Sagacyte's BG corner

The Oculus Rift, one of the upcoming devices that promises virtual reality for users had its price revealed yesterday, and the ripples were all over social networks.

$600.

Six hundred bucks. At first I thought everyone was talking about the much maligned launch price for the Playstation 3!

My first reaction:

And then I got thinking: what comes with such a price? Turns out it includes the Rift (the headset thing itself), a remote, a mic, and an Xbox controller. And then it hit me: you know what else you need to actually use a Rift? A PC.

Recommended PC specs include a good graphics card (NVIDIA GTX 970 or AMD R9 290), an i5 processor, and 8Gb of RAM (plus other stuff). How much is that going for, anyways? Hard question since it all varies wildly from place to place, country to country. Good thing there's gonna be Oculus Ready PCs that will come bundled with the Rift, starting at $1499.

$1499?

My second reaction:

Now, I'll be honest with you: I am not really that interested in VR. Some people think it's a first step into a Sword Art Online future but I think that's taking it a bit too far. I have not hidden my dislike (be it via Twitter or in person) whenever a Playstation conference takes a good chunk of minutes talking about PSVR (Sony's own Rift device). I just don't see it as relevant.

The beauty of this is that it could all blow up in my face and become the next best thing™. Hey, if it does, more power to us all. If it doesn't... well, call me a pessimist.

For now, if you're interested in VR on PC and are looking forward to a Rift get ready to shell $600 for the device, around $300+ for the video card that can handle it, around $400 for a decent PC, and whatever amount you want to use for VR enabled games. Some say that's the price of "early adoption"... I am more concerned with it being the price of "scare away adoption".

Me?

Game on.

- Sagacyte