What you need to know about Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and more:
When it comes to emerging technologies, numerous tech companies appear to be eyeing virtual reality as a veritable New World ripe for plunder. The technology itself, of course, has existed for decades in one form or another; however, it's only been able to offer little more than novel functionality for consumer-facing markets.
But VR tech has evolved dramatically in recent years and the industry is now heating up and heading towards a virtual arms race with 2016 now clearly the year that we'll see the headsets in living rooms.
Companies like Samsung, Sony, Google and Oculus are now all names associated with VR for gaming, social and mobile platforms - and they're all getting closer to bringing their products to market, but how fully realized will the products be?
Microsoft has its own offering evening the playing field with the HoloLens - which focuses on augmented reality, or holograms - leaving us to wonder whether will AR finally secure a place under the spotlight.
Let's take a look at how the virtual competition stacks up so far.
Industry leader: Facebook's Oculus Rift
If smartphone headsets are the toe-in-the-water version of VR, then Oculus is on an Olympic-diving-board level. Remember that duct-taped Oculus Rift prototype with the bulging cable headdress from 2012? That was ages before Facebook bought the tech startup for $2 billion in March, 2014. The company's previous development kit for its flagship VR headset was the industry's leader by a massive margin.
Oculus just held its second Connect conference and while it didn't reveal pricing or an official release date, there was still a lot said about the Rift. Eager consumers were already warned that a heavy duty PC is needed to explore VR with an Oculus Rift. Oculus is releasing PCs that can handle the computing power that's needed called the "Oculus Ready PC Program." In partnership with Nvidia, AMD and Intel, these PCs will be fully stocked and affordable (for a high end machine) with Oculus VP of Product Nate Mitchell promising they'll cost $1000 (about £660, AU$1400) and no higher.
Thanks to a pre-E3 2015 conference, we know the Oculus Rift will ship with anXbox One controller and Oculus Touch controllers later on.
Even better, the company has finally revealed the final consumer version of Rift along with the release date of Q1 2016. This aligns with the Project Morpheus's slated launch as well, meaning 2016 is the year we'll finally see VR thrive at home.
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