The Oculus Rift virtual reality headset is an amazing piece of technology that we've been drooling over for months. Currently only available as a $300 development kit, how will it eventually be sold to the public? Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe says he'd like to have a model that allows user to get the headset for free.
“The lower the price point, the wider the audience,” he said. “We have all kinds of fantasy ideas. We’d love it to be free one day, so how do we get it as close to free as possible? Obviously it won’t be that in the beginning. We’re targeting the $300 price point right now but there’s the potential that it could get much less expensive with a few different relationships and strategies.”
Oculus would like to subsidize its hardware the same way that Microsoft and Sony can because there's "enough money to be made on software and other areas, then there’s the potential that this, in partnership, could get subsidized.”
“We’re not there yet, but we’re sitting there thinking all the time, how can we make this free? You want everybody to play it and the cheaper it is, the more people are going to go out and buy it. Today it’s a $300 dev kit but we’re thinking about how to get it out to as many people as possible.”
We love this idea, but it's pretty far on the horizon. For now the retail version has no release date, so you'll have to settle to watching developers cat-paw the air on YouTube.
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[Via Edge]
