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Comment by Alupis | Hacker News Reader

It's kind of funny to think about --

Oculus, first to "invent", (almost) last to market.

Given all the hype and big names that joined the Oculus team, and even the sudden sell-out to Facebook (leaving most of their Kickstarter backers feeling used), Oculus has yet to produce a consumer product.

At this pace, they're on track to be 3rd to market (well, "tied" if we count pre-orders being taken at CES), even though they were "leading the way" just a short time ago.

In addition, from a consumer perspective, their "finished" product looks almost identical to the "developer" previews they shipped years back...

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"3rd to market"?

The first consumer VR hardware on the market was the GearVR, made by Samsung AND Oculus.

The second consumer VR hardware on the market is likely to be the Oculus Rift (Q1 Jan-Mar shipping) and the Vive is likely to be the third to market (est. April shipping)

This is nothing like the developer previews from years ago. You should read up on the major differences from the DK1->DK2->CV1. Each was a massive leap forward in capability.

Note: I've been developing VR for 1+ years and own every VR headset.

> "own every VR headset"

Even a Virtuality? ;-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuality_%28gaming%29

As much as VR purists love to hate it, Google Cardboard was the first to market.

Durovis Dive was out before Google Cardboard (consumer version of Dive released in November 2013, Google Cardboard was announced in June 2014). Furthermore, there were VR headsets before the Oculus Kickstarter, VR is not a new field, it's just never truly been mainstream before (though it looks likely that it'll breakthrough to the mainstream in 2016).

Not sure if trolling but... The first Oculus dev kit shipped 50k in 2013. Cardboard wasn't announced until I/O 2014.

> The first Oculus dev kit shipped

We're talking about consumer items, not dev kits. In reality, Google Cardboard was the first (modern) VR kit released.

Is Cardboard a consumer item? It's been pretty straight to dev expect marketing promotions and Google IO handouts.

I think it's not a real "serious" product; more of a "gag", if anything.

I think it was Google's way at having fun with all the VR hype around last year's I/O conference (and to show it's not anything really groundbreaking).

A bunch of Chinese companies started pumping out Cardboard clones pretty much as soon as it was announced and at least one commercial VR porn company is using them.

Cardboard is neat, but it's not the same thing.

The Sega Saturn also beat the PlayStation to market. Also Oculus had big improvements from one Dev kit to the next and said their last Dev model would be similar to their final model.

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