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I'm not convinced VR is set to grow a whole lot. I think that the VR that we were looking forward to back in the The Lawn Mower Man / Matrix days is a long way

I'm not convinced VR is set to grow a whole lot. I think that the VR that we were looking forward to back in the The Lawn Mower Man / Matrix days is a long way off. All we have today is just TVs that you glue to your eyes which aren't really close to what we've been fantasizing about in sci-fi for decades. * Most headsets probably aren't good enough to not cause headaches after about 2 hours. I also think they could lead to eye problems. * Right now we only have a very limited subset of senses available. (Touch, Taste and Smell are still a long ways away from being available.) * The way to interface with VR is still very crude. Still uses a traditional controller or at best some Kinect like interface. Which would have the problem of needing a expensive treadmill like device to prevent you from bumping into walls. * The headsets are still expensive. The hardware it takes to run games capable of taking advantage of the headsets is expensive. The cost of developing those games is also crazy expensive.

throwaway34241 6y ago
> Still uses a traditional controller or at best some Kinect like interface. Which would have the problem of needing a expensive treadmill like device to prevent you from bumping into walls. > The headsets are still expensive. The hardware it takes to run games capable of taking advantage of the headsets is expensive. The most popular VR device right now is the Oculus Quest 2, which is $299, needs no additional hardware, and uses fully motion tracked controllers (along with hand tracking). There's a boundary tracking system to prevent running into walls. Also, it is growing a lot on a year-over-year basis, although of course the base is still tiny compared to cell phones etc. So some of your info is out of date. I think that some of the challenges being worked on right now are content, device size/weight, and also integrating eye and face tracking into headsets. [1] [1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/mark-zuckerberg-on-mind-reading-apple-and-the-race-to-mainstream-vr https://www.theinformation.com/articles/mark-zuckerberg-on-m...
- seoaeu 6y ago
  $300 is not cheap for a lot of people. It is more than I've ever spent on a computer monitor, and I use those every day!
  - throwaway3699 6y ago
    People drop $1000 on smartphones all the time. It might be expensive, but it's not unobtanium anymore.
    - jcelerier 6y ago
      > People drop $1000 on smartphones all the time. you live in a different universe
      - forrestthewoods 6y ago
        An iPhone 12 with bumped storage and sales tax is about $1000. Apple probably sells roughly 200 million phones a year that cost at least $800? I'm not sure how many premium smartphones Samsung sells these days. I'm not sure how you can consider that another universe? It's a pretty big market right here on planet Earth?
        jcelerier 6y ago
        ??? but almost no one buys the iphone at their full price. e.g. here if I want an iphone 12, it'd cost me 249€ with a mobile plan (https://m.boutique.orange.fr/mobile/details/apple-iphone-12-5g-bleu-64go https://m.boutique.orange.fr/mobile/details/apple-iphone-12-...)
      - throwaway3699 6y ago
        FWIW I think it is ludicrous too. I'm just saying how it is.
  - throwaway34241 6y ago
    I don't think it's exactly expensive either, relative to other devices that have seen broad adoption. Computers, smart phones, TVs, (LCD/tube) monitors, tablets etc didn't reach that price point until they were in the market for quite a while. Sure it might need to be cheaper to be affordable to 100% of the world, but it's not even close to saturating the market in high income countries yet (or the market share of much more expensive devices). BTW the $300 device is not just a display, it includes a fairly high end smartphone chip in addition to a high res-screen, battery, lenses, controllers, 4 cameras etc. I wouldn't expect major cost reductions anytime soon.
hackRn3975 6y ago
I'm going to go out on a limb and say you don't own a modern VR headset ? Although, you still could and have this opinion I'm just curious. Honestly even if you don't own one I'm not saying we should dismiss your opinion. Honestly it arguably means more or I should say could mean more. The thing that sticks out to me is, do you think these are good arguments for "games won't grow" or "Vr usage won't grow" ? I'm thinking about when video games first were gaining popularity since it's a really good comparison imo. ~ * tv/game eye problems ~ * limited controls ~ * very crude interfaces ~ * expensive hardware (thinking of original pc games to even the N64 $100+) So if we're not close to the ideal then it's not worth it ? "Matrix days is a long way off.", yeah it probably is... so ? If you want VR of today or even in 5 years to be the "Matrix" or the holy grail of VR then yes you will be dissapointed. All that to say this hypothesis you're proposing : "Vr won't grow a whole lot because we're far away from the Matrix vr experience" is not totally unreasonable but I personally think it's really weak and historically proven wrong in so many industries.
thrower123 6y ago
GPU shortages have hit VR at a very unfortunate time. It was just starting to take off a little bit, but now you have to trade your first-born child to get a 3080 card to really drive VR.
- bluescrn 6y ago
  Hasn't Facebook effectively killed PC VR anyway? (discontinuing the Rift S, forced FB logins, and focusing on closed-platform mobile VR)
  - klipklop 6y ago
    Surprising no not really. Facebook has greatly improved the oculus link functionality for the Quest. You can now play PC VR wirelessly with an application called Virtual Desktop. I beat half life Alyx this way and it was awesome. No link cable is my preferred way to play pc vr. They killed the rift S mostly because the Quest 2 is the better unit overall. I do suspect though they will eventually stop supporting pcvr, but today it works pretty well.
Asooka 6y ago
> Still uses a traditional controller or at best some Kinect like interface. Which would have the problem of needing a expensive treadmill like device to prevent you from bumping into walls. It is a shame how many games developers don't want to let people use the analogue stick to move in VR. It's uncomfortable for some people for a bit, but for the majority it's fine and lets you do all the normal in-game things. HL: Alyx is the most recent example where Valve originally didn't offer the option for simply walking and turning smoothly in VR. I get that you want your game to be accessible to the greatest number of people, but you're limiting your design space this way and leaving aside a part of the market.
Animats 6y ago
VR has fundamental usability problems. If you and the world move separately, people get disoriented. Most of the successes involve a virtual world locked to the physical world (Beat Saber) or where the player sits in a vehicle. Still, there are dancers using VRchat with full body tracking, the closest thing yet to full dive. AR, in some ways, has more potential. In AR, people can still see where they are. It's mostly a hardware cost problem. If you could get AR goggles down to swim goggle size and selling for $39.95, you could do Pokemon AR. I'm interested in big virtual worlds. Lately, that field has been invaded by the Make Money Fast / NFT / ICO crowd. They've been building crappy virtual worlds with overpriced virtual assets. I'm not sure how this ends. Second Life has found a new big success. They added an area of "premium homes" two years ago. If you sign up for a paid membership, which is about $100/year, you get a nice upper middle class American house in a nice neighborhood. The neighborhoods are well laid out, nicely landscaped, and have several distinct styles. You can decorate your house, invite people over, have parties, visit other people, walk or drive around, or just hang out in your house. They've built over 60,000 houses so far and are struggling to keep up with demand. The neighborhoods are all hand-built, not just stamped out from some template. These are planned unit developments in a virtual world. It's something people stuck in some crappy apartment want - the American Dream. [1] This isn't the only option - you can buy raw land outside the planned unit developments and build your own thing. But many people just want to buy a nice virtual lifestyle. Something nobody seems to have anticipated is that there's a market for rather boring virtual worlds. [1] https://youtu.be/2peH7aeuwPI https://youtu.be/2peH7aeuwPI
- DonHopkins 6y ago
  >Something nobody seems to have anticipated is that there's a market for rather boring virtual worlds. Philip K Dick predicted it: Accessorize your Perky Pat Layout! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Stigmata_of_Palmer_Eldritch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Stigmata_of_Palmer_E... >The story begins in a future world where global temperatures have risen so high that in most of the world it is unsafe to be outside without special cooling gear during daylight hours. In a desperate bid to preserve humanity and ease population burdens on Earth, the UN has initiated a "draft" for colonizing the nearby planets, where conditions are so horrific and primitive that the unwilling colonists have fallen prey to a form of escapism involving the use of an illegal drug (Can-D) in concert with "layouts." Layouts are physical props intended to simulate a sort of alternative reality where life is easier than either the grim existence of the colonists in their marginal off-world colonies, or even Earth, where global warming has progressed to the point that Antarctica is prime vacation resort territory. The illegal drug Can-D allows people to "share" their experience of the "Perky Pat" (the name of the main female character in the simulated world) layouts. This "sharing" has caused a pseudo-religious cult or series of cults to grow up around the layouts and the use of the drug. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Days_of_Perky_Pat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Days_of_Perky_Pat >In this novel, survivors of a global thermonuclear war live in isolated enclaves in California, surviving off what they can scrounge from the wastes and supplies delivered from Mars. The older generation spend their leisure time playing with the eponymous doll in an escapist role-playing game that recalls life before the apocalypse — a way of life that is being quickly forgotten. At the story's climax, a couple from one isolated outpost of humanity plays a game against the dwellers of another outpost (who play the game with a doll similar to Perky Pat dubbed "Connie Companion") in deadly earnest. The survivors' shared enthusiasm for the Perky Pat doll and the creation of her accessories from vital supplies is a sort of mass delusion that prevents meaningful re-building of the shattered society. In stark contrast, the children of the survivors show absolutely no interest in the delusion and have begun adapting to their new life.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ozten 6y ago
FB claims[1] Quest 2 sales drove Facebook’s Q4 non-advertising revenue to $885 million, a 156% increase year-over-year More than 60 Oculus developers have reached $1M+ revenue Quest 2 has sold more units that all other consumer headsets combined for the history of VR. It’s possible we are early in seeing VR cross the chasm. Or perhaps people are adopting VR due to shelter in place and will abandon it after the pandemic. [1] https://www.roadtovr.com/2021-vr-forecast-key-indicators/ https://www.roadtovr.com/2021-vr-forecast-key-indicators/

throwaway34241 6y ago

> Still uses a traditional controller or at best some Kinect like interface. Which would have the problem of needing a expensive treadmill like device to prevent you from bumping into walls. > The headsets are still expensive. The hardware it takes to run games capable of taking advantage of the headsets is expensive. The most popular VR device right now is the Oculus Quest 2, which is $299, needs no additional hardware, and uses fully motion tracked controllers (along with hand tracking). There's a boundary tracking system to prevent running into walls. Also, it is growing a lot on a year-over-year basis, although of course the base is still tiny compared to cell phones etc. So some of your info is out of date. I think that some of the challenges being worked on right now are content, device size/weight, and also integrating eye and face tracking into headsets. [1] [1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/mark-zuckerberg-on-mind-reading-apple-and-the-race-to-mainstream-vr https://www.theinformation.com/articles/mark-zuckerberg-on-m...

seoaeu 6y ago
$300 is not cheap for a lot of people. It is more than I've ever spent on a computer monitor, and I use those every day!
- throwaway3699 6y ago
  People drop $1000 on smartphones all the time. It might be expensive, but it's not unobtanium anymore.
  - jcelerier 6y ago
    > People drop $1000 on smartphones all the time. you live in a different universe
    - forrestthewoods 6y ago
      An iPhone 12 with bumped storage and sales tax is about $1000. Apple probably sells roughly 200 million phones a year that cost at least $800? I'm not sure how many premium smartphones Samsung sells these days. I'm not sure how you can consider that another universe? It's a pretty big market right here on planet Earth?
      - jcelerier 6y ago
        ??? but almost no one buys the iphone at their full price. e.g. here if I want an iphone 12, it'd cost me 249€ with a mobile plan (https://m.boutique.orange.fr/mobile/details/apple-iphone-12-5g-bleu-64go https://m.boutique.orange.fr/mobile/details/apple-iphone-12-...)
    - throwaway3699 6y ago
      FWIW I think it is ludicrous too. I'm just saying how it is.
- throwaway34241 6y ago
  I don't think it's exactly expensive either, relative to other devices that have seen broad adoption. Computers, smart phones, TVs, (LCD/tube) monitors, tablets etc didn't reach that price point until they were in the market for quite a while. Sure it might need to be cheaper to be affordable to 100% of the world, but it's not even close to saturating the market in high income countries yet (or the market share of much more expensive devices). BTW the $300 device is not just a display, it includes a fairly high end smartphone chip in addition to a high res-screen, battery, lenses, controllers, 4 cameras etc. I wouldn't expect major cost reductions anytime soon.

hackRn3975 6y ago

I'm going to go out on a limb and say you don't own a modern VR headset ? Although, you still could and have this opinion I'm just curious. Honestly even if you don't own one I'm not saying we should dismiss your opinion. Honestly it arguably means more or I should say could mean more. The thing that sticks out to me is, do you think these are good arguments for "games won't grow" or "Vr usage won't grow" ? I'm thinking about when video games first were gaining popularity since it's a really good comparison imo. ~ * tv/game eye problems ~ * limited controls ~ * very crude interfaces ~ * expensive hardware (thinking of original pc games to even the N64 $100+) So if we're not close to the ideal then it's not worth it ? "Matrix days is a long way off.", yeah it probably is... so ? If you want VR of today or even in 5 years to be the "Matrix" or the holy grail of VR then yes you will be dissapointed. All that to say this hypothesis you're proposing : "Vr won't grow a whole lot because we're far away from the Matrix vr experience" is not totally unreasonable but I personally think it's really weak and historically proven wrong in so many industries.

thrower123 6y ago

GPU shortages have hit VR at a very unfortunate time. It was just starting to take off a little bit, but now you have to trade your first-born child to get a 3080 card to really drive VR.

bluescrn 6y ago
Hasn't Facebook effectively killed PC VR anyway? (discontinuing the Rift S, forced FB logins, and focusing on closed-platform mobile VR)
- klipklop 6y ago
  Surprising no not really. Facebook has greatly improved the oculus link functionality for the Quest. You can now play PC VR wirelessly with an application called Virtual Desktop. I beat half life Alyx this way and it was awesome. No link cable is my preferred way to play pc vr. They killed the rift S mostly because the Quest 2 is the better unit overall. I do suspect though they will eventually stop supporting pcvr, but today it works pretty well.

Asooka 6y ago

> Still uses a traditional controller or at best some Kinect like interface. Which would have the problem of needing a expensive treadmill like device to prevent you from bumping into walls. It is a shame how many games developers don't want to let people use the analogue stick to move in VR. It's uncomfortable for some people for a bit, but for the majority it's fine and lets you do all the normal in-game things. HL: Alyx is the most recent example where Valve originally didn't offer the option for simply walking and turning smoothly in VR. I get that you want your game to be accessible to the greatest number of people, but you're limiting your design space this way and leaving aside a part of the market.

Animats 6y ago

VR has fundamental usability problems. If you and the world move separately, people get disoriented. Most of the successes involve a virtual world locked to the physical world (Beat Saber) or where the player sits in a vehicle. Still, there are dancers using VRchat with full body tracking, the closest thing yet to full dive. AR, in some ways, has more potential. In AR, people can still see where they are. It's mostly a hardware cost problem. If you could get AR goggles down to swim goggle size and selling for $39.95, you could do Pokemon AR. I'm interested in big virtual worlds. Lately, that field has been invaded by the Make Money Fast / NFT / ICO crowd. They've been building crappy virtual worlds with overpriced virtual assets. I'm not sure how this ends. Second Life has found a new big success. They added an area of "premium homes" two years ago. If you sign up for a paid membership, which is about $100/year, you get a nice upper middle class American house in a nice neighborhood. The neighborhoods are well laid out, nicely landscaped, and have several distinct styles. You can decorate your house, invite people over, have parties, visit other people, walk or drive around, or just hang out in your house. They've built over 60,000 houses so far and are struggling to keep up with demand. The neighborhoods are all hand-built, not just stamped out from some template. These are planned unit developments in a virtual world. It's something people stuck in some crappy apartment want - the American Dream. [1] This isn't the only option - you can buy raw land outside the planned unit developments and build your own thing. But many people just want to buy a nice virtual lifestyle. Something nobody seems to have anticipated is that there's a market for rather boring virtual worlds. [1] https://youtu.be/2peH7aeuwPI https://youtu.be/2peH7aeuwPI

DonHopkins 6y ago
>Something nobody seems to have anticipated is that there's a market for rather boring virtual worlds. Philip K Dick predicted it: Accessorize your Perky Pat Layout! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Stigmata_of_Palmer_Eldritch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Stigmata_of_Palmer_E... >The story begins in a future world where global temperatures have risen so high that in most of the world it is unsafe to be outside without special cooling gear during daylight hours. In a desperate bid to preserve humanity and ease population burdens on Earth, the UN has initiated a "draft" for colonizing the nearby planets, where conditions are so horrific and primitive that the unwilling colonists have fallen prey to a form of escapism involving the use of an illegal drug (Can-D) in concert with "layouts." Layouts are physical props intended to simulate a sort of alternative reality where life is easier than either the grim existence of the colonists in their marginal off-world colonies, or even Earth, where global warming has progressed to the point that Antarctica is prime vacation resort territory. The illegal drug Can-D allows people to "share" their experience of the "Perky Pat" (the name of the main female character in the simulated world) layouts. This "sharing" has caused a pseudo-religious cult or series of cults to grow up around the layouts and the use of the drug. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Days_of_Perky_Pat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Days_of_Perky_Pat >In this novel, survivors of a global thermonuclear war live in isolated enclaves in California, surviving off what they can scrounge from the wastes and supplies delivered from Mars. The older generation spend their leisure time playing with the eponymous doll in an escapist role-playing game that recalls life before the apocalypse — a way of life that is being quickly forgotten. At the story's climax, a couple from one isolated outpost of humanity plays a game against the dwellers of another outpost (who play the game with a doll similar to Perky Pat dubbed "Connie Companion") in deadly earnest. The survivors' shared enthusiasm for the Perky Pat doll and the creation of her accessories from vital supplies is a sort of mass delusion that prevents meaningful re-building of the shattered society. In stark contrast, the children of the survivors show absolutely no interest in the delusion and have begun adapting to their new life.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ozten 6y ago

FB claims[1] Quest 2 sales drove Facebook’s Q4 non-advertising revenue to $885 million, a 156% increase year-over-year More than 60 Oculus developers have reached $1M+ revenue Quest 2 has sold more units that all other consumer headsets combined for the history of VR. It’s possible we are early in seeing VR cross the chasm. Or perhaps people are adopting VR due to shelter in place and will abandon it after the pandemic. [1] https://www.roadtovr.com/2021-vr-forecast-key-indicators/ https://www.roadtovr.com/2021-vr-forecast-key-indicators/