14 DAY TRIAL // Valve and HTC have finally announced the price and launch date for the Vive virtual reality system, and both of them are surprising.
There are many competing VR solutions right now, but none of them managed to capture the imagination of gamers or of the gaming industry. From the looks of it, everyone is waiting to see which one is the best before committing to buy something.
The road for virtual reality in modern times was opened by Oculus Rift, which started its life as a Kickstarter project back in 2012, but even after four years the technology didn't take off the ground. Now Sony is working on its own solution, Oculus is pushing for a second version. A couple of other big companies have also announced that they are putting funds into VR.
The prices are prohibitive, for now
One thing is certain, now everyone will afford to buy a new VR set when they finally launch. That's true for Oculus and Vive, the new solution from HTC and Valve.
According to a report on cnet.com, the Vive will set you back for $799 (€717), and the launch date has been set for April. In fact, users will be able to pre-purchase Vive starting with February 29.
Vive will be accompanied by two base stations, a link to the PC, and two controllers. From what the industry and the community say so far, Vive seems to be a complete solution, but the price is not really all that attractive.
It will be interesting to see if gaming studios will hurry with the support for these new VR solutions. With so many of them, we might see the gaming industry becoming polarized and we might see titles being launched with support for just one of these VR headsets.
In any case, 2016 will either be the year when VR becomes something that we need to have, or it will be buried along with other technologies that were cool in theory, but inefficient in practice.