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All use cases in the video are games. I think that is the reason why I don't feel anything towards VR headsets. While I am totally into technology, I'm just no

• criddell 3y ago
  > I am not interested in entertainment at all This makes no sense to me. You don’t enjoy music? Movies? Books? Dance? Sports? Plays? Museums of any kind? Have you always been that way? When I was very young I could entertain myself for hours in my backyard looking at shadows and insects.
  • TekMol 3y ago
    When I watch a movie, I do enjoy it. But there are so much way more interesting and exciting things to do than to watch a movie. So I rarely watch one. Books? Loooooove books. But they are usually about the real world. Science, biographies, theories ... I wouldn't call them "entertainment". Never been much into dancing. Doing sport is super awesome. But is that really counted as "entertainment"? Or do you mean watching sports? I find watching sports pretty boring. Plays - whats that? Museums? Hell yeah! But I never heard someone call museums part of the entertainment industry.
    • milkytron 3y ago
      I think your preferred entertainment is still entertainment, it's just not the typical entertainment that many people partake in. The google definition of entertainment: the action of providing or being provided with amusement or enjoyment. So reading, museums, and whatever you do for enjoyment is still entertainment.
      • yccs27 3y ago
        The crucial difference here is between "entertainment" as a general concept and "entertainment" as products of the entertainment industry.
    • BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
      > Plays - whats that? it's like a movie but with real people in real time. you may have heard about something called 'theater'
      • TekMol 3y ago
        Yeah, theater is good. But I like other things more. Like watching people in a cafe. Gives you more opportunity to join the action :)
        • younggeorge 3y ago
          And then the people you talk to end up talking about movies and video games and you lose interest because you're only living interested in the real world.
          • deleted 3y ago
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          • deleted 3y ago
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          • p_j_w 3y ago
            Video games and movies are part of the real world.
      • JohnFen 3y ago
        Live theater is my favorite by a longshot. Beats the hell out of what the movie industry has been churning out.
    • ydnaclementine 3y ago
      > When I watch a movie, I do enjoy it. But there are so much way more interesting and exciting things to do than to watch a movie. So I rarely watch one. I used to think this, turns out I was watching bad movies. Use time as a filter and watch old movies by directors that are still talked about (Kubrick, Tarkovsky, etc)
    • holoduke 3y ago
      Life should be all about entertainment. You are missing something essential I believe.
      • wepple 3y ago
        I disagree. Life is about finding meaning, and for many entertainment is meaningless; distracting yourself until you die.
        • throwaway675309 3y ago
          Every pursuit is a distraction until you die. There is no intrinsic meaning to life, you just do whatever you can to keep a steady release of dopamine in your brain. For some people that's watching television, for other people it's Family, for others it might be practicing musical instrument, the list goes on and on but it's purely subjective.
    • TulliusCicero 3y ago
      > Doing sport is super awesome. But is that really counted as "entertainment"? Or do you mean watching sports? I find watching sports pretty boring. Well, there are some good fitness-oriented VR games around. Beat Saber is rad, that's the main one people know about, and there's a bunch of other ones too.
    • zmmmmm 3y ago
      > Doing sport is super awesome. There are a lot of good VR sport apps. I am part of a VR cricket league which I play in every morning before breakfast. It's awesome!
  • GuestHNUser 3y ago
    I feel the same way as the parent. Just about everything touted in the entertainment industry fails to hold my attention or generate any desire. I haven't felt the urge to watch a movie, play a game, or really engage with much marketed media in a while. Don't mistake me for being depressed too, I am quite happy. I get a lot of fulfillment in life from fairly mundane things: work, socializing, exercise, reading about whatever niche I am interested in the moment. I don't think it's abnormal either.
  • coffeebeqn 3y ago
    The coolest thing I saw on the Quest was a 3D YouTube video - it was something educational ish about the universe maybe. Very immersive but they only had a few good ones
• thetrustworthy 3y ago
  What do you consider entertainment? Do you not do any activities or consume any media that entertains you?
  • TekMol 3y ago
    Our exchange here entertains me :) But I wouldn't call Hacker News part of the entertainment industry.
    • zepolen 3y ago
      I find your comments entertaining.
      • automatic6131 3y ago
        "the man who didn't understand fun" I guess I'm one step closer to understand how the phrase "play-to-earn" was ever born without being stopped by an interlocuter.
        • zepolen 3y ago
          Let us know when you finally get it.
• jdironman 3y ago
  Not necessarily true. There are some "productivity" apps, as well as streaming (does anyone use that though?), and also exercise apps (admittedly probably falls under the game categeory). And, honestly, I don't see this changing until inputs change. Things like coding, spreadsheets, writing, all generally require a keyboard and mouse. At minimum a keyboard. Maybe GPT powered headset that can really understand you and has the ability manipulate things / OS level access might eventually come about.
• eppp 3y ago
  If VR headsets had the resolution to be giant virtual monitors then that seems like a really cool use case.
  • qbasic_forever 3y ago
    They already do have enough resolution to do real work. The problem is that for a lot of folks it is physically straining and taxing to be in a VR headset for hours and hours straight. A small portion of people just physically cannot do anything in VR without getting violently sick.
• toomuchtodo 3y ago
  Adult content is a huge market for this imho.
  • delecti 3y ago
    A big barrier is that Meta isn't going to allow Pornhub (or whoever) to publish on their Oculus app store.
    • numpad0 3y ago
      One of open secrets not spoken in English is there’s the DMM video player, which is… 1: https://www.dmm.com/digital/vr/-/howto/oculusquest/ https://www.dmm.com/digital/vr/-/howto/oculusquest/
    • Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
      You don't need a dedicated porn app, just a VR video player. For PCVR users, there's DeoVR. Download the videos from PornHub/xvideos/etc., then play in DeoVR.
      • wkat4242 3y ago
        On the quest there's also SLR. Google it, as I don't want to link directly to it here. They provide a player as well as a library of suitable content you can stream. They're basically the pornhub for VR. Only issue is that only a small subset of content is streamable for free.
    • wkat4242 3y ago
      It's stupid. It's a huge market, one where VR tech adds huge value. There's a huge sprawling ecosystem with content and "peripherals" that are motion synced. Pretending it doesn't exist doesn't help their metaverse ambitions nor their bottom line. The urban legend is that Betamax eschewing NSFW content lead to their demise in favour of VHS and while that is not entirely true there is certainly some worth to that story.
• lm28469 3y ago
  Lots of people are complete shut ins and/or tech fanatics. People with a life outside of computers aren't really interested in VR, it's a nice gimmick for a dinner at a friend's place but that's about it. I'd go even as far as to say even full blown basement dwellers aren't so interested in VR I was really into it ~10 years ago when I was a shut in nerd, back then they were announcing the revolution, fast forward 10 years and literally nothing changed, it's still a gimmick for 99.9% of people.
  • makeitdouble 3y ago
    You're saying that people with a life outside of computers won't spend their life on a new kind of computer.
• eb0la 3y ago
  There are a lot of use cases in B2B with VR but they are not easy to sell. I remember a long time ago Silicon Graphics used to build Reality Centers. Their best sales pitch was some Oil company was building an Oil rig and using VR they could find - from blueprints - some valves were installed too high and that saved them a lot of money. I worked for a company that had a software to scan train tunnels for inspection. It was cheaper and quicker than sending technicians there, but the interface -built on PowerBI was a pain. VR could be much better... ... but you need an easy way to build that App. (btw if someone knows about it, just drop me message)
• kypro 3y ago
  Out of interest do you have strong interests elsewhere? Or is it just entertainment?
  • TekMol 3y ago
    Yeah, strong interests in a lot of stuff!
• koheripbal 3y ago
  The problem is two fold because the VR video games are boring.
• jayd16 3y ago
  What did you really expect for this sort of venue? B2B clips would muddy the consumer announcement.
• RajT88 3y ago
  One day, there will be a VR desktop environment with floating windows that I can use. People have been playing with it - but it's got a ways to go still. I would love working in VR with many, many floating windows all around, instead of contained within the 2 viewing panes in front of me IRL.
  • hirundo 3y ago
    I bought the new HTC Vive XR Elite last month for just this use case. I had never tried VR before so I really didn't have a feel for whether it would work. It did not. There was so much glare and blurriness that I had to scale the font to huge headline size to read without strain. I returned the system. I'm more than willing to try again if there's a chance it might work. In real life I do not have issues with motion sickness or claustrophobia. Both of these hit me when wearing the headset, particularly the claustrophobia. The nausea was mild but definite. Even so it was an extraordinary experience, and I may be more excited about the potential of AR than before.
  • ilaksh 3y ago
    Floating windows are cool but VR operating systems will be much more interesting when they start integrating 3d tactile widgets and mixed reality. For example, to access your disk it could look like a shelf you pull down from above or something which renders each directory as nested boxes. Or a collection of retro games could display in mixed reality as if it were real boxed games on a shelf along your real wall. Or it could be integrated with a smart home control system so you could just point at a light to turn it on.
    • RajT88 3y ago
      I could see Microsoft making this. ...And then mothballing it, because they couldn't figure out how to make mountains of money off it.
      • jsmith45 3y ago
        >> Or a collection of retro games could display in mixed reality as if it were real boxed games on a shelf along your real wall. > I could see Microsoft making this. The first quoted part is actually similar to part of the old Microsoft BOB concept. Indeed some Later version of Packard Bell Navigator (which was basically a Bob clone) literally had general programs presented as box software sitting on a shelf.
• ilaksh 3y ago
  Have you tried Eleven Table Tennis in VR or any of the other sports titles?
• valine 3y ago
  Its hard to make other use cases work when text is barely readable. The resolution just isn't there for productivity apps. I'd be surprised if Apple doesn't lean into that angle with their new headset. Pixel density on phones was a problem before the iPhone 4, and they sold the heck out of the retina display. If Apple can make small text readable in VR they'll enable a whole world of new VR applications.
  • olah_1 3y ago
    > text is barely readable. I understand what you're saying, and I agree, but it's like saying a party is boring because there are no books. The whole "meta" concept is that you're socializing in VR and it feels as if you're talking to your friend directly. I'm sure the resolution has improved in the new model, but even still, super sharp text isn't as important as you'd think to make the fundamental social use cases work
    • theptip 3y ago
      Socializing is one thing you do in the Metaverse. Working is probably the bigger one though. Lots of people don’t grok this but the endgame for VR/AR is replacing every monitor in every office and home. Probably ditto TVs when every person owns a headset. It’s going to be a massive game-changer (and a rapid transition) when VR gets good enough to work in. The question is just whether this is a 5-year timeline or 50. Mark is obviously betting he can get traction in the 5-10 year timeframe.
      • anotherman554 3y ago
        Why would anyone want to work with a helmet on their head at all times like this? It's like saying the endgame for computers is all communications will be over video phones like on the jetsons. It sounds like a cool scifi concept until you realize even if the technology is there people would often rather not be seen on camera when they talk.
        • valine 3y ago
• Symmetry 3y ago
  SimulaVR markets themselves as a productivity VR headset. Essentially, have as many terminals and other windows as you want floating in the air around you while still having the pass through cameras to see around them. The review copies are just being made now, though. Not really out yet. It is supposed to fit my huge noggin unlike almost every other headset, though, so I certainly preordered. https://simulavr.com/ https://simulavr.com/
  • wkat4242 3y ago
    Is it coming out at some point soon? They've been working on it for so long. I wish they would focus more on software rather than making us all wait for their super expensive hardware. And yeah I know it's a whole PC you're buying. But I don't really buy expensive PCs in a form factor that has yet to prove its usability.
    • Symmetry 3y ago
      They're promising they'll ship by the end of the year at the latest. Again, I pre-ordered but I'm also thinking that if the PC thing sucks at least I'll finally have a plugin VR headset that actually fits my head. Go ahead and wait for the reviews to come in before making a decision if you're not in my boat.
      • wkat4242 3y ago
        I won't buy it either way. I simply can't afford it :) With wages as they are here in Southern Europe it's a non-starter. But I hope their paradigm works out so I can get it from another company or maybe someone ports it to the Oculus Quest. Freely placing windows in space instead of "desktops" or "screens" makes much more sense in VR.
• nologic01 3y ago
  Are movies entertainment? There are movies that would probably count as the best hours of your life. Dont get distracted by labels. Human talent gets expressed in many ways. The important skill is to filter the crap.