Google's Daydream VR Headset Will Reportedly Sell For $79

Google will soon be holding an event in San Francisco where it will announce the Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones. The event will also be where the company is expected to launch the Daydream VR headset, which is rumored to cost $79.

Daydream VR was first announced by Google earlier this year during the company’s I/O conference in May. The new virtual reality platform will live natively within the Android 7.0 Nougat mobile operating system and will function on smartphones that come with decent to high-end specifications.

This approach is similar to Samsung’s Gear VR and Galaxy smartphones. What the company didn’t fully disclose about Daydream was the hardware that would accompany the VR platform. At the time, Google only showed off a rough sketch of what the VR headset would look like.

A source has outed that the Daydream VR headset will sell for at least $79 and will most likely be built by HTC, according to Variety. HTC is also the same company that’s manufacturing the Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones. The headset will ship with a handheld controller that will apparently work like the Wii remote. The controller will be used for playing games as well as navigating the user interface via motion tracking.

Google has been collaborating with a number of smartphone manufacturers for them to make their devices Daydream-ready while also providing them with requirements to build VR headsets on their own. ZTE released the Axon 7 back in May and was the first handset to be considered by Google as Daydream-ready in terms of hardware. Unsurprisingly, both the Pixel and Pixel XL are expected to be the first pair of smartphones that will fully support the Daydream VR straight out of the box, as pointed out by ZDNet.

The Daydream VR headset’s $79 price tag is very competitive especially with Samsung selling its Gear VR headset for $99. Google’s first Daydream VR headset is expected to ship later this month after it’s been officially unveiled tomorrow in San Francisco along with the new Pixel smartphones.