] to be pricey.

 

[eastmen]

That's just the base price for Oculus. I expect hand tracked controllers [Palmer has said they will come bundled with additional 2nd camera] to be pricey.

Prob $100-$200. The vive comes with a light house and 2 hand tracked controllers and is only $200 more . So I think that set the celling on the touch price.

I doubt either controller is that expensive. The xbox 360 controller was something like $8 for MS to make. I would expect similar costs for the touch. So that's like $20 bucks perhaps. I doubt the camera is more than $20 at the high end. So your looking at maybe $40 for oculus on the touch. Put it at $100 and bring in good profits , $200 would be very nice profits and would help make back money lost on the helemet.

However I remember palmer saying that the cost of the helmet would subsidize the cost of touch.

 

[eastmen]

Aw crap.

The whole idea of VR making a comeback was the use of a smartphone type of display and a high volume production. The comparison at the time was sony's $800 HMZ headset being modified for VR, which was stupidly expensive, compared to oculus being $350. The enabler was price. Price meant market penetration. Cost was dominated by display+lenses+profit. They supposedly solved this and it was to be launched in 2014.

Now we have oculus expected around $750 with motion controllers (at the end of the year), and $800 comparable package for Vive. Plus $30 shipping because there is no retail presence. Polls are showing a very very small adoption at these prices. If you're not in the US it's much worse.

If it's true that they are not making money at these prices, there is something we are missing about the BOM of a VR headset. Sony have a few advantages, but nothing obvious that would allow half that price, considering they have a powerful external processor in addition.

I'm going to say its the screens and the physical ipd adjustment mechanic.

I also believe that when they say they aren't making money at this prices its bs. They are making a profit on the hardware but still have R&D to pay back that they are including in the price.


Sony will most likely hit at the lowest price point but I don't think its going to be under $400. Even though they are using a single screen and have only software ipd adjustments the screen is still a 120hz screen which isn't common at all and they have the break out box.

 

[hughJ]

The whole idea of VR making a comeback was the use of a smartphone type of display and a high volume production. The comparison at the time was sony's $800 HMZ headset being modified for VR, which was stupidly expensive, compared to oculus being $350.

The comparisons at the time were the 4-5 figure professional wide-FOV HMDs because that's what the earliest Rift prototypes were proposing to match or exceed in specification while making it economical as a gaming peripheral. The HMZ line was never suitable for what they were trying to achieve in terms of spec, so it was never a relevant goal post. The proposal of cheap, off the shelf components to make an affordable VR HMD was entirely out of necessity back when all you've got is a 19 year old kid with a dream, but I have trouble imagining how that sort of mission statement could have led to them securing the external investment they've been living off of since they started. If you don't hold any core patents to your design and every key component is some commodity part available to anyone at the same price, then you don't have very much beyond your brand and your employees.

From the PS4's side of things I think it's reasonable to care about an affordable price that can sell high volumes because you've got a large, ready-made group of potential customers and well networked dev rel, coupled with a longer life cycle to grow a library that hopefully justifies the price of admission. From the PC side of things though we're probably not looking at more than a couple years or so between hardware iterations, so the hardware sales really have no time to spur new content that could be ready before the next hardware iteration is available for pre-order. There was no reason to think PC VR this generation was ever going to be more than a niche platform for a subset of gamers and the pricing (imo, thankfully) reinforces that.

Looking at the topics being discussed in the various PC VR communities, even now only a couple months from release, it seems that almost none of it revolves around particular games or experiences that people are excited to play. What you see instead is the attention still dominated by the idea of the tech - the promise/potential rather than any content that's actually coming, so wishing/hoping for lower PC HMD prices to enable deeper market penetration seems to me like a dangerous double edged sword. Whether the Vive was $1000 or $300, you're still talking about a price that's impossible to justify for something that's going to allow you to chop virtual carrots, but at a higher price point you're weeding out most of the sensible people that demand value for their money.

 

[temesgen]

Sony has been heading by people who do actually think about what the price needs to be and then match the product to it rather than the other way around. They did the same with the PS4 and were very clear about it, after the whole PS3 debacle with the second job etc it has been ... a thing.

I still think software is going to be critical, these prices are not too much different than what consumers invest in cell phones and tablets and I am inclined to think Sony comes in at around 350 to 400 dollars in the US probably slightly more in Europe. But again if someone buys any of these units and doesn't have software they are going dead on arrival whereas if you or your buddy invest in the platform and interesting titles are coming out fairly regularly it won't take long for friends and family to make the leap.

 

[MrFox]

Looking at the topics being discussed in the various PC VR communities, even now only a couple months from release, it seems that almost none of it revolves around particular games or experiences that people are excited to play. What you see instead is the attention still dominated by the idea of the tech - the promise/potential rather than any content that's actually coming, so wishing/hoping for lower PC HMD prices to enable deeper market penetration seems to me like a dangerous double edged sword. Whether the Vive was $1000 or $300, you're still talking about a price that's impossible to justify for something that's going to allow you to chop virtual carrots, but at a higher price point you're weeding out most of the sensible people that demand value for their money.

Did you look at all the VR games announced and the reports from trade shows? There's a hundred games for Oculus/Vive and a hundred for PSVR (with a lot of overlap). There's more than virtual carrots for core gamers. I can think of a few...

Rigs
Eve Valkyrie
Ace Combat 7
Asseto Corsa
The Assembly
Gran Turismo
Robinson Journey
Final Fantasy 14 Online
War Thunder
Project CARS
Alien: Isolation
Edge of Nowhere
The Climb

Market research is showing a large section of the gamer public was ready to spend $300 for VR, and it drops to a small niche at $1000. It WAS meant to have a significant market. Millions instead of hundreds of thousands. The analysts predictions were in the millions for 2016, at the same point they expected a $350 target.

What does a $800 device brings to the table compare to Crescent Bay which was still targeting $350? It's not like it was destroying the VR experience because of a slightly heavier headset, or some chromatic aberration visible at the edges, or a bit of contrast loss by the fresnel back scattering, of a small loss of FoV without a screen-linked IPD adjustment. These are small details.

From the previous statements, it certainly looks like it was supposed to be a wider market than hundreds of thousands at launch, and at no point did they indicate it would be a niche pricing.

In 2014:
http://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-founder-palmer-luckey-facebook-buyout-reduce-price-oculus-rift/

Responding in Reddit’s Oculus section to the question, “How is this what’s best for VR technology?”, Luckey said that, “This deal specifically lets us greatly lower the price of the Rift.”

Oculus has stated previously that their target price for a consumer virtual reality headset would be around $300. With the Oculus Rift DK2 going on sale last week for $350, it can be assumed that Luckey’s comment applies to the forthcoming consumer version of the Oculus Rift. If the company could bring the cost down to $100 per headset, it would surely go a long way toward widespread adoption of VR.

The Rift is absolutely targeted towards the gaming population, which tends to be teenage to early 20s/30s, which is the exact population that Facebook is currently losing. By partnering with Facebook, you are gaining access to a massive userbase of people that the rift is not targeted towards, which people might feel is a very bad move.

Last year:
http://gamerant.com/facebook-oculus-rift-2015/

The Oculus Rift headsets will be sold at cost, when they go on sale. Luckey gave the example that, if the headset costs $200 dollars to make, it will be sold for $200. However, there is no official price point or release date of the consumer headsets. Of course, the development kits are available now for $350.

At the end of the interview, Luckey addressed the impending competition: Sony’s Project Morpheus, which was announced just two days before news of the Facebook deal made waves. Luckey believes that Project Morpheus is not a true competitor, as Sony is catering to only PS4 consumers, while Oculus VR is aimed at a much wider audience, claiming that Zuckerberg and he have the same dream of making virtual reality mainstream, available to everyone across multiple platforms.

 

[hughJ]

Did you look at the announced games and the reports from trade shows? There's more than virtual carrots for core gamers. I can think of a few...

Heard of them, played some, own some, and some aren't even confirmed for commercial release as VR titles. Even so, I question how many of those are going to be games that people will even try more than a few times, and further I'm not sure if many (any?) of them will make use of the standing/walking motion controller experience that the Vive seems to be laser focused on selling. Most VR games that are currently in the pipeline and shaping up to be ready for 2016 launch are seated gamepad-based games that had to make minimal transition from existing genres - cockpit games, platformers, etc. The only VR games from those genres that I've tried and had something that I could characterize as a compelling VR experience with are the ones with well integrated driving wheel or HOTAS support, (Elite Dangerous, despite its janky, half-broken VR SDK integration still delivers a different category of VR experience compared to Eve Valkyrie.) Those forms of input function as a limited form of motion controller that helps establish the much talked about 'presence' that makes VR special, but you can't build a broadly accepted, affordable gaming platform with expectation that your customers buy specialized input for each genre. Actual motion controller support from VR content is still a long ways off as its going to take time for developers to digest and build new genres around it. I actually think that the development jump from traditional gaming to HMD-only VR is much smaller than the jump is from HMD-only VR to motion controller-enabled VR, so people should be prepared for a marathon. PS4's VR probably has enough runway to see some volume of well made motion controller content added before their life cycle is over, but the Rift and Vive have less time. On top of that, Valve seems to be lacking the serious first/second party content initiative that Oculus is attempting, so I'm particularly concerned about just what content is going to properly exploit the Vive's hardware before the next iteration of hardware is already around the corner.

What does a $800 device brings to the table compare to Crescent Bay which was still targeting $350?

Crescent Bay is a prototype for the consumer hardware. It uses the same specs and major components. The last unit Oculus built that used low cost, non-bespoke components was the DK2, and that design predates the Facebook buyout by ~6 months, going all the way back into 2013. I wouldn't pay a whole lot of attention to any of the PR that was coming out of Oculus shortly after the Facebook acquisition - Palmer and his family were getting death threats over it and you had everyone scrambling against the internet backlash to explain why it was a good thing (the first thing Brendan Iribe bragged about in his announcement was how Facebook would facilitate a more robust purchasing experience for customers.) The deal was hashed out over just a matter of a few days, so no body was in the position to be making predictions about the details of price points for products that were several years down the road.

 

[MrFox]

But they repeated the $350 target until the preorder last month, the explanations for the $600 surprise was the new lenses being fresnel hybrid doublets, made of polymerized unicorn tears or something.

Anyway, the market was being shaped by an expected volume, which was shaped by an expected price point. It changed significantly, I can't wait to see the analysts revisons.

 

[hughJ]

At various points over the last 4 years we've had public price musings from Palmer and other data points that have steadily been creeping higher: '$200-300', '$300' (DK1), '$350' (DK2), 'higher than $350', etc, but he's always been pretty clear that no price had ever been committed to (so much so that he initially balked at someone bringing up a confirmation of a $1500 Rift+PC bundle which was something Iribe had mentioned in an interview last year.) With that official upper ceiling in place the price predictions seemed to vary anywhere from $300 to $600 depending on who you asked, so there wasn't much of a consensus even among the die-hards that eat and breathe the daily trickle of information.

I would agree though that Palmer and co. from the beginning have been more than happy to ride the vacuum of public ignorance when it's suited them to, but I learned that lesson early on and have since been mindful to read between the lines and not build up any expectations beyond what's been officially announced. I would bet given hindsight of the negative public reaction to the price that they probably wouldn't have changed their PR as the blowback from the unofficial low-balling of the price and regular talk of subsidized hardware wasn't all that detrimental, and it must have made things very uncomfortable for HTC's marketing and planning late last year.

I still feel like the price is irrelevant when you consider there's no sign of potential killer apps that can justify the platform(s) to the average consumer. The tech is super promising, but it's almost completely being sold right now on the basis of how well it demos and the crazy word of mouth that spawns. A great recent example of this being the Leap Motion SDK update and the youtube videos prompting people to rush out and buy a piece of hardware that will end up providing them 30 minutes of use for themselves, and 10 minutes of use for each of their friends they show it to before it gets put on a shelf. If you were to take a sampling of the demoed content for the Rift/Vive in the last year that have the most positive reactions it's not Launch-Title-A or Launch-Title-B, but rather the brief, if not mundane, tech-demos like Valve's balloon demo or Oculus's ToyBox. I think a lot of people lining up to pre-order these devices are just assuming that great content will flood in to keep them using their HMDs, that Valve is going to shower them with Portal3-VR, HL3-VR, etc, and that EA and Activision's big franchises will inevitably come just as they do for every new platform.

 

[function]

- buy $600 headset with chromatic aberration free lenses
- play game
- game uses chromatic aberration filter
- tears fill inside of VR device

 

[one]

High-end headsets will be more targeted to non-gamers for a while just like most PC are used for content creation. After all it will take at least 3 years for pricey hardware to reach half the current price point. Yet they will not be $199 at the end of 2018.

Personally I really liked the Aperture VR demo on HTC Vive, it's so clear, detailed and natural. With positional tracking you can walk as far as your are in a relatively large room so you won't feel motion sickness and can stay in the virtual space for hours which is critical for developer use such as a 3D painting tool or the VR editor of UE4/Unity. If you try the official demo you just feel it's a high-end, expensive gear which lives in a different category for prosumers unlike PSVR or Gear VR that people get just to have fun.

 

[MrFox]

- buy $600 headset with chromatic aberration free lenses
- play game
- game uses chromatic aberration filter
- tears fill inside of VR device

 

[eastmen]

I don't think adoption is going to be that bad. They are giving away gear vr + $50 in content for everyone in the united states that preorder the s7 and s7 edge. I believe 15m people preordered the s6 and s6 edge.

So in a few weeks 15m people will have low end VR. Content will get made for that and that content will be made better on the rift / ps4/ vive since the engines used in mobile are the same on all the systems.

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

Giving it away for free is not the same as customers who actually pay money because they want a VR solution. The fact that they are giving it away + 50 dollars in content says something. It certainly doesn't say people are willing to spend hundreds of dollars on VR hardware.

How many that receive a free unit are actually going to A. use it and B. spend money on content?

 

[zed]

I betcha a lot are gonna use it to look at 3d/vr films, after trying it, I am thinking this is gonna be big, then again I do like traveling seeing the sights, others may not feel this way

 

[hughJ]

Before people can 'want a VR solution' they first need to know that it exists and actually try it.

Better for VR that people have their first exposure be a GearVR rather than Cardboard. Better for Samsung because it associates that level of quality with their brand. And better for Oculus as every one of those people will have to create an Oculus store account to access the GearVR content (which happens to be the same account system across all Oculus hardware and software), and they will face the prospect of losing access to it when the time comes for them to consider replacing their phone with a competitor.

If there's a time to try and establish something analogous to the itunes/appstore for VR where you can ingrain long term purchasing habits of a large group of people by giving them a seemingly innocuous nudge, I would say that time is now. Having typed that out and thought about it, I'm not sure how I feel about it now, haha.

 

[DieH@rd]

Polygon's visit to the devs of Golem, a PSVR exclusive made by new team of industry veterans
http://www.polygon.com/2016/2/22/11051686/golem-playstationvr-highwire-games

They have new innovative way of controlling movement in FPS VR game. User simply leans a bit forward/backward for movement [leaning to the side is used for strafing]. Journalists who tried it say that this approach is VERY EFFECTIVE and after just few mins it feels very natural.

Giant Bomb impressions [~1:10 min mark]
http://www.giantbomb.com/podcasts/giant-bombcast-12082015/1600-1437/

- buy $600 headset with chromatic aberration free lenses
- play game
- game uses chromatic aberration filter
- tears fill inside of VR device

LOL


Btw, I see that Wiki page for PSVR has been updated with nice list of upcoming games. I count more than 20 exclusive games.

 

[eastmen]

Giving it away for free is not the same as customers who actually pay money because they want a VR solution. The fact that they are giving it away + 50 dollars in content says something. It certainly doesn't say people are willing to spend hundreds of dollars on VR hardware.

How many that receive a free unit are actually going to A. use it and B. spend money on content?

Gear VR is cheap there is no ipd its basicly just plastic and lenses . Giving it for free is no different than Sony subsidizing the ps4 and most likely the ps vr. They want people to have it and to use it so they make money through content. You get the software through their store and not the android store so they don't give any money to google.

I betcha a lot are gonna use it to look at 3d/vr films, after trying it, I am thinking this is gonna be big, then again I do like traveling seeing the sights, others may not feel this way

It really doesn't matter. There are tens of millions of cardboard out there which we can all agree is the lowest form of VR . People are buying content for it , so more content will be made. This content can be used on the next step up which is gear vr . Those consumers will purchase that content and content made to take advantage of gear vr . This in turn will make even more content for sony ps vr which the same thing happens for and then we are at the top of the food chain the rift and vive will benfit from it.

Consumers will go where the content is.

 

[MrFox]

Content made for gear/cardboard is not the content console gamers want.