Y'know that ridiculously expensive Oculus Rift? Yeah, it just got worse Excited gamers are going to have to dig even deeper if they want to use the new Oculus Rift virtual reality system. It's bad enough that the basic system costs $599 – almost double the expected price of $350. Today, the Facebook-owned biz revealed a range of accessories that will push its cost even higher. If you want a pair …
Quote: "The fact that Oculus has gone to the trouble of creating a custom audio socket is just another sign of the organization's desire to create an entirely walled garden."
Compare that with the HTC Vive, that has both a standard 3.5mm headphone socket, plus an unused USB socket, both on the headset itself, leaving the user free to use just about and headset type they want!
If they had a monopoly.
As it stands Sony are going to wipe up the mid-range. Leaving Oculus & Vive at the high end.
I genuinely can't see a single reason not to go with the Vive, presuming you're OK with Steam (which I love to bits, despite vehemently hating it when it first rocked up).
Putting aside the political stuff - high end VR is not a large market. To then deliverabtely wall yourself into half of a very small space, then fragment internally with those that can look, and maybe wave arms & maybe walk about..
On the bright side, Vive's still sat in my shopping basket waiting for me to get sufficiently drunk enough that I don't think my wife will kill me - and who wouldn't like to see Facebook get a bloody nose?
Indeed, TCO of Rift is close to £2000
If you have a PS4 (and 80m gamers do), TCO is £300. Yes a slightly lesser experience, but Sony has all the good games on tap too.
If VR us going to break into mainstream, there is only one that has any chance of success
I think if you don't already own one of the new ps4's the TCO will be higher, but - it will just work... but - sony have an awful reputation for supporting their products. Vita & ps move anyone?
Poor poor vita, so unloved from birth. Unless you like jrpgs... and I do, so not all bad :D
Jim did a review on the ps vr the other day, says if you want to play games then it's the best about at the moment, but it will depend on Sony making things for it. So we will see.
Though I believe DOAX3 is VR enabled, so that's christmas sorted.
My Vita is quite good.
Move though a wasted opportunity.
Was brilliant fun for shooters, but a lot did not support it.
Was quote annoyed PS4 shooters ignored it as well.
Made Portal 2 more fun, made aiming very quick and accurate without aim assist in Killzone 3.
But definately a wasted opportunity (but it saved me money on shooter games)
The Vive is excellent, although it is expensive..
Just be sure to run the SteamVR test before getting one to make sure your machine is up to the job, then crack open that bottle of Jack Daniels..
Mine wasn't, so I splashed out on a GTX1080 along with the Vive - An Expensive drunk purchase, but completely worth it.
With all the things I'm hearing about Oculus, it makes me sad 'cos I had high hopes for them - but HTC are killing it in terms of the experience in my book - It's a rift killer out of the box.
I was ready to build a new rig and get a vive, that is until ps pro and and the psvr came along to delivery the double whammy.
Not having dipped my toe into the current-gen console market (still using my xb360) meant I might as well go for the pro.
So, including all the extras like move controllers and a camera and a charging station etc. I think it's cost me around £800. A LOT less than the £2k I was looking at for a PC setup.
Admittedly the PC setup would have been superior, but it's a lot more outlay for what is effectively an experimental platform at present - even though it has huge potential.
If it all takes off and I'm ok with VR, then I can always sell the PS stuff and head back to the PC side of things - I still like building my own rigs so it isn't like it's a closed door.
"watch fools rush in to be first to buy"
Ahh the voice of the self-righteous.
I love my Vive and the experience and entertainment value it provides is worth every penny and then some to me. Its truly and literally a gamechanger. From my perspective, the actual fool is the one who self-righteously preaches about something that he hasn't even had the experience of owning.
'Ahh the voice of the self-righteous.'
People who over-pay for stuff always defend the fact that they paid more. Wear your badge with pride, I am glad you are happy with your purchase. Many more will enjoy the same product at a cheaper price. I bet they are all self-righteous. FYI I have no interest in Oculus Rift or similar. I'm just pointing out how things are sold.
> People who over-pay for stuff always defend the fact that they paid more.
Except I didn't over-pay. I paid the going price. I've also owned it for maybe 4 months now and the price hasn't dropped.
> Many more will enjoy the same product at a cheaper price.
Yes maybe in a year or so you can find a new Vive for like $50 cheaper that I paid. Big woop. Personally I'd rather pay the extra and have it for a year sooner, but then I'm not a total tightwad.
Good luck with saving minimal money at the cost of enjoying your life now. I'm sure you'll die happy knowing that you had less fun/fewer experiences in your life but saved yourself $50.
> "Personally I'd rather pay the extra and have it for a year sooner, but then I'm not a total tightwad."
Some people are happy to pay a premium to be beta testers.
Sensible people wait until people like you have spent your wad, and worked out the kinks, before they pay less than you for something that works better than what you got.
If you're happy with being a beta tester, all well and good, enjoy your toy. But just because most of us are jaded and cynical after being treated as beta testers for allegedly "stable" hardware and software, and thus prepared to wait a bit longer for a proper working version to come out, does not make us tighwads.
"> "Personally I'd rather pay the extra and have it for a year sooner."
"Sensible people wait"
There is something to be said for both, depending on how much you want something. Some people really want some specific kind of car where others couldn't care less about. Some people really want some phone that others couldn't care less about. Etc.
Who cares, for each his own :)
> My life is enjoyable because I interact with humans and nature, not a screen.
...he typed, into a screen, on a tech website... I think you forgot your and markers?
The world needs early adopters. Sometimes they get burned, sometimes they don't. We've all been there, and if this guy is enjoying his early adoption, more power to him. If it means the price comes down in a few years for the true mass market, great. If not, fine, he's enjoying some unique hardware.
Really unsure why he is being called a fool, and downvoted, for that.
"I love my Vive and the experience and entertainment value it provides is worth every penny and then some to me. Its truly and literally a gamechanger. From my perspective, the actual fool is the one who self-righteously preaches about something that he hasn't even had the experience of owning."
Said every person who bought <insert abandoned hardware>. Until the maker abandoned it.
Early adoption is risky at best. You may buy into Blu Ray, or you may find yourself using a zip disk.
Going from
Late last week, The Daily Beast revealed that Luckey was behind a $10,000 donation to a group called Nimble America dedicated to creating and spreading memes that attack Hillary Clinton. In one case, the group took out a giant billboard ad in Pittsburgh with a picture of Clinton's face and the tagline "Too Big to Jail."
to "funding pro-Trump neo-nazi trolls" must be in the hypersonic region of Godwin's Law scale.
And seriously, anyone who doesn't troll supporters of La Madame Klingon (who has btw. her own paid-for troll brigade doing Clinton Hasbara) is missing out.
Did I mention that the Daily Beast is suspiciously pro-Clinton? One can practically hear the cheque hit the bank account...
I think I'll reserve judgement on this product and it's price point until after it's released.
Accusing opponents of being Nazis is a sign of desperation when someone has no real arguments to support their opinion. Lots of people all over the world oppose immigration or high levels of immigration for varied reasons and are not Nazis. That said Trump does say some crazy + offensive things which are not constructive for anyone advocating more control over immigration, and who wants to appeal to a broad audience.
What's worse, building a wall to defend your country from illegals who don't respect your laws and who already have a country that they apparently don't want to make better,
or starting a purge of people from their employment based on their opinion which you are attempting to thought criminalise?
For the record, the Nazis didn't build walls to keep people out, but the Soviets built them to keep people in.
"For the record, the Nazis didn't build walls to keep people out, ...
Yes, they did. Westwall, Ostwall, Siegfriedlinie, ... didn't work, though.
"... but the Soviets built them to keep people in."
Well, if you mean the Berlin Wall, the official reason was to keep people out ("Antifschistischer Schutzwall"), but yes, the idea behind it was to keep people in. Didn't really work, though.
The original big-wall-to-keep-people-out, the Great Wall of China, didn't work either. Because thry didn't pay the guards guarding the gates properly.
Some of the thinking behind big walls (particularly Adrian's) wasn't to keep people out - they knew raiders could focus an attack at a vulnerable part and get over quite easily - it was to stop them carrying loot (and particularly cattle) back over.
For your average blue-faced Pict, beating you up and shagging your wife was merely a bonus... it was your cows they were really after ;)
10K to trump campaign openly wouldn't be newsworthy. 10K to troll is infuriating, since it contributes making the society more trollish, aggressive and stupid. As a near-billionaire, you have some responsibility to use that to the good of mankind. There is so many awesome things you can do with big money (people to mars, shooting probes to proxima centauri with a big-ass laser, curing cancer, heck even building gaudy casinos and hotels count, ...). And he decides to support trolls for giggles? That ought to bite, although I guess it will be just an exercise of "I've been unfairly attacked" rather than "I've learned something".
"If you want a pair of half-decent headphones with the VR googles, you will have to cough up an additional $49. And don't imagine you can use your own existing headphones: Oculus has built a custom audio connector."
And that leads me to wonder what's to stop someone just making some kind of adapter to allow people to use regular headphones? Will the Oculus headphones contain special circuitry or something? Will it be more than two channels?
That always annoys me as well, it's like comparing TVs, by including the cost of all the furniture in your living room, a Sky install, and broadband to test the 'smart' features.
There's no point when the same stuff is needed irrespective of TV being purchased.
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