[lukeschlather]

The cheaper devices already exist. An Oculus Quest is basically that. However I don't think the refresh rate or image quality is really up to scratch.

And if this were just a question of image quality, I wouldn't make a big deal about it, but poor image quality means something resembling motion sickness will set in pretty quickly, even if you're just watching a video.

One time I tried to do some yoga while watching TV with an Oculus Go and I stopped immediately, huge mistake, never trying that again. But based on my knowledge of the tech it seems possible that such a thing might be possible at a $3000 price point.

If the external cameras are low enough latency that I could basically have a TV floating at the perfect viewing distance while walking around and doing chores or exercising I would buy one in a heartbeat. Though I'm not sure that's even possible or if that's just guaranteed motion sickness. I would say if it's possible, it's definitely not going to be possible for under $2000, at least not for 3-5 years.

[judge2020]

The problem with image quality is that you either need to use the built-in desktop view, or an app that captures and pipes your desktop view to your VR headset. Both of these approaches don't do any upscaling of your monitor's resolution, so if your monitor itself isn't 4k you have to do one of two things:

- use a vr video viewer to view downloaded 4k content

- use Mirage desktop to create a virtual desktop[0], then start oculus/steamvr, and use that to stream the 4k desktop view. this isn't actually made for regular vr, though, so i don't consider it a great solution

As a side note, you can't view DRM-protected content with any current solution (maybe other than with webvr, but I haven't seen Netflix add a VR button yet), so the only way to actually watch content is via piracy - not something trivial to get into for people without the time to maintain a torrent client+VPN+Plex setup.

0: https://www.mirage-app.com/

[ants_a]

The trouble with VR video and Oculus Go is that 3-DOF has high degree of discomfort when you try to move and the world seems to move with you. There has been some interesting work on synthesizing new viewpoints using deep learning with rather impressive results. That is something that could bring a level of immersion comparable to 3D content to video sources.