LOS ANGELES — The Oculus Rift headset, when it ships early next year, will sell for more than $350, perhaps much higher, according to its founder.
Oculus Rift’s Palmer Luckey told Road to VR the likely price for the VR headset likely will be a bit more in price than his original forecast because his company has added additional technology and custom hardware to its original design.
Last year, Luckey said that the consumer version of Oculus Rift would hover between $200-$400. His latest comments suggest that the final price will land on the higher end of the spectrum.
“The Rift is a lot of custom hardware,” Luckey said. “It’s using lenses that are some of the hardest to manufacture lenses in any consumer product you can go out and buy. It’s using custom displays we worked on with Samsung that are optimized for virtual reality, in a lot of ways even beyond what you’re actually seeing on these prototypes on the show floor. And the tracking system, the same thing.
“We could have made tradeoffs that had … honestly like 90 percent of the tracking quality we had now, and we decided to do things that would bump that quality up a little bit more even though it raised the cost of the headset."
Luckey stressed to Road to VR that Oculus Rift didn’t want to compromise on quality just to hit a lower price point.
“It would really suck if you put something out there and people were like ‘Ah man … the Rift is good, but it’s not quite there’, you know?” Luckey said. “[I] can’t tell you that it’s going to be $350, and I would say I think people are going to be happy with what they get for the price because I really do think it’s going to be that best VR headset you can buy.”
In addition to the Oculus Rift roll out scheduled for the first quarter of the year, the company also will debuting a two-piece Oculus Touch controller in the second quarter.