Let's not forget that peripherals for consoles have historically done financially poorly and adding VR support, from a developer perspective, is not as trivial as you'd like to think. One does not simply add "VR_Module.lib" and have instant VR. These are significant issues stacked against it.

How hard VR is to implement really depends on the game and if a game is not supposed to make special use of features that work only with VR it is indeed a trivial matter. I have implemented VR in a simple project of my own and I have many friends working for studios that focus on VR titles. The basic implementation is not a problem at all and the biggest challenges they face are either related to the specific nature of the titles they work on or are problems that will go away as developers gain more experience with this and more resources will become available on the web. "Instant VR" as you staid is not a thing yet but it will be.

Sorry for double post but... the initial Oculus Roft price is in. It's $600.

"Bundled with the headset are the Eve: Valkyrie and Lucky's Tale video games as well as a movement-tracking sensor, cables, a media remote and an Xbox One controller."

The package is almost twice as expensive as the development versions even though Oculus had originally announced that the consumer version would be cheaper, I recall a price of ~$150 being mentioned at some point. Well, great job. And HTC Vive is said to be even more expensive. To quote a friend: "Oculus dead on arrival?"

Now the question is if Sony will be able to make PlayStation VR significantly cheaper.

Analyst Piers Harding-Rolls from IHS Technology: "We do not expect PlayStation VR to launch at this high a price point, which gives Sony a chance to establish a lead in this opening phase of consumer VR."

Don't know if the hardware will be cheaper but Sony is in a position where it can sell hardware at a loss if a boost in game sales makes up for it, that definitely gives them an advantage.

You're cherry-picking a portion of my argument, when the two components are interrelated.

Of course it depends on the game and the implementation. That goes without saying. But to say it's universally a trivial thing is short-sighted. If people take that approach, we'll see a resurgence of the same issue that plagued VR in the 90's, which I stated prior. Keep up. That being, slapping a "Oculus supported!" badge on the game to garner the support of the few people willing to shell out the not-insubstantial outlay of cash to gain the ability to have that badge and the requisite support in programming mean anything. To everyone else it will be a "meh" sort of tepid response.

If the only gain, to increase the ease of adoption into a given project, is connecting the UVN camera to the gyroscope of the VR helmet as you state, I again predict VR won't do well long-term. Reasons are as I stated above; peripherals have historically done poorly. No one wants to need to buy something extra that gives them a marginally better experience. Law of diminishing returns. Sure, there's always some, but "some" isn't enough to drive developers to make the extra effort and increase already out-of-control development lifecycles, even if it's the most bare implementation, as you likely have seen. The alternative, VR-only titles will also likely not be enough.

Doom helped sell PC's to some degree in the early 90's, but a PC has broader appeal in usage. And, if that was sufficient, you wouldn't have seen Doom on other platforms. Point being, even if there's a "killer app", people will find a way to get an alternative experience if they can 1. Have the platform they already own able to pull double (or more) duty and 2. Make due if the majority of the experience can be had without needing to rely on peripherals. Sony learned this the hard way with their Wii-equivalent.

Here's a case-in-point for you.

Considering there were people who managed to break their TVs with the Wii remote I wouldn't be surprised.
In the words of Einstein: "Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the former".

You forgot shipping which is $30. Tax for me would bump the total up to $665.

RIP VR.

If it gets mass market penetration it will be from cheap headsets designed to hold phones in place. Will that be the best looking option? Nope, but for 5% of the price, it will be "good enough" for most people.

It isn't true immersion unless you can actually feel the bricks in Myst. :v

Nothing you're saying contradicts anything that I said. I stated myself above that I'm sceptical of the success of VR and do predict that it will be a niche thing very soon, much like most other peripherals, and that I have doubts that it will be feasible. Keep up. :P

And I really don't know what you expect VR headsets' proper use to be. It's just an alternate display method and its extra axes' main purpose is to keep people from throwing up. The user's decision to play using a VR headset will be like whether to use a TV's 3D feature or not or whether to play using speakers or headphones. VR headsets alone can by definition provide only a marginally (and subjectively) better experience. Some games will be more suitable for VR than others, some will definitely be optimized (read: will go the extra mile to keep as many people from vomiting as possible and use the extra axes for gimmicky features) but there will not be any groundbreaking new titles that would not have been possible before. And the only long-time users of VR will be those who never feel uncomfortable using VR headsets anyway and just need basic headtracking (which means just a bit of leeway around a point fixed by the character position).

And I think one difference to the 90's you're missing in your argumentation is the fact that now two engines dominate the industry, Unity and the Unreal Engine, and that finding solutions for tons of problems is easier than ever thanks to the internet and the communities it has created. The biggest problem with VR in the 90's, other than the shoddy tech, was that implementation required custom solutions per game and this meant that headsets would work with very few games. These days the same code can be used in zillions of games and it will work after little to no adjustments which means that implementation costs are minimal. As I said, VR is not gonna be a mainstream thing anyway and the niche that will stick with VR in the long run will only expect the same basic implementation in each game marked as "VR ready".

The rest we're largely in agreement, but this above contradicts what you've stated earlier. I'm not sure how deep your development background is, but I'm making an educated guess based off what you've stated that you don't have much, if any, DOS-programming experience. Reason being, assuming what you said is true, that libraries to program VR are available, I'm reasonably certain that .lib and their requisite .h files were available to allow developers to introduce head-tracking into VR games. Diamondware and Miles Sounds System did the same for their sound libraries, so it's not unfathomable to think that some libraries to read the values from it were available. The problem, was lack of market penetration to warrant developers to even bother to add that support. Developer time comes at a significant premium, and people orchestrating said development aren't going to make arbitrary decisions on adding peripheral support when there's little to no chance anyone is going to appreciate that time being spent. Better to fix bugs and add game features than waste valuable time on that.

As far as "proper use", what I mean is to do something revolutionary that only VR can do effectively; IE - No viable replacement can be had with a lesser experience of traditional display technology and input devices. The movie The Lawnmower Man attempted to highlight this concept, in part, Meaning, head-tracking tacked on modern games is not sufficient. It must be a leap forward in some way and pave the way for something that could not exist without it. That would be the "killer app" that it needs to make people willing to pay attention. Even if that happens, and I've played a number of high-end VR units in the 90's which were cool, but not so ground-breaking that they supplanted other game platform alternatives (obviously), it will still likely remain a niche market.

As others have said, now that Oculus has been given a $600 price tag (plus what I understand as a need for a pretty good computer to run the thing well), I don't foresee too many people purchasing it at this point. We will see if Sony can come out with something cheaper, however; it would have to be MUCH cheaper for VR to become mainstream.

We will see at this point.

The super expensive pricetag make VR an unviable platform.

Reduce it to 300-400 and more apps for it will come.

Ten years ago ebook was not considered viable because the platforms at the time were very expensive. The entire industry change with the introduction of cheap smartphone and tablets.

Too expensive. Plus I'm sure I will get a terrible headache if I play with VR. I prefer to have a 4K monitor instead of VR stuff. :)

$600 USD is approximately double what they originally hinted the price to be. There would have been a lot more people willing to put out the money for the $300ish pricetag they initially stated that wont be willing to put out $600. That's not accounting for the mandatory GPU upgrade the majority of people will need in order to use it (using Steam stats as a source of gamer GPU data), and the likely entire system upgrades that people will also need (also using Steam stats). But... that's just in the USA.

In Canada, right now the CAD<->USD exchange rate is about 1.25-1.30, and the price of the Rift has been stated in CAD as $849. When the original numbers floating around of $300 USD a few years ago made the waves the CAD was almost on par with the USD, which would have meant the Rift would be probably $300-325 CAD too. At $849 CAD though I don't think many Canadian gamers are going to rush out and buy one. I've talked to the majority of my Canadian friends and out of 11 people, none are willing to both pay $849 just for the Rift alone and most of them would need a new GPU or a completely new system. Only one of them plans to buy a new system or GPU in the next 1-2 years so it seems unlikely that anyone I know personally will dip that deep into their wallet for VR any time soon. Even if the CAD came back to par with the USD though everyone still indicated it was too much money to put out, which I agree with for myself as well.

There are people out there who will gladly spend the money for the Rift and any hardware upgrades that are needed for it whether they can technically afford it or not. I for one will be grateful for these people personally as it will hopefully stand to help make the product a success and to eventually cause the price to come down as well for the rest of us. My current price point is $300 CAD maximum without any computer upgrades. As time passes, if I'm able to try out a Rift that someone else has (a friend etc.) it may very well alter the maximum amount I'd be willing to spend on one in CAD and I accept that as a possibility however sight unseen I limit myself to $300 CAD. Likewise, no plans to upgrade the GPU until this one either dies or there are enough games I'm eager to play that I'm willing to fork out the money sooner, and the Rift being a great success and hearing awesome things about it by those fortunate enough to have bought one earlier on will likely influence me on that front too.

It'll have to be an absolutely amazing device/experience with tonnes of worthwhile games/etc. that appeal to me to scale the monetary outlay up for me though. Right now I just can't see it happening, but I hope the marketplace responds great for VR and that it ends up coming down in price within the next 1-2 years to something more reasonable.
I fear that now that the hardware pricing is known, that game and other app developers are going to realize that a lot smaller number of consumers will be willing to pay that much to own the hardware and thus the potential market for their VR software just shrunk significantly in the shorter term and that some of them may proceed anyway while others terminate or scale back VR support to reallocate resources to more short term profitable projects. Hopefully the impact isn't too big though. I hope enough devs continue to work on VR game projects without being scared away by lack of hardware ownership.

Having said that though, I also think that as long as there are a big enough handful of incredibly awesome games out there that support VR, it might be enough to get the hardware sales going. Ultimately there has to be or the whole concept falls apart as being "ahead of its time" so to speak.

Well, base on my own experienced in using the Virtual reality, I would have to say that it was all good because I used some high GB and of course a wide monitor so it runs smooth in my PC with respected OS.

People can be as concerned about it as they like, but if people want the technology and companies make the technology and it is successful in the marketplace then it will exist whether or not people are concerned about it for any reason.

The biggest concern that I personally have about it is the initial price.

Oculus Rift: $849 CAD + 13% HST == $960
SteamVR: $799 USD ~= $1119 CAD + 13% HST == $1264

Add on a $600-800 GPU required to run the things and you get $1550-2100ish price range for the tech.

As such, my biggest concern is that the technology is so overpriced that almost nobody will buy it other than the one percenters, and because of that almost no game developers will truly take advantage of it and put games out there that really use it fully and properly.

I really have no concerns whatsoever about people's health and well being regarding VR.