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the-pi-guy said:
potato_hamster said:

Sure, wireless VR is more convenient. Is it a convenience that people are willing to pay for in terms of sacrificing performance or paying hundreds extra for? It appears not. Again, most of the complaints about wired VR isn't based on the wire going to the headset. It has to do with how that wire is positioned with the headset, the wire's length, how there's no solution for minimizing it's impact on using the headset. It has to do with the extra VR processing box that has its own power requirements, and own cables,. It has to do with the camera and other sensors you may have to place in your gaming space. It's a complicated mess that's tedious to set up. Many of those issues aren't solved just by removing the data tether of the headset, and a wireless solution abandons the requirements of those sensors, then it severely limits the motion tracking capabilities of the device itself down to Gear VR territory. Which means many of the convenience issues are fundamental to VR solutions themselves that has little to nothing to do with whether the headset is wireless or not. let 's put it this way. Let's assume that wireless pack works just as well as the tether for the Oculus Rift. Does that really make the device that much more convenient to use to justfy the $400 price tag?


Incorrect.  The tracking capabilities of the GearVR are not inherent with the type of tracking.  It's just a limitation of the current technology.  Oculus Quest doesn't have those limitations.

Who said anything about justifying a $400 wireless pack?  I didn't.  What is your insistence with trying to argue with me about things I don't even think?

potato_hamster said:

I bet if you gave two VR buyers a $500 budget, and they could get a wired VR headset like Oculus Rift for $200, and then spend the other $300 in games and accessories, or they could get a wireless VR headset again, similar to Oculus Rift with no wired thether, for $400, and spend the other $100 in games and accessories, buyers would choose the wired headset over 90% of the time. I think you're grossly overestimating the value of removing that tether completely.

Again, this has nothing to do with anything I've claimed.  

I'm not saying "People are going to be lining up to buy a $800 wireless headset instead of a $400 wired one."

I'm saying "People are more likely to buy a $400 wireless headset instead of a $400 wired one".

potato_hamster said:

Just because the PSVR has been sold art $200 doesn't mean it can be sold at $50 or even $100 without a loss in the future. Again, look at the Wii U. That saw minimal price drops because it was so expensive to make and Nintendo just couldn't lower the Bill of Materials to a point where they could lower the price by even $50 more without taking a loss. You're assuming that Sony can make the PSVR headset for $50-$100 in the years they come. Maybe they can, but perhaps not. Let's not assume.

Sure, it's an assumption.  But it's not an unreasonable assumption.  Do you really think to make something like the Wii U in 10 years would cost as much as it does now?

potato_hamster said: 

So what is it? Are people not buying VR Headsets because of the price? Or are people not buying VR headsets because of the lack of marketing? They can't know that VR headsets are too expensive if they don't know that these VR Headsets exist. If there's a $150 VR Headset that outperforms a HTC Vive, why are people still paying 2-3 times as much for Rifts and Vives? Nintendo sold tens of millions of Wiis through word of mouth, one first hand experience, and a $200 price tag. What's VR's excuse?

If lack of knowledge of the games library is the reason headsets aren't selling, and you think  they would sell if people only knew about these great system selling games that no one has heard of,  I can't help but find that laughable. You have arguably the biggest player in video games for the past two decades,  Sony, pushing PSVR very strongly for years, created TV commercials for it, created ads for major gaming sites, featured it prominently at every major conference including E3, and even started giving out free PSVR games with PS+. What more could VR ever ask for? Furthermore, I get Oculus Rift ads popup in my facebook all the time. What more does VR need? The Initial marketing push has not paid off, and it appears that the Sony has decided to stop investing and market a technology that isn't performing as expected.

People are buying Vive and Rift, instead of the cheaper headsets because they have better marketing and brand awareness.  

The big reasons people are not buying VR:

-It's expensive

-There are too few uses to justify the cost.  The most mainstream game on a headset is Skyrim, a 7 year old game.  Either the best games like Astrobot have to be marketed or popular titles have to be brought over.

-They don't know what it adds to the experience, until they've tried it.  

potato_hamster said: 

Look, If creating a $150 solution that's capable of out-performing a top-of-the-line $800 headset in just two years then price is no longer a constraint for VR success. Since that hasn't even that hasn't made a notable blip in the market, it's safe to assume VR is beyond fucked, and will never be more than a niche product. If it turns out that $150 solution is the Oculus Go, and is only better than the HTC Vive in the sense that it has higher resolution screens, then that was incredibly disingenuous of you.

No, you can find some mixed reality headsets for around $150 with higher resolution, with an actual tracking system.  Vive is still the better tracker.

But the tracking system is one of the cheaper parts of the headsets.  

The Oculus Quest tracks as well as the Oculus Rift with no need for external sensors? I know it has a sensor-less solution, but I also know there are severe limitations in terms of maintaining orientation without fixed reference points. I suspect this solution will suffer from every other sensor-less solution - low fidelity, less accurate motion tracking, and the need the need to recalibrate often. The Rift, Vive and PSVR don't use fixed references for fun - they're far more expensive to produce - they do so because they're magnitudes better than sensorless solutions. In the Case of the Oculus go, it's only going to be able to read the controllers when they're within direct line of sight of the sensors, and that's going to lead to more issues. So like I said, Samsung Gear VR territory, this won't be much better than using an internal gyroscope of a cell phone.

Okay, so you're going to make ridiculous claims. A $400 wireless VR headset will never perform as well as a $400 tethered headset made developed during the same time period. Going with a wireless solution means sacrificing everything else, since you know, a VR device that's totally self-contained has to make sacrifices in order to be self-contained vs something that delegates the processing to another device. To be clear, you think most prospective VR buyers would prefer a wireless VR headset over one that does everything else VR related better? Because if not, that means people are going to have to pay extra to get that same quality of VR experience on a wireless headset. There's no two ways about it.

Well i mean, it kinda is an unreasonable assumption... the Wii U is now 6 years old. I would hope that after 16 years that tech would advance enough that you could make a wii u-like device for cheaper than the Wii U? But using the Wii U's BOM? It might actually be more expensive to make as there may be critical components inside it like processors that are no longer produced in 10 years since you know, no one has a use for them any more, meaning that some components might cost most to produce in 10 years than they do today. Perhaps you should look into instances where companies try to resurrect and start re-making 10-15-20 year old electronics and find out they actually cost more to make today than they did 20 years ago. it's not as simple as you're making it out to be. Let me give you a realistic example. let's take the PS1 classic. That undoubtedly shares almost zero components in common with the original PS1, but also doesn't play the same discs, use the same memory cards, or use the same controllers. But let's say Sony wanted to actually re-release the PS1 in all of it's classic glory, with 100% compatibility with all old PS1 games, which likely means exact replication. There are a pile of custom chips in that PS1, along with controller ports, memory card ports etc that are no longer made, and that might mean that fabricating them today means creating them at today's rates, that may require old fabrication processes that are actually more expensive to employ today than it was i decades ago. it could mean that producing a PS1 today using the same technology that the original PS1 used costs more today than it did in 1998.

You think the only reason that poople are buying Oculus Rift or HTC Vive over other headsets is brand awareness and marketing, and not because, you know, they're better VR headsets and better ecosystems with better games libraries? If you say so. I'm not sure how you think devices that are pretty much not stocked at retail stores are getting sales off of brand awareness, as if HTC and Oculus are recognizable brands to the average consumer. I'd say most VR buyers are people that have done their homework, which means they're probablly looking up reviews, most all of which put HTC Vive and Oculus Rift at the top of the PC VR pile by far.

Another big reason for not buying VR: People prefer to game on televisions with gamepads, and don't think VR adds to that in a meaningful way
Another big reason: Motion sickness. Some people flat out can't use VR.

And again, if people have to use a product in order to get the experience necessary to want to buy one, you're never going to sell very many.

... you do realize that your phones accelerometer is "an actual tracking system", right? Sure it's very basic, and not very reliable or accurate, but it is "an actual tracking system".