Fool me, this is real good shit ! [the VR thread]

[venusian]

It really shouldn't cost what they're charging. It's two lenses, a screen, some sensors and plastic to hold it all together. Regardless of why they're charging so much right now, there's massive potential for the price to plummet. Under £200 in two years. Under £100 once the basic requirements are clear and the Chinese factories start churning out clones.

[pogo]

Yes, there will definitely be clones if it starts doing well. They might try and prevent it by locking developers into their hardware with the SDK but developers will go wherever the installed base is, so if clones are cheaper and sell well...

Unless they want to compete on price, but they may have to cut the price sharp-ish to do that. They may find like other firms that once Asian manufacturers take an interest it’s impossible to compete with them on price or speed of development.

[PumaG]

It really shouldn't cost what they're charging. It's two lenses, a screen, some sensors and plastic to hold it all together. Regardless of why they're charging so much right now, there's massive potential for the price to plummet. Under £200 in two years. Under £100 once the basic requirements are clear and the Chinese factories start churning out clones.

No not if we pretend they're not actually a business but a charity.

You seem to be convinced the PC game market will grow enough for the Chinese to power up their clone factories. Nvidia 3D vision glasses are still £100+. If the masses go VR mad, then they'll be cloning the console and smart phone versions and building their own standalone devices. There's also the possibility of the console hardware and it's clones being hacked to work on the PC as a cheap option.

[KlaxonCow]

I guess the XBOX controller is "because if you don't have any controller what you control stuff with ?"

Or, more precisely, this thing was originally supposed to ship with their own "touch" controller thingy.

But that got delayed.

"So, shit", Oculus says to itself, "what are we supposed to do now? Ah, fuck it, just throw an X-Box controller in there as the stop-gap for the time being. That'll do! I mean, it's not ideal and not what we planned but it'll work and do the job for now".

At least that's how I imagine it likely happened.

Pure pragmatism. Their own controller wasn't finished in time for this release. They can't reasonably delay the entire release just for that (they'd lose "first to market" doing so and that's been their one major advantage over their rivals). They need to put something in the box. And, well, people have been using X-Box controllers with the dev kits and stuff. So it works. Thus, we'll just go with that - because we've got to go with something - until our better solution to this is done cooking.

(Mind you, they were kind of screwed on this decision. Without their own controller, the other options were Sony's Dualshock - but they're the enemy with their own system coming - and the Steam Controller - but they're also sort of the enemy with their partnership with HTC's Vive - and the X-Box controller and Microsoft is also creating their own "holographic Minecraft on a table" AR thingy too. But I guess they thought that of the available options of just handing money to their competition by buying their controllers from them, Microsoft was the best bet because their system is the least "direct competition" of them all. But, yeah, as I say, without their own controller because of the delays, they've landed in a position where they can't really not incidentally end up giving cash to their rivals in all this.)

[gravy]

It really shouldn't cost what they're charging. It's two lenses, a screen, some sensors and plastic to hold it all together. Regardless of why they're charging so much right now, there's massive potential for the price to plummet. Under £200 in two years. Under £100 once the basic requirements are clear and the Chinese factories start churning out clones.

Palmer Luckey talks about that on a reddit AMA yesterday.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ ... _designer/

The OLED / high refresh rate custom screens seem to be a big part of the cost and he claims that the lenses are bespoke for Rift too.

The comment I found most interesting is that there was a strategic change in direction from price to quality. I kind of get that, if it goes out shit and cheap that's a dead end. Expensive and really really good? The price will eventually come down and you've got something people want.

He claims the XB1 controller costs them nothing. Maybe it's subsidised by MS to get more people using the XB1 controller on PC? Sounds unlikely tbh

I understand the thought process, time will tell if it's the right tack to take.

Finally managed to order ours this morning after the shop not working properly yesterday and it's a June delivery date.

[KlaxonCow]

It's two lenses, a screen, some sensors and plastic to hold it all together.

Yeah, and you're just "mostly carbon and water".

Being horribly reductionist, you can make anything and everything sound crap.

[venusian]

Palmer Luckey talks about that on a reddit AMA yesterday.

It'll be interesting to see what the BOM and quality differences are between the OR's premier experience and somebody else's good-enough experience. Alot of people seem to think the Gear VR is good-enough and it ought to be possible to build and sell one of those, minus the phone components, for £250 via a web store.

One can see why they'd want to be Apple or Bang and Olufsen but it's not obvious the VR market can sustain one of those.


(Edited to make it clear who I was responding to.)

[venusian]

It's two lenses, a screen, some sensors and plastic to hold it all together.

Yeah, and you're just "mostly carbon and water".
Being horribly reductionist, you can make anything and everything sound crap.

Point completely missed, but congratulations on posting fewer than 500 words.

[pogo]

The comment I found most interesting is that there was a strategic change in direction from price to quality. I kind of get that, if it goes out shit and cheap that's a dead end. Expensive and really really good? The price will eventually come down and you've got something people want.

The trap with that is that you may not be the one to bring the price down, other firms will get in there ahead of you. Often Asian firms with their lower costs, faster turnaround times, well established trade routes to the US and Europe. It’s especially a problem if they are already sourcing from Asia, as it means the firms already have the capability. I’m sure many of them are watching carefully for the best time to enter the market.

Only Apple have managed to avoid this, by maintaining an unprecedented degree of control over their products. Not only the external designs but individual components with their own CPU designs. Not just the SDK but the whole OS, written from the ground up for their devices. Not coincidentally Apple are about the only ones who have been able to long term maintain high prices and margins on mass market products.

[zip accident]

Maybe - FINALLY - we'll have a "revival" of desktop machines and even better graphic cards on the market.

I think I can hear Dio laughing and smiling with a 360 smile across his face Yes I think your pension is sorted

Graphics cards can't be that big an issue, or the PS4 wouldn't be capable of running anything similar.

A lot of PCs at the moment have overpowerful CPUs and underpowered GPUs, and it would be nice to see that ratio change, but given that the PS4 is a potential competitor, I don't think that's actually likely to be caused by the Rift.

[gravy]

The comment I found most interesting is that there was a strategic change in direction from price to quality. I kind of get that, if it goes out shit and cheap that's a dead end. Expensive and really really good? The price will eventually come down and you've got something people want.

The trap with that is that you may not be the one to bring the price down, other firms will get in there ahead of you. Often Asian firms with their lower costs, faster turnaround times, well established trade routes to the US and Europe. It’s especially a problem if they are already sourcing from Asia, as it means the firms already have the capability. I’m sure many of them are watching carefully for the best time to enter the market.

Only Apple have managed to avoid this, by maintaining an unprecedented degree of control over their products. Not only the external designs but individual components with their own CPU designs. Not just the SDK but the whole OS, written from the ground up for their devices. Not coincidentally Apple are about the only ones who have been able to long term maintain high prices and margins on mass market products.

You're rewriting history there. Apple's story is a progression from outsourced components (including the OS on iPods) to internal creation of technologies. Even then major components of all of their hardware are externally designed and manufactured.

[tenshi_alpha]

I've decided - this generation, I'll wait for the PS4 VR thingy to come out and see how it is.

Next generation, when PS4 is looking rather elderly and the hyper mega ultra graphics cards required for Oculus are kind of cheap and so is the Oculus... I might get one. Then I'll play all the VR games I missed in the meantime (presuming they are still about on Steam or whatever).

Unless something better than the both of those VR sets comes along.

[pogo]

You're rewriting history there. Apple's story is a progression from outsourced components (including the OS on iPods) to internal creation of technologies. Even then major components of all of their hardware are externally designed and manufactured.

I know their history. All of the elements are based off someone else’s work, yes, but they have made them all their own. The key thing that lets them keep making phones and charging several hundred pounds is their ownership of all the elements. The CPU is ARM based but they several years ago took a license that let them make their own chips and pulled ahead of their competitors with the first 64 bit ARM CPU in a phone. The OS is Unix-based but with an all new UI and is now on its ninth iteration as a phone OS.

If anyone else tries it they get slaughtered. Samsung for a while had a nice business selling overpriced Android phones, but soon other manufacturers caught up with slightly different designs and stock Android, and their market share and profits plummeted. If someone can copy most of the elements they will, and I can’t see why that won’t happen here.

[zip accident]

I know their history. All of the elements are based off someone else’s work, yes, but they have made them all their own. The key thing that lets them keep making phones and charging several hundred pounds is their ownership of all the elements. The CPU is ARM based but they several years ago took a license that let them make their own chips and pulled ahead of their competitors with the first 64 bit ARM CPU in a phone. The OS is Unix-based but with an all new UI and is now on its ninth iteration as a phone OS.

If anyone else tries it they get slaughtered. Samsung for a while had a nice business selling overpriced Android phones, but soon other manufacturers caught up with slightly different designs and stock Android, and their market share and profits plummeted. If someone can copy most of the elements they will, and I can’t see why that won’t happen here.

Top of the range Android phones typically cost more than iphones, while no-name brand Android phones with very reasonable performance and no VAT charged against direct import from (typically China) Asia cost something like £50-150.

[venusian]

Have just seen that the pack-in game with the OR is a "cute" platformer; no objection to that. It's interesting, at least to me, that this showcase for the OR has a quite distant 3rd person camera.