Valve’s Index VR headset will officially cost $999, on sale tomorrow - The Verge

You may recall that Valve has its own virtual reality headset, the Valve Index, which it surprise-revealed one month ago. And you might even remember that Valve said preorders will begin tomorrow, May 1st, and ship this June. Now, Valve is fully detailing the Index headset for the first time, and revealing exactly how much it will cost: $999.

That’s a relatively high price by today’s VR headset standards — Facebook just announced the Oculus Quest and Oculus Rift S will ship May 21st for $399 — but Valve will also let you buy parts piecemeal if you need, which is rather nice. If you’ve already got a Vive or Vive Pro and / or don’t need the latest Knuckles controllers, you won’t necessarily need to spend that whole $999 to get started.

Here’s the whole price list right now:

And here’s your best look yet at the Valve Index, courtesy of Valve’s official photos:

Like the HTC Vive before it, which was co-designed with Valve, the Vive Pro will still be a tethered experience with a 5-meter cable that plugs into your beefy gaming PC, and one that uses the company’s laser-firing Lighthouse base stations to figure out where the headset is at any given time, and thus let you walk around a room’s worth of space in VR. It’s not using cameras for inside-out tracking; Valve says the twin stereo RGB cameras here are designed for passthrough (letting you see the real world through the headset) and for whatever the computer vision community can dream up.

Instead, Valve says the Index’s focus is on delivering the highest fidelity VR experience possible, meaning improved lenses, screens, and audio — which in this case actually includes a pair of 1440 x 1600-resolution RGB LCDs, rather than the higher-res OLED screens much of the competition is using. But Valve says its screens run faster — 120Hz, with an experimental 144Hz mode — and are better at combating the “screen door effect” and blurry-when-you-move-your-head persistence issues that first-gen VR headsets struggled with.

The Valve Index also has an IPD slider to adjust for the distance between your eyes, something none other than Oculus founder Palmer Luckey criticized the new Rift S for leaving out, and lenses that Valve says offers a 20-degree larger field of view than the HTC Vive “for typical users”.

Interestingly, Valve says the built-in headphones we saw in leaked images aren’t actually headphones — they’re speakers, and ones designed not to touch your ears, instead firing their sound towards your head. That’s similar to how Microsoft’s HoloLens visors produce audio, and it means that while people around you could theoretically hear what you’re doing, there’ll be less adjustment needed to get that audio aligned with your ears. There’s also a 3.5mm headphone jack for private listening.

Our sister site Polygon has an early hands-on with the Valve Index, which you can check out while I continue to flesh this post. Unfortunately, Polygon says that Valve is still being tight-lipped about its promised three full-length virtual reality games, meaning there aren’t currently any big Valve-exclusive titles to tempt you into VR quite yet.

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