Another Price Slash Suggests the Oculus Rift Is Dead in the Water | Hacker News Reader

Another Price Slash Suggests the Oculus Rift Is Dead in the Water

technologyreview.com

31 pointswhiskers19 comments

Kind of disappointed the article made no mention of the Vive.

Oculus is a PC product, PSVR is, well, obviously a PS4 product. I would think Oculus's primary competitor is the Vive, another PC product. A quick Google search leads to a lot of articles written in January claiming the Vive is outselling Oculus 2-to-1.

Oculus's problem is that they buddied up with Facebook and then tried to create a walled garden. Meanwhile, HTC buddied up with Steam, the de facto home for PC gamers, to market the Vive. Oculus is also behind the curve. Vive is room-scale and had motion controls from day 1.

> Kind of disappointed the article made no mention of the Vive.

I'm always disappointed that no mention is ever made of Razer's OSVR HMD (HDK):

http://www.osvr.org/

Open-Source. Virtual Reality.

Instead we get closed source, walled garden, proprietary APIs - and of course, virtually zero Linux support.

OSVR isn't great tbh

HTC frequently send out Vive kits or new controllers like their tracker free. (Though the full product is about $800).

Whereas Razer makes it difficult to find a price, but when you do, it's about $400 for their devkit.

That aside, the huge difference is Steam's backing. Steam is where customers go, and they only see Vive there. (Where Linux users are I'm afraid, quite a small percentage. But, the Vive has decent support for Vulkan on Linux, and as Vulkan becomes more and more the standard, it'll work better and better).

> Vive is room-scale and had motion controls from day 1.

Right, and it is native instead of a hack. The Oculus roomscale is completely impractical - hoarding all of the fastest USB ports on your machine.

Meanwhile, I'm running my Vive through a single USB2 port because things hiccup if I run it through USB3.

I honestly wonder how much of this has to do with the fact that it is associated with Facebook.

Purely anecdotal, but in my gamer circles, seeing Facebook mentioned anywhere near video games is met with repulsion. Blizzard's choice to have Facebook-only live streaming means we would never use it (Yes Mom, I didn't call you back because, as you can see, I played Overwatch for 8 hours). As soon as we saw the announcement for Facebook taking over Oculus, we knew we weren't going to purchase it solely for keeping Zuckerberg out of our video games.

This. All of my old hardcore MMO buddies were pumped up during the Kickstarter days and during the following development phase.

Once Oculus took FB's "dirty money" though, every single one of them saw the writing on the wall, lost interest, and those with dev kits sold them off.

Gamers don't want social garbage getting in their way and pimping their activity/habits/preferences out to advertisers. Oculus may not have had much of a choice with their burn rate, but taking FB's money certainly didn't win them any friends among the userbase they were targeting from day one.

Same for all of us who just hate Facebook. I got off Facebook back in college and now avoid it like the plague. When they bought Oculus my interest in it died. No way am I using any app or product tied to Facebook in any way.

I was really excited about VR but the price(and nausea/headaches) put me off it.

I'm sure the price will continue to drop, as is par for the course in technology, but the physical side effects..? I don't want to be like Richard Hendricks and hug the porcelain after 30mins of gameplay.

> but the physical side effects..? I don't want to be like Richard Hendricks and hug the porcelain after 30mins of gameplay.

Depending on the game, this does or does not happen.

It depends on whether the movement in the game is based purely on your physical movements, or if there's something else moving you. For example, in a game like Job Simulator where you stand mostly in one place and only take a couple steps in each direction, it's incredibly rare for people to get motion sick.

On the other hand, in a driving game, motion sickness can kick in nearly instantly once the car moves. I played Zombie Training Simulator for nearly two hours straight when I first got it and never felt the slightest bit of sickness. But then I picked up Project Cars, and as soon as I hit the gas pedal, I started getting dizzy. I only played for about 5 minutes before I had to stop because I was starting to feel sick.

But FWIW, it IS possible to train yourself to eliminate the sickness. These days, I can drive in Project Cars indefinitely and not get sick as long as I keep looking straight ahead. If I turn my head to the side to look out the side window, I instantly feel sick. MS Flight Simulator X also tends to make me feel a bit sick whenever I make banking changes.

Physical symptoms in VR are a hardware (bad tracking) or software (too much forced motion) problem.

Most games on Vive don't make me motion sick in the slightest, but games where you're shooting around in a car or spaceship make me motion sick nearly immediately.

Similarly, bad tracking (like on PSVR, or a Vive if there's a mirror in the room) can make you motion sick just standing still.

Well, what an individual person can tolerate varies widely too. VR hardware and software can't fix every problem with motion sickness just as we've yet to fix every problem with motion sickness on moving vehicles (cars, planes, boats), outside of blunt drugs (and their side effects).

I guess what I meant is that with current technology VR should not make you sick doing something that doesn't make you sick in real life.

I can't remember the source for this. 30% will never experience simulator sickness, 10% will always experience it and 60% can learn how to deal with nearly anything. If you were only sick after 30min then I'd put you in the final category - simply take breaks long before you are sick.

They should have done everything in their power to keep the Facebook brand away from the Oculus brand, Vive fits in with the gamer / early adopter culture, where as Oculus now fits in with..... mom and dad.... I guess?

Bought the dev kit, they never full developed the linux dev kit, then they killed it. My dev kit is sitting collecting dust.

Similar. Bought the dev kit, then they killed OS X support.

i bought the DK2 dev kit but never bothered with the 'consumer' version.

i genuinely believe that oculus never expected rift to be 'big' in any way, i think it was about building up a VR game library ready for the next gen of phone holders a-la samsung gear.

once phones are powerful enough to match a current mid-range gaming GPU and can use cameras for low latency and high accuracy "inside-out tracking" (their definition) without all the wires/lasers/sensorcameras facebook will be right there with a store and a big library.

give it 5 years and VR might finally take off!

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