Oculus Rift - retail

[Gorion]

Kickstarter backers will get one for free.  

As for the price, quite the longshot from the affordable entry level VR ~$300 they promised.  700euros, + shipping + import tax  + courier customs release charge = No thank you.

We'll see what Valve have in store for the future.

[albert]

Kickstarter backers will get one for free.  

As for the price, quite the longshot from the affordable entry level VR ~$300 they promised.  700euros, + shipping + import tax  + courier customs release charge = No thank you.

We'll see what Valve have in store for the future.

All European prices are quoted with Tax included so the shipping just needs added. The US price +21% converted to Euros is â,¬670. Still about â,¬150 more than I expected to pay and more than the press were expecting. I'm on the fence right now. It seems Oculus have come at the HTC price point to me. Although it is a proven brand.

[smilodon]

I work on the principal that unless I absolutely need something right now, I never ever buy the first generation of anything. It will always be the most buggy, feature poor iteration. Once it's out, the reviews are in and the developer starts getting feedback from it's customers the second version is never far behind. It's usually vastly superior to the first version.

[Gorion]

All European prices are quoted with Tax included so the shipping just needs added. The US price +21% converted to Euros is â,¬670. Still about â,¬150 more than I expected to pay and more than the press were expecting. I'm on the fence right now. It seems Oculus have come at the HTC price point to me. Although it is a proven brand.

Still overpriced for what it is, and what it does imo.

I work on the principal that unless I absolutely need something right now, I never ever buy the first generation of anything. It will always be the most buggy, feature poor iteration. Once it's out, the reviews are in and the developer starts getting feedback from it's customers the second version is never far behind. It's usually vastly superior to the first version.

Yep, that is true.  I'll be waiting around two years more to decide on the issue.

Plus it's not mainstream yet so support isn't that great.

[Obsydian]

All European prices are quoted with Tax included so the shipping just needs added. The US price +21% converted to Euros is â,¬670. Still about â,¬150 more than I expected to pay and more than the press were expecting. I'm on the fence right now. It seems Oculus have come at the HTC price point to me. Although it is a proven brand.

The website price for European countries is quoted as â,¬699 including VAT, but excludes shipping.  As the items are high ticket price, there is likely to be import duty as well, which is not quoted.  So I'm out for now.

[Tutonic]

500 quid? Ouch.

So, still a niche device for now then.

[albert]

The website price for European countries is quoted as â,¬699 including VAT, but excludes shipping.  As the items are high ticket price, there is likely to be import duty as well, which is not quoted.  So I'm out for now.

The fact that tax is included suggests that the seller is a registered European company. Arithon got charged 20% VAT at checkout so they shouldn't charge duty.

[Obsydian]

The fact that tax is included suggests that the seller is a registered European company. Arithon got charged 20% VAT at checkout so they shouldn't charge duty.

Yeah, for UK, I get billed by Oculus Ireland Ltd, so that includes VAT and should not attract import duty.

Still too pricey for me though.

[albert]

Yeah, for UK, I get billed by Oculus Ireland Ltd, so that includes VAT and should not attract import duty.

Still too pricey for me though.

Personally, the use of the device for Elite and that new Eve title they are giving away with the headset are probably enough to justify buying it.

Also the thought of using it for SC probably not long after it is shipped is appealing.

I can say from having tried it with Elite, the immersion is increased hugely by VR. The visual impact of the ships and the environments is impressive.

[TeaLeaf]

I think VR is going through massive and fast change, so I'm sitting on the fence for now until (a) I know it won't rape my eyesight and (b) star citizen comes out.

[albert]

I pre-ordered, they don't take the money until the system ships. I think we'll know if HTC has a better offering by then.

[Gorion]

New preorders delayed to June.

[smilodon]

New preorders delayed to June.

Which in Industry Speak means October.

I think Apple can get away with this sort of price for it's latest i-thing because..... well because Apple is Apple. However Facebook is no Apple and they've messed up both in the final price point and in the confusion surrounding what the price was going to be. If they kept quiet maybe we'd have swallowed the obscene price. But when they charged £250-ish for the developer kit and teased a retail price of about £300 it's going to a be a PR disaster when they release at twice the leaked price. Typical Mark Zuckerberg, do bad stuff now and apologise later. Yes early adopters will pay a price premium for new tech but there is a limit.


I twelve months everyone and their dog will have released a VR Headset and I'm pretty sure there will be a lot better and a lot cheaper options to choose from. They'll also be made by serious hardware developers and not a company that basically wants everyone using VR to visit Facebook and play Farmville 360 :eyebrow:

[ArithonUK]

As pre-orders are added, the shipping date started on March 28th.

Because of their site crashing a few times when ordering it too me an hour or so to get my pre-order in, by which time the shipping date was into April.

Orders now will be shipping in June. They're allocating production on a first-come-first-served basis. They have also said they are weeding out "fraudulent" orders, so some of us may find our dates moving up.

Due to the amount of time I play Elite, especially on the rift, this was going to be a must-have. If I can spend £200 on headset or £150 on a joystick, £500 isn't a leap for an HMD I'll use for three hours daily.

The implementation of the Vive has ruled it out for me as a viable option. Why? Because it requires two wall-mounted sensors that are roughly 6cm cubed, with bright-green always-on LEDs. Not something my wife would accept in any room in the house (especially not the bedroom where my PC resides) and since I don't have a dedicated VR room where I could bury the cables in the wall, it ain't gonna happen. The revised version (with camera) has slightly smaller sensors than the prototype I used last year, so they can be tripod-mounted, but do you have 15 square feet around your PC to accommodate two tripods with associated cabling across the floor? I don't.

The biggest issues with the DK2 were heat (hot to wear in summer), weight and resolution. The CV1 has a fabric-like shell instead of solid plastic and weighs a fraction of what the DK2 did and has the same resolution as the Vive (which I've tried using Elite), so it ticks all the boxes.

I suspect that the Vive is going make people blow coffee out their nose when they announce their price. They've said theirs will be "premium" HMD. They made a (presumably costly) last-minute revision to the consumer version to include the camera and they plan to include motion controllers, so the whole package is going to cost more. That's not a bad thing, but the people will look back and see the Oculus as the entry-level HMD option.

On the upside the current gen of top-end 28nm graphics cards are £400-500 and there aren't many to choose from, but both AMD and nVidia are set to release a range of 14nm video cards this year. Now while the top-end cards will probably cost over the £500 mark, the huge boost in performance these cards should offer means the mid-rage offerings should outperform the likes of the current GTX 980s. So look forward to cheaper super-powerful graphics later this year.

[Chaosphere]

I was so interested in Oculus... especially after trying at LAN... but that price is just obscene.

That much money for 1080p, absolutely not.