[Gravityloss]

To a not-so-knowledgeable person like myself, this seems like a bubble. Is it so hard to wire up some displays, optics and gyros? 2 billion? What could you do in-house or with a new team with, say 20 million?

Maybe it is so hard.

[booruguru]

That's like saying the iPhone is just a touch screen with a battery and a CPU.

VR has been nothing more than a pipe dream for decades. But the problem isn't just merely optics and gyros...it also needs to be lightweight and super-responsive in order to prevent headaches, motion sickness, and disorientation. And also I think there are some complicated things they have to do in order to simulate stereo vision.

These challenges are hardly trivial and there's still a lot that needs to be learned in order to refine the technology.

$2 billion is a lot of money, more than it would cost to develop from scratch. But, in the past, others have tried to perfect this technology and failed.

Facebook (or Apple or Google or Microsoft) could spend $2 billion developing their own VR hardware and easily end up with nothing more than vaporware. Occulus Rift has the benefit of being a real product that works...while only being a few iterations away from a consumer-ready product.

[integraton]

Two informative decks from Michael Abrash:

http://media.steampowered.com/apps/abrashblog/Abrash%20Dev%2...

http://media.steampowered.com/apps/valve/2013/MAbrashGDC2013...

[Gravityloss]

Thanks, that's a great response. Seems like higher refresh rates and better sensors could solve a lot.

Has everybody else except the few panel makers resigned on actually creating advances in display technologies? Seems theoretically OLED tech can go to 100,000 Hz.

[kevingadd]

People have been trying to get VR right for decades, and Oculus's developer units were probably the first remotely accessible devices to let you experience something that approximates good VR.

Reportedly the second-generation oculus devices are even better.

The criteria for 'good' here are things like low latency, good position tracking, low display persistence, etc. Getting those things wrong causes headaches, nausea...

[Pxtl]

> People have been trying to get VR right for decades,

Because display technology wasn't there yet. The thing that made Oculus possible wasn't some miraculous development at Oculus VR, but the fact that smartphones created a massive market of low-cost high-quality super-high-pixel-density tiny screens.

[kevingadd]

The cellphone market pushing displays forward was only one ingredient. Cellphones don't have low-latency, low-persistence displays, and they don't have the kind of specialized optics needed for a VR headset, and they don't do low-latency high-precision orientation/position tracking.

[clef]

That's like saying whatsapp is a fancied-up text messaging app..wait, it is.

[wmf]

Don't forget the developer ecosystem. Oh wait.