Virtual reality company Oculus, now owned by Facebook, has announced a new Rift+Touch bundle on its website. The bundle now retails for $598 against the older price of $798 for both.
PC virtual reality is one of the emerging branches of alternate digital reality. Along with augmented reality and mixed reality, it is quickly becoming an affordable form of entertainment. The bundle price of $598 doesn’t exactly make it cheap, but it’s still better than shelling out eight hundred bucks just to get a taste of VR.
The real magic of VR, however, is not the devices themselves. Those merely facilitate VR and make it possible. The real commodity here is VR content, and Oculus is keen on getting more content out to its users in the coming months.
Oculus’s VP for Content, Jason Rubin, has shared his thoughts on content for 2017 as well:
“High-end VR has been out in the wild for over a year now, and the number one question I’ve received since Rift launch is, “What’s the killer app going to be and when does it arrive?” I always give the same answer: No one could have predicted that Mario or Halo would be the definitive games in their era. Nobody could predict how loved they would become or how big an impact they would have in pushing their respective hardware platforms forward. They were the right games, at the right time.
I can’t say for sure that this year’s line-up is going to have VR’s World of Warcraft or GTA, but with every new release, and with every new discovery, VR gets closer to finding its killer app.”
From what he says, it’s clear that nobody knows the direction that VR apps will take. For now, gaming and amusement park-like applications have taken center stage, but that might be very different even as soon as 2-3 years from now.
While it is true that Oculus is the single biggest investor in the VR space, there are other options like Microsoft’s mixed reality and augmented reality that are quickly emerging in the market. Google is in the thick of things, too, with their Daydream unit that has considerable device choices and a growing list of apps that can be used with Daydream View, the search engine giant’s own VR platform.
Can Oculus pick up the pace and start releasing title after title for Rift, while keeping its user base entertained with existing content until they’re able to build their apps portfolio? We’ll just have to wait and see. But, for now, it appears that Oculus is addressing the issue of price as a matter of priority.
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