HTC has kept the price of the Vive from us long enough! While at Mobile World Congress the team let the cat out of the bag and officially announced the Vive’s price and all the features those dollars will get you. The price of HTC and Valve’s state-of-the-art virtual reality system is going to be $799 US dollars with the price possibly varying per country and with tax/shipping costs.
We anticipated the cost to be a bit above the cost of the Oculus Rift, but less than $1000 and the confirmed price is right in the middle. The included hardware will be the HMD, two wireless controllers, two lighthouses for tracking.
HTC has outdone themselves by adding so much technology into a beautiful package. Speaking of the package, for a limited time HTC is going to include two fully-fledged VR experiences to get you started. Those titles are:
- Job Simulator: The 2050 Archives,by Owlchemy Labs: In a firmly tongue-in-cheek world where robots have replaced all human jobs, step into the ‘Job Simulator’ to learn what it was like ‘to job’.
- Fantastic Contraption, by Northway Games in collaboration with Radial Games: Imagine walking around a grassy island floating in the sky, building a machine the size of a horse with your own hands, and then watching it roll out into the world.
Here’s a teaser video of Fantastic Contraption using early Vive tech:
Along with the Vive’s polished Head Mounted Display (HMD) with a front facing camera that blends reality with the virtual, brighter displays for deeper immersion, and wireless haptic feedback controllers HTC has added Vive Phone Services.
HTC bridges another gap by extending your phone into the virtual environment. The Vive allows you to receive and respond to both incoming and missed calls, get text messages and send quick replies and check upcoming calendar invites directly through the headset, it creates a hybrid reality opening up a whole new world of possibilities for both consumers and businesses.
The Vive we saw at CES will be the same design shipping at launch. The only changes until then, if any, will be software tweaks and all future updates will be passed along through the SteamVR platform which is HTC’s main method for delivering content to Vive with.
HTC specifically says pre-orders for the Vive will go live at 10AM ET on February 29th and will begin to ship on the 1st of April.
Now that you know the price of the Vive we want to know if you will be first in line to buy the Vive online.
