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I think they just never had a great product. Look at VR, even though the products are becoming really good, it is not hitting mainstream and this is even more n

I think they just never had a great product. Look at VR, even though the products are becoming really good, it is not hitting mainstream and this is even more niche. The startup cost is enormous, it is really hard to create good content and there is close to zero revenue since there are few users. And the users that does exist is the techie crowd that doesn't like to pay for anything.

huffmsa 7y ago
Techies will pay for hardware though. But it's got to be good hardware.
- redis_mlc 7y ago
  > Techies will pay for hardware though. But it's got to be good hardware. Technies will pay for hardware like the iPhone, that gets you laid. Not AR/VR, which makes you look like a dork and makes you seasick. FTFY.
- ChuckNorris89 7y ago
  Oculus Quest and its 3 year old mobile chipset would like to disagree. People pay for a good experience.
  - gfxgirl 7y ago
    The Quest is underpowered to run any of the truly compelling VR experiences. You can't play Half Life Alex on a Quest, nor No Man's Sky, Boneworks, SkyRim, Lone Echo, etc.... You basically get a 3 or 4 mobile class experiences and then you're done. Yes you can use the link, but then you need an NVidia 1650 RTX or better which means you're a high end gamer already and so were not this supposed "mass market" PSVR is still top selling VR and while cable and setup wise it's arguably the worst it at least has quality content.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      > The Quest is underpowered to run any of the truly compelling VR experiences. It is, but it compensates by offering good enough experience while being untethered, self-contained and quick to start up. It may not matter for teenagers with expensive gaming rigs, but it matters for working adults with families, who otherwise don't have time and space to justify a VR gaming PC build.
    - shafyy 7y ago
      You can make the same arugment for gaming on smartphones, yet it's a huge and growing market. The truth is, most people don't care about the latest and best technology. They care about great games, and often times the best games don't need the cutting edge hardware (see Minecraft, Fornite). Meanwhile, I've been playing the Echo VR alpha on my Quest (not Link) and it's fucking great.
    - whywhywhywhy 7y ago
      We just gonna ignore it runs Beatsaber and VRChat two arguably much more important and popular VR apps than that janky Skyrim port. PCVR is an evolutionary dead end, few adults want giant PC towers in their homes anymore. Even when I demoed PCVR with amazing experiences like Lone Echo people lost interest when I told them no, it wont run on your macbook, you need a tower PC. Yet I demoed them Beatsaber on the quest and a guy ordered one within a minute of taking the headset off, he demoed it at a family BBQ and two of his relatives bought it after.
    - Agenttin 7y ago
      Can anyone actually run No Man's Sky without tonnes of reprojection?
    - esyir 7y ago
      It's also untethered, which is a far bigger deal than you think. I tried playing tethered and really didn't enjoy it that much, but wireless? That gets used multiple times a week.
npunt 7y ago
The question I'm asking is why they don't have a great product. Why is it bulky, weird looking, expensive, etc? Why does their marketing fail to explain the product's value? There are tons of ways to implement AR. They chose 'general AR', the kind of thing you see on Westworld or Black Mirror. That was a bad choice, because the tech isn't there and won't be for a long time, and it only follows that the implementation was going to be bad. There are alternative ways to find a good v1 for AR. Take a look at this tweet storm for more of my thoughts on what that could be: https://twitter.com/nickpunt/status/1253087195159654400 https://twitter.com/nickpunt/status/1253087195159654400 As far as VR goes, it's further along. Quest is a quality stand-alone product, but VR is young and content is still lacking. Its also completely sold out, even before coronavirus. They aren't producing them in Sony/MS console numbers but its not a failure, just a stepping stone to success. Unlike the Rift or Vive, with cords hanging out of them and an appeal only to hardcore gamers, Quest is definitely on the path to mainstream, or mainstream-adjacent success.
- abacadaba 7y ago
  I've only used the quest for a short demo, but I have a hard time seeing what full AR gets you that a quest in camera augmented setup mode can't. What's the point of crappy half dim see-through display when you can just pipe the camera output to a normal VR screen?
  - TwoBit 7y ago
    Currently the cameras are low fidelity, but perhaps that will improve enough in the future.
    - tsbinz 7y ago
      Camera quality is the easy problem. The hard problems are getting camera latency down and dealing with depth of field and all the other things you lose when you replace the incoming light field with camera images.
      - 7y ago
chaostheory 7y ago
VR is becoming mainstream with Covid19 lockdowns. Oculus Quest keeps going out of stock and there's a long waiting list for Valve's Index.
- _-___________-_ 7y ago
  I doubt that indicates that it's becoming mainstream so much as that they had trouble scaling production up quickly enough for all the techies that all decided at once to play with VR once they were stuck inside.
flukus 7y ago
> I think they just never had a great product Bingo. If the product works as advertised I could justify the cost just in replacing existing screens, I could have a dozen virtual terminals floating around, I could replace my large TV, etc. All with zero new content required. The problem is it doesn't seem to work as advertised.
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  I’ve not looked into this but is this bad for your eyes to be focusing so close for long periods?
  - esyir 7y ago
    A few things: - VR headsets generally are similar to focusing on something further away due to the setup of the lenses. It's not literally focusing on a screen 1cm from your face. - One direction for current VR work is dynamic focus via lens arrays.
criddell 7y ago
> I think they just never had a great product. What were they showing investors and writers under NDA that caused billions of dollars and thousands of words of praise to flow? I wonder if the NDAs still in effect? I'd love for Kevin Kelly to talk more openly about what he saw and heard.
Robotbeat 7y ago
VR headsets have been sold out for months, now. I got an Oculus Quest, but only got one because I refreshed the product page (on multiple vendors) constantly for days. I think VR is starting the mainstream (at least for gaming), and Coronavirus is encouraging this (as it’s making virtually all gaming platforms a boost).
- Noos 7y ago
  no, not really. You can't get over the motion sickness thing for many people. And VR games will always need to mitigate that, which means they are going to be limited in significant ways compared to normal games.
  - Robotbeat 7y ago
    This is a misconception borne of ignorance of the current state of VR tech. Your statement was true for early VR seated games that used smooth locomotion or flight-sim-like games. Roomscale VR games don't have motion sickness because of different locomotion methods (teleport, for instance... or they take place entirely within the room volume you have available). In fact, less motion sickness than you'd experience with a large monitor and something like a dynamic flight-based combat game. Unlike a monitor, your in-game view motion is mapped perfectly to physical head motion. I've tried out about a dozen games, and the only time I had motion sickness at all was when I changed locomotion method from teleport to smooth in Rec Room.

huffmsa 7y ago

Techies will pay for hardware though. But it's got to be good hardware.

redis_mlc 7y ago
> Techies will pay for hardware though. But it's got to be good hardware. Technies will pay for hardware like the iPhone, that gets you laid. Not AR/VR, which makes you look like a dork and makes you seasick. FTFY.
ChuckNorris89 7y ago
Oculus Quest and its 3 year old mobile chipset would like to disagree. People pay for a good experience.
- gfxgirl 7y ago
  The Quest is underpowered to run any of the truly compelling VR experiences. You can't play Half Life Alex on a Quest, nor No Man's Sky, Boneworks, SkyRim, Lone Echo, etc.... You basically get a 3 or 4 mobile class experiences and then you're done. Yes you can use the link, but then you need an NVidia 1650 RTX or better which means you're a high end gamer already and so were not this supposed "mass market" PSVR is still top selling VR and while cable and setup wise it's arguably the worst it at least has quality content.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > The Quest is underpowered to run any of the truly compelling VR experiences. It is, but it compensates by offering good enough experience while being untethered, self-contained and quick to start up. It may not matter for teenagers with expensive gaming rigs, but it matters for working adults with families, who otherwise don't have time and space to justify a VR gaming PC build.
  - shafyy 7y ago
    You can make the same arugment for gaming on smartphones, yet it's a huge and growing market. The truth is, most people don't care about the latest and best technology. They care about great games, and often times the best games don't need the cutting edge hardware (see Minecraft, Fornite). Meanwhile, I've been playing the Echo VR alpha on my Quest (not Link) and it's fucking great.
  - whywhywhywhy 7y ago
    We just gonna ignore it runs Beatsaber and VRChat two arguably much more important and popular VR apps than that janky Skyrim port. PCVR is an evolutionary dead end, few adults want giant PC towers in their homes anymore. Even when I demoed PCVR with amazing experiences like Lone Echo people lost interest when I told them no, it wont run on your macbook, you need a tower PC. Yet I demoed them Beatsaber on the quest and a guy ordered one within a minute of taking the headset off, he demoed it at a family BBQ and two of his relatives bought it after.
  - Agenttin 7y ago
    Can anyone actually run No Man's Sky without tonnes of reprojection?
  - esyir 7y ago
    It's also untethered, which is a far bigger deal than you think. I tried playing tethered and really didn't enjoy it that much, but wireless? That gets used multiple times a week.

npunt 7y ago

The question I'm asking is why they don't have a great product. Why is it bulky, weird looking, expensive, etc? Why does their marketing fail to explain the product's value? There are tons of ways to implement AR. They chose 'general AR', the kind of thing you see on Westworld or Black Mirror. That was a bad choice, because the tech isn't there and won't be for a long time, and it only follows that the implementation was going to be bad. There are alternative ways to find a good v1 for AR. Take a look at this tweet storm for more of my thoughts on what that could be: https://twitter.com/nickpunt/status/1253087195159654400 https://twitter.com/nickpunt/status/1253087195159654400 As far as VR goes, it's further along. Quest is a quality stand-alone product, but VR is young and content is still lacking. Its also completely sold out, even before coronavirus. They aren't producing them in Sony/MS console numbers but its not a failure, just a stepping stone to success. Unlike the Rift or Vive, with cords hanging out of them and an appeal only to hardcore gamers, Quest is definitely on the path to mainstream, or mainstream-adjacent success.

abacadaba 7y ago
I've only used the quest for a short demo, but I have a hard time seeing what full AR gets you that a quest in camera augmented setup mode can't. What's the point of crappy half dim see-through display when you can just pipe the camera output to a normal VR screen?
- TwoBit 7y ago
  Currently the cameras are low fidelity, but perhaps that will improve enough in the future.
  - tsbinz 7y ago
    Camera quality is the easy problem. The hard problems are getting camera latency down and dealing with depth of field and all the other things you lose when you replace the incoming light field with camera images.
    - 7y ago

chaostheory 7y ago

VR is becoming mainstream with Covid19 lockdowns. Oculus Quest keeps going out of stock and there's a long waiting list for Valve's Index.

_-___________-_ 7y ago
I doubt that indicates that it's becoming mainstream so much as that they had trouble scaling production up quickly enough for all the techies that all decided at once to play with VR once they were stuck inside.

flukus 7y ago

> I think they just never had a great product Bingo. If the product works as advertised I could justify the cost just in replacing existing screens, I could have a dozen virtual terminals floating around, I could replace my large TV, etc. All with zero new content required. The problem is it doesn't seem to work as advertised.

quickthrower2 7y ago
I’ve not looked into this but is this bad for your eyes to be focusing so close for long periods?
- esyir 7y ago
  A few things: - VR headsets generally are similar to focusing on something further away due to the setup of the lenses. It's not literally focusing on a screen 1cm from your face. - One direction for current VR work is dynamic focus via lens arrays.

criddell 7y ago

> I think they just never had a great product. What were they showing investors and writers under NDA that caused billions of dollars and thousands of words of praise to flow? I wonder if the NDAs still in effect? I'd love for Kevin Kelly to talk more openly about what he saw and heard.

Robotbeat 7y ago

VR headsets have been sold out for months, now. I got an Oculus Quest, but only got one because I refreshed the product page (on multiple vendors) constantly for days. I think VR is starting the mainstream (at least for gaming), and Coronavirus is encouraging this (as it’s making virtually all gaming platforms a boost).

Noos 7y ago
no, not really. You can't get over the motion sickness thing for many people. And VR games will always need to mitigate that, which means they are going to be limited in significant ways compared to normal games.
- Robotbeat 7y ago
  This is a misconception borne of ignorance of the current state of VR tech. Your statement was true for early VR seated games that used smooth locomotion or flight-sim-like games. Roomscale VR games don't have motion sickness because of different locomotion methods (teleport, for instance... or they take place entirely within the room volume you have available). In fact, less motion sickness than you'd experience with a large monitor and something like a dynamic flight-based combat game. Unlike a monitor, your in-game view motion is mapped perfectly to physical head motion. I've tried out about a dozen games, and the only time I had motion sickness at all was when I changed locomotion method from teleport to smooth in Rec Room.