VR Headsets

[Icthyes]

The combined price will come down as manufacturers make a return on investment, manufacturing processes become improved and on the flip side the components needed to run it become cheaper too through the same reasons and more powerful stuff supplanting it. For VR itself though, I don't see it becoming a game-changer that every developer has to pay attention to. It will also always be somewhat of a premium purchase so I can only see its attraction staying with hardcore gamers. It has a good chance of being a profitable industry, but that's as far as it'll go I reckon.

[Smidgey]

I have a 3 year old GFX card that quite happily handles the latest games at 1080p and near enough max settings. According to the system specs, this card isn't enough and I'll need to spend another £300+ to get said graphics card. I know a lot of people who went out and brought new cards in the last year (970s mostly) which will also apparently struggle with running the Rift.

[ajokay]

[Lemm314]

2560x1200 90hz OLED display that's smaller than a tablet. That alone is pretty high end hardware... And even accommodating monitors with that kind of resolution/refresh rate has always been a tall order for PCs. Nothing new there.

[Icthyes]

[shaxberd]

So this is a thing I never heard about before. Sold by Razer, apparently

[camp_bell]

I remember reading about that some time last year. It's a nice idea but I can see it going the way of the MSX (an early home computer standard in the 1980s that was supported by the likes of Microsoft, Sony, Phillips, etc) since everyone involved is only there because they can't/won't develop their own.

VR will need to adopt some kind of open-ish standard if it's going to go mainstream though, and while I don't think OSVR will be it I think it is a sign of things to come. Much like how the PC eventually emerged in the 1990s.

[Lemm314]

They all work more or less the same way already. All the VR headset makers either provide the data for doing the necessary distortions, or have functions for doing it for you. They all feed back head position information, and all have an interface for showing pictures in the headset. Any other considerations, like writing low-latency code, is all outside the scope of VR anyway so will be common across them all.

Really, the foundations are already out there for an abstraction library which gives developers a common interface for VR headsets and just translates everything to whatever it detects is there. I think that's the idea behind Valve's OpenVR already.