The HTC Vive was labeled with an official price tag of $799 in the United States just recently, but the device maker hasn't given out how much it'll cost in other countries – until now.
Right off the bat, early UK adopters will be able to get their hands on the virtual reality headset for £689. The device will go for €899 pretty much everywhere in Europe, from Belgium and Denmark to Spain and Switzerland, and it'll hold back consumers by $899 U.S. dollars in Australia, $1,149 CAD in Canada and $949 U.S. dollars in New Zealand. As for the Asian countries, the Vive will cost ¥6,888 CNY in China, ¥111,999 JPY in Japan and NT$28,288 in Taiwan.
HTC will start accepting Vive preorders on Monday (Feb. 29) at 10:00 a.m. ET, and payments can be made via credit card or PayPal. The headset will be limited to one unit for each customer.
For a limited time only, the company is also offering Fantastic Contraption and Job Simulator. To make the pot sweeter, it's also throwing in Google's Tilt Brush, an application that allows the user to paint in a 3D environment inside the virtual reality world. It's "painting from a new perspective."
As everyone can see, the most affordable pricing out of the bunch is for the United States, but that's because the sales tax hasn't been crunched in that figure yet. Well, it's also partly because the U.S. dollar is doing well in the currency game. To put things into perspective, £689 is about $955, ¥111,999 JPY is approximately $992 and ¥6,888 CNY is roughly $1,047.
The Vive will come with two 360-degree tracking and movement sensors plus two-position tracking controllers along with a Vive Link Box and some Vive ear buds out of the box. It sports a 2,160 x 1,200 resolution, pushing out 1,080 x 1,200 per eye through a dual OLED setup. The headset also boasts a 90 Hz refresh rate and a 110-degree field of view.
Compared to the Oculus Rift, the Vive has a couple of technological advantages over it, not to mention Vive Phone Services is quite the nifty feature, too.
Before placing that order, it's a good idea to make sure that your rig can handle it. The Vive demands at least an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 or an AMD Radeon R9 290 and an Intel i5-4590, but it only needs a mere 4 GB worth of RAM to work and just a single USB 2.0 port.
