As a VR developer, I'm super excited about your device. I work for a foreign language instruction service, where we teach adults in diplomatic and security service settings. We've built a VR app that lets our students meet with their instructors remotely and practice language skills in culturally-appropriate settings.
In that capacity, I've done a lot of pricing out of VR kits and evaluation of devices. It became pretty clear early on that A) our students need the simplest possible setup that we can ship to them, B) the market is still too volatile and the current dominant players are too platform-oriented to commit fully to any one headset, and C) we need to be able to iterate rapidly, on our own, away from any app store.
Balancing all of these requirements eventually led us to building a WebXR app. It runs pretty much everywhere (any VR headset that matters[0], desktop, mobile[1]). We had high hopes for the Pico Neo and the HTC Vive Focus, but we primarily target the Meta Quest 2.
Mozilla was the biggest factor in that decision to focus on the Quest 2, because they really dropped the ball with Firefox Reality. Firefox Reality's last update was over a year ago, despite many desperately needed fixes for major show-stopper defects. Stuff like not being able to handle non-default IPD without massively distorting the image. Stuff like not being able to anti-alias the framebuffer the VR context uses. Stuff like janky ImageBitmap support forcing all of our texture pre-processing into the main render thread. Lesser stuff like being based on the pre-standards WebVR API, which lacked all but the most basic of VR features.
Quest's Oculus Browser is based on Chromium, with support for some experimental WebXR features that drastically improve the experience such as the Layers extension and the high refresh rate support. The lack of a serious browser competitor to Chrome across the entire market--but especially in a greenfield market like VR, when Mozilla has Hubs as a revenue-earning concern--has been the single biggest impediment to our ability to be truly cross-platform. But now Igalia has picked up the torch with Wolvic, so we're looking forward to seeing where that goes.
Wanting to stay out of any app stores and not wanting to require our users to have to share any data (see above on who we serve, Facebook login is a hard stop), we bought 35 headsets through the Oculus for Business program over the course of last year. Then with the Meta announcement Facebook also announced they are shutting down Oculus for Business.
So needless to say, this has been a very rocky journey. An open source, high-end, standalone, not-tied-to-a-platform VR headset can't come soon enough.
I'm curious if you have any plans on making any lower spec models at a lower price point? I've found that, given all our needs, we can't get any combo of kit together for less than roughly $1000, after you add up all the licensing and accessory costs. We're really comfortable spending that amount of money per headset. PCVR is a no-go for us--we already have enough problems getting linguists to figure out how to use the Quest 2 that I'm not going to toss a tethered VR setup at them--but if we were to go there it'd be around $2000.
We'll probably be able to get by with our current fleet of headsets for at least a year, but at that point we're going to be looking at depreciating them out. We have enough to cover about 10% of our student body at any one time, which is more than enough now, but my hope is to grow the app and start encouraging instructors to use VR as well. We basically choose the number of headsets we have based on how much we can afford, and then we push it out to students based on how many we have available, so any reduction in price is directly transferable to growth for us.
[0] I don't know of any currently that don't have some browser support available, though see my notes on Firefox later.
[1] Minus iOS, for well-known reasons, but that might be getting better soon. Not that it matters, nobody is using it that way.
In that capacity, I've done a lot of pricing out of VR kits and evaluation of devices. It became pretty clear early on that A) our students need the simplest possible setup that we can ship to them, B) the market is still too volatile and the current dominant players are too platform-oriented to commit fully to any one headset, and C) we need to be able to iterate rapidly, on our own, away from any app store.
Balancing all of these requirements eventually led us to building a WebXR app. It runs pretty much everywhere (any VR headset that matters[0], desktop, mobile[1]). We had high hopes for the Pico Neo and the HTC Vive Focus, but we primarily target the Meta Quest 2.
Mozilla was the biggest factor in that decision to focus on the Quest 2, because they really dropped the ball with Firefox Reality. Firefox Reality's last update was over a year ago, despite many desperately needed fixes for major show-stopper defects. Stuff like not being able to handle non-default IPD without massively distorting the image. Stuff like not being able to anti-alias the framebuffer the VR context uses. Stuff like janky ImageBitmap support forcing all of our texture pre-processing into the main render thread. Lesser stuff like being based on the pre-standards WebVR API, which lacked all but the most basic of VR features.
Quest's Oculus Browser is based on Chromium, with support for some experimental WebXR features that drastically improve the experience such as the Layers extension and the high refresh rate support. The lack of a serious browser competitor to Chrome across the entire market--but especially in a greenfield market like VR, when Mozilla has Hubs as a revenue-earning concern--has been the single biggest impediment to our ability to be truly cross-platform. But now Igalia has picked up the torch with Wolvic, so we're looking forward to seeing where that goes.
Wanting to stay out of any app stores and not wanting to require our users to have to share any data (see above on who we serve, Facebook login is a hard stop), we bought 35 headsets through the Oculus for Business program over the course of last year. Then with the Meta announcement Facebook also announced they are shutting down Oculus for Business.
So needless to say, this has been a very rocky journey. An open source, high-end, standalone, not-tied-to-a-platform VR headset can't come soon enough.
I'm curious if you have any plans on making any lower spec models at a lower price point? I've found that, given all our needs, we can't get any combo of kit together for less than roughly $1000, after you add up all the licensing and accessory costs. We're really comfortable spending that amount of money per headset. PCVR is a no-go for us--we already have enough problems getting linguists to figure out how to use the Quest 2 that I'm not going to toss a tethered VR setup at them--but if we were to go there it'd be around $2000.
We'll probably be able to get by with our current fleet of headsets for at least a year, but at that point we're going to be looking at depreciating them out. We have enough to cover about 10% of our student body at any one time, which is more than enough now, but my hope is to grow the app and start encouraging instructors to use VR as well. We basically choose the number of headsets we have based on how much we can afford, and then we push it out to students based on how many we have available, so any reduction in price is directly transferable to growth for us.
[0] I don't know of any currently that don't have some browser support available, though see my notes on Firefox later.
[1] Minus iOS, for well-known reasons, but that might be getting better soon. Not that it matters, nobody is using it that way.