Oculus Plan to Unveil $200 Standalone Wireless VR Headset in 2018

[Tbone]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-13/facebook-said-to-plan-200-wireless-oculus-vr-headset-for-2018

Facebook Inc. is taking another stab at turning its Oculus Rift virtual reality headset into a mass-market phenomenon. Later this year, the company plans to unveil a cheaper, wireless device that the company is betting will popularize VR the way Apple did the smartphone.

Currently VR hardware comes in two flavors: cheap headsets that turn smartphones into virtual reality players (like Samsung’s $130 Gear VR) and high-end gaming rigs (like Facebook’s $400 Oculus Rift) that hook up to $1,000-plus desktop computers. Facebook’s new headset is designed to bridge the gap -- a device that will sell for as little as $200 and need not be tethered to a PC or phone, according to people familiar with its development. It will ship next year and represent an entirely new category.

It sounds like this will be basically what the Gameboy was to the SNES. The benefit here is that you can take VR anywhere without the hassle of fiddling with your phone. The downside is that, currently, there's no plans for it to have positional tracking - meaning you'll be looking at the GearVR library of apps rather than the PC Rift's more robust offering.

This was teased about the positional tracking, however:

A future version of the product will have that technology, according to a person familiar with the plans.