30 ms·

When will virtual reality take off? The $100 bet

• jschveibinz 6y ago
  Here is a good explanation on the AR/VR adoption struggles: https://arpost.co/2019/11/27/ar-and-vr-changed-our-lives-5-barriers-adoption/ https://arpost.co/2019/11/27/ar-and-vr-changed-our-lives-5-b... Gilmore and Pine “Experience Economy” suggests that we are now in the transformation economy. Maybe VR needs to be transformative?
  • echelon 6y ago
    We're still several VR hardware iterations away. Oculus, Vive, Index - these are like the pre-iPhone smart phones. They're bulky, slow, they kind of do their job, but they're not something everybody wants. VR has to get better. The resolution and FOV are terrible. The gameplay paradigms kind of suck because movement is such a pain. AR honestly seems even further away. Pokemon Go and all the other AR trinkets are clunky toys. I can't ever see holding up a device for anything other than picturing furniture in a space, and none of these apps even work well. An AR headset outside of industrial/military uses is a pipe dream that will rely on miniaturization and being fashionable. Google Glass wasn't cool, and nobody is going to wear a bulky HoloLens anywhere. There's a lot of work that needs to be done.
    • com2kid 6y ago
      > , and none of these apps even work well Modsy works well, but it is a curated hands on experience. That said, the end product is really nice.
    • jaegerpicker 6y ago
      I think you are wrong about AR, once a decent set of AR capable glasses hit the market I think we will see a very large market adoption. Very much like the smart phone and smart watch and tablet it will be a toy for techies until a company with real design chops and solid software/hardware gets behind it. I also believe that Apple is the most likely to be that company, solid design and a well liked ecosystem, plus a proven history at creating/shaping new consumer tech device markets. Apple AR Glasses have will likely be a huge success. It helps a ton that ARKit 4 and the new Lidar sensors on the pro level devices are next level good over the current AR software.
      • imglorp 6y ago
        This might not be a tech or business problem. Remember Google tried AR with Glass -- decent hardware and UI -- and ran into an uncomfortable social valley, eg "glassholes". Turns out people don't want pervasive video recording in every social situation. That said I think there are still unexplored workplace markets like medical, mechanical etc. There seem to be a very, very small number of consumer applications: heads up nav display for bicycle/motorcycle operators comes to mind.
      • PeterisP 6y ago
        To me, AR seems further away simply because "decent set of AR capable glasses" is further away than decent VR hardware, so the AR market adoption you expect would happen a couple years after VR has sufficiently good hardware to go mainstream.
• dukeofdoom 6y ago
  With so many schools under lockdown, kids staying at home. I think one application would be a virtual school. Right now when teachers teach over google classroom, the kids have their cameras and mikes turned off. And basically there is almost no interaction, and feedback as the teacher teaches. Kids don't like showing their living room environment. Also, the social interaction between kids in a school is basically non existent now. There's probably a real need for a virtualized environment of a school, or even a church if the lockdowns continue. And background replacement for video calls, in general.
  • ceilingcorner 6y ago
    VR isn’t a replacement for actual in person schooling. We’d be better off finding a solution that gets kids back into schools.
    • dukeofdoom 6y ago
      I agree, you can't beat the real thing. I think we will probably have both though, going forward. Online classes will be a lot more popular even if the lockdown ends, and teachers will live stream by default. And kids interacting in a virtual school would be a nice addition to a real school too.
      • ceilingcorner 6y ago
        Everything I’ve heard about online classes for K-12 has indicated that it’s been a disaster. Which is really not a surprise, considering that teaching is only a tiny portion of the function of a school. It’s also a daycare, lunchroom, social hall, and a million other things that can’t be replicated on a laptop screen. This is really a situation where “more technology” is not better.
  • chromaton 6y ago
    How's this work? In VR, the teacher can't see the kids' faces or other non-verbal communication.
• lo_fye 6y ago
  It started to take off in October, with the release of the Oculus Quest 2, which is out of stock all over the place. It has nearly doubled Oculus' userbase on Steam in just 2.5 months despite their various other headsets having been out for years.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • croes 6y ago
    That's not a take off but still a niche. The Quest 2 is more likely to just replace other VR headsets.
    • reason-mr 6y ago
      Still on the same old tired track with this. Stores can't keep Quest2s in stock and have you tried to actually buy an HP Reverb2 lately? Developers are making decent amounts of money out of VR titles. Users who have the headsets love them, and the various reddit VR groups are extremely active. Still, nothing to see, and it's not getting adoption. Pls ..
      • croes 6y ago
        Quest 2 and Reverb2 have low production numbers compared to the PS5 and XBox, so it's not surprising they are quickly out of stock. And VR is missing the you-do-not-want-to-miss App.
      • fomine3 6y ago
        Here in Japan, we have enough Quest2 stock over a month. I believe FB assigned too much volume dedicated for Japan. (Quest2 sold in Japan has special packaging for Japan)
      • Dylan16807 6y ago
        The inability to keep a specific tech product in stock, especially in 2020, doesn't say much about total industry sales.
• standardUser 6y ago
  It's a hard sell for an older (early 40's) gamer like me. I have far more games I want to play on my expensive PC than I have time for (or likely ever will). To consider investing in a new gaming technology it would have to be more enticing than the abundance of stuff I already have! And a lot of the games I'm eager to play are sequels/remakes of things I already know I enjoy immensely, so to draw me away would take something big.
  • entropicdrifter 6y ago
    As a late 20s gamer, some of my earliest gaming memories were formed during the flight/space flight sim boom of the 90s, so I absolutely adore my Vive for Elite Dangerous, Star Wars Squadrons, and No Man's Sky. Put it this way, for simulation gamers it's a godsend compared to a 3 or 4 monitor setup with head tracking.
    • standardUser 6y ago
      Right, the type of games matter a lot. I do like first-person RPGs, but those are only a little appealing to me in VR so far. And most of my gaming (4x, strategy, builder) don't benefit much from VR as far as I can tell.
      • entropicdrifter 6y ago
        For the most part, that's true. There's a couple of strategy/card games for VR that are nice since they're in sort of a "You're a god looking down at the table with the battle on it" perspective. Likewise Tabletop Simulator has decent VR support, so for tabletop strategy games it can be fun. It doesn't add much to the experience, though, aside from the ability to move your head to control the camera being very intuitive.
    • FrojoS 6y ago
      Try VTOL VR It blew my mind You have physical buttons in your cockpit. It really feels like being in a plane. No flight stick required. Everyone interested in the potential of VR should check this out: https://youtu.be/LQT6sQ6o0uY https://youtu.be/LQT6sQ6o0uY
• binarymax 6y ago
  Technology is not the problem. Flashback to 1995. I'm a 17 year old PFY invited to beta test a VR headset from a local company. My Uncle was an investor and I was technically savvy and the target market. I had a copy of Descent that supported VR, and while it was a bit of a hassle to get setup, I got it working. The experience was incredible. After the first use I said to myself "this is the future". I had permission to test the headset for two weeks, and I wanted my friends to see it as well. So I invited them over that weekend. And that's where the problem set in. When one person was using the headset, they were gone. You couldn't interact with them in any way. They might as well have been in a different room. Then I said to myself "this is not the future", and haven't touched VR since. There is no amount of technology that can get over this problem. It's not about FOV or resolution or immersion. It's a social problem. If you live alone at home, and want to plugin then great. But if you live with someone, its distant, weird, and kinda creepy, to have the other person in a headset and unreachable.
  • api 6y ago
    It's a great opportunity to prank people though. There was someone testing some kind of VR app in a co-working space I used to frequent, and people would do things like sprinkle confetti on them or move things around on their desk while they were jacked in.
  • cma 6y ago
    There are all kinds of technological solutions to that: Both have headsets (used to be a cost issue, gradually getting solved) and play the same thing. Or one has AR glasses and can peek into what the other is doing and communicate with them. An internal camera captures the face under the headset and presents it on the outside with correct parallax (could be presented with AR or with auto stereo display), AI in the headset can tell when someone is wanting attention etc. and use other cameras with depth reconstruction or depth sensors to fade them into the VR player's world.
    • binarymax 6y ago
      We’re talking about widespread adoption of consumer technology. Everything you just mentioned is a niche workaround, and to be blunt, not very good ones. Sure, there are always going to be people who love VR, and it’s really cool! But there’s no way it becomes as popular as TVs or smartphones.
• Geee 6y ago
  I think VR will become mainstream when it's good enough to replace large screens in productive work. It should leave large screens in dust, if done right. Productivity is quite strongly correlated with screen size, so I'm expecting quite a leap in this regard when the right software is matched with the right hardware.
  • canada_dry 6y ago
    > good enough to replace large screens The resolution is pretty good already and rapidly getting better. What I'm excited about is hand tracking [i] so that I can use a real keyboard (and interact with real objects e.g. coffee cup) to type while I'm wearing a headset. [i] https://youtu.be/XnG1l0qQW9k https://youtu.be/XnG1l0qQW9k
    • forgotmysn 6y ago
      thats true, but for most headsets, resolution still isn't high enough to read bodies of text without eye fatigue. until that is solved, I don't think VR will move from entertainment to productivity. Varjo is getting closer to that resolution level, but their headsets are priced for enterprise ($8k i think?)
      • dougmwne 6y ago
        I pulled my neck last week and spent the weekend working, watching amazon prime and playing xbox cloud streaming flat on my back on a 10 foot virtual screen. I was working for multiple hours at a time reviewing programming specifications and taking notes. The display tech is pretty much there, even for text. Keyboard input is still unsolved, though I was using Office 365 dictation and that was working well for taking notes. This was on the Quest 2. The fresnel lenses are actually a bigger downside than the screen resolution, which is not retina, but still better than the 24" 1080p external display I use all day.
        • novok 6y ago
          When I tried it, it wasn't that good. The screens on the Q2 felt like a resolution of something between 720 and 1080p, which isn't that good compared to my dual 4k monitors. Same with a 8k & 6k 180 & 360 video. Overall VR feels like it needs a 4x resolution bump. Basically a 16k 360 video rendering and 4k x 4k per eye vs the 1832x1920 per eye that the current q2 has. To do that well you probably need something like a two 3080 GPUs, one for each eye. Even after that, maybe even an 8k x 8k would give a big improvement. We don't have GPUs that can render that today. Foveated rendering is definitely needed for this to become possible.
• kiseleon 6y ago
  I bought my Dell Visor (Windows Mixed Reality) headset for ~$230 in early 2018. It's fun, but my computer can only run things at low/medium quality (i7-7700, gtx 1060 3gb). I'm in a situation where there is literally no reason for me to buy a new headset until I have at least a new GPU. It really doesn't help that you're basically stuck buying the facebook-locked Oculus (either the Quest with a more limited game selection or the Rift S which requires a good PC), spend a bit more and get a Vive Cosmos, or you can spend boatloads of money and buy the Index (or buy an old Vive and piecemeal the Index parts you want since the lighthouses are compatible). Any VR that is not roomscale will feel limited, and any VR that doesn't use some sort of tracking for the headset/controllers (IR based, usually) will feel clunky and will lose track of the controllers constantly. I tried (and loved, despite its limitations) Google Cardboard and Daydream, but those definitely never took off. Playstation VR isn't roomscale so you can't move around in the environment, so it's inherently limited. The Windows Mixed Reality inside-out tracking works for 95% of what you need to do -- overhand throws don't work reliably since your controller leaves the tracking area, so you have to throw things by doing awkward pushing motions most of the time. So again -- I'm faced with: - Upgrade to a more expensive headset to get better tracking but still have low/medium quality ($300-1000). - Upgrade my GPU to max out the quality on my current headset ($300-1000). - Do both ($600-2000). In all honesty, for the limited amount of time I spend in VR (1-2 hours once or twice a week, mostly for exercise with Beat Saber or BoxVR) -- None of those options appeal to me. I'll just keep using my headset until it dies, and then we will see where we are at. There's not enough new features coming out (or enough new VR hardware in general coming out) to justify an upgrade every year or two, especially when it relies on my PC having sufficient specs to power it.
  • vlovich123 6y ago
    Just a small correction. The Quest can access all PC software that the Rift S can through Oculus Link.
• coding123 6y ago
  I think it would have had Oculus not been owned by a shitty company. I have a hard time directly giving FB money. I'm not going to reward FB for anything.
  • croes 6y ago
    Yes and no. Without FB Oculus would already be dead. With FB it keeps being a niche.
  • brixon 6y ago
    For non-tech people they think the exact opposite. Facebook is a name they know and understand.
• MisterBastahrd 6y ago
  When there is a desktop OS used for being work-level productive that can be used at high resolution to accomplish actual work in a manner that is cost-competitive to a multi-monitor setup.
• ykevinator 6y ago
  I left vr in 2010 because there was no commercial opportunity except video games and even that was not getting more than niche traction. If you google be headsets you'll see that the occulus is basically a redo of 20 year old tech. It's still baffling why Facebook paid so much for this.
• 99_00 6y ago
  I still have my Nintendo virtual boy from 1996. It was discontinued and someone bought it for me for a steep discount, around $20.
• chris_st 6y ago
  I wonder how many people, like me, tried it on a friend's equipment and found that the motion sickness is just impossible to get past. I had motion sickness when I tried the early first-person shooters, but got over it when I learned to keep the (non-moving) screen bounds in mind. That' just impossible in VR, and when the motion in my eyes doesn't match my vestibular system, wow, it's bad. Sigh... some of the games were amazing.
  • Der_Einzige 6y ago
    Things like motion sickness and the screen-door effect are results of lower refresh-rate/resolution than what should be used for VR. It's very sad that as of right now, you're forced to choose movement freedom (e.g. Vive Wireless) OR the highest refresh rate / highest resolution (Valve Index). And don't get me started on the proliferation of low quality "mixed reality" headsets. Honest enthusiasts have no options for high quality "world scale" VR. The best VR experience is STILL found this way, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DvB07X84HM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DvB07X84HM - but it requires a shitty headset compared to the Index. VR most likely would have ended up with the same experience (but better quality) if the manufacturers built better quality headsets with wireless and higher resolution (most likely attached to a high quality laptop in a backpack), priced it more highly (1500-2000$+ in kits like the youtube video), and then let VRs merits sell itself, rather than allow half-baked headsets to frustrate and dissuade people.
    • chris_st 6y ago
      > Things like motion sickness and the screen-door effect are results of lower refresh-rate/resolution than what should be used for VR. I disagree -- it's the same principle that makes me motion sick on boats, when I can't see the horizon for reference. It's a vestibular thing, not just a vision-system thing.
  • istorical 6y ago
    I have to simultaneously agree with you (and even go further and state that the existence of 3-degree-of-freedom devices like Samsung GearVR which was cheap enough to be passed out and demo'd everywhere) really gave people terrible first experiences, both in terms of giving them low expectations in terms of motion sickness and also resolution. But the reason it's really bittersweet is you _don't_ have to get motion sick in VR, if you just try experiences that don't take control of your in-game/in-experience "camera" and move it without any input from your physical head. In other words, as long as the camera in-game only corresponds 1 to 1 to your real life head movements, there is no motion sickness for the vast vast majority of users. I've given tons of demos and beat saber won't make new users sick. Superhot won't make new users sick. Echo VR, Skyrim VR, anything that doesn't map head movement -> camera movement 1:1 has a 75% chance of making a new user sick, whether immediately and badly or after a medium duration experience and mildy. But people who are early adopters and have overcome the hump of nausea and forgotten how it feels continue to expose new users to poorly chosen first experiences with joystick movement or even worse - just straight up camera movement entirely unmapped to user input. That and naive users not realizing they need to limit their first experiences to non-joystick locomotion experiences. It's a bit like if everyone who tried alcohol for the first time took 10 shots of vodka and then span in circles for 10 minutes straight instead of sipping an alcopop or a beginner wine or beer. There are also hardware solutions like vibrating motors you place on your wrists (or neck/near-the-ear?) that could help as well. And vignetting and tunneling approaches to keep a fixed frame of reference in the users field of view for those that are advanced enough to begin with joystick movement. But anyway, in 2020 the most compelling use-case is still porn. And laughably, many people who may have tried VR porn in 2016 or who only viewed free/old/poorly-made files have also had that well poisoned for themselves as well, while newer, higher quality VR film (and porn) is incredibly more realistic and immersive than early attempts or that which you could find on pornhub.
• ehonda 6y ago
  I think mobile phones will become the standard VR devices most people will opt to use with a headset that you insert the phone into, esp as phones become increasingly advanced, due to it being the cheapest option for most people.
  • dougmwne 6y ago
    I doubt it because I think a successful VR headset will have 6dof room scale tracking, hand controllers, and facial expression tracking. That will takes several well positioned cameras, plus additional cameras for eye and face tracking. I think they will be standalone devices that will potentially include AR at some point and even replace phones.
• memetherapy 6y ago
  The quest 2 is pretty much a revelation. Untethered, light, cheap, high quality display and inside out tracking and connects wirelessly to a gaming PC allowing you to play virtually any title if you pay $15 for vrdesktop. Obviously you have to be comfortable with facebook but it's just a better end to end experience than any other headset I've tried, although it would be better if VR desktop or something similar was included out of the box instead of them trying to flog you the kludgy occulus link cable that doesn't work as well and which tethers you to a pc. It feels like VR done right for the first time in the same way as the iPhone was a smart phone done right for the first time.
  • kreddor 6y ago
    Is it that much better than Quest 1? The first Quest was already pretty great compared to everything else, Facebook or not.
    • ipsum2 6y ago
      It's not substantially better. It's only a good upgrade if the screen resolution bothers you.
    • chaostheory 6y ago
      The visuals are already a big improvement, but I think the big difference will happen once 90HZ unlocked with Quest 2
    • scpedicini 6y ago
      No, the resolution and refresh rates were increased but the field of vision was actually REDUCED from the already narrow oculus quest which had a fov of about 90 degrees. Think about that for a minute, the normal fov for a human is about 200 degrees. It's like looking out of a damn periscope on a submarine, which is the first VR experience I would develop for the oculus quest.
  • canada_dry 6y ago
    > quest 2 is pretty much a revelation I liken where we are with VR right now as to about 5 yrs ago with IoT. Arduino and Rpi began to gain huge momentum due to the low cost of entry and availability of more and more useful tools. Quest hopefully is just the start.
• insert_coin 6y ago
  Never, it will forever be a niche product. It doesn't solve almost any problem better than what we actually have but keep the mind engaged in the future of virtual reality. VR is the flying car of software: so amazing to imagine, so impractical in real life.
  • istorical 6y ago
    And color film doesn't solve anything that black and white film can't do. Besides, why watch film at all when you can look around the real world instead of looking at a moving picture on a screen.
    • insert_coin 6y ago
      What? Color film can do color, and took off because a lot of people wanted to see their memories in color. Infrared film can do infrared colors, and people who need to see those colors use it and to them is invaluable, but that need is not a mainstream need. VR is infrared film.
      • istorical 6y ago
        Well if we're gonna use that analogy, VR is spatial film or 3d film.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• ajcp 6y ago
  When VR starts delivering on the "virtual" part of the "reality" concept whereby my girlfriend, uncle, or neighbor can put on a headset and say "why go back?" or When VR doesn't merely solve for an "immersive" experience, but rather provides for a better way to interface with 3D "space" than does a 2D monitor.
  • blackearl 6y ago
    I don't think I'll play a 2d rhythm game after beat saber
    • lucasmullens 6y ago
      Aren't most successful rhythm games already 3d? I guess I'm agreeing with you, DDR, Guitar Hero, and Rock Band all are sort of 3d, just not VR.
      • blackearl 6y ago
        I mean 3d as in a screen being 2d and VR being 3d The mod community have made beat saber incredibly immersive in the way of light shows and "wall maps" which go beyond just hitting blocks with your sabers. I'd recommend checking out an example like this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZd_I86i8eQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZd_I86i8eQ - which is like being inside your own personal rave
    • ajcp 6y ago
      I'm with you there, but that's one application to one sphere (gaming)of VR application. That being said maybe that's all "3D interface with 3D objects" is right now? So might be more accurate to say: When our current 2D interfaces like file systems/operating systems, entertainment (movies/tv), socializing, etc are addressed a 3D objects in a 3D space.
• riazrizvi 6y ago
  I worked for a VR/AR platform helping 3rd parties port apps onto the platform for a couple of years. Low traction seemed to be a combination of the following related problems: 1) ROI for the platform's premium was not worth it, due to... 2) lack of must-have apps, due to... 3) poor ratio of difficulty designing a great user experience vs low number of outfits trying to build that software, due to ... 4) fragmentation in technology (AR & VR) which results in different user experience in each platform, and low rates of adoption especially given dispersion over different platforms, consequently there was far less financial motivation for a company to invest long term resources. With VR/AR, the obvious killer app is 3D model generation, because you could turn efficient workflows into money, but the amount of effort that has been thrown into desktop publishing is so much that the bar for a VR/AR app to get over is very, very high. If your audience is professional 3d modelers. The mouse is such an excellent precision instrument, it's going to be a long time before we have a 6 degree-of-freedom input device that can match it for precision and ease of long term use. The existing CAD companies with funds sit on large portfolios of software, and a fantastic VR/AR experience would devalue them, so they don't have a lot of motivation. Long story short, it's going to take longer than the PC revolution, because the adoption-conformity numbers are not as good. I'd guess another ten years?
  • vadansky 6y ago
    > The mouse is such an excellent precision instrument, it's going to be a long time before we have a 6 degree-of-freedom input device that can match it for precision and ease of long term use. From my experience don't most professional 3D modelers use some sort of pen tablet like a Wacom? Now I'm thinning I would love if Wacom pivoted to the VR/AR space and made a special 6 DOF pen you can use. I hope they don't go the way to Kodak and just get stuck being a pen tablet company while artists make the jump the VR (eventually?)
    • Ruthalas 6y ago
      Good call, Wacom is doing exactly that: https://developer.wacom.com/en-us/wacomvrpen https://developer.wacom.com/en-us/wacomvrpen
    • 6y ago
• bullen 6y ago
  The major (unpopular) reasons for VR plateau: - Fresnel lenses! - No haptic feedback? - Closed hardware/software. Unfortunately in the future electricity prices will mostly limit VR to non-realistic graphics, f.ex. Cyberpunk 2077 can't render (full blast) at 60 FPS on a 350W 3090, so to get 90FPS on both eyes you would need (if it was possible, it's not) more than 3x 3090 at a whopping 1000W! And this is at peak everything: memory speed and litography; with cheap- energy, hardware, (food, rent too) etc. The final medium is not VR, it is regular 3D MMO action potentially with server-side neural-network brained mobs/npcs! How is that progressing Mr Carmack?
  • kraftman 6y ago
    foveated rendering should solve this if it can be done well, as you're only rendering high quality where the eye is looking.
    • numpad0 6y ago
      Last time I did a napkin math, cone size required for foveated rendering with current latency and framerate to match slew rate of human eyes basically equals to the whole FOV of typical headset that it’s pointless to implement.
  • entropicdrifter 6y ago
    Considering the ridiculous pace of progress for GPU performance we've seen in the last few years, coupled with NN-based upscaling of frames, foveated rendering with eye tracking, and the fact that you've cherry-picked a game whose performance is wildly unoptimized with graphics that are on the absolute cutting edge of what PCs can handle, I imagine there are still many possible scenarios that could play out over the next decade or so where VR with reasonably realistic graphics by today's standards is not only possible to do on a normal PC power budget, but even with a mobile/tablet chipset, as in the Oculus Quest or some similar standalone headset. Things would get really interesting if Apple decided to enter the standalone VR/AR arena with their cutting edge ARM chipsets
• nynx 6y ago
  Honestly, I think a large barrier here is there's no pre-existing platform yet. When developing an application for a computer with a regular screen, you have all sorts of supporting software (e.g. window managers, browsers, ui frameworks, etc). When developing for VR, you have to start over almost completely: you have to deal with controller input, different kinds of headsets, designing a UI. For XR to take off, I think something akin to the metaverse needs to exist first, so applications can develop within its framework.
• iamwil 6y ago
  Would you do engineering interviews in VR as a candidate? I had wondered if larger companies would do VR technical interviews to remove biases in their quest to "hire the best". You can have a whiteboard, and the usual schtick, but you can disguise the voice, height, gender, ethnicity, etc of a candidate, so the interviewer can focus on the communication and the solution. And then the interpersonal part of the interview can be done in person and unmasked. After that, both parts of the interview can be conjoined during the committee evaluation. I never went down this avenue, because I thought sourcing candidates was a bigger problem than evaluation accuracy, and all but the biggest companies don't worry so much about their interview methods.
• daemonk 6y ago
  I can't get past the motion sickness. I wonder what percentage of the willing market also can't handle it.
  • stocknoob 6y ago
    I tried a Oculus DK2 and got motion sick, and that's burned into my memory like a drink that gave you a hangover. I'm only going to try it again in the 5th gen after they've eliminated all issues.
  • cwkoss 6y ago
    Ginger pills can be very helpful
  • chaostheory 6y ago
    I used to get motion sickness with previous gen VR headsets. Not so much with the higher resolution models with better lenses. There's also feet based movement that help https://store.steampowered.com/app/798810/Natural_Locomotion/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/798810/Natural_Locomotion...
• flerchin 6y ago
  VR has been a fun thing for my kids during this long pandemic. I don't foresee it getting much use once they can do team sports again.
• jmiskovic 6y ago
  On same note, developing VR from inside is incredible and it quickly turned into my #1 hobby. At first you are surrounded with blank space, then you slowly fill it out with whatever reality rules you can think of. I went with code-only approach (no binary assets) and built a primitive development environment that works in VR. Now I have a neat little virtual shed with different experiments and demo projects. Geometrical landscapes, driving & flying, teleporting, various gizmos... Currently I'm tweaking physics engine to work with hand tracking skeleton. Masses connected with springs turn out to be amazingly palpable even without any haptic feedback and with simple cartoonish visuals. VR is already fun and we're in for a wild ride once AR hits the market.
  • deeeeplearning 6y ago
    >VR is already fun and we're in for a wild ride once AR hits the market. I for one can't wait for full field of vision pop up adds to infest our daily lives. How exiting.
    • jjeaff 6y ago
      I'm all for that ad subsidized tech. I'll take advantage of it just as soon as uBlock Origin VR is released.
      • deeeeplearning 6y ago
        Imagine cheering for a dystopian future.
        • Cactus2018 6y ago
          HYPER-REALITY by Keiichi Matsuda https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs
  • bmiller2 6y ago
    Any resources you can share? Sounds amazing
• stevebmark 6y ago
  I don't think the current incarnation of VR will ever take off. It's too inconvenient to need to block out everything around you with a headset. It's fundamentally incompatible with human behavior. Until VR is as convenient as picking up a phone or tablet, it's not going anywhere.
  • cwkoss 6y ago
    Oculus has a cool pass-through mode where it displays what the cameras are seeing in black and white. I think this sort of feature will become widespread in future generations.
  • allenu 6y ago
    That's my problem with it as well. You need to have a space set up where you can use it, and you also have to have the VR headset/equipment available to just grab and put on in an instant, otherwise I think it will just languish in the closet. VR is competing with phones, tablets, and TVs today, which are in my opinion good enough and way more convenient. The experience within VR might be amazing, but it has to be so good that you forego other more convenient devices available to you.
    • Kiro 6y ago
      For me, the Quest is pretty much like that. It's so small I just keep it on a shelf and I don't need a dedicated space. I'm just playing in the living room or in the office (you paint a Guardian for the play area in AR, and it remembers it unless you put it on another place). Been playing almost every day for more than a year now. I'm still amazed of how low friction it is to start using. I just grab it, put it on my head and all of a sudden I'm in the VR world.
      • _carbyau_ 6y ago
        Well, "dedicated" means different things to different people. I have a two year old kid. For VR, my space would have to be properly "dedicated" as it were...
  • 6y ago
• nukemandan 6y ago
  For me (and many) when Facebook doesn't have a controlling stake in hardware and requires you to register said hardware with an account in good standing in order to use that hardware.
  • fron 6y ago
    It's truly unfortunate. I would love to try the Quest 2, I've heard some pretty great things. The requirement to have a Facebook account makes it a complete nonstarter by itself. The fact that I can get locked out of my hardware that I purchased because Facebook's software decides my account isn't 'legit' enough? Gonna be a serious nope from me.
• jjd33 6y ago
  Never. If you surpass a certain technological threshold it will start to get worse rather than better.
  • lucasmullens 6y ago
    What? Why would that be the case?
• _iyig 6y ago
  Having owned every Oculus headset since the Kickstarter, I think the Quest is the first truly consumer-ready VR headset. At $300 it’s competitively priced against gaming consoles, without requiring a gaming PC or separate tracking sensors. It has a healthy library of games, 6DOF position tracking, and hand-tracking controllers with excellent haptics. I was tremendously excited about it, to include messing around with VR development in my spare time, until the Facebook account debacle dropped my enthusiasm to zero. I’ve used my Quest maybe twice since my account got caught up in all that. I have no plans to develop any software for such a closed platform with arbitrary gatekeeping.
• randyrand 6y ago
  As soon as 6dof VR video is easily available.
  • ipsum2 6y ago
    https://augmentedperception.github.io/deepviewvideo/ https://augmentedperception.github.io/deepviewvideo/ here you go :)
• dougmwne 6y ago
  I very much think that folks on HN are jaded by the long wait and the unfulfilled promises of VR. I recently picked up a Quest 2 as my first VR headset and I am blown away and convinced it is the future. The thing is, I also recognize that while it is already an incredible achievement, it's still probably 5-20 years from hitting its iPhone moment. By then, my initial excitement will have gone away and I'll have tired of waiting too. But for all you jaded folks out there, let me tell you that this is an absolutely unstoppable evolution of computing. All entertainment since sung epic poetry has aimed to briefly take us into another world. Plays, novels, movies, theme parks, and video games have always offered immersive fantasy. This is the ultimate fufilment of that very human impulse, to consciously enter another world. If we lose sight of that, then it will be up to the next generation of technologists to create it.
  • inventtheday 6y ago
    ya it's a slow burn, but I think the September '20 - September '21 period will end up seeing roughly the unit sales mentioned in their bet. Quest 2 is making a large impact.
  • an_opabinia 6y ago
    > The thing is, I also recognize that while it is already an incredible achievement, it's still probably 5-20 years from hitting its iPhone moment. Ironically, by getting acquired by a giant company, Quest development was set back by that many years. The real problem isn't technology or even adoption, it's that people who work at giant companies suck at making games.
    • Impossible 6y ago
      Microsoft has a good track record with making games, but yes all of FAANG is terrible at this. I have a little more hope for Facebook now that they've started acquiring studios and letting them run independently, instead of the previous combination of publishing\funding and having few internal game teams (which generally doesn't work in big tech anyway). This could lead to a model that looks more like Microsoft Game Studios.
• aeturnum 6y ago
  When I think about VR I think about my developer friend who would never spend more than $100 on a cell phone. He'd always lose or break phones, so he just started buying the cheapest Android phones he could. His camera sucked and he'd run out of memory, but it was still a phone and we could still text him. He had a "smartphone" and all of the utility it provided even though it was cheap and low-end. When people talk about how VR hasn't taken off like they expect, I really wonder about their understanding of technology. As a high end technology, I think VR is doing great. There are some pieces of work that people like, but the state of the technology reminds me of smart phones circa 2008[1]. Technology is getting better, but there's substantial disagreement about what a "good" experience needs. Do we need higher resolution? Easier access? Better integration? Obviously all of them are good but the point is that the field is still very much in flux and even people who have spent thousands of dollars on a nice setup are looking forward to the next generation. I also think about LCD televisions. I don't really know what their sales numbers are over the years, but Wikipedia tells me they started selling more than CRT TVs in 2007[2]. They came on the market in the 1980s[3]. That's a ~27 year journey from being in a consumer good and becoming the dominant technology. Smartphones improved uniquely fast, and since VR is (right now) more firmly centered on luxury and leisure, I wonder if the arc of LCD televisions isn't more indicative. I think VR will "arrive" when you can spend under $100 (maybe $200?) and get all "the good parts" of the VR experience, like my friend did with his cheap phones. It will also help if the high end is better established than it is now. It can't be used or home-made or just a part - one price for a low-frills version of what you came for. I think successful technology needs a "bottom-end" as well as a top-end and I don't think VR is very close right now. The first Oculus shipped to consumers in 2016, which puts us 4 years into my proposed ~27 year arc. That feels about right to me. Edit: for all my skepticism about VR, writing this post has me researching the price of headsets again :p [1] As a point of comparison, the first iPhone sold 6m units. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(1st_generation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(1st_generation) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_set [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid-crystal_display https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid-crystal_display
• RoboTeddy 6y ago
  I strongly suspect that VR will take off once it can pass through facial expressions, gaze, and other body language with high fidelity. At that point it will probably be substantially better than normal videoconference, and will take off extremely quickly (first for business meetings and perhaps social gatherings; then for virtual worlds)
  • Impossible 6y ago
    This, greatly improved comfort, and quality 3D scanning\photogrammetry being mainstream (close with Apple LIDAR) at the same or similar cost (~$200-$500 for a standalone HMD) enables a host of interesting stuff. Right now Social VR and VR collaboration software has some potential, but is more awkward and challenging to use than video conferencing.
  • TulliusCicero 6y ago
    Agreed, VR still has a ton of medium term improvements to make on a technical level, much more than, say, consoles. Going from PS4 to PS5, the SSD is a huge change, the controller is pretty nifty, but ultimately it's not that big of a change other than the faster loading times. And that's after 7 years. Meanwhile, comparing a Quest 2 vs a 2013 headset like the Oculus Rift DK1 is like night and day. No comparison. Everything about it is a vast improvement that completely changes how you experience VR.
• lwansbrough 6y ago
  It was pretty clear to me back in 2015-2016 that VR was going absolutely no where. All you had to do was try on any headset and evaluate it honestly. The graphics sucked, the lag sucked, it gave some people nausea and others an unwanted sense of vertigo. Prices for high-end equipment were (and still are) ridiculous and unattainable for the mass market. Even if you could afford it, do you also own a space big enough to set it up? And if you did, was it convenient to have to be in that space to use it? The premise of VR as a foundational technology is totally flawed. VR is for experiences that take you out of reality, but most people aren't looking for that on a daily basis. Entering VR is comparable to going to the movies: it's something to do once you've exhausted better options. To those who say the technology can never get there, I disagree. The market will explode once the first real AR/MR device arrives. People won't care what it looks like or that it has a pervy camera if it's the most amazing piece of technology they've ever used. It will be like the first iPhone - an "Aha!" moment in amongst a sea of products that just don't get it. It won't require lighthouses or setup or spatial mapping or wires or the social isolation of being at home, it will just implicitly understand the world wherever you are and will be available to you when you need to use it. Like a phone in your pocket. And I'm sure with the equivalent of a sleeping mask such a device would be VR capable as well. It's coming, but it won't be a product from a startup (anyone remember Magic Leap?) and not for maybe 5-10 years.
  • edmundsauto 6y ago
    The Quest line has been a major step up. You should consider updating your 5 year old opinion in a product category that is nascent. Also, I believe a lot of hype around VR is that it is a necessary first step before VR. Finally, while I agree that AR is the “mobile phone” type of revolutionary product, I still think VR is going to be wildly successful. To me, the limiting factor is the builders tools - it’s so expensive to put together good interactive VR content.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • lwansbrough 6y ago
      > You should consider updating your 5 year old opinion in a product category that is nascent. I no longer have a Facebook account, so this is impossible for me, right? But let me check Google. Bulky, isolating, still requires controllers. Yep, nothing has changed, as expected. People who have staked their livelihoods on this technology are mad about my initial comment but the fact remains: nobody is buying these things, and the product hasn't changed meaningfully since the last iteration.
• outside1234 6y ago
  I don't think VR is every going to take off - it is just too isolating and most people don't want a completely new world. They want to socialize in this one. But AR - that's different - and I think it will happen the second we can get a full day of use out of it in a normal glasses form factor. (With enterprise scenarios driving earlier larger form factors)
  • tolbish 6y ago
    > most people don't want a completely new world. They want to socialize in this one. The popularity of video games proves that is demonstrably false.
  • CyberDildonics 6y ago
    That reasoning is contradicted by IRC, online video games, offline video games and every internet forum, including this one.
• mchusma 6y ago
  In my opinion, I think the takeoff point for virtual reality for office use is: 1) Reasonable price point (Quest 2 hits that) 2) Text must be easily clear and legible. Quest 2 does not really hit that, but high end units seem to. So it seems like we are about 1 generation away from having something mainstream for work, so probably 2 years away. We are a remote team and I decided against Quest 2 but was borderline due to text legibility. I would probably buy everyone a Quest 3 though as a way to interact on some things.
• Impossible 6y ago
  Estimates of total hardware sales vary depending on what is considered VR hardware, but most estimates I've seen have worldwide unit sales at around 5-6M in 2020. His sales estimates are a little low, unless he's only including PC VR. PSVR alone has sold ~5M units by most estimates. In the most recent Steam hardware survey, about 2% of users that completed the survey have VR devices, which is roughly another 2M users. That doesn't include Quest and Quest 2 sales (many people never use the link cable), or the few Rifts out there that aren't on Steam. So while it's highly unlikely that 6DOF VR devices have sold 10M units, its likely cleared 8M units and could easily surpass 10M in 2021. The biggest issue right now is lack of software. There isn't much to play at all in VR, and there are very few great VR titles and only a handful of good ones. For HN commenters that want the infinite screen experience, I unfortunately believe that will be relatively niche (you sell to a bunch of programmers) and none of the current players are really focused on enterprise as games have been the stickiest thing so far. Quest 2 is pretty high resolution and eventually a tracked keyboard and infinite office will ship, so it might still be the best option for a while for people looking for VR productivity.
  • arduinomancer 6y ago
    Maybe he's referring to yearly sales of 5-6M
    • Impossible 6y ago
      Ah yeah, you're probably right. I read it as total sold units. He's probably right about total units sold in 2020, or maybe a little bit on the high end. Because we don't know Quest and Quest 2 sales and they're harder to estimate it's hard to know
• dudeinhawaii 6y ago
  I don't think it's been mentioned enough that VR doesn't fundamentally bring anything new to the -gameplay- table. There are some 'experiences' that are better, like piloting games since they play to the "sit here and look around" model, but that places VR in the same category as a really awesome flight stick, steering wheel, or the Kinect. Mobility is a huge problem that needs to be solved. Until then, VR will be a peripheral like the Kinect, great for one-off interactive experiences involving your full body... but never able to deliver truly transformational gameplay.
  • Kiro 6y ago
    Sounds like you haven't tried Superhot. Even Beat Saber is a mechanic unlike anything else. Right now I'm having a great time in Blaston and that's also gameplay that would not be possible in another medium. Mobility was solved with untethered devices. Just put it on and start playing immediately. No dedicated area required.
    • dudeinhawaii 6y ago
      When I say mobility, I'm referring to mobility within the game. Within a non-VR shooter I can, in one continuous motion, run into and knockdown a guard, shoot his friend, jump through a window, run across a room, leap over a crate, parkour up a wall, grab a rifle, and shoot another flanked enemy. VR gameplay isn't remotely comparable. Perhaps it's due to VR linking us with our real-life limitations. In real-life, I doubt many untrained people can turn 90 or 180 degrees, raise a rifle, sight in, and fire accurately in a under a second. I'm not saying there aren't great VR games but VR doesn't appear to add new elements to the genres or gameplay beyond "now try this without an accurate mouse/keyboard/controller" or "you can now see a virtual representation of your hands... and use them to awkwardly manipulate the environment". When you say "Blaston.. (provides).. gameplay that would not be possible in another medium", I think that's what you're referring to.. the awkward manipulation of the environment. Blaston is a very simple 3D game that absolutely could be played without VR but wouldn't be nearly as goofy and fun. Perhaps that's it, perhaps the "akwardly manipulating/traversing the environment" is the unique gameplay that VR adds (similar to Kinect). The human element I guess you could say. It seems as though the trade-off is a boost in immersion for a simultaneous reduction in game and gameplay complexity.
• nickelcitymario 6y ago
  I think it will take off when we see a convergence of some things. Specifically: 1. It looks real 2. It's affordable 3. AI characters become believable If anyone's played with Replika.ai lately, you'll know #3 is starting to get really close. #1 and #2 are inevitable. So at some point it becomes wildly rewarding to spend hours hanging out with your AI friends in virtual space. Simply being in a 3D space isn't enough. Most people seem to experience this as a neat trick, but not something they feel the need to make a part of their daily lives. But building emotional bonds with characters who are only accessible in VR? Or perhaps can be texted (like Replika) and then met "in person" in VR? I see that being worth many billions.
• johnklos 6y ago
  VR will become mainstream when you can play Mario Kart in VR. Forget about photorealism - cartoony, Nintendo Wii style graphics are much more forgivable on VR hardware. Currently, VR is bad considering the cost.
• agentultra 6y ago
  I'm probably an enthusiast, so grain of salt, but... warning: discussion about guns > Half Life Alyx seems to me to suffer from the same problem, a fun game with some compelling content, so great to try, but not a must-have. Exercise programs like Supernatural or Beat Saber fall in the same category, fun, cool to try, but not something without okay substitutes or alternatives. I think HL:Alyx is a game changer. Elite: Dangerous sold me on it initially. I regularly use Beat Saber to stay fit during the pandemic -- the recent addition of multiplayer is amazing. VR Chat is really awesome. I find it's not nearly as exhausting to hang out with friends in VR Chat than a Zoom meeting. HL:Alyx -- the fidelity, performance, and detail given to the content is amazing. But what was unique about it for me was that it made exchanges with guns actually harrowing and... more cinematic and believable. A lot of FPS' have to band-aid around the fact that the player character can soak bullets/zaps/whatever because the lack of spatial awareness of a projection onto a 2D surface means most casual players are going to be running into the middle of a fire fight and expect to have a reasonable chance to win. In one of the opening scenes a soldier catches you off guard and points a gun right at you. In VR, without even thinking, my hands went up. In any other FPS, unless that interaction was scripted, I would have just shot back or ran. Yet even because Alyx isn't a super hero or wearing some high-tech recharging shield, it still feels cinematic. I'm physically ducking behind walls, tossing items and using bits of junk as a temporary shield. And it does advance the story of the HL universe so there's that... I wouldn't say it didn't change anything. It raised the bar for VR content that was lacking original content from AAA studios. Elite: Dangerous. VR changed how I play completely. I was instantly better at flying. The added benefit of depth perception improved my reaction speed and spacial awareness. I play on a flat monitor now and again but it's too boring and awkward. Although you can't argue with the numbers -- it's not mainstream in the way that a Nintendo Switch or other game system is. But I wonder if that's not so much a content issue but if there were other factors involved like, say, how FB has managed Oculus or how it wasn't deeply discounted at first to gain adoption like most new hardware platforms are.
• Animats 6y ago
  I should have made a bet like that with the "thought leader" who threatened to ban me from his blog after I said VR looked to be the next 3D TV. The problem isn't the cost. It's that moving around while wearing VR headgear is only safe in either customized environments, like the Star Wars location based entertainment system, or when movement is in a small area, like Beat Saber. Which is why Beat Saber is the #1 VR game. Read the setup and cautions for full-body tracking in VRChat.[1] It can be done, but it's not popular. Partly because it requires the agility of a dancer to use properly. Wearing VR headgear while sitting down isn't worth the trouble. Plus about 10% of the population gets nauseated when visual and actual motion differ. On the other hand, make an AR headset that sells for $79.95 and runs Pokemon Go, and you have a hit. [1] https://docs.vrchat.com/docs/full-body-tracking https://docs.vrchat.com/docs/full-body-tracking
  • saberdancer 6y ago
    Even current Oculus Quest can detect and show objects in your environment. It doesn't seem that hard for VR in the future to utilize that and adapt the environment around you to mimic your obstacles. Another possibility is games that create infinite impossible maze (Tea For God). You can walk around in that game for hours without hitting anything. You don't need customized environments, you need some free space around yourself. I live in a small apartment and I do just fine. One of basic aspects of VR is setting up a virtual "play area" that the headset warns when you are close to leaving so I don't see how most of the complaints are valid.
    • fomine3 6y ago
      Virtual barrier won't work if I move quickly. Play The Thrill of the Fight, punch a wall!
      • saberdancer 6y ago
        Yes, if you run you will hit a wall. If you completely lose track of outside world that is a possibility. For most people, if they have issues with this constantly they should make their guardian smaller and put the system to be more sensitive and show the guardian earlier. If this doesn't help then you are out of luck but for most people, it works fine.
• scalablenotions 6y ago
  Chronic undersupply is probably the only reason it's not going crazy in 2020. The demand is extremely high, and suppliers are struggling to meet it.
• rchaud 6y ago
  I picked up a GearVR headset w/ my Galaxy S7 phone in 2016, and was really impressed with the graphics and immersion in the games I tried. There really wasn't any kind of killer app, like say Pokemon Go was in the summer of that year. After a few weeks of use, the novelty wore off and I haven't used it since. Considering the massive success of group games like Jackbox.tv and Among Us, I think the killer app for VR has to have a group competition or co-op element. Single player VR stuff was cool but felt pretty isolating.
• jedberg 6y ago
  I didn't think I'd love my Quest as much as I do. I got it on a whim because someone here on HN was offering theirs for sale at a discount. I wish I had more time to play it! I'll put it on and start playing, and two hours later I'm still going, I'm exhausted from the workout, and I don't want to stop. And my six year old loves it too! She loves to draw in 3D. She loves the YouTube VR roller coasters, especially because she isn't big enough for the biggest coasters just yet. And every other person whose tried it loves it too (sadly with lockdowns I don't get a chance to share very often because I don't see a lot of people and have to quarantine the unit for two days every time I loan it out). My sister in law is an artist so I dropped her into the 3D paint program. In 10 minutes she had made a beautiful 3D sculpture from nothing. My brother refused to give it up for days because he couldn't stop playing. And I just got a second unit from Amazon to participate in a virtual world experience for re:invent, and it was the most awesome way to have a remote meeting! The sound is directional, so you have an idea of who is talking, and the avatars have hands, so you can see people's hand movements as well as their head and body movements. It adds so much to the conversation to see body language. Let's just say I'm a bigger fan than I thought I'd ever be. Especially since the last time I tried it it got really motion sick, but that was years ago. The tech has come a long way.
• awillen 6y ago
  I think it's really great when people write down bets like this publicly, so we can go back and see what people's expectations of the future are. There are snippets of this kind of speculation from many decades ago, plus of course there's sci-fi to look at, and it's amazing how much further we've advanced than most people expect. If you look at where we are now vs. 100 years ago, our technology would be utterly unrecognizable to them. When people of that age predicted the future, they didn't do great. I'd like to think we have better foresight, but the reality is we'd probably be just as bad at predicting what things will be like in 100 years. The thing that amazes me is the exponential nature of human progress. Even if we made linear progress - that is, some "equal" amount of advancement in the next hundred years as we did in the last, that would be incredible. But of course our progress builds on itself, and so if we assign a value of 100 to the amount of progress in the last hundred years, we're likely to have a 200, 300 or 400 over the next hundred years. Personally, I'm betting on pretty much all computer interfaces being directly connected to the brain and people living off of earth permanently.
• abraxas 6y ago
  Rhythm, exercise, boxing, fencing games are second to none in VR thanks to the medium itself. They are much more compelling in VR vs jumping in front of a television set while waving a pair of Wii wands. The reason VR is struggling is the same reason that most exercise games eventually struggle. Humans are lazy and prefer sitting on their asses and click buttons with near zero muscle activity.
  • ColFrancis 6y ago
    But how many people play wii sports? It was awesome fun, super novel, and was huge for a while there but now it's died off. It'll be interesting to see if VR does the same. One thing going for VR is that there's more than one company making stuff.
    • chaostheory 6y ago
      The problem with Wii Sports is that you couldn't make it a high intensity workout. High intensity workouts are a reality in VR. This is just one example out of many https://www.getsupernatural.com https://www.getsupernatural.com Even boxing is amazing and tiring https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/3008315795852749 https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/3008315795852749
      • abraxas 6y ago
        Thrill of the Fight is an integral part of my workouts.
      • Noos 6y ago
        Don't need VR for that at all, Konami did a great arcade boxing game that was also quite the workout in 2001, called Mocap boxing: https://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=8724 https://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=8724
        • chaostheory 6y ago
          The Oculus Quest 2 is $299 and it fits inside a small case. I'm not sure if you're joking or not, but your alternative is a giant, heavy, antique that's hard to find and that probably costs a few thousand dollars not including maintenance; and it plays only one game. I would highly recommend at least trying modern VR (Google Cardboard doesn't count) before having a stronger opinion on it
• Kiro 6y ago
  I think fitness is the killer app. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fKpJ-hKbiE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fKpJ-hKbiE I haven't tried Supernatural but FitXR was a great improvement from Beat Saber (granted, BS is more fun but the workout is nothing compared to FitXR or Thrill of the Fight). I'm very excited for the future of fitness in VR. Oculus Move shows that it's a rising star.
• monkeydust 6y ago
  Really got into VR earlier this year with Quest 1. Managed to put together a small skunkworks team to develop an application to view data - goal was to gain insights through manipulation and viewing data in an immersive space. We had a novel approach to do this. Problem is COVID-19 hit so getting other people to try it became impossible and most target users do not have their own headset. We used video's to showcase but its obviously not the same. Project on ice (for now) but we felt there was definitely something there. What we developed was not the final killer product but it got people talking a lot. Its (VR/AR) time will come, that's for sure, but we need more 6DFs, lighter, capable standalone headsets.
  • zmmmmm 6y ago
    Yeah - COVID has really destroyed my VR evangilism. We aren't even supposed to be within 1.5m of each other, let alone sharing phyiscal headsets. Showing a room full of people VR is dead now. I'm not sure how to recover that ... it's going to be a while at very least.
• vmception 6y ago
  A console linked VR headset that has local multiplayer would be nice. The PSVR and camera doesn't even have an upgrade for PS5 yet. So that's too bad. Something more advanced like the Oculus Quest 2 or HTC or Valve, but for powerful enough hardware people and brands people already have would be the right move. Also an ability to ditch the external camera requirement. and also ditch the cords, but we can revisit that stretchgoal later.
• grawprog 6y ago
  I have to admit, about the only thing that's really looked appealing to me as far as VR goes is Tabletop Simulator. The concept seems really cool. I haven't tried it, but looking at it, my guess in reality it's a bit awkward to use and probably ends up being more frustrating than fun. Current VR just seems not quite immersive enough to feel real or worth using for most things but slightly too immersive so that it ends up being unnerving after a while. The lack of tactile stimulation doesn't help either. I think if they could come up with some kind of gloves that could simulate pressure and touch, that worked reliably as controllers, VR would become more popular.
• egypturnash 6y ago
  Chris Pruett, who runs part of Oculus, speculated about that, saying: "My guess would be something that is highly immersive, that involves active motion of your body, and ... it's probably going to be something that you either play with other people or is shareable with other people." VRChat. More and more of my furry online circles are constantly posting VRChat videos and photos. Give it a year or two of the gear needed dropping in price and I think it may finally explode in usage. The ‘rona helps here; all the furry cons have been cancelled but furries still want to be cartoon animals at each other. There have been virtual cons via VRCHat already. I don’t have the spare cash to get a vr setup myself so I can’t talk about how well they went off, but I bet the virtual-first cons founded this year are not gonna go away just because physical gatherings are safe again...
• amelius 6y ago
  Looking at older technology like VHS/Betamax, VR will take off when people can use it to consume pr0n without being tethered to some company like Oculus/Facebook that may collect information about them.
• zmmmmm 6y ago
  I'm sold on VR because it has completely revolutionised my fitness regime. It turns what is otherwise a boring, painful chore into immersive, interactive and fun experience that leaves me sweating and heart pounding and running late because I wanted to do just one more round ... If my headset broke today, I would order a new one same day.
  • simonswords82 6y ago
    What headset do you have and what do you play to work out?
    • zmmmmm 6y ago
      It's a v1 Quest. I have a combo routine that involves Synthriders then Beat Saber and finally pistol whip. These all exercise different aspects - Synthriders builds muscle mass in arms, Beat Saber is more cardio, and pistol whip has me crouching / squatting to do my legs.
    • chaostheory 6y ago
      I use a Quest 2 and I can vouch for it as a fitness machine. You can even use it on a stationary bike if you get a $20 cadence sensor https://www.virzoom.com/ https://www.virzoom.com/
• holoduke 6y ago
  Once the headset is as big and light as a pair of sunglasses and has 2x 8k screens build in. Since desktops are no longer mainstream, the controlling hardware is most likely not integrated yet. It needs to be +-50 times faster than current hardware though. Probably in 5 to 10 years it will be a necessity in order to live a mainstream life.
• mncharity 6y ago
  Perhaps part of the problem was a premature switch from exploration to exploitation? When Facebook bought Oculus for $$$$, the collaborative community which had been pushing the envelope, exploring for possibilities, rapidly died. People took it as a hint to switch modes. And eye-tracking rent seekers, already in low-volume high-cost exploitation mode, weren't then incentivized to support exploration. Gaming had dollars, and so became a dominating focus. But it also had challenging constraints, which further pruned exploration. Do you want higher resolution, to allow text and programming in VR? Well, a panel existed, but gaming standards of immersion and such were too GPU intensive for the market at that resolution, so ... feel free to diy it yourself. In an environment where diy was no longer a supported thing. Programmers - a niche market. Facebook et al, even Chinese OEMs, aren't interested in niche, or in making "commodity" hardware. Consumer platforms, and lock-in, and unicorn dreams. Even while that further cripples exploration. Nreal light AR glasses are a laptop-comparable 1080p 3D screen at 2 meters. As with their dev kit, consumer availability is now first in China, SK, and Japan, then later in Europe, and eventually in the US. So asia now, and maybe US late next year. And the glasses are developed on linux, but you can't have that - no unicorns there. Here's this amazing tech, and instead of an exploratory ferment, we wait for a few large companies to navigate patent thickets, to eventually meet the severe constraints of creating mass-market consumer devices. And then we'll dig in to exploring.
  • TulliusCicero 6y ago
    Facebook has already released two mass market targeted VR headsets with moderate success. It's not console numbers yet, but then again, there's still plenty of low-hanging fruit to grab when it comes to technical improvements (and unlike early video game consoles, the market always has plenty of mature ecosystems for interactive games).
    • mncharity 6y ago
      Yeah, sorry I was less than clear. The idea was that capabilities become available to us for exploration, via mass consumer and gaming products. A rather narrow and higher-latency channel. Rather than say a dynamic market of small companies and a diy community. Leaving plenty of low-hanging fruit not yet grabbed. A less concentrated industry might have been more interested, creative, and effective, at gathering such fruit, and exploring for accessible markets. Perhaps yielding a less slow takeoff. A counter argument is that Intel's RealSense does exist to build on, and Leap Motion's hand tracker and Project NorthStar. A counter^2 argument is these are outliers, with LM's work only remaining available, because they dropped IIRC three separate acquisition attempts by Apple. Most work hasn't remained available to use and build on. But perhaps a healthy commercial-diy blended market was never an option. Given a patent regime optimized for pharma-shaped industry. There seemed a long-term pre-concentration pattern of patent dodging via non-commercial software, and hardware "kits". Leaving many capabilities already unavailable, because a bit of commercially-motivated effort was needed, but discouraged by a too-small community market and/or associated patents. The current concentration of effort may well get us more quickly to eventual phone-scale broad consumer adoption of XR. It has motivated the supply and R&D tech chain in a way a small market never could. But perhaps it has also contributed to a less-diverse flatter takeoff. And perhaps, if XR encounters difficulties with mass consumer adoption, it maybe have added a fragility risk of larger delays.
• aronowb14 6y ago
  Totally agree with the sentiment in this post. I've been working in VR for about 5 years now and came to this conclusion a couple weeks ago. There simply are better alternatives to mostly every VR application. Also, I do think the "Killer app" for VR has already been found: education. The US Military, Airforce, and NASA has been using VR for decades for training for example, and will continue to use them. There are several startups working on adapting VR education to other high-end use cases like surgery and enterprise training as well. I think those will still be niche, but will probably make for a couple companies with longevity in the end. There are some unexplored but interesting pieces to the VR puzzle that also haven't been either invented or put together yet: better hand tracking, better haptics, better eye tracking, better displays, and lighter headsets for example. Potentially some combination of these will result in a 'must have' application for VR. Who can say when this will happen though.
• aaron695 6y ago
  The reason we are not apes in trees is our ability to reduce dimensions, not increase them. If you don't get that, then you won't understand the What, How, When of VR. (Hint, it's a long way off)
• Yhippa 6y ago
  I got burned as an early adopter. Tried the Oculus Rift and PSVR. I had to deal with minor motion sickness issues with both. I didn't like that there was a lot of setup and physical space involved with keeping them ready. It seems like that's gotten better with the Quest 2 but there's no trade-in program so I guess I'm stuck for a while. Here are some experiences I wish I could have: 1. Virtual presence at a concert or sporting event 2. More apps or games where I sit down and can move around but still experience VR. Controls seem awkward still for this type of thing. Maybe it contributes to motion sickness.
• Aaronstotle 6y ago
  I can't put on a VR headset for more than 5 minutes without getting a headache. Also VR headsets have a resolution that is still too low to be worth trying imo, so I feel it's about another decade away from mass adoption.
• quadcore 6y ago
  Easy: when this platform will have a killer app other platforms cant have.
• rocky1138 6y ago
  I know I'm late to the conversation, but one of the biggest unreported problems with VR adoption is that it's impossible to show anyone what it is like to actually experience it. You can't share a video or a photo with a friend and have them understand. They have to do it to understand it.
  • blhack 6y ago
    And what's worse is that the most accessible version of "VR", google cardboard (or equivalents) is actually a terrible representation of VR. So people will try that, dismiss VR as a gimmick, and not revisit it again. A proper VR rig is likely going to cost you >$2000, and it's going to need a dedicated room of your house. It's really inaccessible. But man when it works... Playing skyrim, or fallout in my vive was such a pleasant experience for me.
    • valbaca 6y ago
      "likely going to cost you >$2000, and it's going to need a dedicated room of your house" Sounds exactly like the requirements of the very first home TVs.
      • _carbyau_ 6y ago
        Yeah but a bit more. Toddlers and pets didn't have to be kept out of the TV room. For VR they could wreak havoc...
    • ipsum2 6y ago
      > A proper VR rig is likely going to cost you >$2000, and it's going to need a dedicated room of your house. It's really inaccessible. Oculus Quest 2 is $299. If you have a 1m x 1m space you can play a majority of games.
• Cactus2018 6y ago
  VR Headsets comparison table: "VR System Guide Summer 2020! Updated with Reverb G2, and all recent info. By Evanlyboy" https://imgur.com/a/QVbyeA1 https://imgur.com/a/QVbyeA1 https://old.reddit.com/r/SteamVR/comments/hzkl36/vr_system_guide_summer_2020_is_finally_here/ https://old.reddit.com/r/SteamVR/comments/hzkl36/vr_system_g...
  • strombofulous 6y ago
    Personally I think this one offers more usable information: https://i.redd.it/r6idh33kitp51.png https://i.redd.it/r6idh33kitp51.png
    • Cactus2018 6y ago
      That is a great comparison. This was the source cannel - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJy8VU1mV08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJy8VU1mV08 Note that the image is a contentious summary (people talking about the camera's focus and aperture, and the many comments on the Index's screen shot) https://old.reddit.com/r/virtualreality/comments/j15plf/12_headset_comparison/ https://old.reddit.com/r/virtualreality/comments/j15plf/12_h...
• m3kw9 6y ago
  VR moment will start from the AR moment
• mikenew 6y ago
  The Valve Index and the Quest have been sold out for just about the entire year. Half Life: Alyx is one of the best gaming experiences I've had in my life. I have witnessed everyone who tried Beat Saber completely fall in love with it after about 10 minutes, including people who were 100% positive that they hated video games and would not enjoy it. It is obvious, if you have the right system and you do the right things, that VR is mind blowing. BUT, the VR ecosystem is a shitshow. So many manufactures are making crappy headsets and wondering why they don't sell. The HTC Cosmos Elite, for example, ships with old base stations and clunky-as-hell Vive wands, and costs almost as much as an Index. Windows Mixed Reality is, for one, not "mixed reality" at all, and the tracking is so fucking broken I'm honestly surprised we haven't seen class action lawsuits. Most VR games are just normal 2d games with VR tacked on, or if they are made for VR they're tiny. Valve made a good headset and it's been sold out since launch. They made a good game and it's won awards and sold to pretty much every single person who can play it. Facebook (as much as I hate they're a major player here) made a good headset with the Quest (not with the Rift), and it's been sold out since it launched as well. Just make good products and we'll buy them FFS. It's not that complicated.
  • imaginenore 6y ago
    I hate Beat Saber. My least favorite VR game.
• nicetryguy 6y ago
  Unfortunatly i just don't ever see myself putting something on my head with headphones and video screens a couple inches from my eyes. Freaks me out. I'm uncomfortable just thinking about the sensory deprivation. At least when i'm watching a screen, i can be somewhat aware of the rest of the world. I don't think i'm alone with these feelings either.
  • mrlala 6y ago
    > I don't think i'm alone with these feelings either. Hmm.. I think you are in the vast minority for sure. I've been following (and an adopter) of VR since the beginning and I think this is really the first time I've heard someone say something like that. What I don't get is you say "sensory deprivation" but you are anything but deprived on sensory.. you feel like you are in another place with visual & audio. I guess when there's a loading time or something and it's all black, I can see what you mean a little bit..
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• ab-dm 6y ago
  I was pretty anti-VR until a friend wouldn’t shut up about how good the rift-S was and I finally picked one up this year during lockdown. Now I have an index a quest 2, and spend far, far too much time in VR. Nothing comes close to PCVR gaming in VR, and quest 2 titles are starting to become really good. Population 1 is probably one of the most enjoyable games I’ve ever played in my entire life, and I don’t even like battle royals. Yes there are some things we need to get better at, but I just can’t imagine something this transformative, that is consistently sold out, doesn’t take off at one point, even if it is 5 years away.
• WhompingWindows 6y ago
  I can't use any VR I've ever tried -- I get nauseous after 5 minutes. Until they solve this, I'm all about monitors.
• causality0 6y ago
  VR is a magical experience but for me it just isn't worth the hassle. VR is going to have to get to the "pick up and play within 60 seconds" level of convenience before I spend any more money on it. Getting my glasses to fit correctly in the headset is a pain. Adjusting the focus when I put it on is a pain. Software that tells me everything is working fine when I have no picture is a pain. Setting up the play area every time I start up because I breathed too hard since last time is a pain. Not being able to recommend it to anyone I know because they'll rely on me to sort out the problems is a massive pain. When I tell someone to buy a Nintendo I know they're not going to call me to complain about how annoying it is to use.
  • J5892 6y ago
    What headset do you have? I've never had any trouble with my glasses or focus with the Vive. (granted, my glasses are fairly small) And I've never had issues with my play area being messed up. I don't mean to belittle your issues. I'm just curious why our experiences are so different.
    • MikusR 6y ago
      The only headset with adjustable focus is GearVR, but its only 3dof so no idea
  • zmmmmm 6y ago
    If you haven't used a Quest headset then you should update your thoughts after doing that. It pretty much solves the points you raise.
    • laser 6y ago
      That hasn't been my experience. It's directionally closer than the last generation of headsets, but my oculus quest mostly just sits around because pickup and use is still not the reality. In another few years I'm hoping we get to smart-phone level ease of use, that + superior capabilities will kick-off the real "bend in the curve" in VR or AR growth.
• peter303 6y ago
  I saw an analysis about 7 years ago (Boulder startup week) that adequate spatial resolution, fps refresh and tracker response would require about 100 teraops of local processing power in the display device. At that time it was just one percent of that power. Apples family of top end ARM devices are closing that. Another bottleneck was that standard graphics pipeline in GPU had too much latency to keep up with user movements.
• rdw 6y ago
  I was tangentially involved with VR as a game developer, in the 2015-2016 timeframe. Both Oculus and Valve really strongly believed that there was a "there" there, but didn't know what the actual killer app would be. They spent a lot of money trying to find it, and I benefited by getting some free headsets! I don't feel like they have actually found it yet, though they seem to be closer. It probably will eventually be a successful thing, probably slowly and incrementally, but I think that the rush to be first to market caused all parties involved to make some mistakes that prevented the wild success they were envisioning. - They should have been even more experimental. Bootstrapping a market is difficult. The way it goes is that the audience is zero at the start, so no sensible publisher or developer would risk their money over the years it takes to build a game, so the platform creator has to fund them 100%. But that also means that the platform creator gets to control the games and how they're made. I got the sense that the VR platform owners were overly controlling. I was involved with several different headset makers and they were pretty specific about how the input devices had to be used, limitations on the permissible content, and what kinds of games they were looking for. That makes sense for a mature platform where you know what a killer app looks like, but I think they needed much more experimentation for VR. When we first started building for VR, our team strongly believed that it would be the most fun to make games that focused on small-scale, close-up experiences, basically fitting everything on a tabletop. But we were steered away from such ideas, in part due to platform pressure. I guess they felt that big, splashy, open experiences were going to dominate (or would at least make good screenshots for marketing), but they were wrong. Long distance scenes aren't actually that cool in VR because the stereoscopic difference goes to zero; it becomes no different from looking at a monitor. Maybe small-scale stuff wouldn't have worked out -- the lack of vergence cues may cause additional eyestrain -- but it still seems like a big unexplored area of potential. - Fragmentation is a huge problem. Even within one single headset model, developers cannot assume that players have more than a seated chair's worth of space. If you make a game that accepts that limit, it feels like you're "not really doing VR" and that pisses off funders. So you try and awkwardly have some sort of "progressive enhancement" that makes the game more fun when moving around the room, but still playable when stationary. You really have to build the entire game around such a compromise, so most such games felt very demo-y (e.g. Robo Recall, Job Simulator). Plus all the options for the inputs -- remember how the Rift shipped with an xbox controller? Building a game that can use either xbox or 3DOF or 6DOF controller is madness; the paradigms are totally different. So you're pretty much limited to building a lowest-common-denominator system, which sucks. I think Oculus is trying to address this now, by focusing on standalone headsets, but that saddles them with additional technical challenges so it'll be a few years before that can succeed. - Inputs are everything for VR, and I don't think people realize how late in the game they actually were. When Oculus and Vive announced, the problem of having accurate-enough handheld controllers was not known to be solvable. Valve's "room demo" had inside-out head tracking that looked at barcodes plastered on the walls, clearly a temporary hack. Good game development takes years; not having a reliable input paradigm to count on _severely_ impacted developer productivity. That said, vehicular games like Elite which can treat the VR headset as a more immersive display were and continue to be some of the high points of the VR experience. I think that they thought that more genres of games would behave like that, but, no. - I think it was a mistake on Oculus's part to have different levels of buy-in for their platform. It would have worked better if there was one package that everyone bought, even if it was expensive. Maybe the thought that they could have a cheap version for the masses, and people who wanted a better experience could spend more. But it isn't the case that getting the fancier VR package improves the visuals without affecting the gameplay; the different controller types and increased precision substantially changed the types of games you were able to play, exacerbating the fragmentation problem. - The technical road to having high resolution displays and low-latency rendering was too long. It may be there now, after 5 years of concerted effort, but it wasn't in 2016. If the renderer can't keep up, it's super noticeable in VR. The analogy is capacitive touchscreens. Until they were _absolutely nailed_, they were worse than no touchscreen at all. Game platforms fail to take off all the time, this was just one of the more well-funded and public ones. Remember the Ouya? Google's various game platforms preceding Stadia? Stadia itself? Failure is the norm; what might eventually turn this around is the very strong dedication some people have to the idea.
• TulliusCicero 6y ago
  > We’ve been talking about virtual reality for decades, but it’s gone pretty much nowhere. What? Going from essentially zero consumer sales to 5m/year is 'nothing'? It's not smartphone or even console numbers yet, but it's not some tiny insignificant niche anymore (now it's a significant niche).
• tmsh 6y ago
  Part of what made the iPhone take off is that it was good UX and everyone uses their phone every day multiple times a day. For VR to succeed at that level it needs: better UX (Quest is close but needs to be 2x resolution and content richness / latency) and ease of use needs to be 100. I.e., it needs to replace people’s glasses and/or be as easy as turning on the tv. I.e., very lightweight. Again Quest is the closest but still I’d say 25% of the way there.
• ineedasername 6y ago
  I'm not sure the decision on the basis of unit sales, in COVID's 2020, is a proper metric for "mainstream". Because VR manufacturers were unprepared for the surge in demand, things like the Quest were out of stock constantly for months. The Quest 2 is still extremely hard to find outside of crazy scalper prices or a 1-month wait if you buy direct. Besides which, 10,000,000 seems very large for an early adopter group a anyway. I'd argue that anything selling 1million+ units has pretty much made the mainstream. Still, that wasn't the bet, but it may very well be that demand for 10,000,000 existed, it just outstripped supply, at which point I'd say the spirit of the bet was fulfilled.
• gwbas1c 6y ago
  VR is like listening to music is surround sound: There's a small, dedicated market that will eat it up, but most people just don't care. I love listening to music in surround, but it requires time to fill a room with speakers placed just right. A few years ago I tried my friend's VR setup. He had to set up a room just right, and the space had to be completely empty or you'd smack into things. I even smacked into a wall where some sensor wasn't calibrated right. Even the economics of dedicating a large, empty space for VR means it's mostly for "rich" people. You could be middle class in the 'burbs and pull the car out of the garage to do VR... But what if you live in a tiny SF or NYC apartment? What about even denser living conditions outside of the US?
  • Melting_Harps 6y ago
    > Even the economics of dedicating a large, empty space for VR means it's mostly for "rich" people. You could be middle class in the 'burbs and pull the car out of the garage to do VR... But what if you live in a tiny SF or NYC apartment? What about even denser living conditions outside of the US? I get the complaints, and VR isn't really something that suits me as I get nausea really quick with headsets messing up my hearing somehow. I had this same effect when I took the train and had to face backwards to the direction the train was heading. It's really unpleasant and losses all novelty in about 10 minutes. But, I have to ask: with the advent (or promise really) of 5G why wouldn't you take to being outdoors for a session of alien blasters VR instead of being suck inside? One of the cool things I think AR has over VR is that we saw how the Pokemon game fad got people who spend way too much time on their phones to go back outside with the right incentive (and putting aside the massive privacy intrusion it turned out to be) and being able to interact with their environment as part of the game quest. I can't see why a designated area in the park couldn't be allotted for that, and it would be cool as you could share it with younger kids who may not be able to afford or have access to the unit to ever try it and ultimately build community with other enthusiasts. I saw that happen with some of the local kids with drones at my community park this year after seeing little to no kids the year earlier ever playing there. By the end of summer it looked they were all making videos or something together. This is one of the cooler unintentional things that happened I was learning to fish out at the pier; the looks on some kids faces when something 'feels like a bite' is hilarious, and its pretty much Christmas if they ever catch anything even if its just bait fish. There are Bitcoin meetups in VR happening right now, but to be honest I'd rather just go to the conference calls one where you can see a stream along with the attendees faces. Anything else seems off putting, but then I don't really get the appeal of something like second-life interactions with avatars. I was re-watching season 3 of the Expanse, and that ship building puzzle in the train station on Mars with all of those kids assembling it looked like a really cool thing to have if we could work out the tech. Hacking culture can't be introduced early enough in my opinion.
• dwighttk 6y ago
  VR won’t take off until they solve the movement problem. Every game I’ve played uses some hack to make up for the fact that I can’t just walk anywhere I want in the world they are presenting. I don’t think this is a solvable problem, but I could be wrong. Occasionally a game will do a very good job disguising this problem, but I’ve never seen anything that hints at a solution. We're getting the bottoms of our toes wet and calling it immersion.
  • scpedicini 6y ago
    I really wish that you could take an inside-out tracker virtual reality system like the oculus quest outside and then draw boundaries in your backyard. Can you imagine being able to use an entire soccer field or a basketball court? Although even if this was technically possible, it would likely open up companies to massive potential safety issue related lawsuits.
• ilaksh 6y ago
  When optical waveguide comes in an affordable consumer AR/VR product with a separate tethered battery/computer pack.
• irrational 6y ago
  It will take off when Apple releases a VR headset (iVR?) At least, from my viewpoint that has been the impetus for many things taking off, even if they existed for years beforehand. Smart phones, tablets, watches, I can't think of any other examples but maybe there are some.
• FrozenVoid 6y ago
  I'd rather wait for something like the holodeck, instead of various head-mounted gadgets simulating dynamic 3D scenes. "VR" has limited appeal if you know its just a fancy display technology tracking head movement.
• helsinkiandrew 6y ago
  I first used a VR helmet 30 years ago in a CS department (think Dire Straits 'Money for Nothing' quality graphics). It was a fun experience and I've used VR helmets since then and its been another fun experience, but we still don't have a must have, killer application that is going to bring VR to the masses. iPhones were replacing something that people already had with something that did it so much better than before that it seemed like magic. I can't see VR doing that unless the tech becomes so wonderful that it can be added to spectacles/contact lenses or the experience injected right into the brain cheaply and someone creates a killer app that people will want to use repeatedly. There will always be technical and industrial uses - training, visualization etc that can justify expensive headsets and expensive content creation but those are niche markets.
• stiray 6y ago
  I love idea of VR but... Sure, I would love to buy VR headset but there are things that are stopping me, and until they are fixed, I will wait before buying, it is not a crucial piece of technology after all (like robotic vacuum cleaners are :D ) - I will not vendor lockin myself into some store "Hey, buy xy monitor and you can only use software for it from xy store". - I will not pay for the VR substantially more than good monitor (of normal size) - I will not pay extra for games that I have already bought as non VR - I will not upgrade my whole hardware just to be able to use VR (I do understand why hardware requirements are as they are but I will just not do it) - I will absolutely not buy anything subscription based. - I will never buy it from facebook (,google,...), I dont consider them a trustworthy company and I am not buying anything that is positioned in home from those. - While watching tv, playing playstation whole family can have fun, for the same price, not just one And once I go trough all the points I dont think that here is any VR headset that fits. And to me all those points are showstoppers. Maybe buying new computer hardware can be left out as a showstopper, it is just a huge annoyance. Bottom line the VR technology is not even a problem at all. Everything around is.
  • asiachick 6y ago
    > - I will not vendor lockin myself into some store "Hey, buy xy monitor and you can only use software for it from xy store". Steam VR games, the largest VR market, have no vendor lock in AFAIK > - I will not pay for the VR substantially more than good monitor (of normal size) A Rift 2 is $300 right now. Many of the windows ones are also in the $300-$500 range. I don't know what your range is. To me it would be unreasonable to limit the price to $100. I've bought monitors for $800, $1500, $4000, $200, $400. > - I will not pay extra for games that I have already bought as non VR you don't want non-VR games ported to VR. They suck > - I will absolutely not buy anything subscription based. I know of no subscription based VR except porn and even though you're paying for access to their libraries and you download unencrypted mp4s. Your subscription just gives you access to new content. > - I will never buy it from facebook (,google,...), I dont consider them a trustworthy company and I am not buying anything that is positioned in home from those. Agreed though sadly, in my experience, they do have the best experience ATM (I know others disagree...) I hope that changes meaning I hope the experience elsewhere becomes better. > - While watching tv, playing playstation whole family can have fun, for the same price, not just one Not sure what your point is here. you're comparing apples to oranges. That's like saying "I'll never buy a snowboard because my car carries 4 people"
• asiachick 6y ago
  I love Love LOVE VR!!! I'm unfortunately not convinced it will ever "take off". At least not in its current incarnation of HMDs and controllers. There are just too any limitations. 1) You usually need a 10x10sqft open space to use it. Sure there are examples of experiences or tools that you can sit in chair but they are very limiting. 2) You're isolated. Watching TV or playing a video game you can be in the same room as others but standing in the same room as other playing VR is kind of off putting (maybe that's just me) 3) People get sick from motion so more limits on what you can actually do. I generally don't get sick and have played a few games 5-8hrs a day though I have experiences serious debilitating sick for 3 hours nausea in 2 "VR hacked into a not designed for VR" games Other issues are chicken and egg. * You can't show people what it's like to be in VR without them being in VR. If you stand out of VR and look at the screen it looks just like a standard video game. The feeling of presence is not something you can show in video so the user who doesn't have VR equipment will never get excited about it from videos of what the experience is like * The audience is too small so there isn't enough content. There's a ton of tiny indie games but there are very few well made AAA VR games. Some AAA games have a VR mode but the game wasn't designed for VR and so is usually poor. I'm sure this will be controversial if you're a fan but for example Eve Valkyrie fails for me because none of the controls are in VR. You need to sit at a keyboard where as I just want to reach out and touch the controls that I see on the control panels of the ship I'm in. No Man's Sky did some of this better with it's VR control stick and thrust stick and the exit handle but failed everywhere else where all the inventory screens are designed for joypads, not VR. * This is more of the same but many interfaces are bad or to put it another way they are kind of like "by gamers for gamers" I almost wish valve/oculus had shipped controllers with no buttons or at most one button per controller to force the devs to put the controls in VR. In VR they are usually intuitive where as most games it's press one of the 18 buttons on both controllers (Oculus has A,B,X,Y,Left Trigger, Left Grab, Right Trigger, Right Grab, Left stick Up, Left Stick down, Left stick left, Left stick up, Left stick press, right stuck up, right stick down, right stick left, right stick right, right stick press and there's actually to more, left menu button and right menu button. I realize that 1 button per controller would be limiting, I just wish more games/tools/software embraced VR more * Inside out tracking of controllers and Quest level smartphone hardware are very limited. I know many owners of Quest are enthralled with it but for me it's a step back. The fact that it can't track your hands in all directions at all times breaks many experiences. Designing around that limitation basically means giving up on many experiences. Similarly a smartphone GPU is just not up to providing the top level experiences. It's like Switch vs PS4. Sure there are wonderful experiences on a Switch but there are also 100s of PS4 experiences that are just not possible on a Switch. Same with Quest. It's underpowered so Beat Saber, great! HL2: Alyx, not going to happen. (even with the link which you can go read reviews of blurriness and latency. People make due but it's not compelling the same way high powered VR is)
• cesarvarela 6y ago
  As soon as you don’t have to put that huge thing in your head anymore.
• whywhywhywhy 6y ago
  Honestly Virtual Reality has only just begun. The entire Vive PC VR era was a complete false start and had no chance of ever becoming mainstream. Every time I demoed it to people who were totally floored they completely lost interest in buying it the second I told them it needed a tower PC. Oculus Quest (just looking at the hardware) may as well by the first VR headset because it’s the first that is both feature complete with full head and hand presence and doesn’t have to be tethered to another bulky system and doesn’t cost $1000+ to get started. First time I demoed quest to a friend he had ordered one off Amazon 2 minutes seconds after taking it off and him demoing it to his family and friends sold 4 more.
• intrasight 6y ago
  Late to the thread - but was thinking about when I woke up. I think that compelling (eg non FPS games) content will have to wait for a mainstream device. My prediction is that Apple will make a compelling headset within two years. It'll wirelessly tether to the next generation (M2-M3) Macbook. It'll sell for about $1000. And the developer community will jump on board.