At the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco this week, thousands gathered to discuss the art and tech of creating video games. But the first two days were dubbed VRDC, a sure sign that virtual reality had grown into an important component of gaming’s future. With everything that was announced this week, it is not difficult to see why.
Sony revealed that PlayStation VR would be released in October, at $399. Preorders will start Tuesday 3/22. The camera and PlayStation Move controllers would need to be bought separately, for those who don’t already own them—a $499 bundle adds them to the headset. The final design and specs of PSVR were also shown, though those did not differ much from previous prototypes.
All in, PlayStation 4 owners will need to spend about $500—which is pretty competitive with Oculus Rift’s $599 price point (without the Touch motion controls coming later this year) and HTC Vive’s $799 price tag, though both require a ~$1000 PC as well. A handful of games were shown, like Rez Infinite (a psychedelic shooter), Xing: The Land Beyond (an exploration adventure game) and Tumble (a physics-based puzzle game), with more likely to debut in June at the annual E3 video game convention.
Sony wasn’t the only one to debut hardware. Computer chip maker AMD announced the Sulon Q, a standalone virtual reality headset powered by the company’s hardware. It will support Augmented Reality as well, where graphics are overlaid on top of the real world and react to your movement. It will be untethered to a PC, which will likely make it more expensive, but far more mobile. AMD has said the Sulon will be released in the Spring.
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