The real cost of using an Oculus Rift

It seems there's another technological revolution on the way, with the retail release of the Oculus Rift planned for early in 2016. Virtual Reality is back, and your games and movies will never be the same again.

That's certainly the plan, but three years on from the Oculus Rift Kickstarter campaign most people still don't have the slighest idea what Virtual Reality can really do for them. And that might continue to be the case, as we're starting to learn just how much it will cost to get on the Oculus train. And it isn't cheap. Company CEO Brendan Iribe has been talking about the cost of getting a headset and the PC required to run the software, and the figure he's ballparking is $1500. You'll need a fairly hefty PC to run what amounts to two HD images at the same time and do all the other fancy processing, and Oculus previously released what they consider to be the basic PC specs. Of course, getting a good PC does have lots of other uses, provided you have the room for a beige box and are interested in that hardware but this is going to cause some problems for people who will need to buy all new components from scratch. And we don't yet know the cost of the headset alone, though its like to be in the region of $300-400. With most of a year to go, it remains to be seen how Oculus handles this issue and, more importantly, whether the public at large actually gets onboard with Virtual Reality when it finally becomes available. The Oculus Rift will be available to buy in early 2016.

The real cost of using an Oculus Rift on ClickOnline.com