Oculus Go and a new lower price point – Oculus Connect Announcements

Oculus hosted their Connect event last night and made several big announcements including lower prices and content from Pixar.

A lower price comes hot on the heels of HTC lowering the price of the Vive to £599. The Oculus was still cheaper at £499, but has now been officially reduced to £399. That lower price gets you the headset and two Oculus Touch controllers, so that’s a pretty good deal for home VR.

Also announced was Oculus’ new Go headset, a completely untethered device that doesn’t even require a separate mobile device (like Samsung Gear VR). This is set to be priced at £199 and will feature orientation tracking and will come with a 3DOF controller.

In a night full of announcements Oculus also revealed what they’re calling Project Santa Cruz, another untethered headset, but this one tracks your position and comes with a 6DOF controller for true hand presence.

In software announcements

• A partnership with Pixar is set to bring their new film Coco to Rift and Gear VR as a VR experience in November. Rift will get it on November 17 and Gear VR on November 22 which is when the film is released.
• Launching on Halloween is also a Stranger things tie-in VR experience, coming just in time for the new series on Netflix (which of course, I am looking forward to). This will allow you to experience the Upside Down first hand, well, kinda.
• Blade Runner: 2049 gets a new VR tie in called Memory Lab. It’ll be on Rift on October 19 and Gear VR on October 26.
• You’ll be able to experience life as an Astronaut (without the immense G-Force) in Space Explorers in 2018.
• Ready at Dawn (those of The Order 1886) are bringing a zero-g FPS to VR, I expect a few lunches to be lost when Echo Combat is released in 2018.
• Respawn Entertainment (yes, the people behind Titanfall) are bringing a title to VR in 2019.

Finally a £900 Oculus for Business model was announced. The bundle would include a Rift, the touch controllers and extra facial interfaces, giving an excellent VR platform for employee training, meetings, and client experiences.

If any of the above has convinced you that now is the time to jump into Oculus then you might want to check out Adam’s review from last year (spoilers – he thought it was pretty good).