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Especially if you're more interested in making an exciting toy for rich people instead of a mass market product, Facebook might not be the company you want to s

• Aeolun 8y ago
  People with a computer that want true instead of toy VR are hardly ‘rich people’.
  • wlesieutre 8y ago
    Maybe I exaggerated, but $1200 (figure $800 for a computer and $400 for the Rift) is a much bigger ask than $400. So they’re basically targeting a subset of the existing high-end PC gamer market and would have a very hard time growing it beyond people who already own a computer with the required specs. It’s a much more expensive toy and much harder to sell. You also need to set up a bunch of cameras for tracking, and to get the most out of it requires a 10x10 open space near your computer, which is something I’ve never managed to have. Plus the high requirements are pegging the whole product’s market viability on “I hope blockchain people don’t fuck up the whole GPU market for several years again!” Price of a GTX 1070 is basically the same as it was at launch more than two years ago ($400ish), and it went up and back down in the meantime. Oculus owning the complete unit sidesteps this concern. I think it’s a bit of a bummer, especially since OC5’s presentation touched on neat PC focused stuff like their VR Substance Painter demo. But it’s unsurprising from a Facebook perspective. I was hoping that the Quest’s USB-C charging port secretly implements VirtualLink and would effectively become a new higher-res Rift with inside-out tracking in addition to its standalone capabilities, but with Iribe’s departure that seems less likely.