VR-ready PC for Oculus Rift Will Cost About $1000!

Oculus Rift will begin to ship sometime in early 2016. This means that you have all the time in the world to upgrade your PC so it can run the VR toy.

Oculus Rift CEO Brendan Iribe has been reported of saying at the Re/code conference that – ” We are looking at an all-in price, if you have to go out and actually need to buy a new computer and you’re going to buy the Rift… at most you should be in that $1,500 range.”

This isn’t bad to be honest.

Previous Oculus Rift development kits have been priced at $350 – we don’t expect it to go any higher than $400; so a $1000 PC rig sounds more than decent.

These are the technical specifications that you need to base your new PC on.

NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater

Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater

8GB+ RAM

Windows 7 SP1 or newer

2x USB 3.0 ports

HDMI 1.3 video output supporting a 297MHz clock via a direct output architecture

With time, we expect those pieces of hardware to drop their price, and you can bet your hiney that in 2016 you’ll pay less than the $1000 mentioned cost.

Oculus Rift Chieft Architect Atman Binstock has said earlier this month that these specifications will apply for the entirety of the product’s life span, and consumers shouldn’t worry that besides upgrading their VR gear, they should also upgrade their PC. It is unknown at the moment if Oculus Rift owners will have to upgrade their device’s components with time.

It’s all in a mist at this point – nothing is clear. We truly hope that these are the specifications, and that the price is cemented, but who really knows?!

Can Oculus Rift deliver?

What we do know is that Oculus Rift is trying to gain the lead. The company has recently bought a firm that reconstructs 3D scenes in real time – Surreal Vision. It sure comes in handy when big daddy Facebook opens its pockets. Their official blog post reads – ” Great scene reconstruction will enable a new level of presence and telepresence, allowing you to move around the real world and interact with real-world objects from within VR.” Sure Oculus, buy everything you can – just release a proper product.

I’m no that sceptical, and I’m not that optimistic either. When it comes to jumping on the hype-train I rather remain suspicious on where we’re going, and how long the trip will last. At this point, we’re seeing so much news regarding virtual reality. It seems like every big industry behemoth has a virtual reality gear in the makings.

“We’re developing breakthrough techniques to capture, interpret, manage, analyse, and finally reproject in real-time a model of reality back to the user in a way that feels real, creating a new, mixed reality that brings together the virtual and real worlds.” it concludes the blog post.

And I proclaim myself the king of Sweden. Big expectations Oculus Rift, really big expectations.

Can the Facebook-owned VR company deliver? Or we’re being grotesquely lied to?

Image Source: 1, 2, 3

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Karen Jackson

Karen Jackson has always been passionate about technology. All the way through high-school she immersed herself in computers and web-design. Her ambitious nature helped her become a pro in Adobe Photoshop only by watching online videos and working with the program herself. This is also the program that she mostly uses in the creation of websites at her work-place. Technological innovation and gadgets that push the boundaries of what we are comfortable with have always fascinated her, so expect to see some weird gadget reviews coming from her.