I got a Valve Index 2 months ago for VRChat. Turns out there's a huge music and dance community on VRC that spends a rediculous amount of money on various things to make it more usable.
The Index is $1000. Then some people get extra base stations which are $200 a pop. Then if you dance with full body tracking most people get Vive Tracker 3.0 which you need 3 for feet and waist. Add the $2000 gaming desktop I use for powering it and you're already at the price of the Vision Pro.
Except the Vision Pro is stand alone and has some really nice quality of life hacks that I haven't seen before in the VR space.
Also dancing in a VR rave is a pretty good workout and you get to meet tons of cool people. It sort of self selects for cool tech nerds. So far I've met a ton of amazing people through it.
There's a bit of irony there though, in that the most compelling things in VR are from gamers creating awesome things (VR Chat, modding in Beat Saber, etc), and emphatically not from giant companies providing these "experiences" that they're positive everyone will love.
As incredible as Apple's hardware looks, you are absolutely not going to have the kind of freedom you have with a piece of Valve hardware connected to your own PC. We'll be lucky if they even allow VR Chat on the platform.
They spared couple minutes on specifically Unity compatibility. That's definitely a codeword for VRChat, Virtual Desktop for SteamVR compatibility, and accommodations for local development for VRChat contents.
Some of the most intense users of the VRC platform are hacker furries so I have zero doubt that someone will figure out how to get it going. They said they are working with Unity in the keynote.
It would be weird if they totally blocked VRChat cause it's the top VR app on Steam.
The VR ecosystem feel feels a lot like the early 90s all over again. FPS mods, small community on fanatics, 90s wild west internet... Just saying, a lot of the comments here are coming from people who have never used VR. It's the obsessive kids right now that will drive the next 10-20 years, like I bet, a lot of what we do now was driven by 90s kids.
Im extremely skeptical that Apple will let this be used with VRC via PCVR. It would need to be a new build for the device with support for tracking. Plus those body trackers don’t suffer from occlusion.
The Index is $1000. Then some people get extra base stations which are $200 a pop. Then if you dance with full body tracking most people get Vive Tracker 3.0 which you need 3 for feet and waist. Add the $2000 gaming desktop I use for powering it and you're already at the price of the Vision Pro.
Except the Vision Pro is stand alone and has some really nice quality of life hacks that I haven't seen before in the VR space.
Also dancing in a VR rave is a pretty good workout and you get to meet tons of cool people. It sort of self selects for cool tech nerds. So far I've met a ton of amazing people through it.