The cost of virtual reality: Expensive.
The Price for the Oculus Rift Virtual Reality Headset: $599
Virtual reality isn’t cheap.
Kurt Wagner
Facebook-owned Oculus opened preorders for its new virtual reality headset, Oculus Rift, on Wednesday morning after years of pumping air into the product. Oculus showed off Rift and most of the features back at a press event in June. The few remaining unknowns were the cost and the actual shipping date.
Well not anymore! Buying an Oculus Rift headset will cost you a cool $599, according to the preorder website, and the devices are set to ship in March of this year. Update: It looks like the units shipping in March are already sold out. The current shipping date on the site now reads April 2016.
The $599 total cost includes two games, an Oculus remote and an Xbox One Controller (for gaming). Not included: A high-powered Windows PC. The shop page offers a downloadable tool to check if your PC will be compatible with the Rift, but most won’t be; you need special hardware, not a software update, to power virtual reality.
You can buy the necessary PC from Oculus, too, though. Consumers can wait until February to buy a headset/PC bundle for $1,499 or get the headset today and tack on the $900 PC later, according to the company website.
That makes the Rift a pricey option for the general consumer still trying to decide if VR is worth his time. For comparison, the Samsung Gear VR headset, a lower-end headset that requires a Samsung smartphone to operate, is selling for a modest $99 retail.
The Oculus Rift price is not a surprise, though. Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe said the headset/PC package would cost around $1500 when he spoke at Re/code’s annual Code conference back in May (although it wasn’t clear at the time how much the headset would cost on its own). So while the Rift won’t be kind to your wallet, you had fair warning.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
