The virtual reality (VR) industry has made great strides over the past few years to bring down the entry barrier the technology faces, namely, the high-end expensive PC’s required to run the headsets. While it used to be the case that a suitable gaming rig would cost in excess of £1,000 GBP plus the headset, that’s no longer the case and devices like Oculus Quest have made VR gaming even easier to get into. Shadow, a cloud gaming service aims to make that transition into VR even more straight forward with its Shadow VR Exploration Program.
This week Shadow announced a new subscription model for its US customer base as well as new capabilities such as Ray Tracing enhanced graphics, high-speed processing and up to 1TB of storage. In amongst all of this was its Shadow VR Exploration Program designed to allow high-end PC gaming on Oculus Quest – to begin with, Shadow is interested in supporting more devices.
The initiative will launch on 1st April as a beta programme, allowing Oculus Quest owners to remotely access PC VR titles. As this is a beta there are a few requirements you need to consider before trying to signup. First, you do need to live in the US – at the moment Shadow isn’t available in the UK, its entry-level ‘Boost’ subscription is slated for release June 2020. You’ll also need a fiber connection offering download and upload speeds of 100Mbps and 20Mbps respectively. Also on the list is a 5GHz WiFi router and an Oculus Quest of course.
If all of that is met then you can signup for the beta today, with selected participants notified on 23rd March (Half-Life: Alyx day no less). This could offer a far more viable alternative to Oculus Link which still requires a PC and you lose the wireless freedom.
As for the subscription service itself, Shadow into annual and monthly subscriptions followed by three tiers depending upon the sort of performance gamers want. For example, the cheapest tier is Boost which offers GTX 1080 quality and 256GB of storage for $11.99 per month when you sign up for a 12-month plan ($14.99 when you sign up on a month by month basis). By comparison, the Infinite tier comes in at $39.99 per month (yearly) or $49.99 per month (monthly) offering RTX Titan level visuals, 32GB RAM and 1TB of storage.
As further details regarding the Shadow VR Exploration Program are released, VRFocus will let you know.
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