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Just last week Oculus began gearing up for the launch of the Rift with pre-orders opening up and shipments due out in March. However, there is another big VR launch on the way in the next few months- the HTC Vive, which will also have its price and ship date announced at the end of next month when pre-orders officially go live.
Right now, we are expecting the HTC Vive to release in April, though it looks like pre-orders will be opening up on the 29th of February.
This news comes from HTC CEO, Cher Wang, who spoke with The Telegraph recently. It looks like entering the virtual reality market will also see HTC focussing a bit less on smartphones in order to keep up with this new technology.
The HTC Vive is being developed using technology licensed from Valve itself so these two companies are working somewhat closely together for this launch and while nothing has been announced just yet, there are rumors that Valve will have a launch title prepared for the Vive's release date.
We still don't have much information on price but it seems likely that the Vive will end up costing either a similar amount or being a bit more expensive than the £500 Oculus Rift- partially due to the lighthouse sensors and additional controllers that come with it.
KitGuru Says: At this point, most people should be expecting VR to be a bit more expensive than previously anticipated. We don't have a price just yet but it will be interesting to have some final details on the Vive before its launch in April.
All I’ve got to say is so much for 2016 being the year VR goes mainstream. This reminds me of the last VR push that happened about 10 years ago: A bunch of companies, including Sony, talked about how they were going to bring the first quality VR to the masses at affordable prices, and in the end most failed to materialized, and those that did were way more expensive than promised, and the ones that did meet the $300-$400 range that they were claiming had crappy resolutions, bad latency, and terrible viewing angles.
The tech may be a little better this go around, but it’s pretty much the same story as the last round: it started out being about bring VR to the masses and ended up pricing itself out as a niche product for enthusiasts. Too bad, because I was really looking forward to a great VR experience at an affordable price. Looks like I’ll be sticking with Google Cardboard for the time being.