6 ms·

Not necessarily. As always, the answer is "it depends". If you're looking to get into high-end, room-scale VR with hand-tracked controllers and high-fidelity g

Not necessarily. As always, the answer is "it depends". If you're looking to get into high-end, room-scale VR with hand-tracked controllers and high-fidelity graphics, then yes. You need a Windows 10 PC with as much RAM, CPU, and GPU as you can muster. Plan on spending at least USD 2000 on a custom-built PC. If you're looking to get into smartphone-based AR, you can use practically anything to write the code, and there are plenty of tools to be able to build completely cross-platform apps. But you will want a flagship phone, whether that's the latest iPhone or one of the Androids with a powerful CPU and GPU. AR is very CPU intensive. While there have been demonstrations of SLAM on GPUs, all of the implementations I'm aware of are doing it on the CPU. Where should you start? Well, without hand-tracking of some kind, I don't really consider it VR. Google Cardboard, Google Daydream, Samsung Gear VR, and Oculus Rift without the Touch controllers are all glorified 2D interfaces. They don't provide anything actually new in terms of being able to interact with the application. Smartphone-based AR apps will probably reach a wider audience sooner than VR. But if Microsoft's approach to headsets and Windows Holographic pays off, I think that is not a perpetual state of affairs. Ideally, this gets down to the size of a pair of sunglasses (which is very nearly the case already). At that point, smartphone-based AR is going to be a quaint novelty.

kettlecorn 10y ago
2000 USD is too high for the cost of a VR PC. I built a PC in fall 2016 that was more powerful than what was required for VR and it cost me around $1200. Additionally there are companies advertising "VR Ready PCs" that come with an Oculus headset for around USD 1,000. See this article: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/01/dont-look-now-but-oculus-ready-pcs-are-getting-relatively-cheap/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/01/dont-look-now-but-ocu...
- moron4hire 10y ago
  Well lah dee freaking dah, dude. I'm just talking about rough ballparks.
  - kettlecorn 10y ago
    You used the language "at least" implying that you had a fair amount of certainty that that's the minimum cost of a VR PC. Additionally you were off by at least a factor of 2, which is outside a rough ballpark. While it might seem picky the amount of people who would decide to commit 2k to VR is far lower than those who would commit 1k, so in this case it is important to be accurate.
    - omg_ketchup 10y ago
      If you include the price of the headset with a serious VR development computer, you get pretty close to $2,000 pretty quickly.
      - kettlecorn 10y ago
        That is true. I was discussing just the cost of the PC in the above comments, but when I built my development PC and bought a Vive it ended up costing me over 2k USD after taxes.
    - moron4hire 10y ago
      $1000 might be good enough for playing the Vive and Rift games that launched with the platform. If that's all you want, I guess you're not quite so annoyingly pedantic as you first seem. But that's a really narrow use case. "I'd like to play only the worst VR games, please. Let's forget about keeping up with the market. That's not for me." If you're just getting in as a consumer, a $1000 VR-capable PC is going to age very quickly. In my experience, the only way to get any sort of legs out of a high-end purchase is to buy the top of the line. Unless you're buying right before a major product release, my experience has been that you end up spending less year over year than if you try to commoditize. But I took the person I was replying to to be asking about getting in as a developer, considering the blog post is about getting in as a developer, and considering this site is full of developers. $2000 has been very consistently the price one pays for "top of the line PC with parts that aren't going to shit the bed". You should not cheap out on a development PC for VR. You're going to be doing a lot of experimenting and running up against performance limits during development. You should have some headroom to avoid giving yourself a headache for the day. But go ahead. Buy a Radeon GPU. Have fun not being able to use your VR headset right before a crucial demo because of some obscure driver issue. Cheap out on a crappy power supply. See how many investors you get for our VR startup when your demo PC won't even start.

kettlecorn 10y ago

2000 USD is too high for the cost of a VR PC. I built a PC in fall 2016 that was more powerful than what was required for VR and it cost me around $1200. Additionally there are companies advertising "VR Ready PCs" that come with an Oculus headset for around USD 1,000. See this article: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/01/dont-look-now-but-oculus-ready-pcs-are-getting-relatively-cheap/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/01/dont-look-now-but-ocu...

moron4hire 10y ago
Well lah dee freaking dah, dude. I'm just talking about rough ballparks.
- kettlecorn 10y ago
  You used the language "at least" implying that you had a fair amount of certainty that that's the minimum cost of a VR PC. Additionally you were off by at least a factor of 2, which is outside a rough ballpark. While it might seem picky the amount of people who would decide to commit 2k to VR is far lower than those who would commit 1k, so in this case it is important to be accurate.
  - omg_ketchup 10y ago
    If you include the price of the headset with a serious VR development computer, you get pretty close to $2,000 pretty quickly.
    - kettlecorn 10y ago
      That is true. I was discussing just the cost of the PC in the above comments, but when I built my development PC and bought a Vive it ended up costing me over 2k USD after taxes.
  - moron4hire 10y ago
    $1000 might be good enough for playing the Vive and Rift games that launched with the platform. If that's all you want, I guess you're not quite so annoyingly pedantic as you first seem. But that's a really narrow use case. "I'd like to play only the worst VR games, please. Let's forget about keeping up with the market. That's not for me." If you're just getting in as a consumer, a $1000 VR-capable PC is going to age very quickly. In my experience, the only way to get any sort of legs out of a high-end purchase is to buy the top of the line. Unless you're buying right before a major product release, my experience has been that you end up spending less year over year than if you try to commoditize. But I took the person I was replying to to be asking about getting in as a developer, considering the blog post is about getting in as a developer, and considering this site is full of developers. $2000 has been very consistently the price one pays for "top of the line PC with parts that aren't going to shit the bed". You should not cheap out on a development PC for VR. You're going to be doing a lot of experimenting and running up against performance limits during development. You should have some headroom to avoid giving yourself a headache for the day. But go ahead. Buy a Radeon GPU. Have fun not being able to use your VR headset right before a crucial demo because of some obscure driver issue. Cheap out on a crappy power supply. See how many investors you get for our VR startup when your demo PC won't even start.