“Facebook has launched a six-week summer sale on the Oculus Rift headset — and while there is no official support for it from the company, it can be used in conjunction with High Sierra and the SteamVR beta,” Mike Wuerthele reports for AppleInsider.
“The headset and set of two Touch controllers normally retail for $500 for just the headset and $100 for the controllers,” Wuerthele reports. “The ‘Summer of Rift’ promotion, launched on Monday, cuts this price to $400 for the set.”
“Valve’s preferred VR hardware, isn’t the Oculus Rift, but the HTC Vive — developed by the company in cooperation with HTC,” Wuerthele reports. “But, AppleInsider has confirmed both from a Valve FAQ page, and some preliminary testing, that the Oculus Rift functions in the SteamVR beta with the eGPU Developer’s Kit connected to a Mac running the High Sierra beta.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Firesale.
SEE ALSO:
Varjo unveils first human eye-resolution VR solution – June 30, 2017
Well well well. Time to sell.
Nobody wants to wear a clunky goofy piece of equipment on the top of their head and face, even with this discount.
focus group syndrome, love it on trade show floors but not in daily use. VR etc has been around for decades in one form or another… entertainment is a social experience best when shared ie enjoyed together simultaneously, none of these technologies provide that core principle
“Enjoyed together simultaneously ”
In todays gaming world the above is not defined in Actual physical presence…. Rather virtual presense and realtime conversation and discourse online.
virtual gaming environments( realtime audio and graphics ) have replaced the good ole playgrounds and hangout/in together.
I see it everyday with kids/teens and how they prefer to socialize…. its online. ….
VR/AR will only escalate this to a new level. Imo.
mdn take is hilarious.
but varjo had very very very high hardware specs, and guess whats, its not a mac.
Give me a good hi-res headset (as in not pixelated) and connect it to X-Plane software and I’m in.
https://flyinside-fsx.com
I have to hand it to Oculus (now Facebook) for pioneering work in the ‘portable’ VR field.
But it’s odd to think of their ‘fire sale’ as response to Apple’s move into AR.
• Oculus never bothered to code their gear beyond a limited set of Windows box hardware. Despite nonsense to the contrary, Oculus were entirely capable of coding their gear to run on Macs with dedicated GPU hardware (versus mere relatively lame Intel GPUs).
• The demos I watched of Oculus software were never inspiring. 3D is great and all. But when it’s only applied to games with graphics quality worthy of the late 1990s, BFD. Getting developers to create killer app games for Oculus has apparently been difficult.
I hope the SteamVR system works out. Steam has its problems (its support and update system is a mess IMHO). But when it works I find it to be brilliant. The vast majority of my games run on Steam. Will there be anything ‘killer’ on SteamVR? We wait to see…
Oh and there’s that other factor about VR that’s shared with 3D TV: The Queasy Effect.
With time and experience I expect developers will minimize The Queasy Effect in their graphics work. But I also suspect it will remain a problem with at least a few users.
framerates need to be stable and very fast with 0 lag.
macs are not powerful enough, those AMD GPU’s are garbage.. they already benchmarked their new TOP O D LINE model thats expected on the iMac Pro and it barely performs as well as a GTX 1080, and the 1080 use WAY LESS POWER.
apple needs nvidia in their camp if they are serious about VR.
I don’t know what’s up with Apple and GPUs in Macs. I bought a MacBook Pro years back (Late 2013) with an NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M and am glad I did. But in the most recent MBPs Apple offers an AMD (ATI) Radeon Pro 450, 455 or 460. Maybe Apple wants to support both, supporting competition, making sure there is choice in the future. Or maybe it’s a question of who offers Apple the better deal. I personally would prefer NVIDIA and consistently read about its advantages over current ATI (AMD). That Apple doesn’t put the best hardware into a ‘Pro’ machine is part of the ongoing annoyance with their bad attitude toward Macs in recent years. Stupid and shameful. No excuse. Etc.
Meanwhile, months ago I read about the Oculus specs. But the fact is that they chose to write to specific specs. I can also point out that it is possible to write more efficient code (with the expense of time and money) that could work fine with lower (within limits) specs. IOW: I entirely disregard Oculus’ excuse making for their specs. They directly choose what to do with their gear. They choose how to write software for it. They set their boundaries and call them ‘absolute’. No they’re not.
That said, the quality is always going to be better at the bleeding edge of the most current technology. That’s certainly a factor to consider in this field.
The porn industry is salivating at VR’s and AR’s potential.
The most egalitarian use for this technology is in medicine such as remote operations using robots on the other end and in seeing in dangerous environments such as in nuke plants. CAVES are useful in archeology.
But I think that VR/AR is yet another inadvertent method to isolate/push people into their own minds. A dictator has to fit into this equation somehow.
LOL.. no doubt.
Just installed high sierra on a MacBook Air connected to the work wireless network. Network shares would not mount through the wireless network although they mount wired. I was pleasantly surprised to see them mount while connected to the wireless network.