Not necessarily. As always, the answer is "it depends".

If you're looking to get into high-end, room-scale VR with hand-tracked controllers and high-fidelity graphics, then yes. You need a Windows 10 PC with as much RAM, CPU, and GPU as you can muster. Plan on spending at least USD 2000 on a custom-built PC.

If you're looking to get into smartphone-based AR, you can use practically anything to write the code, and there are plenty of tools to be able to build completely cross-platform apps. But you will want a flagship phone, whether that's the latest iPhone or one of the Androids with a powerful CPU and GPU. AR is very CPU intensive. While there have been demonstrations of SLAM on GPUs, all of the implementations I'm aware of are doing it on the CPU.

Where should you start? Well, without hand-tracking of some kind, I don't really consider it VR. Google Cardboard, Google Daydream, Samsung Gear VR, and Oculus Rift without the Touch controllers are all glorified 2D interfaces. They don't provide anything actually new in terms of being able to interact with the application.

Smartphone-based AR apps will probably reach a wider audience sooner than VR. But if Microsoft's approach to headsets and Windows Holographic pays off, I think that is not a perpetual state of affairs. Ideally, this gets down to the size of a pair of sunglasses (which is very nearly the case already). At that point, smartphone-based AR is going to be a quaint novelty.

2000 USD is too high for the cost of a VR PC. I built a PC in fall 2016 that was more powerful than what was required for VR and it cost me around $1200. Additionally there are companies advertising "VR Ready PCs" that come with an Oculus headset for around USD 1,000. See this article: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/01/dont-look-now-but-ocu...

You used the language "at least" implying that you had a fair amount of certainty that that's the minimum cost of a VR PC. Additionally you were off by at least a factor of 2, which is outside a rough ballpark. While it might seem picky the amount of people who would decide to commit 2k to VR is far lower than those who would commit 1k, so in this case it is important to be accurate.

$1000 might be good enough for playing the Vive and Rift games that launched with the platform. If that's all you want, I guess you're not quite so annoyingly pedantic as you first seem. But that's a really narrow use case. "I'd like to play only the worst VR games, please. Let's forget about keeping up with the market. That's not for me."

If you're just getting in as a consumer, a $1000 VR-capable PC is going to age very quickly. In my experience, the only way to get any sort of legs out of a high-end purchase is to buy the top of the line. Unless you're buying right before a major product release, my experience has been that you end up spending less year over year than if you try to commoditize.

But I took the person I was replying to to be asking about getting in as a developer, considering the blog post is about getting in as a developer, and considering this site is full of developers. $2000 has been very consistently the price one pays for "top of the line PC with parts that aren't going to shit the bed". You should not cheap out on a development PC for VR. You're going to be doing a lot of experimenting and running up against performance limits during development. You should have some headroom to avoid giving yourself a headache for the day.

But go ahead. Buy a Radeon GPU. Have fun not being able to use your VR headset right before a crucial demo because of some obscure driver issue. Cheap out on a crappy power supply. See how many investors you get for our VR startup when your demo PC won't even start.

We may just have different approaches to this sort of thing.

My personal experience has been that my VR development PC, which cost me around $1200 in the fall, has been great. I opted for parts just below the top of the line because I thought that would be the sweet spot. (I opted for a GTX 1070 rather than a 1080 for example). I have had no issues so far, but perhaps over the longer term I'll wish I had opted for the top of the line build. That is not the case yet. I see your point about buying for the long term savings rather than needing to upgrade every year. I haven't yet had issues with that but that may be true over a longer period of time.

Additionally, if you choose to buy a PC prebuilt rather than building it yourself it costs a lot more so your price range becomes more accurate than my estimates. That said if I were to give a cost estimate to someone who wanted to get a PC for VR development I'd tell them they can build a PC that can run everything for around $1200 USD and it would be completely adequate for development work for at least a year or two. As someone pointed out above that doesn't include the headsets, so the whole endeavour is still quite expensive.

If you include the price of the headset with a serious VR development computer, you get pretty close to $2,000 pretty quickly.

That is true. I was discussing just the cost of the PC in the above comments, but when I built my development PC and bought a Vive it ended up costing me over 2k USD after taxes.

Check out the Samsung Gear VR and Google Daydream if you have a compatible smartphone. If you don't you can use Google Cardboard (I believe even with iOS).

From a development standpoint the main difference between mobile headsets and PC headsets is that mobile VR doesn't track the physical position of your head or hands. However you can still learn a ton and make a lot of cool things with them.

You can just download VR prototyping kits for Unity or Unreal, you don't even need a headset.

I have a Google Pixel and Google Daydream and am an Android programmer.

If you have these things you can go into Google's Daydream store and download some Daydream apps, free or paid. I have done so and virtually every app has a logo somewhere said made with Unity. Each app seems to be multi-platform - it is made with Unity, and exported to Google Daydream, Oculus, Gear VR etc.

I programmed a basic OpenGLES shape in Android Studio for Daydream, but there was a lot that was lacking. I suspect most people will use Unity, and target the various VR platforms.

So in general, the answer is you need a platform Unity is on. Which in production is MacOS and Windows, although they have a Linux beta from what I understand.

Nope. I just recently did a VR project for school, and we did it all with a Gear VR using Samsung phone's. The interfaces aren't the best, but you can make things fairly portable so you could always move to a PC later if you wanted to.

At the moment, if you want the real VR with positional 6 DOF tracking, yes.

No! To get started, there are many opportunities for VR dev on smartphones. You can even start working with hand-tracking with the new Samsung Gear/Google Daydream!

However, you do need a PC with a pretty good GPU if you want to get serious about playing with more advanced systems like the Vive and the Rift. (This was a great resource for me when I built my PC! http://www.logicalincrements.com/articles/vrguide)