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Is it just me or is there a wider belief that VR will never be anything more than a niche? Facebook aka Meta has bet its future on this and I think it's a mista

by jmyeet 5y ago

Is it just me or is there a wider belief that VR will never be anything more than a niche? Facebook aka Meta has bet its future on this and I think it's a mistake. When people think of VR they think of the Matrix but that will never be because of the laws of physics. Latency is the big problem (unless such a network is very localized in the real world) but visually speaking, black is a problem. Black is a colour on computer displays but in the real world it's the absence of light. Another big visual problem: focus. Yet another problem: controls. In the real world you just think and act. In VR you have these controls to direct movement. That's never going to feel natural so you're pretty much predicated on a pure brain-computer interface for it to feel realistic. There's no killer app for VR (optimists will add "yet") and no hint of what one might be. Part of what made these old adventure games so compelling (IMHO) was the format: text. Games like Myst added images and can have an appeal all of their own but it's different to the text adventure game. The same goes for video (meaning rendered 3D graphics). I have doubts that this magic (which has a heavy dose of nostalgia) will translate to VR. For me the Infocom games (Zork in particular) will always be remembered fondly but part of the magic was the time and you can never step in the same river twice.

delecti 5y ago
How much VR have you tried? After just 10 minutes of Beat Saber I was left with an odd feeling after taking off the headset. I think your standards for VR are unreasonably high, considering how utterly addicting it's likely to be to huge numbers of people if it just gets fairly engaging. Put another way, both Roblox and Minecraft look like crap, and are largely graphics we could have replicated on the the Playstation 1 or N64, but Microsoft bought Minecraft for $2.5 billion, and Roblox has a valuation in the tens of billions. The threshold between "there's no killer app" and "yet" is razor thin.
- jmyeet 5y ago
  I've tried an Oculus Go for maybe 12 hours? Some of it was interesting but it always felt gimmicky to me. A bit like 3D in movie theaters. Like it was all so... forced.
  - andybak 5y ago
    The Oculus Go was a 3DOF headset. That's basically a glorified 360 movie viewer. 6DOF is the absolute bare minimum and I feel we should have reserved the term "VR" specifically for 6DOF devices. The immersion just isn't there without positional tracking. And positional tracking with the controllers is another huge factor. So - I would argue you've never really tried "real VR".
    - shadowgovt 5y ago
      People don't realize it, but without positional tracking, even seated experiences feel very "off." Consider where the joint is that moves your head. When you rotate your head, you're not rotating through an axis in the center of your head; you're pivoting a spline describing your neck. That's a very complicated motion and it can't be faked by just turning the view without moving the view also (and if you try to simulate it without full 6DOF tracking, you'll have to model the user's neck length and curvature profile, and that'll get very messy, with disorientation consequences when you get it wrong).
      - andybak 5y ago
        Actually 3dof headsets did try and compensate for this by modelling the human neck. But that still ignores a lot of the range of movement that one makes even when seated and relatively still.
      - ehnto 5y ago
        With that said, head tracking just on it's own adds a new dimension to the experience of a first person game. Sitting in the cockpit of a spaceship and moving around with the mouse feels like a game, but being able to tilt your head around, move it side to side and experience the parallax of all the different elements moving around eachother is astonishing. Even if you're one of the types that can't quite get into VR or wearing the headset, I'd recommend trying out some TrackIR, or for free you can try Opentrack + AI track and just use your standard webcam.
    - krapp 5y ago
- tokai 5y ago
  >largely graphics we could have replicated on the the Playstation 1 or N64 I know you are making a hyperbole, but that is just absolutely ridiculous.
  - delecti 5y ago
    I am being hyperbolic, but not that much. Certainly running the full simulation of either Minecraft or Roblox (not to mention the network bandwidth requirements) is well beyond anything that old, but purely the level of visual detail would barely be out of reach of that generation.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  Everyone loves to bring up beatsaber when discussing the future of VR but beat saber is so carefully designed to avoid its pitfalls. You don't move more than a few feet irl or in game. Everything you need to see is in front of you. You have infinitely light weapons with no resistance. Graphics is not the problem. It's the interface.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    That's how all 80s and 90s games were carefully designed with limited memory/cpu. They designed to avoid those limitations by limiting play or encouraging other actions.
    - spywaregorilla 5y ago
      Memory limits weren't fundamental problems with video games. They were temporary limitations. My point is not that you cannot make fun games in VR. you can, and beat saber is very fun. But you can only have so many beat sabers.
      - mmcgaha 5y ago
        I love beat saber, but I feel like it is VR at the space invaders stage. I think in the next ten years we will see the platformer and beat-um-up stage games; I just don't have the imagination to predict what they will be like.
      - ipaddr 5y ago
        Memory limits are still problems on my c64 but clever people came up with ways around like[geos windows before windows) or There is a guy who appears on here powering his website off a c64. Whatever limits vr creates there are people who can work within those limits. The problem is so fewer developers are making indie vr because it is locked down and expensive.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      One of the giant limitations for VR is physical playing space. Memory and processor can always get better, faster, and cheaper, but I don't see how available playing space is going to improve in the future.
- ekianjo 5y ago
  > After just 10 minutes of Beat Saber I was left with an odd feeling after taking off the headset. Beatsaber is like the Tetris of VR. It won't change anything, while it's a good game and it's addictive.
- tomc1985 5y ago
  The VR folks are starting to sound like the Year of the Linux Desktop folks. Y'all standing at the station for a train that might never come
  - moron4hire 5y ago
    The train already came. We're already on it. We're having fun and getting work done. And I'm not even going to say "you missed it". You can get on the train any time you want. It's here and it's pretty cool.
    - tomc1985 5y ago
      With the exception of Half-Life Alyx, everything I've seen on VR has been either a gimmick or "meh" And don't even get me started on how awful virtual workspaces are.
      - oneoff786 5y ago
        Half life alyx is extremely gimmicky if you stop to observe how it works. Enemies are stupidly generous in telegraphing their moves. The game, correctly, expects you to be very slow and unable to integrate moving and shooting. Boneworks is a game that does the opposite, but is similarly disappointing. You get fast walking speed with the analog stick allowing you to be very agile. Presuming you don’t get nausea… this is by far your most useful asset in a fight. The real world movement is basically nothing and a lot of the fighting is better done as a sort of jousting with your weapon held in front of you and your move stick held forward.
      - ehnto 5y ago
        Not liking it is pretty different to it not being here though. I think people expect VR to be something more than it is, but it is just some sensors tracking your body and a screen strapped to your face. That enables some unique experiences, but it's no braindance.
        tomc1985 5y ago
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Beat Saber is the only reason I still have a VR rig and I still feel like I agree with parent. It is a solid rhythm game and decent upper body workout on higher difficulties, but if I hadn't already bought a friend's used Oculus I don't think it would convince me. A big part of it is how damned inconvenient the whole thing is. I need all these long high-quality USB3 cables for the headset and sensors, a beefy video card, and most importantly an otherwise empty room to play it in safely. The Quest, the most convenient system, only kinda deals with the first two problems and does nothing for the third. I don't know about you guys, but I can't just have the servants clear out the tertiary ball room whenever I want to play a game. In the normal sized bedroom I've allocated for VR I have managed to slam into walls on more than one occasion when moving quickly trying to hit something or dodge something. I would definitely say the whole thing is still pretty far into "gimmick" territory for the vast majority of gamers.
  - ehnto 5y ago
    There are some "solutions" to the third, but they're all just workarounds to what is a very hard limitation that I don't think we should expect to ever be fixed. I think games just need to design around it. Putting a small mat on the ground gives you a reference to where you are in your room, if need be maybe you just make sure you never stray from the mat. One of the reasons I got an "inside out" style headset is so I don't have to worry about all the cables and base stations, with the tradeoff that the hand tracking isn't quite as robust. Much less faffing about.
  - renox 5y ago
    I even managed to slam into a wall in a VR demo, the guy who was my "guardian angel" wasn't paying enough attention.. When you think about all the things which can be on the ground in a typical house..
tluyben2 5y ago
I agree with most you say, but did you try a newer Standalone VR helmet? It might not be for everyone and overhyped last year, but we are getting tremendous value from it in online meetings, working together and using it as substitute for a stack of (5) large monitors on one laptop. I like the games but I am not a big gamer and can see how the controls are an issue for hardcore gamers, however for at least dev work, this thing was worth it’s weight in palladium and then some for during and now ‘after’ covid. Now that handtracking starts working well, it is only getting better. I hope it will improving as I can see this working well for portable dev work once everything gets smaller and more powerful. I mean I am there now but there is no software (at least last I checked) to work in environments where I can just have 5-6 screens with browsers open without my laptop connected. If that and a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and I no longer need a laptop for 90% of my work. And then just make it smaller for improvement:.
kgwxd 5y ago
I did, until my kid started playing it a few months ago and that was all he wanted to do all day, every day. Then, he completely lost interest and hasn't used it in weeks, so I'm back where I started.
onion2k 5y ago
visually speaking, black is a problem. Black is a colour on computer displays but in the real world it's the absence of light That isn't a problem. People don't want to use technology to exactly replicate the real world - they use tech to replicate the real world up to a point, and then they diverge into things that can't happen in the real world. People don't care if the black isn't quite right. After all, people watch films and TV a lot, and they have the same problem. There are lots of reasons why VR might fail to become mainstream in the long term but graphics isn't one of them.
andybak 5y ago
I've loved VR since I first tried it and I still love it. > There's no killer app for VR We'll end up quibbling about the definition of "killer app" but I think there's dozens killer apps for VR. If you mean "an app that will make it as popular as the smartphone" then you're right. But that's a strangely high bar. If you mean "an app that is compelling enough to sell a reasonably large number of headsets" then that definitely already exists. (but then we can enjoy quibbling about what "reasonably large" means)
- ehnto 5y ago
  I think the idea of a killer app for VR misses the point a bit anyway. It doesn't need a killer app since it doesn't need mainstream adoption. If we are looking for a mainstream adoptable use case it is probably in AR. VR has a specific use case and that's fine.
Netcob 5y ago
I got the first Oculus Rift dev kit not too long after it came out and I got the first version of the HTC Vive. I find it hard to talk about VR as some monolithic thing. When I first tried it, I felt the same "wow, this is the future!" feeling most enthusiasts got. The stutters and the weird headaches then made me add "...but not the present". But my personal issues with it are both surmountable and not shared by everyone. On the hardware side, the depth-of-focus issue must be solved somehow, and graphics processing must improve a lot on both the hardware and software side in order to eliminate any stutters (IMO any frame drop or framerates below 90 are unacceptable, again, my personal issue), image sharpness must match real-world screens at a reasonable distance (at least where I'm looking at) and when it comes to games, unfortunately anything that tries to look realistic still looks like mid-2000s graphics in VR. Plus the headset must be comfortable to wear for at least 8h at a time, and there needs to be good full-body tracking, although for a virtual workplace that's not so important. I'd probably spend all of my work and play time in VR if these things were solved, and I could totally see that happening in the next few years, the way things are going. Unless the only good option is Facebook, in which case, I'll pass.
zeagle 5y ago
Re: the blacks. Hopefully the next generation of valve index & others will have OLED screens with proper blacks.
moron4hire 5y ago
I have worked in the VR industry full time for the last 5 years. Your description of the problems of VR are unrecognizable to me. Which people are these that "think of the Matrix" when they think of VR? I've seen some people talk about it, or more often Sword Art Online. But they are rare. It tends to mark folks as not having really tried VR. I've seen people talk about not even wanting to try VR until it's "full dive". That's dumb. I doubt it's ever going to get there and I also doubt it's even a good idea. See: The Matrix and SAO for depictions of why. I think "people" know the tech is not magic and have decent expectations on what it entails. What I tend to see are people blown away by how impactful that simple "box with a display and some lenses" concept works at transporting a person to a new world. I don't think anyone really cares about black levels that much, not to the degree that it becomes any kind of deciding factor on purchases. Focus... are you sure you're not Ronny Abovitz? Literally the only person I've seen ranting about focus. Again, nobody cares. It'd certainly be nice, but it's just not that important of a feature. Your comment on latency is confusing. Which latency? Motion-to-photon latency? Hasn't been a problem in years. Network latency? We're not talking about a networked game here, and regardless, that's going to be true for any kind of multiplayer experience, VR or otherwise. It's also a largely solved problem and people don't tend to notice network latency in most multiplayer games. The only latency issue I encounter on a regular basis is Oculus Quest 2's hand tracking latency. That's not a fundamental limitation, though, because other hand tracking systems like UltraLeap show that it can be done very well. The Quest's problem is that it's running on what's essentially a 3 year old smartphone SOC. As for "killer apps", honestly, I have never really believed in the concept. There's nothing on my smartphone that I can't do without it being specifically on my smartphone. But combined, the whole ecosystem is extremely useful. My smartphone also isn't the seamless digital assistant Jobs predicted it would be, but it's still extremely useful. Back in 2008, most people thought smartphones weren't for them, but now most find them extremely useful. There are problems in the VR industry. Any device that isn't the Quest 2 is too expensive and not featureful enough to warrant the expense. Building software for VR is still extremely primitive (No, Unity doesn't solve it. Come back to me after you ship a Unity VR project that meets Meta's store guidelines if you disagree). Battery life on standalone systems is abysmal. I don't know anyone with a PC-tethered system that hasn't destroyed several cables, ports, keyboards, or even just glass containers. And there are problems being foisted on VR. The global chip shortage is making it way to hard to scale. Meta's attempts to dominate the market by undercutting the competition is a huge danger to everyone. This coopting of social VR into "metaverse" by crypto grifters is going to kill an entire segment of the app market. Megacorp's inability/unwillingness to moderate user behavior on their platforms is a lot more harmful to people's mental health when it's literally in their faces. But the biggest one might be people who don't know anything about VR claiming it's "useless" or "dead".
gotaquestion 5y ago
I played around with VR back in 2013, and thought 3D conferences were neat, but annoying. However, I believe that if headsets can be made less bulky, it will become ubiquitous. I don't know what the experience will be like, it certainly won't be matrix-y, but I can absolutely see a generation of 20 somethings expecting goggles at some point in the future, maybe 10 years from now. It might actually be Zuck's vision of sanitized cartoony avatars zipping around with no legs because look at how much money kids spend on VBUCKS to look slightly different in Fortnight. The Fortnight generation's kids will be hooked on VR if the goggles are cheap/small enough.
rob74 5y ago
What makes me worried about the future of VR is that there is no "entry-level" VR solution anymore since Google and Samsung cancelled Daydream and Gear VR respectively. Which means that in order to try it out in the comfort of your own home you now have to invest ~400 €.
- grumbel 5y ago
  Quest2 goes for $300/350€ and is a substantially more complete and better VR package than Daydream/GearVR ever was, i.e. positional tracking on headset and controller, Daydream/GearVR was rotation only. Not having to use a phone also reduces a lot of friction in using the device and drastically improves the visuals. I do however miss the $200/200€ WMR headsets that we had for a while, that felt like a more reasonable entry point for a PC gaming headset. There is currently no replacement for those. Quest2 not only adds price, but also weight due to battery and SoC, which you don't really want or need when using it only on PC.
- dylan-m 5y ago
  I think Daydream and Gear VR set VR back more than anything, and if they were going to keep doing what they were doing it's a good thing they're gone. See the many comments in this thread conflating 3DOF headsets (glorified panorama viewers) with the same 6DOF VR (full movement in space plus all-important hands) that people are actually excited about.
gfxgirl 5y ago
The same was said for PDAs from Apple Newton (1992) -> Windows CE devices (1996) -> Palm Pilot (1997) -> iPhone (2007). Lots of enthusiasts who thought having a computer in their pocket was amazing and everyone else who thought it would never be anything more than a niche.
- ekianjo 5y ago
  SO are you saying that all niche eventually become mainstream products? I hate to disappoint you, but most niche products remain niche products. The exception you took is far from being the rule.
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago
    Power glove.
  - gfxgirl 5y ago
    I don't know. I only know that for me, after playing Half Life: Alyx, I never want the play a non-VR first person shooter again. Being there is 10x better than looking at a movie of being there (a 2D monitor). Having played No Man's Sky in VR I can't imagine being satisfied with a non VR space game. Having played Until You Fall, I can't imagine being okay with a non-VR action hand-2-hand combat game. Having played several rhythm games in VR I can't imagine going back to most 2D rhythm games. The VR ones make me dance so the experience is far more impactful. The 2D ones, maybe only those with accessories (Rockband, Guitar Hero) would still be ok but their excitement level is not even close to the VR games. Having played Jet Island I'd never be satisfied with non-VR Spiderman. Having played Farpoint I won't be able to appreciate the Metroid Prime 4. Even Astrobot VR makes it hard to go back to Mario even if Mario is a better game. I'm not saying all those games are perfect or even good, only that the immersion, presence, impact was such that I can't go back to many 2D monitor based games. Sure there are exceptions, it's not always about graphics or etc, but I'd much rather play GTA5 than GTA3, not because GTA3 is bad, it was great, but because based on the type of game it is it's just better with modern tech. The same is true for many well made games in VR. So will VR get to iPhone level? No idea. But I hope it gets close to PS4/PS5/Switch levels --- Let me add, my point in PDA progression is that we don't know what it will take for VR to explode. PDAs didn't explode until 3 things happened (1) switching from resistive (stylus required) to capacitive (finger) displays, (2) requiring a data connections, all previous PDAs it was an expensive option that few opted into but iPhone effectively required it since it was a replacement for your phone and so it forced users to see the benefit (3) an OS designed for fingers/phones first. In VR it could be we need smaller eyeglass like devices instead of bulky phone display devices: https://www.gmw3.com/2021/01/new-design-appears-at-ces-2021-for-panasonics-vr-glasses/ https://www.gmw3.com/2021/01/new-design-appears-at-ces-2021-... It could be we need the device to read your hands+fingers instead of requiring controllers. It could be we need to wait for the VR to be like that in Black Mirror, Season 5, episode 1, Striking Vipers. That's still "VR".
ekianjo 5y ago
> There's no killer app for VR Apparently HL: Alyx may be that kind of thing. Problem is, it's just one game, and it took years and lots of efforts to make for probably very little return on investment.
- sitzkrieg 5y ago
  its not a killer app. it was a decent ~12 hr single player game, and yet one of the only really fleshed out games for vr so far
- gs17 5y ago
  It's pretty close, I just wish it had proper mod tools.
- oneoff786 5y ago
  Alyx was fun. It was nothing close to a killer app.
shadowgovt 5y ago
I've seen this kind of boom become bust twice already; we'll have to see how this one pans out. I will note that technology-wise, the hardware is better than it's ever been and I think it has a fighting chance this time previous iterations lacked. For all their simplicity, mouse and keyboard have a level of accuracy and precision that VR does not. This is partially due to their simplicity (keys are binary devices, and a mouse can track position to near-perfection with optical flow modeling, or even the old wheel solution from days of yore). In contrast, VR not only has traditionally had lower-resolution on the tracking signal, it's tracking far, far more degrees of freedom (at least six, but if you want to accurately represent the user's kinematics the number explodes). Plus, the biological sensor fusion we humans use to determine our position in the world demands accuracy from the virtual hardware because we can be very sensitive to input error (and we feel it as nausea, disorientation, or vertigo). The sensor fusion of modern cheap accelerometer tech with the absolute tracking of either lighthouses or whole-room flow imaging has had amazing consequences, but it's not yet perfect and I don't know if a critical mass of users will demand perfection or not. We'll find out. But, I've never seen better hardware taking a stab at the market before.
mancerayder 5y ago
I have a Steam Index and I think the games are fun and re-playable. The problem for me was - I live in too small a space, and this requires a dedicated game room or having to re-arrange furniture, set up the external sensors (not true for Oculus but true for this), and then recalibrating. That, plus the heavy headset and massive cables. The controllers are amazing through, they track all your fingers without being attached to your fingers. It has a future, it's still a little rough around the edges. However, apartment dwellers might be limited in their interest.
coldpie 5y ago
I think it has a chance, but it's definitely on life support. All the big names from this latest attempt (Valve, HTC, Sony) have already given up on it. Facebook is trying to turn it into a thing, but I think they're just trying one last gasp on a failed acquisition before firing that team. Sony and Apple claim to have new hardware coming down the pipe, but I imagine they're feeling much less enthusiastic about it now than when they started those projects. Maybe one of those three will pull it off, but it's not looking good.
- pavlov 5y ago
  Meta has over 10,000 people working on VR / AR and has invested tens of billions in it. I don't think they're giving up very soon.
  - coldpie 5y ago
    If the best they've got for all that investment is that hilariously terrible VR demo video from a couple months ago, I wouldn't bet on that team sticking around around long term.
    - pavlov 5y ago
      Have you tried the Quest? It's actually good. I don't know if it will find a true mass-market product fit: annual unit sales are still in the millions, a long way from the billions of the smartphone market. But it's certainly not because the product inherently sucks. I bet Zuckerberg is ready to swallow at least another $50 billion in losses before giving up on the VR dream. The FB/IG ad machine is sputtering but still pays for that easily.
      - coldpie 5y ago
        I haven't used a Quest specifically, but I have used a number of VR headsets, both personally and for work. Regardless of the hardware tech, there just isn't a compelling user story there, and I think the market performance over the past five years bears that out. The only thing anyone talks about is Beat Saber, not even Alyx made a cultural dent. Facebook's VR demo video was frankly embarassing. There's just nothing there to attract users, it's a solution looking for a problem. Facebook certainly has the money to fund this boondoggle for eternity, but that doesn't guarantee any significant userbase or cultural impact. Like I said in my original comment, maybe Apple will strike gold and find another iPod in this, but I just don't see it happening. Put another way: VR has the smell of 3D TVs and movies, and not the next smartphone.
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caslon 5y ago
A very large body of HMDs have OLED displays, which have "true" blacks.
dwringer 5y ago
Wow, your post sure got a lot of replies, heh. I've not used a modern VR headset but I have used a TrackIR, and to me it provides such a huge leap in immersion that I can't really see how VR would be worth the extra hassle over that. I'd rather have a CAVE than anything like today's consumer VR. Give me more and bigger screens, not some headwear out of a dystopian sci-fi movie.
grumbel 5y ago
Blacks are essentially a solved problem with (micro)OLED. Controls are a non-issue, it's no different than holding a screwdriver or pen, humans are quite adapted to using tools to manipulate the world and we have hand and finger tracking on top if necessary. Latency again, not really a major problem, works well enough, this is VR after all, not telerobotics, if the game engine has to cheat a little, that's fine. Focus adjust exists in a couple of prototypes, but so far hasn't made it into the consumer space, I'd rate this as a "nice to have", most people quickly get used to the fixed focus. The big problem VR has to overcome is getting resolution parity with monitors. At the moment VR is still extremely low resolution, even headsets in the 2000x2000 realm are, due to the image being stretch across ~100° FOV, only the equivalent of an old 800x600 monitor. That's not good enough for a lot of uses. It works fine for VR games, but barely works for 2D movies and even less so for text. Given that the majority of content out there is made for larger resolutions, that's the biggest stumbling block for VR as it means people have to get out of VR and use another display device. I think once resolution is solved, that will be the killer-app for VR just by itself. As it means a VR headsets, which can be turned into an AR headset via camera pass through, is able to replace every screen you currently have. That will be the point where people can start ditching their multi-monitor setups and have essentially an empty desk with just a headset. The appeal of getting ever bigger TVs will also vanish when you can have a virtual IMAX screen in your headset. It will still take some years until VR/AR headset are good enough and comfortable enough to replace TVs and monitors en masse. But I have little doubt that it will happen sooner or later. All the VR gaming stuff is really just a bonus here and I don't think we'll get mass VR adaption just from that.
- trafficante 5y ago
  The software side of this vision is already surprisingly mature and mostly waiting for hardware to catch up. On my Quest 2, I can pop into a virtual environment with 5 desktops scaled around me in 3D space, a physical keyboard fully rendered into the environment that also tracks my fingers, and a scaleable camera “portal” positioned over the location of my doorway (in physical space) that displays a camera feed of anyone entering the room. If I’m trying to relax, I can hop into a virtual movie theater on the moon and watch a 3D Blu-ray rip or play most modern AAA pc games. All of this while sitting in a lounge chair in my living room. And then, of course, there’s all the 6dof VR games but, after Alyx barely moved the hardware sales needle, I don’t think that sort of thing is what’s needed to drive mass adoption at this point. VR needs much better screen tech, high performant SoCs, and a “coolness” factor. I wonder if there’s a company known for all three that has repeatedly yoinked entire markets even though they entered “late”?
telman17 5y ago
I use VR for Flight Simulator and Elite Dangerous. Living my space exploration dream in VR (sitting down!) is truly a magical thing. VR isn't necessarily only the room experience games and I think some folks forget that.
Spooky23 5y ago
I think it’s an example of why companies need mature governance models. It’s cool tech, but it seems like it’s boiled down to Second Life + helmet graphics.
anthk 5y ago
>For me the Infocom games (Zork in particular) will always be remembered fondly but part of the magic was the time and you can never step in the same river twice. Inform6, 7. Then get Anchorhead, Inside Woman, Spider and Web, Vicious Cycles, Slouch Over Bedlam, Curses+Jigsaw and get amazed.
ynx 5y ago
There's plenty of people who, having not tried anything resembling modern VR, completely discount it as a medium. So while you're not alone in your belief, your criticism also has red flags that will cause most people with experience in VR to not take it seriously, even its informed critics. - Handling latency is more akin to client-side prediction behavior, rather than synchronous awaiting on network response for frame-by-frame accuracy. So it's more of a distribution problem of how to replicate and conflict-resolve state most efficiently, rather than round-trip latency. - Black is not that much of a problem. The brain adapts. - Focus is a problem with active work on it (using eye tracking) which we'll see improvements on in the near future, but it's worth noting that a fixed focal distance actually helps vision for some people. - "There's no killer app for VR (optimists will add "yet") and no hint of what one might be.": no, optimists would tell you you're wrong. Someone mostly neutral would point to things like VRChat driving a noticeable portion of sales of VR headsets or additional equipment, which is promising in that there is a viable non-Meta social VR app currently in existence. A pessimist would argue that VRChat hasn't achieved a sustainable business model. A contrarian would further add to the pessimist's point that the top sellers in VR tend to be stagnant year over year, suggesting the industry isn't as live (optimist: yet) as many perceive it to be. - "you're pretty much predicated on a pure brain-computer interface for it to feel realistic" - not quite. You might depend on that to present approximate realism, but VR - and we're talking 6dof here, 3dof is far below any threshold of believability/immersion - does not require much approximation of hand position for the brain to very quickly allow a virtual world to feel "real" enough for some fairly deep immersion. Better-informed critics of VR typically question its broad appeal based on motion sickness, lack of support/indifference/hostility from other game developers or middleware developers, difficulty of authoring plausible VR content in general, inconsistent hardware depressing the quality of software aimed at the "lowest common denominator" device (though this last one has largely evaporated due to the Quest 2 being very cheap and very good), possible risk of effects on children's development of physical balance if they play too much, and so on.
ehnto 5y ago
Perhaps you're imagining VR as an alternative to real life, but it's actually just an alternative to gaming on a monitor. I don't expect it to be comparable to life, I just expect it to be better than gaming on my monitor, and even then only for really particular games. You wouldn't play an RTS in VR, or even FPS games like Counter-Strike, since the actual gameplay of CS is mouse precision, reflexes and playspace awareness. So VR is a niche even within the gaming community and will never replace the monitor except for some circumstances. But it does enable unique experiences that no other platform can. Where VR excels is in visual immersion, intuitive interaction and spatial awareness. So it excel in games like racing and flight simulators, space sims, and in things like puzzle games where manipulating things with your hands adds a new dimension to the game.

by jmyeet 5y ago

delecti 5y ago

How much VR have you tried? After just 10 minutes of Beat Saber I was left with an odd feeling after taking off the headset. I think your standards for VR are unreasonably high, considering how utterly addicting it's likely to be to huge numbers of people if it just gets fairly engaging. Put another way, both Roblox and Minecraft look like crap, and are largely graphics we could have replicated on the the Playstation 1 or N64, but Microsoft bought Minecraft for $2.5 billion, and Roblox has a valuation in the tens of billions. The threshold between "there's no killer app" and "yet" is razor thin.

jmyeet 5y ago
I've tried an Oculus Go for maybe 12 hours? Some of it was interesting but it always felt gimmicky to me. A bit like 3D in movie theaters. Like it was all so... forced.
- andybak 5y ago
  The Oculus Go was a 3DOF headset. That's basically a glorified 360 movie viewer. 6DOF is the absolute bare minimum and I feel we should have reserved the term "VR" specifically for 6DOF devices. The immersion just isn't there without positional tracking. And positional tracking with the controllers is another huge factor. So - I would argue you've never really tried "real VR".
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    People don't realize it, but without positional tracking, even seated experiences feel very "off." Consider where the joint is that moves your head. When you rotate your head, you're not rotating through an axis in the center of your head; you're pivoting a spline describing your neck. That's a very complicated motion and it can't be faked by just turning the view without moving the view also (and if you try to simulate it without full 6DOF tracking, you'll have to model the user's neck length and curvature profile, and that'll get very messy, with disorientation consequences when you get it wrong).
    - andybak 5y ago
      Actually 3dof headsets did try and compensate for this by modelling the human neck. But that still ignores a lot of the range of movement that one makes even when seated and relatively still.
    - ehnto 5y ago
      With that said, head tracking just on it's own adds a new dimension to the experience of a first person game. Sitting in the cockpit of a spaceship and moving around with the mouse feels like a game, but being able to tilt your head around, move it side to side and experience the parallax of all the different elements moving around eachother is astonishing. Even if you're one of the types that can't quite get into VR or wearing the headset, I'd recommend trying out some TrackIR, or for free you can try Opentrack + AI track and just use your standard webcam.
  - krapp 5y ago
tokai 5y ago
>largely graphics we could have replicated on the the Playstation 1 or N64 I know you are making a hyperbole, but that is just absolutely ridiculous.
- delecti 5y ago
  I am being hyperbolic, but not that much. Certainly running the full simulation of either Minecraft or Roblox (not to mention the network bandwidth requirements) is well beyond anything that old, but purely the level of visual detail would barely be out of reach of that generation.
spywaregorilla 5y ago
Everyone loves to bring up beatsaber when discussing the future of VR but beat saber is so carefully designed to avoid its pitfalls. You don't move more than a few feet irl or in game. Everything you need to see is in front of you. You have infinitely light weapons with no resistance. Graphics is not the problem. It's the interface.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  That's how all 80s and 90s games were carefully designed with limited memory/cpu. They designed to avoid those limitations by limiting play or encouraging other actions.
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    Memory limits weren't fundamental problems with video games. They were temporary limitations. My point is not that you cannot make fun games in VR. you can, and beat saber is very fun. But you can only have so many beat sabers.
    - mmcgaha 5y ago
      I love beat saber, but I feel like it is VR at the space invaders stage. I think in the next ten years we will see the platformer and beat-um-up stage games; I just don't have the imagination to predict what they will be like.
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      Memory limits are still problems on my c64 but clever people came up with ways around like[geos windows before windows) or There is a guy who appears on here powering his website off a c64. Whatever limits vr creates there are people who can work within those limits. The problem is so fewer developers are making indie vr because it is locked down and expensive.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    One of the giant limitations for VR is physical playing space. Memory and processor can always get better, faster, and cheaper, but I don't see how available playing space is going to improve in the future.
ekianjo 5y ago
> After just 10 minutes of Beat Saber I was left with an odd feeling after taking off the headset. Beatsaber is like the Tetris of VR. It won't change anything, while it's a good game and it's addictive.
tomc1985 5y ago
The VR folks are starting to sound like the Year of the Linux Desktop folks. Y'all standing at the station for a train that might never come
- moron4hire 5y ago
  The train already came. We're already on it. We're having fun and getting work done. And I'm not even going to say "you missed it". You can get on the train any time you want. It's here and it's pretty cool.
  - tomc1985 5y ago
    With the exception of Half-Life Alyx, everything I've seen on VR has been either a gimmick or "meh" And don't even get me started on how awful virtual workspaces are.
    - oneoff786 5y ago
      Half life alyx is extremely gimmicky if you stop to observe how it works. Enemies are stupidly generous in telegraphing their moves. The game, correctly, expects you to be very slow and unable to integrate moving and shooting. Boneworks is a game that does the opposite, but is similarly disappointing. You get fast walking speed with the analog stick allowing you to be very agile. Presuming you don’t get nausea… this is by far your most useful asset in a fight. The real world movement is basically nothing and a lot of the fighting is better done as a sort of jousting with your weapon held in front of you and your move stick held forward.
    - ehnto 5y ago
      Not liking it is pretty different to it not being here though. I think people expect VR to be something more than it is, but it is just some sensors tracking your body and a screen strapped to your face. That enables some unique experiences, but it's no braindance.
      - tomc1985 5y ago
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Beat Saber is the only reason I still have a VR rig and I still feel like I agree with parent. It is a solid rhythm game and decent upper body workout on higher difficulties, but if I hadn't already bought a friend's used Oculus I don't think it would convince me. A big part of it is how damned inconvenient the whole thing is. I need all these long high-quality USB3 cables for the headset and sensors, a beefy video card, and most importantly an otherwise empty room to play it in safely. The Quest, the most convenient system, only kinda deals with the first two problems and does nothing for the third. I don't know about you guys, but I can't just have the servants clear out the tertiary ball room whenever I want to play a game. In the normal sized bedroom I've allocated for VR I have managed to slam into walls on more than one occasion when moving quickly trying to hit something or dodge something. I would definitely say the whole thing is still pretty far into "gimmick" territory for the vast majority of gamers.
- ehnto 5y ago
  There are some "solutions" to the third, but they're all just workarounds to what is a very hard limitation that I don't think we should expect to ever be fixed. I think games just need to design around it. Putting a small mat on the ground gives you a reference to where you are in your room, if need be maybe you just make sure you never stray from the mat. One of the reasons I got an "inside out" style headset is so I don't have to worry about all the cables and base stations, with the tradeoff that the hand tracking isn't quite as robust. Much less faffing about.
- renox 5y ago
  I even managed to slam into a wall in a VR demo, the guy who was my "guardian angel" wasn't paying enough attention.. When you think about all the things which can be on the ground in a typical house..

tluyben2 5y ago

I agree with most you say, but did you try a newer Standalone VR helmet? It might not be for everyone and overhyped last year, but we are getting tremendous value from it in online meetings, working together and using it as substitute for a stack of (5) large monitors on one laptop. I like the games but I am not a big gamer and can see how the controls are an issue for hardcore gamers, however for at least dev work, this thing was worth it’s weight in palladium and then some for during and now ‘after’ covid. Now that handtracking starts working well, it is only getting better. I hope it will improving as I can see this working well for portable dev work once everything gets smaller and more powerful. I mean I am there now but there is no software (at least last I checked) to work in environments where I can just have 5-6 screens with browsers open without my laptop connected. If that and a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and I no longer need a laptop for 90% of my work. And then just make it smaller for improvement:.

kgwxd 5y ago

I did, until my kid started playing it a few months ago and that was all he wanted to do all day, every day. Then, he completely lost interest and hasn't used it in weeks, so I'm back where I started.

onion2k 5y ago

visually speaking, black is a problem. Black is a colour on computer displays but in the real world it's the absence of light That isn't a problem. People don't want to use technology to exactly replicate the real world - they use tech to replicate the real world up to a point, and then they diverge into things that can't happen in the real world. People don't care if the black isn't quite right. After all, people watch films and TV a lot, and they have the same problem. There are lots of reasons why VR might fail to become mainstream in the long term but graphics isn't one of them.

andybak 5y ago

I've loved VR since I first tried it and I still love it. > There's no killer app for VR We'll end up quibbling about the definition of "killer app" but I think there's dozens killer apps for VR. If you mean "an app that will make it as popular as the smartphone" then you're right. But that's a strangely high bar. If you mean "an app that is compelling enough to sell a reasonably large number of headsets" then that definitely already exists. (but then we can enjoy quibbling about what "reasonably large" means)

ehnto 5y ago
I think the idea of a killer app for VR misses the point a bit anyway. It doesn't need a killer app since it doesn't need mainstream adoption. If we are looking for a mainstream adoptable use case it is probably in AR. VR has a specific use case and that's fine.

Netcob 5y ago

I got the first Oculus Rift dev kit not too long after it came out and I got the first version of the HTC Vive. I find it hard to talk about VR as some monolithic thing. When I first tried it, I felt the same "wow, this is the future!" feeling most enthusiasts got. The stutters and the weird headaches then made me add "...but not the present". But my personal issues with it are both surmountable and not shared by everyone. On the hardware side, the depth-of-focus issue must be solved somehow, and graphics processing must improve a lot on both the hardware and software side in order to eliminate any stutters (IMO any frame drop or framerates below 90 are unacceptable, again, my personal issue), image sharpness must match real-world screens at a reasonable distance (at least where I'm looking at) and when it comes to games, unfortunately anything that tries to look realistic still looks like mid-2000s graphics in VR. Plus the headset must be comfortable to wear for at least 8h at a time, and there needs to be good full-body tracking, although for a virtual workplace that's not so important. I'd probably spend all of my work and play time in VR if these things were solved, and I could totally see that happening in the next few years, the way things are going. Unless the only good option is Facebook, in which case, I'll pass.

zeagle 5y ago

Re: the blacks. Hopefully the next generation of valve index & others will have OLED screens with proper blacks.

moron4hire 5y ago

I have worked in the VR industry full time for the last 5 years. Your description of the problems of VR are unrecognizable to me. Which people are these that "think of the Matrix" when they think of VR? I've seen some people talk about it, or more often Sword Art Online. But they are rare. It tends to mark folks as not having really tried VR. I've seen people talk about not even wanting to try VR until it's "full dive". That's dumb. I doubt it's ever going to get there and I also doubt it's even a good idea. See: The Matrix and SAO for depictions of why. I think "people" know the tech is not magic and have decent expectations on what it entails. What I tend to see are people blown away by how impactful that simple "box with a display and some lenses" concept works at transporting a person to a new world. I don't think anyone really cares about black levels that much, not to the degree that it becomes any kind of deciding factor on purchases. Focus... are you sure you're not Ronny Abovitz? Literally the only person I've seen ranting about focus. Again, nobody cares. It'd certainly be nice, but it's just not that important of a feature. Your comment on latency is confusing. Which latency? Motion-to-photon latency? Hasn't been a problem in years. Network latency? We're not talking about a networked game here, and regardless, that's going to be true for any kind of multiplayer experience, VR or otherwise. It's also a largely solved problem and people don't tend to notice network latency in most multiplayer games. The only latency issue I encounter on a regular basis is Oculus Quest 2's hand tracking latency. That's not a fundamental limitation, though, because other hand tracking systems like UltraLeap show that it can be done very well. The Quest's problem is that it's running on what's essentially a 3 year old smartphone SOC. As for "killer apps", honestly, I have never really believed in the concept. There's nothing on my smartphone that I can't do without it being specifically on my smartphone. But combined, the whole ecosystem is extremely useful. My smartphone also isn't the seamless digital assistant Jobs predicted it would be, but it's still extremely useful. Back in 2008, most people thought smartphones weren't for them, but now most find them extremely useful. There are problems in the VR industry. Any device that isn't the Quest 2 is too expensive and not featureful enough to warrant the expense. Building software for VR is still extremely primitive (No, Unity doesn't solve it. Come back to me after you ship a Unity VR project that meets Meta's store guidelines if you disagree). Battery life on standalone systems is abysmal. I don't know anyone with a PC-tethered system that hasn't destroyed several cables, ports, keyboards, or even just glass containers. And there are problems being foisted on VR. The global chip shortage is making it way to hard to scale. Meta's attempts to dominate the market by undercutting the competition is a huge danger to everyone. This coopting of social VR into "metaverse" by crypto grifters is going to kill an entire segment of the app market. Megacorp's inability/unwillingness to moderate user behavior on their platforms is a lot more harmful to people's mental health when it's literally in their faces. But the biggest one might be people who don't know anything about VR claiming it's "useless" or "dead".

gotaquestion 5y ago

I played around with VR back in 2013, and thought 3D conferences were neat, but annoying. However, I believe that if headsets can be made less bulky, it will become ubiquitous. I don't know what the experience will be like, it certainly won't be matrix-y, but I can absolutely see a generation of 20 somethings expecting goggles at some point in the future, maybe 10 years from now. It might actually be Zuck's vision of sanitized cartoony avatars zipping around with no legs because look at how much money kids spend on VBUCKS to look slightly different in Fortnight. The Fortnight generation's kids will be hooked on VR if the goggles are cheap/small enough.

rob74 5y ago

What makes me worried about the future of VR is that there is no "entry-level" VR solution anymore since Google and Samsung cancelled Daydream and Gear VR respectively. Which means that in order to try it out in the comfort of your own home you now have to invest ~400 €.

grumbel 5y ago
Quest2 goes for $300/350€ and is a substantially more complete and better VR package than Daydream/GearVR ever was, i.e. positional tracking on headset and controller, Daydream/GearVR was rotation only. Not having to use a phone also reduces a lot of friction in using the device and drastically improves the visuals. I do however miss the $200/200€ WMR headsets that we had for a while, that felt like a more reasonable entry point for a PC gaming headset. There is currently no replacement for those. Quest2 not only adds price, but also weight due to battery and SoC, which you don't really want or need when using it only on PC.
dylan-m 5y ago
I think Daydream and Gear VR set VR back more than anything, and if they were going to keep doing what they were doing it's a good thing they're gone. See the many comments in this thread conflating 3DOF headsets (glorified panorama viewers) with the same 6DOF VR (full movement in space plus all-important hands) that people are actually excited about.

gfxgirl 5y ago

The same was said for PDAs from Apple Newton (1992) -> Windows CE devices (1996) -> Palm Pilot (1997) -> iPhone (2007). Lots of enthusiasts who thought having a computer in their pocket was amazing and everyone else who thought it would never be anything more than a niche.

ekianjo 5y ago
SO are you saying that all niche eventually become mainstream products? I hate to disappoint you, but most niche products remain niche products. The exception you took is far from being the rule.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  Power glove.
- gfxgirl 5y ago
  I don't know. I only know that for me, after playing Half Life: Alyx, I never want the play a non-VR first person shooter again. Being there is 10x better than looking at a movie of being there (a 2D monitor). Having played No Man's Sky in VR I can't imagine being satisfied with a non VR space game. Having played Until You Fall, I can't imagine being okay with a non-VR action hand-2-hand combat game. Having played several rhythm games in VR I can't imagine going back to most 2D rhythm games. The VR ones make me dance so the experience is far more impactful. The 2D ones, maybe only those with accessories (Rockband, Guitar Hero) would still be ok but their excitement level is not even close to the VR games. Having played Jet Island I'd never be satisfied with non-VR Spiderman. Having played Farpoint I won't be able to appreciate the Metroid Prime 4. Even Astrobot VR makes it hard to go back to Mario even if Mario is a better game. I'm not saying all those games are perfect or even good, only that the immersion, presence, impact was such that I can't go back to many 2D monitor based games. Sure there are exceptions, it's not always about graphics or etc, but I'd much rather play GTA5 than GTA3, not because GTA3 is bad, it was great, but because based on the type of game it is it's just better with modern tech. The same is true for many well made games in VR. So will VR get to iPhone level? No idea. But I hope it gets close to PS4/PS5/Switch levels --- Let me add, my point in PDA progression is that we don't know what it will take for VR to explode. PDAs didn't explode until 3 things happened (1) switching from resistive (stylus required) to capacitive (finger) displays, (2) requiring a data connections, all previous PDAs it was an expensive option that few opted into but iPhone effectively required it since it was a replacement for your phone and so it forced users to see the benefit (3) an OS designed for fingers/phones first. In VR it could be we need smaller eyeglass like devices instead of bulky phone display devices: https://www.gmw3.com/2021/01/new-design-appears-at-ces-2021-for-panasonics-vr-glasses/ https://www.gmw3.com/2021/01/new-design-appears-at-ces-2021-... It could be we need the device to read your hands+fingers instead of requiring controllers. It could be we need to wait for the VR to be like that in Black Mirror, Season 5, episode 1, Striking Vipers. That's still "VR".

ekianjo 5y ago

> There's no killer app for VR Apparently HL: Alyx may be that kind of thing. Problem is, it's just one game, and it took years and lots of efforts to make for probably very little return on investment.

sitzkrieg 5y ago
its not a killer app. it was a decent ~12 hr single player game, and yet one of the only really fleshed out games for vr so far
gs17 5y ago
It's pretty close, I just wish it had proper mod tools.
oneoff786 5y ago
Alyx was fun. It was nothing close to a killer app.

shadowgovt 5y ago

I've seen this kind of boom become bust twice already; we'll have to see how this one pans out. I will note that technology-wise, the hardware is better than it's ever been and I think it has a fighting chance this time previous iterations lacked. For all their simplicity, mouse and keyboard have a level of accuracy and precision that VR does not. This is partially due to their simplicity (keys are binary devices, and a mouse can track position to near-perfection with optical flow modeling, or even the old wheel solution from days of yore). In contrast, VR not only has traditionally had lower-resolution on the tracking signal, it's tracking far, far more degrees of freedom (at least six, but if you want to accurately represent the user's kinematics the number explodes). Plus, the biological sensor fusion we humans use to determine our position in the world demands accuracy from the virtual hardware because we can be very sensitive to input error (and we feel it as nausea, disorientation, or vertigo). The sensor fusion of modern cheap accelerometer tech with the absolute tracking of either lighthouses or whole-room flow imaging has had amazing consequences, but it's not yet perfect and I don't know if a critical mass of users will demand perfection or not. We'll find out. But, I've never seen better hardware taking a stab at the market before.

mancerayder 5y ago

I have a Steam Index and I think the games are fun and re-playable. The problem for me was - I live in too small a space, and this requires a dedicated game room or having to re-arrange furniture, set up the external sensors (not true for Oculus but true for this), and then recalibrating. That, plus the heavy headset and massive cables. The controllers are amazing through, they track all your fingers without being attached to your fingers. It has a future, it's still a little rough around the edges. However, apartment dwellers might be limited in their interest.

coldpie 5y ago

I think it has a chance, but it's definitely on life support. All the big names from this latest attempt (Valve, HTC, Sony) have already given up on it. Facebook is trying to turn it into a thing, but I think they're just trying one last gasp on a failed acquisition before firing that team. Sony and Apple claim to have new hardware coming down the pipe, but I imagine they're feeling much less enthusiastic about it now than when they started those projects. Maybe one of those three will pull it off, but it's not looking good.

pavlov 5y ago
Meta has over 10,000 people working on VR / AR and has invested tens of billions in it. I don't think they're giving up very soon.
- coldpie 5y ago
  If the best they've got for all that investment is that hilariously terrible VR demo video from a couple months ago, I wouldn't bet on that team sticking around around long term.
  - pavlov 5y ago
    Have you tried the Quest? It's actually good. I don't know if it will find a true mass-market product fit: annual unit sales are still in the millions, a long way from the billions of the smartphone market. But it's certainly not because the product inherently sucks. I bet Zuckerberg is ready to swallow at least another $50 billion in losses before giving up on the VR dream. The FB/IG ad machine is sputtering but still pays for that easily.
    - coldpie 5y ago
      I haven't used a Quest specifically, but I have used a number of VR headsets, both personally and for work. Regardless of the hardware tech, there just isn't a compelling user story there, and I think the market performance over the past five years bears that out. The only thing anyone talks about is Beat Saber, not even Alyx made a cultural dent. Facebook's VR demo video was frankly embarassing. There's just nothing there to attract users, it's a solution looking for a problem. Facebook certainly has the money to fund this boondoggle for eternity, but that doesn't guarantee any significant userbase or cultural impact. Like I said in my original comment, maybe Apple will strike gold and find another iPod in this, but I just don't see it happening. Put another way: VR has the smell of 3D TVs and movies, and not the next smartphone.

deleted 5y ago

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caslon 5y ago

A very large body of HMDs have OLED displays, which have "true" blacks.

dwringer 5y ago

Wow, your post sure got a lot of replies, heh. I've not used a modern VR headset but I have used a TrackIR, and to me it provides such a huge leap in immersion that I can't really see how VR would be worth the extra hassle over that. I'd rather have a CAVE than anything like today's consumer VR. Give me more and bigger screens, not some headwear out of a dystopian sci-fi movie.

grumbel 5y ago

Blacks are essentially a solved problem with (micro)OLED. Controls are a non-issue, it's no different than holding a screwdriver or pen, humans are quite adapted to using tools to manipulate the world and we have hand and finger tracking on top if necessary. Latency again, not really a major problem, works well enough, this is VR after all, not telerobotics, if the game engine has to cheat a little, that's fine. Focus adjust exists in a couple of prototypes, but so far hasn't made it into the consumer space, I'd rate this as a "nice to have", most people quickly get used to the fixed focus. The big problem VR has to overcome is getting resolution parity with monitors. At the moment VR is still extremely low resolution, even headsets in the 2000x2000 realm are, due to the image being stretch across ~100° FOV, only the equivalent of an old 800x600 monitor. That's not good enough for a lot of uses. It works fine for VR games, but barely works for 2D movies and even less so for text. Given that the majority of content out there is made for larger resolutions, that's the biggest stumbling block for VR as it means people have to get out of VR and use another display device. I think once resolution is solved, that will be the killer-app for VR just by itself. As it means a VR headsets, which can be turned into an AR headset via camera pass through, is able to replace every screen you currently have. That will be the point where people can start ditching their multi-monitor setups and have essentially an empty desk with just a headset. The appeal of getting ever bigger TVs will also vanish when you can have a virtual IMAX screen in your headset. It will still take some years until VR/AR headset are good enough and comfortable enough to replace TVs and monitors en masse. But I have little doubt that it will happen sooner or later. All the VR gaming stuff is really just a bonus here and I don't think we'll get mass VR adaption just from that.

trafficante 5y ago
The software side of this vision is already surprisingly mature and mostly waiting for hardware to catch up. On my Quest 2, I can pop into a virtual environment with 5 desktops scaled around me in 3D space, a physical keyboard fully rendered into the environment that also tracks my fingers, and a scaleable camera “portal” positioned over the location of my doorway (in physical space) that displays a camera feed of anyone entering the room. If I’m trying to relax, I can hop into a virtual movie theater on the moon and watch a 3D Blu-ray rip or play most modern AAA pc games. All of this while sitting in a lounge chair in my living room. And then, of course, there’s all the 6dof VR games but, after Alyx barely moved the hardware sales needle, I don’t think that sort of thing is what’s needed to drive mass adoption at this point. VR needs much better screen tech, high performant SoCs, and a “coolness” factor. I wonder if there’s a company known for all three that has repeatedly yoinked entire markets even though they entered “late”?

telman17 5y ago

I use VR for Flight Simulator and Elite Dangerous. Living my space exploration dream in VR (sitting down!) is truly a magical thing. VR isn't necessarily only the room experience games and I think some folks forget that.

Spooky23 5y ago

I think it’s an example of why companies need mature governance models. It’s cool tech, but it seems like it’s boiled down to Second Life + helmet graphics.

anthk 5y ago

>For me the Infocom games (Zork in particular) will always be remembered fondly but part of the magic was the time and you can never step in the same river twice. Inform6, 7. Then get Anchorhead, Inside Woman, Spider and Web, Vicious Cycles, Slouch Over Bedlam, Curses+Jigsaw and get amazed.

ynx 5y ago

There's plenty of people who, having not tried anything resembling modern VR, completely discount it as a medium. So while you're not alone in your belief, your criticism also has red flags that will cause most people with experience in VR to not take it seriously, even its informed critics. - Handling latency is more akin to client-side prediction behavior, rather than synchronous awaiting on network response for frame-by-frame accuracy. So it's more of a distribution problem of how to replicate and conflict-resolve state most efficiently, rather than round-trip latency. - Black is not that much of a problem. The brain adapts. - Focus is a problem with active work on it (using eye tracking) which we'll see improvements on in the near future, but it's worth noting that a fixed focal distance actually helps vision for some people. - "There's no killer app for VR (optimists will add "yet") and no hint of what one might be.": no, optimists would tell you you're wrong. Someone mostly neutral would point to things like VRChat driving a noticeable portion of sales of VR headsets or additional equipment, which is promising in that there is a viable non-Meta social VR app currently in existence. A pessimist would argue that VRChat hasn't achieved a sustainable business model. A contrarian would further add to the pessimist's point that the top sellers in VR tend to be stagnant year over year, suggesting the industry isn't as live (optimist: yet) as many perceive it to be. - "you're pretty much predicated on a pure brain-computer interface for it to feel realistic" - not quite. You might depend on that to present approximate realism, but VR - and we're talking 6dof here, 3dof is far below any threshold of believability/immersion - does not require much approximation of hand position for the brain to very quickly allow a virtual world to feel "real" enough for some fairly deep immersion. Better-informed critics of VR typically question its broad appeal based on motion sickness, lack of support/indifference/hostility from other game developers or middleware developers, difficulty of authoring plausible VR content in general, inconsistent hardware depressing the quality of software aimed at the "lowest common denominator" device (though this last one has largely evaporated due to the Quest 2 being very cheap and very good), possible risk of effects on children's development of physical balance if they play too much, and so on.

ehnto 5y ago

Perhaps you're imagining VR as an alternative to real life, but it's actually just an alternative to gaming on a monitor. I don't expect it to be comparable to life, I just expect it to be better than gaming on my monitor, and even then only for really particular games. You wouldn't play an RTS in VR, or even FPS games like Counter-Strike, since the actual gameplay of CS is mouse precision, reflexes and playspace awareness. So VR is a niche even within the gaming community and will never replace the monitor except for some circumstances. But it does enable unique experiences that no other platform can. Where VR excels is in visual immersion, intuitive interaction and spatial awareness. So it excel in games like racing and flight simulators, space sims, and in things like puzzle games where manipulating things with your hands adds a new dimension to the game.