I am briefly wondering what an interesting VR setup would cost me. Let's say a baseline of "play Beat Sabre" and "watch myself dance around in VRChat wearing a cool avatar that I might have made myself".
I've only got a Mac so any PC involved would be part of the setup cost along with the headset/controls/trackers.
@anthracite unfortunately VRChat has no Mac client so you'd need whatever software they've got now to let you run Windows on it, or similar. A Quest 2 costs about $400 brand new but requires a Facebook account. my advice for these is to start with a second hand HTC Vive set.
huh, tbh the $1100 XR Elite sounds pretty close to the amount of money I was vaguely thinking felt like the hardest limit I'd want to pay for the whole computer/headset/trackers deal.
@anthracite oh dang i thought your budget was way lower. if you wanna buy new the Valve Index is probably the way to go. It's got the best controllers and you'd be surprised just how important that becomes in something like VRChat. it's also cheaper at $1000 for a full set including lighthouses for positional tracking.
if you want Full Body Tracking, apparently using a Kinect is a viable way of doing it.
I haven't really defined a budget yet, though $1k is definitely feeling like it's close to the max. $2k is right out, and 1.5 is pushing it.
I wonder if the Leap Motion I have sitting around unused could be pressed into service for tracking.
...and adding in a couple k to the $1k Valve Index for a Serious Gamer Rig is definitely over the line, yipes.
@anthracite @PsyChuan couple k? We built our desktop for, maybe $600ish?, all new parts except for the GPU which is an old RX 580 that we got off eBay.
And entry-level new GPUs are in the $200 range I think – no idea whether they can do VR, but our RX 580 can supposedly do low-end VR and newer cards are faster.
@anthracite @PsyChuan (we have no headset, so we can't actually test VR)