HTC sold 15,000 $800 Vive virtual reality headsets in 10 minutes(venturebeat.com) |
HTC sold 15,000 $800 Vive virtual reality headsets in 10 minutes(venturebeat.com) |
VR lust is insane. The money could be better spent, I'm not sure if I'll have much time to play with it anyway. I just can't help it -- this is the system I've been waiting for since I was 10 years old.
(To be fair, I have a personal company to which I can expense all sorts of gadgets and subtract the VAT, so the impulse buy treshold is much less. If I were an employee, I would have thought harder about it.)
Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of nVidia has stated that the next generation of video cards will be 10x as fast as current cards.[1] That's probably an extremely cherry picked example, but it is obvious that the next generation will be a lot faster. All of the following are lining up:
- 28nm -> 14/16nm node jump allows twice the transistors in the same space. For video cards, that basically means double the performance.
- 28nm -> 14/16nm promises a 65% increase in transistor switching speeds
- 28nm -> 14/16nm promises a 70% decrease in power consumption. The very high end cards are currently power-limited, and many are limited by cooling.
- HBM2 memory promises a 3x increase in memory throughput
- Vulkan / DX12 promise to reduce CPU bottlenecks, this is the first generation to be explicitly optimized for Vulkan & DX12.
- This generation of video cards is the first to receive explicit optimizations for VR
- Both AMD & nVidia are promising significant architectural improvements.
Both AMD & nVidia are aiming for summer releases so that they solidly nail the August/September buying season.
Waiting a few months will also give a chance for the reviews to roll in. Early indications are that the Vive is the one to buy, but that's early. Things can change quickly as games come out, and nobody's had a really good look at the PSVR, AFAICT.
If I had a proper video card, I'd be jumping in now on the Vive. But I don't, so I'm going to wait, as painful as that is.
extremely happy to be proven wrong in near future :)
With the first gen iPhone, it was really delightful to show dozens of people the future. Likewise, I have a strong inkling that the friends/family I show VR to will have their minds blown in a way that will be great fun to watch, providing them and me a lot more pleasure than if we were to wait a few years.
The more interesting question is if VR can fill more than some niches?
I wonder how many headsets they will sell in the first year, but seeing how much interest there is, I won't be surprised if they sell more than 1 million.
Otherwise, lots of free room if you want to enjoy room scale VR.
If you want to really enjoy driving games, you want a good steering wheel. If you want to enjoy flying games, you need a good stick. Those two can get up to $200 each.
Software. VR is a niche market, so prices may need to be high to recoup R&D until volume is there.
According to reviews, this is awesome. http://www.virtuix.com/ $699, plus extras.
Then you need keyboard, mouse, monitor, internet, power...
Then you need Windows 10 (roughly $100).
Then you need games, which you will probably get through Steam [2] or through Oculus [3].
That's on top of the ~ $600 for an Oculus Rift, or ~ $800 for an HTC Vive.
[1]: http://logicalincrements.com/articles/vrguide/
I'm pretty excited for more asymmetrical games and experiences along the lines of http://www.keeptalkinggame.com/ (which is hilariously fun). I don't own a WiiU, but I've heard it has some pretty good asymmetrical examples as well.
I think something like livestreaming to a Chromecast would be cool.
Besides,here are a lot of ways to "share" an experience - playing an intense game of VR ping pong with a friend across the country sounds like an addictive shared experience to me. I don't imagine that it's lost on Facebook/Valve/all of the gaming companies that multi-player gaming will be a huge hook for VR's adoption. And many of the VR movies are shorts that are bite sized enough to pass back and forth and bask in an experience with a small group, albeit not simultaneously.
There are a lot of games that sound intriguing (the Oculus Toybox and Eve Valkyrie sound like good intros), but what really sold me are reports that when asked to jump off of a 1,000 foot high precipice in Minecraft in the Rift, most people can't do it. I've never seen someone flinch doing the same in Assassin's Creed, with it's staggeringly detailed graphics. I'm excited to show people that and similar experiences that dramatically trip the brain's sense of presence.
People can wax lyrical all day about how there was nothing technically sophisticated about the phone, but the day the iPhone came out was the day the average user started caring about that sophistication.
I'm curious about that too. The first 4 hours / day seems like a more relevant metric. I was ready when the countdown hit 0, and it took 55 minutes before I could manage to pre-order one.
You don't have to look beyond the spread of the cell phone to see that there would be a huge demand for an "immersive iphone".
I can see some common usage, like working in a plane. You can face a giant spreadsheet that you only can see. For 3d modelling this will be certainly useful.
Is it going to change significantly our way of life like mobile phones did? I can't see how.
Google glasses were still way too clunky; ubiquity may not happen in earnest until the technology comes as contact lenses. That's still science fiction, but far from impossible. And many of us wear glasses already, so wearing something discrete that doesn't look as ridiculous as google glasses did, would already be embraced.
There is a huge opportunity for such tech to change our life as much as the cell phone. Discrete heads up display with instructions for new objects, forgotten names, dates, places etc.. Beautiful, personalized artwork and decor at the office and home. The list is endless.
People were saying headphones will never become a thing because no one likes to put something clunky like that on their head and ears. Now it has become a fashion item too.
Same thing will happen with these VR headsets.
True, initial first few generations were sometimes progressing fast, but only because architecture was clunky and everybody was just exploring new realm of chip & API design.
So, any outrageous 10x performance jumps in this industry IN LAST 15 YEARS? :)
And I am not saying VR headsets will be stillborn, I fact I even pre-ordered both the Oculus and the Vine! But I do not believe we will be wearing those all day long.
Your point about financials is spot on, though. We don't have the competition we had during those early generations; I expect nVidia to bump prices. I think that the Titan and 980 ti cards have sold surprisingly well, so I expect nVidia to try even harder to find enthusiast's price ceiling, as well as try to bump the $200-$300 sweet spot up in price a bit.
As you get older, you will likely develop presbyopia, and, at some point, get comfortable with glasses.
And for the 30-40% (in Europe+USA [1]) of people who (unlike you) are already near-sighted and are thus already wearing glasses anyway (unless they have contact lenses), VR glasses shouldn't be a problem.
And I am sure that many people will.
I am not saying that VR headsets won't be useful. I can see a future when your laptop will basically just be a keyboard, and your VR headset your screen. Doesn't mean you will wear it all the time though.