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Comment by trapperkeeper79 | Hacker News Reader

Likewise. I have phone-based VR and a beefy PC. The pricey headsets, limited content and exclusives for headsets have kept me out of the higher end. A friend (also a dev) and I were just chatting yesterday that we'd get hololens and attempt to write apps with it - were it not for the insane price (especially after I wasted almost 2K on Google's Glass debacle). A lower price point and wide availability across vendors might mean fewer exclusives and that is great for the whole industry.

Incidently, I thought Google was doing a good job with the Google VR SDK. But I now am very skeptical since it appears (just my humble, personal opinion) they are more focused on their Daydream platform than they are on wide availability across vendor devices.

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I bought a fancy PC, a Vive and the Rift to play with them and see how the tech is shaping up.

The Rift may be better now given Zuckerberg's demo and the shipping touch controls, but I ended up selling it. Playing with an Xbox One controller was a pretty bad experience (with the one exception being the space game) and it was overall pretty disappointing compared to the Vive.

The Vive with room scale is something different - it's really impressive. The touch controllers work well and the movement feels natural. The content right now though is pretty limited and Oculus has tied up a lot with software exclusives.

Maybe Oculus will do well with the social stuff they're working on (demo was cool) and GearVR might save them, but the Vive is a much better product right now and worth playing with if you can.

Yeah. For $299, I can buy a headset with the knowledge I'm gonna replace it soon. But if I buy an $800 headset, it has to do EVERYTHING.

I did Glass too, and again, HoloLens outpriced my acceptable "stupid expense to be on the leading edge" budget. :D

Buying nextstep on intel (I think it was os 3.3, it cost like $800) was the last big thing I invested in that turned out to be a big mistake, but I'm lucky :-) I happened to think google glass would never go anywhere but that was lucky too. Probably most developers never have been nextstep running (except on a mac ;-)).

If you are not developing for VR then wait. We all know that version 1 is always a bit rubbish. Version 2 is better, version 3 is better and hits the right price point.

Unless Lighthouses are super-seeded by inside-out tracking in all kinds of common household light settings at comparable precision, for the VIVE the thing that needs an upgrade the headset (with a flip up style option for casual use), which will also result in a new non-HDMI connector box, you could still keep the controllers plus the lighthouses.

Also shipping the headset only, should be less pricey than it was on that comparably huge VIVE box set.

I'm quite confident there will be room-scale enabled (foveated) 4k resolution class headsets in the next two years for $500 or less.

Although the money saved will then still have to go towards a more capable GPU than something currently available in the $200 price range.

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