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> no one wants to wear VR goggles I would be curious how many people are willing to wear VR goggles for any amount of time. I spend easily 10-12 hours a day at

> no one wants to wear VR goggles I would be curious how many people are willing to wear VR goggles for any amount of time. I spend easily 10-12 hours a day at my computer. I am absolutely someone who is happy working, socializing, playing, and learning all at the same desk. But I can't wear those goggles for even 2 hours. Are there people who can wear them for 12?

b112 4y ago
But I can't wear those goggles for even 2 hours. Are there people who can wear them for 12? As someone who has never seen or held a pair (I don't have a facebook account), what is the long term barrier? Weight? Size? Such as, if they were sunglass sized, would they be longer term wear? Or is it still the resolution/disconnected feeling/etc?
- Gigachad 4y ago
  I have a HTC vive original and I actually had a lot of fun with it, but I don’t use it anymore because it takes up a lot of space and the experience is still kind of clunky/low res. For many people there is a physical discomfort side. From either the heavy device or motion sickness. I didn’t have much issue with this other than playing one time for most of the day and the weight on my face was a bit much.
- TremendousJudge 4y ago
  For me personally, my eyes got very tired very fast, after an hour long session left me feeling as though I had been staring at a screen for 10 hours straight
- NikolaNovak 4y ago
  I use Ocullus quest 2 to play (and LOVE it!). Weight, head and neck strain / tightness are the first issue. Nausea is the follow up. Eye strain is the final. I never use it for more than 30min at the time. I cannot imagine spending ANY work time in VR at this point in technology cycle, once you add resolution, accuracy, etc. I do not understand what problem it's solving - if you want to visually interact remotely, turn on your camera. If you don't, just talk and screenshare. I do not understand what virtual reality will add to my interactions and productivity.
- wccrawford 4y ago
  There's a little bit of heaviness if they headset isn't balanced well, but that's easily fixed. The more concerning thing is the motion sickness. Most people, at first, get nauseated after a short while, and if they don't stop using them for hours at that point, it gets worse and worse each time they use them. However, if they stop and recover (at least a few hours, a day is better) when they first start to feel it, they'll gradually get more and more used to it. There's also the inability to properly see things around you, like your coffee or your mouse. AR is a good fix for that, though, and Meta's new Pro glasses specifically don't have full wrap-around so that you can still see around you somewhat. It ruins immersion in games, but they aren't meant for games. I'm a pretty big fan of VR from way back, and I've owned multiple different headsets now. I do think the "metaverse" is an eventuality, but it's not about meetings, it's about agency. Meta's current attempt at "the metaverse" is just a crappy attempt at doing better than Second Life, but without even the things that made Second Life as good as it was. The agency to create things yourself and sell to others, and the ability to buy licensed in-universe items is pretty much essential to a functional metaverse, IMO. Meta may intend to get there eventually, but trying to sell it as "the metaverse" before that point is pointless and harmful to their goals. It's going to take a long time to get there, and I'm still hoping that a grassroots movement makes it happen first instead of a big corporation. Ready Player One was all about that scenario and what it would mean. You have to look past the cloying nostalgia to see it, of course. ;)
- Arrath 4y ago
  As someone who has pretty heavily used a Rift 2 for 5+ years now, primarily its ergonomics and comfort. More physical activities can result in the foam around the eye piece absorbing a goodly quantity of sweat (addressable e.g. with the plastic cover that comes with the Quest 2 or aftermarket alternatives) which just feels gross and can lead to more humidity being trapped within the headset, fogging the lenses, and so on. The weight is a bit awkward, and different straps can help distribute it better and stay comfortable for longer. The ear phones can be uncomfortable after a time as well, pressing down on the ears as they do. If they were a cupping style like high end headphones, that would help a lot. I do find that the tethered units like the Rift are more comfortable for longer than the self contained units like the Quest, since they offload processing, power, etc and the attendant weight, to the desktop machine. Eye strain does add up eventually, and newer headsets have better screens but I wonder if this is just a truly insurmountable problem of mounting screens mere inches from your eyes.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Weight, they can make you sweaty, may feel uncomfortable in other ways, look dorky as hell. Probably do a bunch of bad eyestrain-related stuff that we haven't figured out yet (or some have but are keeping it quiet). Serious motion-sickness issues for a fraction of users that's too large to ignore, even with top-notch goggles. When they're in the same size/weight/appearance ballpark as sunglasses, is when AR/VR glasses will take off. It'll be the next "smartphone revolution", no question about it. We'll wonder how we ever put up with being as tied-down as we are at a normal office workstation. The smartphone put the Internet everywhere, rather than in one place, AR/VR will put your computer everywhere. Until then... yeah, it's niche tech.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    > AR/VR will put your computer everywhere. Sounds like a nightmare. And I already have frequent nightmares about my phone. The one where I need to do something urgently and the phone just gets slower and slower. It's a modern rehash of the dream where you are trying to run from something but your legs just get heavier and heavier.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      I don't love it either but it seems inevitable unless it turns out to be impossible to make AR/VR glasses that are svelte enough for people to actually wear in public, and I wouldn't bet against it—I expect most of us in 1995 didn't believe we'd have many-core computers with gigabytes of ram and disk and with near-zero-latency touchscreens and all-day+ (for typical use, at least) battery life in devices with about the same volume as a cigarette packet, just ~12 years later. Otherwise, the future of at least "consumer" computing is surely computer-as-overlay/HUD-on-reality, very likely with a side of being able to toggle totally virtual environments on and off at will ("Siri, take me to my office") which is what I meant by the computer being everywhere, rather than just having Internet access everywhere. Unless we crack some kind of really good brain/computer interface before we solve the VR-goggles-suck problem, which I doubt, but who knows.
- jandrese 4y ago
  So the plural of anecdote isn't data, but I have a Quest 2 and the limiting factor on use for me is one of two things. 1. The battery runs out. 2. I get physically exhausted. Most of the VR stuff I do is fairly energetic so it's not the VR goggles that tire me out, it's the constant swinging of arms and jumping/crouching. I've never had an issue with motion sickness and since I'm doing it in my home any worries about how dorky they look are silly. Comfort is mostly fine, although you do have to wash off the foam bits that touch your face regularly or they'll start to smell like old gym socks. Fogging of the lenses is also an annoying and regular issue that I've never fully solved, mostly just getting used to everything being soft looking. The final minor issue is that the lenses can get warm (like hardworking cell phone level warm) so if your room is already hot they would probably get fairly uncomfortable. Thanks to the battery issue I've never used them for more than a couple of hours at a time however. I can't comment about the comfort after 12 hours. I imagine my arms would have fallen off long before I got to 12 hours of Dragon Fist, Ragnarock, or Beat Saber however. To stay article relevant I will comment about Horizon Worlds: My overall impression after an hour of trying it out just to see was "What did they spend the billions of dollars on?" It's so corporate and empty and I have no idea where all of the money went. It looks like any old VR Chat clone, there are a handful of minigames, chatrooms, and "VR Experiences" which are just short looped videos. It's not like SecondLife where you could maybe build your own thing or might stumble upon some crazy weird thing at any point. It's just minimal effort everywhere you look. To hear that it is such a money pit makes me wonder if it's some kind of weird money laundering thing or if the developers are just watching YouTube all day for years?
- fatneckbeardz 4y ago
  I think the problem is something that we dont actually understand yet. Like there needs to be some kind of psychologist to study it to figure out what is going on. When I am in the goggles, Its kind of cool, but Im completely disconnected from the real world. Its not a group activity either, like board games connect you to other people. VR connects you to the matrix. When one person in a family puts on the goggles, everyone else just leaves the room. There is nothing to see or share. (if you have a TV on, maybe its interesting but you are still like watching a person move their head around and look at things that arent there like a person whose mentally ill, its a strange experience) And the physical barrier is always there. You walk up to the zone you have defined in your real life room, which is probably a few dozen square feet. You can touch invisibility, some bizarre barrier exists to your hands but your eyes tell you the exact opposite - you see infinite space, but are trapped inside a tiny grid whose barriers appear when you walk too far. Your eyes and ears tell you theres a whole world, your hands and feet understand you are still in your living room or whatever. So when I come out of VR i have this bizarre, uneasy, queasy, unpleasant, feeling, for which I have not the word to describe. It is not like waking up from a dream. It's like shifting uncomfortably from one reality to another, one you have been to by yourself, completely alone.
  - rewgs 4y ago
    Incredible description and eerily similar to my own experiences.
TremendousJudge 4y ago
Well, not that I'm in favor of the idea, but probably if you're used to wearing VR goggles since childhood (the same way we are with regular screens) spending 12 hours a day with them on may be just fine.
- DoingIsLearning 4y ago
  When I am interacting with regular screens what my eyes see and what my proprioception and internal ear perceive are perfectly synchronous. However, the lag in VR is still human perceivable. It is not a 'getting used to' exposure problem it is still very much is a VR technology problem. We are just not quite there yet.
- projectazorian 4y ago
  Can’t wait to find out about all the new types of repetitive strain injury caused by doing this for decades on end!
luckylion 4y ago
I haven't used the new ones, but I have an Oculus Go. I think the most important part is fitting. I believe there are companies selling accessories to make it more comfortable to wear, and I'd totally invest in that if I planned to use it more, or in a different setting. I'm using it for porn (and it's amazing, VR porn is the most underrated thing imho, but maybe I'm just weird) and for movies (non-3d, having these slightly-3d-movies didn't really add to the experience for me). I'm someone who can't concentrate on movies on a normal screen, my attention wanders and I'll quit watching and do something else, continue later etc and it might take me three days to complete a single movie. Not so while using the Oculus Go, I'm cut off from the world around me, focused on the movie, and now I sometimes watch a movie in one sitting (though I do rarely watch movies these days, so idk how much this is worth). I don't know if I want to spend any time "socializing" through it, but when I was sick I've definitely used it for 6-7 hours on one day to watch multiple movies, and it was fine.
- bink 4y ago
  Watching movies seems like a different application of the tech. Doesn't that just simulate a movie screen several feet in front of you? That's probably not quite as sickness inducing as moving around a full VR environment.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    Yes. I mean, if you want to, you can also have a simulated empty cinema around the screen. I've never felt sick while using it, but I've also only played very few games on it, and those weren't action packed with lots of moving about, but more simple and relaxed.
- rurp 4y ago
  The fact that VR content is gated behind major companies concerned with brand safety is a major reason to be skeptical about current VR tech ever taking off. If it were more like the early internet where any passionate and reasonably technical person could make widely available apps and content, I think VR would be much more interesting. Porn is one of the most obvious genres, but also just having a bunch of weird niche content and experimental games would be really cool. Living in a bland Facebook controlled world overseen by Zuckerberg the God is about as enticing as filing my taxes on a daily cadence.
mr_gibbins 4y ago
I can manage 15 minutes or so on my aging Oculus Quest but that's about it. There's a Netflix option on there, I can relax in a virtual cinema with surround sound and a screen sized big enough to feel like a cinema screen and I've not been able to watch anything because of the vertigo. I thought my kids would go crazy on it, perhaps I'm too old, out of touch etc. but they can do 15 mins max too. It's a novelty toy, quickly put away. If Google Glasses had really taken off and I could have AR, not VR - overlays on ordinary vision - I'd be there. Handy for work, could do virtual meetings, notifications, all sorts. But as with most things Google it went the way of the dodo and I haven't heard of any replacement poised to take the world by storm.
- fatneckbeardz 4y ago
  TiltFive AR (formerly Cast AR) is still a thing. they are shipping product to early backers and people are working on games for it.
- samplatt 4y ago
  The Quest has a fairly low refresh rate, which is one of the main barriers to delivering a product that doesn't make you sick. Back when Carmack was leading the tech dev, they came out with a rule saying that they needed a working minimum of 90fps for MOST people to tolerate VR. The Quest headset screens operate at 72hz, iirc.
  - webmaven 4y ago
    We've known for a long time that for actual use refresh rate (and secondary factors like jitter and tearing) is far more important than resolution, or polygons (and before it became a moot point, color depth). But the demos and screenshots required to sell the idea aren't impressive if they don't look comparable to recent AAA games, so the wrong kind of hardware keeps getting crammed into the prototypes, and the target keeps moving so there is no opportunity for Moore's Law to solve the mismatch for you.
wilsonnb3 4y ago
VR goggles are going to continue getting lighter, smaller, and more comfortable to wear. Soon enough they will be more comparable to glasses than goggles and plenty of people wear glasses for 12-16 hours a day.
- alpha_squared 4y ago
  Maybe I'm in a bubble, but most people I know who wear glasses don't actually enjoy doing so and would really rather not if they can avoid it. VR would have to be demonstrably superior to any alternative to justify wearing it for that long even if it was as light as a feather.
  - djur 4y ago
    I've worn glasses since I was a small child and that's not my experience at all. It's comparable to wearing clothes, except they cost me less and are quicker and easier to clean and maintain. I've occasionally had uncomfortable glasses with materials that my skin reacted to, but that's easy to resolve. And I've occasionally lost or damaged a pair of glasses, and that's a hassle, but not as much as losing your wallet or keys. On any given day I don't consciously think about my glasses at all.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    >Maybe I'm in a bubble, but most people I know who wear glasses don't actually enjoy doing so and would really rather not if they can avoid it. I think you're in a bubble. We have a way of avoiding glasses: contacts. But people choose glasses instead. I wear contacts, not glasses, but every time I ever talk to a glasses-wearer about why they wear glasses instead, they usually can't imagine wearing contacts and think glasses are just fine. I've never heard anyone complain about them. And just looking around me, most men wear glasses; it's usually women that wear contacts.
    - oldsecondhand 4y ago
      Glasses need less maintenance than contacts, and aren't as weird to put them on, so it's an easy sell.
lovehashbrowns 4y ago
I got used to them pretty quickly after some initial motion sickness issues and could wear them for quite a while. Multiple hours if I got super into a few games. I'm pretty excited for having VR replace multiple physical monitors. I'm gonna be looking for a new headset in the coming weeks to see if that's viable right now--maybe the new Meta headset. But if something is promising and can render text fairly well, I'm gonna give it a whirl and see how it goes. Right now the tech obviously has a ton of comfort issues, from motion sickness to fatigue. But it's not hard to imagine a near future where it's a lot more comfortable to wear VR headsets and be able to do some novel things with them. I mean, the first "laptops" were quite burdensome.
seanmcdirmid 4y ago
I spend about 40 minutes-1 hour/day with my Oculus 2 (just did a 40 minute Fall Out Boy Beatsaber session). But just playing. I've done 2 hour sessions before and they are pretty intense, but not in the eyes (maybe the weight becomes a bit of a strain after 1 hour?).

b112 4y ago

But I can't wear those goggles for even 2 hours. Are there people who can wear them for 12? As someone who has never seen or held a pair (I don't have a facebook account), what is the long term barrier? Weight? Size? Such as, if they were sunglass sized, would they be longer term wear? Or is it still the resolution/disconnected feeling/etc?

Gigachad 4y ago
I have a HTC vive original and I actually had a lot of fun with it, but I don’t use it anymore because it takes up a lot of space and the experience is still kind of clunky/low res. For many people there is a physical discomfort side. From either the heavy device or motion sickness. I didn’t have much issue with this other than playing one time for most of the day and the weight on my face was a bit much.
TremendousJudge 4y ago
For me personally, my eyes got very tired very fast, after an hour long session left me feeling as though I had been staring at a screen for 10 hours straight
NikolaNovak 4y ago
I use Ocullus quest 2 to play (and LOVE it!). Weight, head and neck strain / tightness are the first issue. Nausea is the follow up. Eye strain is the final. I never use it for more than 30min at the time. I cannot imagine spending ANY work time in VR at this point in technology cycle, once you add resolution, accuracy, etc. I do not understand what problem it's solving - if you want to visually interact remotely, turn on your camera. If you don't, just talk and screenshare. I do not understand what virtual reality will add to my interactions and productivity.
wccrawford 4y ago
There's a little bit of heaviness if they headset isn't balanced well, but that's easily fixed. The more concerning thing is the motion sickness. Most people, at first, get nauseated after a short while, and if they don't stop using them for hours at that point, it gets worse and worse each time they use them. However, if they stop and recover (at least a few hours, a day is better) when they first start to feel it, they'll gradually get more and more used to it. There's also the inability to properly see things around you, like your coffee or your mouse. AR is a good fix for that, though, and Meta's new Pro glasses specifically don't have full wrap-around so that you can still see around you somewhat. It ruins immersion in games, but they aren't meant for games. I'm a pretty big fan of VR from way back, and I've owned multiple different headsets now. I do think the "metaverse" is an eventuality, but it's not about meetings, it's about agency. Meta's current attempt at "the metaverse" is just a crappy attempt at doing better than Second Life, but without even the things that made Second Life as good as it was. The agency to create things yourself and sell to others, and the ability to buy licensed in-universe items is pretty much essential to a functional metaverse, IMO. Meta may intend to get there eventually, but trying to sell it as "the metaverse" before that point is pointless and harmful to their goals. It's going to take a long time to get there, and I'm still hoping that a grassroots movement makes it happen first instead of a big corporation. Ready Player One was all about that scenario and what it would mean. You have to look past the cloying nostalgia to see it, of course. ;)
Arrath 4y ago
As someone who has pretty heavily used a Rift 2 for 5+ years now, primarily its ergonomics and comfort. More physical activities can result in the foam around the eye piece absorbing a goodly quantity of sweat (addressable e.g. with the plastic cover that comes with the Quest 2 or aftermarket alternatives) which just feels gross and can lead to more humidity being trapped within the headset, fogging the lenses, and so on. The weight is a bit awkward, and different straps can help distribute it better and stay comfortable for longer. The ear phones can be uncomfortable after a time as well, pressing down on the ears as they do. If they were a cupping style like high end headphones, that would help a lot. I do find that the tethered units like the Rift are more comfortable for longer than the self contained units like the Quest, since they offload processing, power, etc and the attendant weight, to the desktop machine. Eye strain does add up eventually, and newer headsets have better screens but I wonder if this is just a truly insurmountable problem of mounting screens mere inches from your eyes.
yamtaddle 4y ago
Weight, they can make you sweaty, may feel uncomfortable in other ways, look dorky as hell. Probably do a bunch of bad eyestrain-related stuff that we haven't figured out yet (or some have but are keeping it quiet). Serious motion-sickness issues for a fraction of users that's too large to ignore, even with top-notch goggles. When they're in the same size/weight/appearance ballpark as sunglasses, is when AR/VR glasses will take off. It'll be the next "smartphone revolution", no question about it. We'll wonder how we ever put up with being as tied-down as we are at a normal office workstation. The smartphone put the Internet everywhere, rather than in one place, AR/VR will put your computer everywhere. Until then... yeah, it's niche tech.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  > AR/VR will put your computer everywhere. Sounds like a nightmare. And I already have frequent nightmares about my phone. The one where I need to do something urgently and the phone just gets slower and slower. It's a modern rehash of the dream where you are trying to run from something but your legs just get heavier and heavier.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    I don't love it either but it seems inevitable unless it turns out to be impossible to make AR/VR glasses that are svelte enough for people to actually wear in public, and I wouldn't bet against it—I expect most of us in 1995 didn't believe we'd have many-core computers with gigabytes of ram and disk and with near-zero-latency touchscreens and all-day+ (for typical use, at least) battery life in devices with about the same volume as a cigarette packet, just ~12 years later. Otherwise, the future of at least "consumer" computing is surely computer-as-overlay/HUD-on-reality, very likely with a side of being able to toggle totally virtual environments on and off at will ("Siri, take me to my office") which is what I meant by the computer being everywhere, rather than just having Internet access everywhere. Unless we crack some kind of really good brain/computer interface before we solve the VR-goggles-suck problem, which I doubt, but who knows.
jandrese 4y ago
So the plural of anecdote isn't data, but I have a Quest 2 and the limiting factor on use for me is one of two things. 1. The battery runs out. 2. I get physically exhausted. Most of the VR stuff I do is fairly energetic so it's not the VR goggles that tire me out, it's the constant swinging of arms and jumping/crouching. I've never had an issue with motion sickness and since I'm doing it in my home any worries about how dorky they look are silly. Comfort is mostly fine, although you do have to wash off the foam bits that touch your face regularly or they'll start to smell like old gym socks. Fogging of the lenses is also an annoying and regular issue that I've never fully solved, mostly just getting used to everything being soft looking. The final minor issue is that the lenses can get warm (like hardworking cell phone level warm) so if your room is already hot they would probably get fairly uncomfortable. Thanks to the battery issue I've never used them for more than a couple of hours at a time however. I can't comment about the comfort after 12 hours. I imagine my arms would have fallen off long before I got to 12 hours of Dragon Fist, Ragnarock, or Beat Saber however. To stay article relevant I will comment about Horizon Worlds: My overall impression after an hour of trying it out just to see was "What did they spend the billions of dollars on?" It's so corporate and empty and I have no idea where all of the money went. It looks like any old VR Chat clone, there are a handful of minigames, chatrooms, and "VR Experiences" which are just short looped videos. It's not like SecondLife where you could maybe build your own thing or might stumble upon some crazy weird thing at any point. It's just minimal effort everywhere you look. To hear that it is such a money pit makes me wonder if it's some kind of weird money laundering thing or if the developers are just watching YouTube all day for years?
fatneckbeardz 4y ago
I think the problem is something that we dont actually understand yet. Like there needs to be some kind of psychologist to study it to figure out what is going on. When I am in the goggles, Its kind of cool, but Im completely disconnected from the real world. Its not a group activity either, like board games connect you to other people. VR connects you to the matrix. When one person in a family puts on the goggles, everyone else just leaves the room. There is nothing to see or share. (if you have a TV on, maybe its interesting but you are still like watching a person move their head around and look at things that arent there like a person whose mentally ill, its a strange experience) And the physical barrier is always there. You walk up to the zone you have defined in your real life room, which is probably a few dozen square feet. You can touch invisibility, some bizarre barrier exists to your hands but your eyes tell you the exact opposite - you see infinite space, but are trapped inside a tiny grid whose barriers appear when you walk too far. Your eyes and ears tell you theres a whole world, your hands and feet understand you are still in your living room or whatever. So when I come out of VR i have this bizarre, uneasy, queasy, unpleasant, feeling, for which I have not the word to describe. It is not like waking up from a dream. It's like shifting uncomfortably from one reality to another, one you have been to by yourself, completely alone.
- rewgs 4y ago
  Incredible description and eerily similar to my own experiences.

TremendousJudge 4y ago

Well, not that I'm in favor of the idea, but probably if you're used to wearing VR goggles since childhood (the same way we are with regular screens) spending 12 hours a day with them on may be just fine.

DoingIsLearning 4y ago
When I am interacting with regular screens what my eyes see and what my proprioception and internal ear perceive are perfectly synchronous. However, the lag in VR is still human perceivable. It is not a 'getting used to' exposure problem it is still very much is a VR technology problem. We are just not quite there yet.
projectazorian 4y ago
Can’t wait to find out about all the new types of repetitive strain injury caused by doing this for decades on end!

luckylion 4y ago

I haven't used the new ones, but I have an Oculus Go. I think the most important part is fitting. I believe there are companies selling accessories to make it more comfortable to wear, and I'd totally invest in that if I planned to use it more, or in a different setting. I'm using it for porn (and it's amazing, VR porn is the most underrated thing imho, but maybe I'm just weird) and for movies (non-3d, having these slightly-3d-movies didn't really add to the experience for me). I'm someone who can't concentrate on movies on a normal screen, my attention wanders and I'll quit watching and do something else, continue later etc and it might take me three days to complete a single movie. Not so while using the Oculus Go, I'm cut off from the world around me, focused on the movie, and now I sometimes watch a movie in one sitting (though I do rarely watch movies these days, so idk how much this is worth). I don't know if I want to spend any time "socializing" through it, but when I was sick I've definitely used it for 6-7 hours on one day to watch multiple movies, and it was fine.

bink 4y ago
Watching movies seems like a different application of the tech. Doesn't that just simulate a movie screen several feet in front of you? That's probably not quite as sickness inducing as moving around a full VR environment.
- luckylion 4y ago
  Yes. I mean, if you want to, you can also have a simulated empty cinema around the screen. I've never felt sick while using it, but I've also only played very few games on it, and those weren't action packed with lots of moving about, but more simple and relaxed.
rurp 4y ago
The fact that VR content is gated behind major companies concerned with brand safety is a major reason to be skeptical about current VR tech ever taking off. If it were more like the early internet where any passionate and reasonably technical person could make widely available apps and content, I think VR would be much more interesting. Porn is one of the most obvious genres, but also just having a bunch of weird niche content and experimental games would be really cool. Living in a bland Facebook controlled world overseen by Zuckerberg the God is about as enticing as filing my taxes on a daily cadence.

mr_gibbins 4y ago

I can manage 15 minutes or so on my aging Oculus Quest but that's about it. There's a Netflix option on there, I can relax in a virtual cinema with surround sound and a screen sized big enough to feel like a cinema screen and I've not been able to watch anything because of the vertigo. I thought my kids would go crazy on it, perhaps I'm too old, out of touch etc. but they can do 15 mins max too. It's a novelty toy, quickly put away. If Google Glasses had really taken off and I could have AR, not VR - overlays on ordinary vision - I'd be there. Handy for work, could do virtual meetings, notifications, all sorts. But as with most things Google it went the way of the dodo and I haven't heard of any replacement poised to take the world by storm.

fatneckbeardz 4y ago
TiltFive AR (formerly Cast AR) is still a thing. they are shipping product to early backers and people are working on games for it.
samplatt 4y ago
The Quest has a fairly low refresh rate, which is one of the main barriers to delivering a product that doesn't make you sick. Back when Carmack was leading the tech dev, they came out with a rule saying that they needed a working minimum of 90fps for MOST people to tolerate VR. The Quest headset screens operate at 72hz, iirc.
- webmaven 4y ago
  We've known for a long time that for actual use refresh rate (and secondary factors like jitter and tearing) is far more important than resolution, or polygons (and before it became a moot point, color depth). But the demos and screenshots required to sell the idea aren't impressive if they don't look comparable to recent AAA games, so the wrong kind of hardware keeps getting crammed into the prototypes, and the target keeps moving so there is no opportunity for Moore's Law to solve the mismatch for you.

wilsonnb3 4y ago

VR goggles are going to continue getting lighter, smaller, and more comfortable to wear. Soon enough they will be more comparable to glasses than goggles and plenty of people wear glasses for 12-16 hours a day.

alpha_squared 4y ago
Maybe I'm in a bubble, but most people I know who wear glasses don't actually enjoy doing so and would really rather not if they can avoid it. VR would have to be demonstrably superior to any alternative to justify wearing it for that long even if it was as light as a feather.
- djur 4y ago
  I've worn glasses since I was a small child and that's not my experience at all. It's comparable to wearing clothes, except they cost me less and are quicker and easier to clean and maintain. I've occasionally had uncomfortable glasses with materials that my skin reacted to, but that's easy to resolve. And I've occasionally lost or damaged a pair of glasses, and that's a hassle, but not as much as losing your wallet or keys. On any given day I don't consciously think about my glasses at all.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  >Maybe I'm in a bubble, but most people I know who wear glasses don't actually enjoy doing so and would really rather not if they can avoid it. I think you're in a bubble. We have a way of avoiding glasses: contacts. But people choose glasses instead. I wear contacts, not glasses, but every time I ever talk to a glasses-wearer about why they wear glasses instead, they usually can't imagine wearing contacts and think glasses are just fine. I've never heard anyone complain about them. And just looking around me, most men wear glasses; it's usually women that wear contacts.
  - oldsecondhand 4y ago
    Glasses need less maintenance than contacts, and aren't as weird to put them on, so it's an easy sell.

lovehashbrowns 4y ago

I got used to them pretty quickly after some initial motion sickness issues and could wear them for quite a while. Multiple hours if I got super into a few games. I'm pretty excited for having VR replace multiple physical monitors. I'm gonna be looking for a new headset in the coming weeks to see if that's viable right now--maybe the new Meta headset. But if something is promising and can render text fairly well, I'm gonna give it a whirl and see how it goes. Right now the tech obviously has a ton of comfort issues, from motion sickness to fatigue. But it's not hard to imagine a near future where it's a lot more comfortable to wear VR headsets and be able to do some novel things with them. I mean, the first "laptops" were quite burdensome.

seanmcdirmid 4y ago

I spend about 40 minutes-1 hour/day with my Oculus 2 (just did a 40 minute Fall Out Boy Beatsaber session). But just playing. I've done 2 hour sessions before and they are pretty intense, but not in the eyes (maybe the weight becomes a bit of a strain after 1 hour?).