As I've said in the past, I'd be pleasantly surprised if I become a "futurist" by Christmas. But I expected this going in. If it at least pushes one of the big players to significantly up their game sooner rather than later, I'm not complaining...
I think it has. The Vive Pro came as a surprise and if it wasn't for the Odyssey and the Pimax I don't reckon HTC would have bothered.
I saw an image of how Elite Dangerous looks in a Pimax the other day and it did grab my attention.
The problem for me is the cost, and the law of diminishing returns.
I spent a lot on my Oculus stuff - most of it at launch prices. But that, for my £700 or whatever it was, took me from having no consumer release VR to having an Oculus Rift, Touch etc.
But to shell out another £700 or whatever it will be to go from having consumer VR to having consumer VR with an improvement in image quality, that's a big ask.
Will the Pimax, and the Vive Pro for that matter, have the kind of widespread appeal to people who already have VR?
For people with an existing Vive setup, yes as they're effectively drop-in HMD replacements. For Rift and Mixed Reality owners, probably not as you'd need to purchase compatible controllers and lighthouses as well which makes the cost even more exorbitant.
But that's what I mean. Diminishing returns.
Your first £500 gets you the entire Vive setup. Wands, tracking, HMD. You go from having nothing to having a VR setup.
But then another - what is it? £800? for exactly the same setup, just slightly better HMD?
Diminishing returns. I get a lot less for my additional £800 than I did for my initial £500.
This is true and it would be way to rich for my blood.... But that is true of many things. Look at the usual prices of GPUs (it's a bit out of wack right now ) but usually it is quite normal to pay almost 100% extra cost for a 20% increase in performance
Or look at the cost of TVs a Sony 65xf9005 compared to 75xf9005. Those last 10inches cost a lot