[dandanisaur]

Sadly, this is what stopped me from considering the Oculus Rift. My expectations were wrong in thinking this would be more of a mass-consumer oriented product instead of targeting VR hobbyists'*

Basically, forcing people to shell out ATLEAST 1600$ to be able to use it (not to mention making them buy a desktop).

Aside: I was always more interested in the potential of Gear VR. Thanks for the info.

[potatolicious]

Unfortunately this is the way it will be for the immediate future - the combination of high resolution requirements and high refresh rate requirements means that any VR application will have to render a lot more pixels than "typical" games on phones/PCs.

You can for example get away with rendering at 30Hz for a typical game, but that's a recipe for nausea in VR - where you'd want 90-120Hz instead. That's a lot of extra pixels immediately.

Even something as simple as a virtual desktop is going to be pretty performance intensive if only because of how many pixels your hardware has to push around.

There's not really a good way to make a mass-consumer (i.e., low-end PC, mid-end phone) version of this tech yet, and probably not in the near future either since any hardware gains we make (either in mobile or desktop) will be poured into visual fidelity.

[amock]

You don't need to spend anywhere close to $1600. I just put together http://pcpartpicker.com/p/p8MjmG with only a little consideration for price and it's less than $900 while exceeding the requirements.

[AndrewKemendo]

$885 (PC you linked) + $600 (Rift) = $1485

That's pretty close.

[TulliusCicero]

It's in between right now. It's not just targeted at 'VR hobbyists', but it IS targeted at tech early adopters/hardcore gamers. Give it a few more years and I'm sure the price will slowly come down.