Oculus cut Rift price, announce standalone Go headset

One of those newfangled windows into cyberspace just got a bit cheaper, with the Oculus Rift (bundled with its motion controllers) now priced at £399/$399. That's down from the previous $499 price point, and effectively makes the summer sale a permanent deal.

They've also announced the Oculus Go, a self-contained VR headset.

They bill Oculus Go as "a totally new phase of VR Hardware", though you can take that with more than a pinch of virtual salt. You won't need to plug it into a pc or even slot in a mobile phone, with the wholeshabang packed into the goggles themselves. It'll release at some point next year for $199, and you can read all about how high-resolution, lightweight and soft it is here. It'll be compatible with Gear VR, meaning anything that gets produced for one system will work on the other.

I've always felt that the brand of VR offered by Oculus pales in comparison to the HTC Vive, with room-scale VR being much better at convincing me that I'm actually being transported to another place. It is much pricier though, and I can see the advantages of having a completely untethered headset. You can already get that with Gear VR if you have a decent phone though, so the Oculus Go will have to look considerably better if it wants to compete with the existing headset.

Oculus have also announced a substantial software update for the rift, which overhauls the UI and makes the Home - the virtual equivalent of a homescreen - more customisable. Here, have a gander for yourself:

They're both part of the Rift Core 2.0 update, which will release for free in December.