Our Opinion
Phil explains that he’d love to, but the price is still too much for him. He’s been involved in computer journalism since the ’80s and was able to witness VR and has kept this eye on it since. It’s always been so expensive, though, and he jokes that the expense and nausea were what prevents it from going mainstream. He feels the biggest problem is that “instead of ploughing energy into fast, accurate head tracking and nausea reduction which makes it immersive, all the money instead goes towards graphics quality”. He believes the “best implementation of VR with market penetration” would be Google Cardboard.
Kenneth realizes that the future of gaming is virtual reality but believes “the price as it is now is way too high for the average consumer.” While the HTC Vive is $800, the headsets require a powerful PC. It needs a minimum of a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M video graphics GPU card and thinks an equipped laptop can’t be found for less than $!,000. However, as more people use it, he believes the price and maybe even the requirements will go down, and he won’t look into it until at least then. Alex sees VR as exciting and agrees with Kenneth that it’s the future of gaming, but the price point is still out of his reach considering the current capability. He’s seen some cool demos but thinks he’d be disappointed if he actually bought it. There aren’t many games available, and “most either look like tech demos or unsatisfying ‘VR experiences.’” He’d like to wait for the technology behind it to grow and expand. Simon thinks it looks like fun and can’t wait to try it, but like with the others here, he believes “the computer specs needed to run it are a little too high” for his tastes. He’d like to wait for the technology behind it to advance to where VR is a big part of how we interact with the scene seen in the headset, and many games don’t allow you to fully walk around. Until the tech advances to the point where the player can interact with a scene in a similar, if not better, way than using a mouse and keyboard, it will always feel more like a gimmick” to him. For me there is no way it would be cost effective. I’m not particularly a big game person but do think it looks cool. I also think the technology could be applied to other things than just gaming. Once that happens and the price comes way down I’d definitely be a customer.
Your Opinion
How do you feel about it? Have you been anxiously waiting for virtual reality? Are you going to be using it? Or are you waiting until the price point gets a little cheaper? With VR technology going mainstream, will you be using VR? Let us know in the comments below.
