With the Oculus Rift’s seemingly high $599 price tag coming as quite a surprise to the VR community, one might be tempted to think that it would put a major dent in pre-orders. Indications from Oculus suggest it may only be a vocal minority who have been turned off by the cost.
While the HTC Vive is known for its ‘room-scale tracking space, the company maintains that it works just as well for seated VR experiences. At CES 2016, HTC showed just that, using Elite Dangerous running great on the new Vive Pre.
Windlands, a first-person exploration game from Psytech Games, is now available for purchase on Steam Early Access. The game is currently on sale for $15.99, and returns to the normal price of $19.99 after January 15th.
There’s been a serious demand for pre-orders of the consumer Oculus Rift since going live Wednesday, and if you haven’t thrown your credit card at Oculus yet, you may be waiting until as late as June to get your hands on one.
Nikon, the Japanese multinational giant known for everything from simple point-and-shoots to some of the most sophisticated optics on the market, has built a 360 action camera capable of up to 4K UHD video and still images, dubbed KeyMission 360. Although footage from the camera appears to be good quality, albeit with a few stitching issues to sort out, the test footage raises some definite concerns about 360 action cams in general.
We went hands-on with Audi’s new room-scale VR showroom experience that the company is hoping will add new dimensions to the car buying experience whilst also introducing entirely new demographics to VR.
Although the HTC Vive saw a significant delay, pushing its expected delivery date way back from Q4 2015 to April 2016, development of the headset has not stalled. The new Vive Pre, the second Vive development kit, makes improvements across the board.
We caught up with the developers of Rink, a new wireless motion controller that uses a combination of magnetic field enabled positional tracking and infra-red finger tracking.
You may or may not need a cool carrying case to go with your pre-ordered Oculus Rift, but dammit, you’ll be getting one whether you like it or not. We got a closer look at the newly revealed Rift carrying case, one that according to company founder Palmer Luckey is “doper than ever.”
Oculus has partnered with Asus, Alienware, and Dell to provide a number of ‘Oculus Ready’ badged systems to VR fans looking to jump head first into the world high-end virtual reality gaming. The all-inclusive Rift/PC bundle will be available for pre-order in February at $1499.
Palmer Luckey, Oculus’ founder and inventor of the company’s iconic first VR headset, answered number of questions from the Reddit community in last night’s AMA (ask me anything), even admitting in a comprehensive question that his $350 ballpark figure on Rift pricing leading up to pre-orders ‘was handled poorly’.
Infinadeck, the active omnidirectional treadmill is back after it’s debut at SVVR Expo 2014. The latest prototype is on show at CES 2016 in a form that’s half the size, twice as quiet and now includes a harness to detect directional input. We took it for a spin.
With the price of the Oculus Rift headset coming in above the expectation of many, eyes turn to competitor HTC, whose Vive system has yet to be priced. The company isn’t ready to commit to a firm price for the headset but compared the purchase to an investment by the customer.
Like new consoles, new VR headsets are only as good as the games you can play on them. Playful’s Lucky’s Tale and CCP’s EVE: Valkyrie are coming for free to customers that pre-order the Oculus Rift, but the company says that they expect many more titles to come down the pipeline by the end of 2016—also including Minecraft.
