This is likely going to be the biggest turn-off. People don't have those big PCs any more. Most people have just laptops/MacBook. I guess nobody would want to bring back those beasts in their living rooms again just to use Oculus Rift. They should have really considered full device experience where you get everything you need and hardware is exactly designed to give optimal Oculus experience. World has long moved on from knowing which graphic card you need for your PC. I really hope this has good enough performance on typical Lenovo/MBP at least.
> I guess nobody would want to bring back those beasts in their living rooms again just to use Oculus Rift.
If they like to play PC games in their living room, they already have a PC there. If they don't, this won't change that.
>"They should have really considered full device experience where you get everything you need and hardware is exactly designed to give optimal Oculus experience."
So... sell the Oculus together with a gaming PC? What's the difference between that and getting your own separately?
>World has long moved on from knowing which graphic card you need for your PC.
Except for those people who play video games on their PC. Those people generally do know what video card they have.
>I really hope this has good enough performance on typical Lenovo/MBP at least.
It will not. A powerful desktop gaming computer is absolutely required for acceptable VR performance in any interesting game.
The entire PC gaming industry would beg to differ, which is likely the initial target market. Of course that will change. Also I wouldn't exactly consider my desktop a beast. Form factors are pretty small these days.
Sure, this will be a hot product among PC gamers but they are not the mainstream consumers. I wanted to buy the device for my mom and have her use it. I think the vision should be to bring VR mainstream that is usable by all without technological friction.
Yea, I am sure that is the goal. But in order to provide a clean, seamless experience, you need to render what is roughly 3x the amount of data compared to normal 1080p monitors. You'll also want to make sure you don't have dropped frames as that would have a huge impact in the experience. You need high framerates and responsive feeback so that motion sickness is minimized. As you can see, there are a lot of reasons why a high-end graphics card is required. So yes, that is the goal but we can't get there right now.
The mainstream experience will be on high-end smartphones, not PCs. When Carmack and Facebook talk about getting a billion users into VR, this is how they plan to do it.
Something like this may become more mainstream [1]. Use your laptop on the go, and plug it into a high-power graphics card at your desk (along with monitor, keyboard, etc., and now Rift!)
