Availability and Accessibility
Unfortunately, availability is where the virtual headsets have really suffered in establishing themselves in 2016. For the most part, managing to get one of these in your hands, at least during the couple of months following each headset’s launch, was near-impossible. As this is being written, Sony’s PSVR, the potential sales leader of the three virtual reality systems, still appears to be out of stock just about everywhere. Both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive suffered serious backlogs when pre-orders were first made available. However, just as the Vive and Rift went through the same issue and are now far easier to get hold of, you can expect to see more of Sony’s system in 2017.
One of the major contentions that both Oculus Rift and HTC Vive must overcome, and Oculus has already started working towards, is making these systems more accessible in terms of the power required to run them. Both of these systems needed some pretty powerful PCs running them if you were going to have any chance of smooth sailing with your VR headset. While Oculus has solved this with its new minimum specs, Vive still remains the ‘premium’ headset with the more demanding specs, the heftier price tag, and the slightly better experience. With Rift becoming more accessible with its minimum specs, it’ll be interesting to see if this, indeed, opens up the door to more adopters in the early months of 2017.
