Virtual Reality

I think the $350 was an honest figure produced based on the thought of, "If we can rip apart consumer electronics and shove them together to make a best-in-class VR system for $350, surely scaling up to 1million+ units will allow us to do the same with a much improved system."

However as we explore VR we're finding that there is an uncanny-valley like increase in difficulty where continuously improving the experience to a product that will achieve good market penetration results in much higher costs. And instead of riding the wave of consumer mobile device electronics research, VR has broken off onto a parallel but related path for VR-specific feature sets. After the VIVE, CV1 and other entrants come to market there will be an arms race to retina-level displays (8k? 16k?), perfect head tracking (We're pretty much there) and perfect eye tracking (not even attempted in this generation but it'll be the thing that enables rendering to retina-level displays). Only after we get to that point is it likely that the price of top-of-the-line VR will drop to $350. It'll be similar to how SSDs kept to enthusiast prices until they saturated the SATA3 bandwidth and began competing on price.


It would be interesting to hear the internal debates taking place to choose the right price point for each of the individual components and see that number keep increasing as they err on the side of better quality vs lower cost. From the lens to the accelerometers to the foam to the specific production tech for the display everything probably crept the cost of the display beyond that $350 target. I say let it, the CV1 is an enthusiast piece of hardware. Better the release story be, "VR is expensive" rather than "VR is not good.".

Let the CV1.5 approach the $350 target price, or let the CV1-ex version be the cheaper version. But the CV1 should be a flagship entry at an enthusiast cost.

Skanda_sl said:

Component prices may have dropped but they have put in time on their software and I'm sure tons of R&D into not only the Rift but all their side projects like the Touch. Then there's the whole Facebook looking to make all that money they spent back. The real question is how much over $350 are we talking. Also how does it compare to similar products like Valve's offering.

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I think this is pretty specious. Facebook's motivations are unclear but it's likely they want to branch out from social media technology and want to keep relevant in the upcoming meta-verse social media. Short term gaps from their 2billion investment not being recouped in the initial VR release shouldn't impact these goals.

Your point about Valve is poignant though, OVR has reason to want to compete with Valve. Valve is not even considering a $350 pricepoint, but OVR can't just beat them on price, they want to offer a platform that competes on quality. So they will want to minimize the number of arguable advantages the VIVE has even if it increases the cost.

I agree with Skanda on #1.


Regarding motion sickness, it's not a binary thing like driving, boating or even roller coasters where someone 'gets sick when I sit in a car and read', it's a continuous spectrum of sickness that depends on what you're doing in the game and whether everything is working properly. I can go into more detail if you'd like, but bottom line is that very few people get motion sickness from the more gentle demonstrations, and almost everyone gets motion sickness from the more aggressive demonstrations / unworking demonstrations.

People also have different tolerances. I'm probably somewhere in the middle of the pack. I can play pretty much anything but if the game stutters or has latency I feel sick.