All you need to know about the much anticipated Oculus VR headset

Facebook-owned company Oculus VR is about to bring Virtual Reality headsets to your living rooms. Oculus VR is an American Virtual Reality company founded by Palmer Luckey and Brendan Iribe that was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for $2 billion.

When Facebook acquired Oculus, their Virtual Reality (VR) headset was just prototype. They have since been working on perfecting the model and it is expected to be released in 2016. Two other headsets will also be released around that time; these are HTC Vive and Project Morpheus.

Facebook did say that the Oculus Virtual Reality headset would be out in the first quarter of 2016. However, no further details have been made available and people wanted to know more. Fortunately, Palmer Luckey answered a few questions during in a recent interview regarding the much anticipated VR headset.

There were rumors that the VR would cost around $350. Oculus had previously released two developer kits of the headset, DK1 and DK2. DK1 and DK2 cost $300 and $350 respectively so it was assumed that the final product would be priced within a very close range of the $350 price point. In the interview, Luckey was asked about the price of their new VR headset.

“You know, I’m going to be perfectly honest with you. We’re roughly in that ballpark… but it’s going to cost more than that. And the reason for that is that we’ve added a lot of technology to this thing beyond what existed in the DK1 and DK2 days.” he said.

At first, there were concerns about the price of DK2 because it was more expensive than the previous version. Luckey was quick to explain the reason behind the increase in price. The following is a direct quote from him.

It’s not a matter of “Oh we’re selling more, we can make more money!” It’s just the reality that when you make this thing, you have to decide what trade-offs you’re going to make. Are you going to optimize for absolute lowest price possible, even if it’s gonna be a lower quality experience? Or do you try to say “you know what, this is the first consumer VR headset that were going to be pushing out to people. We need to put a stake in the ground and say: this is the best possible experience that we were able to make. No compromises were made in terms of quality. Get the cost down as much as you can on that experience, but make it so that the Rift is something that everybody wants to use to the best of your ability.”

Luckey also pointed out that the Oculus VR headset will be available with flexible pricing based on performance levels. So we should expect different VR headsets with different performances sold at different price points.

And one important point is that the Oculus Virtual Reality headset cannot be used without a high-performance PC. In the event that you do not have one, you might be looking at buying a new PC as well.