In a move that virtually everyone predicted, Sony has announced that PlayStation VR, the add-on for the company’s PlayStation 4, will launch this Fall at a price of $399 USD / $549 CAD.
The Japanese company made the announcement at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco Tuesday afternoon.
Sony is the last major player in the virtual reality space to announce the price and release date of its platform, following Oculus’s Rift announcement in January, and HTC’s Vive announcement last month. With the Rift at $599 and the Vive at $799, Sony is certainly cornering a much more palatable price of the VR market.
The hardware itself is comprised of a 5.7-inch OLED screen running at 1080p resolution (split across both eyes) with a 120Hz refresh rate. It also has nine LEDs on the outside that let the PlayStation camera know where the player is in the space in front of the television. Somehow, Sony says, these LEDs also allow for tracking when the person is facing away from the camera.
We’ll find out just how important all this is when PlayStation VR launches later this year.