5 things to check before you play Virtual Reality.
1 Money: With the price of the average virtual reality headset around $300-$400 plus the price of a decent vr ready computer at around one thousand dollars you may realize that you could pay your rent and your car payment with the money it would take to set this up, and you wouldn’t even be there yet. $1300- $1400 for just the hardware. The software is another story altogether. I can only speak to SteamVR and VivePort as I have not tried windows mixed reality yet. The dollars you spend on these software applications are some hard-working dollars. There is pretty much nothing that is complete that doesn’t cost upwards of thirty bucks. Most of these projects are taking the download price and reinvesting in their projects.
2 Internet This seems like a no brainer but it’s not. For SteamVR you need an internet connection in order to load the applications. It doesn’t matter if the app is stored locally. Upon startup these apps won’t load unless they establish a secure connection with their servers.
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3 Ram 4 gb of ram. A standard ram setup should be enough to perform.
4 GPU Nividia GTX 1060 or higher I have run the HTC Vive on the GTX 1050 but the refresh rate is very slow.
5 Patience: If anything was a work in progress, it would be the infrastructure of VR. To equate it to a real wold example when I look into the vr world all I see is the framing of buildings. A lot of projects are aspirational, but most none of them are anywhere near being finished. This is why it is a good idea to realize that this is not a finish project and you will most likely be a beta tester of most of these games and applications.
It is definitely worth making the investment if you can afford it. Just make sure you do you research first.
You can listen about it more here on the vrpodcast.
If you are interested in virtual reality but don’t want to pay the full cost of a set up personally you may be able to rent a VR set up from VR Parties & Events.
Find out more here: https://www.vrparties.org
- Riley Seaburg
