Oculus Rift controllers Oculus Touch to cost £190 in UK - report
Now on equal price-pegging with HTC Vive.
It looks like the long-awaited Oculus Touch controllers will cost £190 in the UK, which means, after all that price posturing, the full Oculus Rift virtual reality experience will be expensive as HTC Vive's.
HTC Vive costs £759 in the UK following the Brexit price jump. Oculus Rift costs £549 in the UK, and with the £190 Oculus Touch on top totals £739.
The £190 price comes from a poster seen in the big Stratford Westfield GAME store - GAME being the dominant video game shop chain in the UK. Engadget reporter Nick Summers took a picture of the poster and verified the photo location to me this morning.
I phoned the Stratford Westfield GAME store but a shop assistant told me there was no such poster there now. The shop assistant couldn't find Oculus Touch price (or date) in the store's computer database. Oculus declined to comment when contacted by Eurogamer. I'm waiting to hear back from GAME PR.
The Oculus Touch controllers bring a player's hands into the virtual world, just like the HTC Vive controllers do. It's a whole body-step deeper into virtual reality - and these controllers have been the key differentiator between what Vive and Rift offer at the moment. Oculus Touch finally puts them on even footing.
The Oculus Touch controllers come with an extra sensor for your room, and there will be a suite of virtual reality experiences at launch to make use of Touch. I played those experiences on Oculus Touch at Gamescom 2015 and was blown away. The most impressive part was having another person in the virtual reality with you - especially when that person shrunk me with a shrink-ray gun, and then held a cuddly toy up for me to punch like some kind of giant boxing bag. Oli played and wrote about the same Oculus Touch demo a month earlier, and he was similarly impressed.
There's no release date for Oculus Touch other than second-half of 2016. Presumably sometime in the run-up to Christmas - October/November - would make sense. Eurogamer has both a review of Oculus Rift and a review of HTC Vive.
Sony's PlayStation VR will launch 13th October for £349.99, which is a lot cheaper than both the PC virtual reality headsets. But in order to get a kind of experience similar to Oculus Touch and HTC Vive you will need a sold-separately PlayStation Camera and the Move controllers.