VR, or "virtual reality" if your first taste of it was 1992's The Lawnmower Man, has taken huge strides forward in the last couple of years, culminating with the recent solicitation for the Oculus Rift.
The Rift came in at both a lower than expected asking price ($599 for headset, sensor, remote, cables, Xbox One controller, EVE: Valkyrie, and Lucky's Tale) and a more depressingly probable $1,598 if you don't already have a "Rift ready PC," and are forced to buy both the PC and the Rift package.
(Most reading this will likely have to go this direction if they wish to experience it.)
Still, given the gaming capabilities that Oculus brings to the table with its VR technology, $1,598 is still cheaper than what you will likely pay for a Donkey Kong Arcade Machine.
That said, most analysts believe the price point is too high for widespread adoption at this point. However, that hasn't stopped Goldman Sachs from sharing their more optimistic long-term projections.
According to the company, reported here by Business Insider, VR tech will be bigger than television inside of 10 years.
Just how much "bigger" will it be?
According to a report from the banking firm, the VR market will generate $182 billion dollars ($110 billion hardware, $72 billion software) "compared to TVs $99 billion in 10 years," BI notes.
Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe liked that projection, and told BI that the company "definitely" aimed in the long term to "get a billion people in VR" and that "these two areas and categories will converge and deliver an incredibly comfortable VR experience in a set of sunglasses" eventually.
That could take longer than a decade to pull off, though, he acknowledged.
And that could also be where VR technology has the toughest time.
The closest thing you can use to compare virtual reality and television at this time is the difference between going to see a movie at the theaters and choosing between 3D and 2D.
