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These companies are reaching really hard for use cases while ignoring the only ones VR actually works well for. If they just went all in on gaming it would be a

These companies are reaching really hard for use cases while ignoring the only ones VR actually works well for. If they just went all in on gaming it would be a much better product than trying to push AI slop cooking help.

bee_rider 1y ago
VR gaming seems like it is a bit of a niche, though. I think they want to sell glasses in quantities more like cellphones than gaming peripherals. I agree they are reaching (and not finding) for an application.
- ubb_server 1y ago
  I agree that VR gaming is a niche, but I think it could be explosively improved if we had the kind of all-in idealism that the previous commenter referred to. I think because VR gaming IS niche, we haven't yet delved into what VR/AR could do in non-gaming. An idea that I've had before is like 'augmented curated experiences' for all kinds of things--for example imagine playing a Magic the Gathering (or similar) card game, and watching your cards come to life on the board in hologram-esque 3D. Or while watching a sports match, being able to pull up the stats or numbers of any players, or flip through channels of POV camera from helmets. Car navigation that shows you what turns to make by augmenting lanes or signs with highlighting. Brick and mortar stores having a live wayfinding route to products in their store based on your grocery list, recognizing and highlighting items you like.
  - Aeolun 1y ago
    We should re-watch Dennou Coil every few years to be reminded of what we’re working towards :)
  - jdprgm 1y ago
    I remain convinced VR gaming is niche because despite these companies being willing to drop boatloads of money on all kinds of things they for some reason never decided to just allocate a few billion to create a handful of true AAA games and jumpstart the industry. I think even just 3 proper games with several hundred mil budgets and VR gaming might be in an entirely different space than it is now.
    - tsimionescu 1y ago
      I think this is extremely doubtful. The reality remains that it's impossible to make a first person or even third person VR game with free movement, because of fundamental limitations in how human brains process movement. Having your eyes tell you are moving but your muscles and inner ear tell you that you are not makes you extremely sick very quickly, and technology can't actually fix this. The better and more immersive the visual illusion of movement, the worse the movement sickness you'll experience. And without free movement, you can't build any of the mainstream game genres. You can't build and get people excited in a Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed or Fortnite or Elden Ring or Zelda where movement works like Riven, the sequel to Myst. Valve actually tried with the first Half-Life game in a decade, and even that didn't work. Add to this massive gameplay limitation the second massive issue that you can't get a mass audience to pay hundreds of dollars extra for a peripheral without which they can't play your 70-80 dollar game.
      - xdfgh1112 1y ago
        Those games literally exist now. Almost all new VR games use free movement not teleportation. It is frustrating that you seem to be talking confidently when your knowledge is 5 years out of date.
        swalsh 1y ago
        10 years out of date. Free motion has been the norm for indie games since HTC vive. The bigger studios kept using teleportation because that was the "best practice" gamers got their VR legs and preferred free motion.
      - WhiteNoiz3 1y ago
        > Valve actually tried with the first Half-Life game in a decade, and even that didn't work. Half Life Alyx is still considered to be one of the best VR games ever made and one that is still consistently recommended to new users even years after release. IMO people buy hardware because of the exclusive content. If a standard game console came out and it only had one AAA game on it, I probably wouldn't bother buying it. But if there were 3-4 games that looked really interesting it starts to look more worth the investment. Playing VR games takes a lot of committment (time / physical space / $$$) so the payoff has to be worth it or you'll lose people. With the huge amount of money spent on R&D for new hardware I think it's a valid argument to say that maybe funding content would have been a better investment in terms of ensuring platform growth. Also, side note but not every game requires free motion. Plenty of hits had no movement or teleport etc. A lot of these were completely new (sub-)genres that didn't exist or hit the same as they would in a traditional pancake game. Plus lots of kids seem unaffected by free movement (maybe as high as 50% of users by my rough estimate).
  - tsimionescu 1y ago
    > for example imagine playing a Magic the Gathering (or similar) card game, and watching your cards come to life on the board in hologram-esque 3D This is the kind of thing that buries VR ideas. It's very cute in a demo, but as an actual product, the cost of coming up with 3D models and animations for all MTG cards currently being played is many orders of magnitude more than the total number of people who would pay for this. Ultimately this is completely unnecessary fluff for the game, like chess games where the pieces actually fight: irrelevant, and it actually detracts from the game because it interrupts the flow of what you're actually doing.
bayarearefugee 1y ago
As a gamer, in my experience people don't want to play VR games either. Beat Saber as a social party experience with friends in the same room, sure, that's fun... but for day to day gaming the amount of people who want to play VR games on the regular is nearly zero. If they really want to lean into the VR use case that people want, its porn, but I suspect they won't put that front and center.
- swalsh 1y ago
  I LOVED VR gaming, but after playing the same 2 games for 10 years, it never really evolved. They stopped innovating and went all in on AR.
  - SchemaLoad 1y ago
    I had a HTC Vive and I really loved playing VR games, particularly a shooter called Pavlov. Felt pretty social with a ton of absurd custom maps where the actual game was almost secondary to experiencing the immersive and strange maps. But since I moved I didn't want to screw the base stations in to the walls again and haven't played in a long time. I feel like I probably still would like VR gaming but haven't been tempted enough to buy any of the newer systems since it seems like Meta has fully captured the market and it all seems pretty distasteful now.
  - tsimionescu 1y ago
    I think you're very much in the minority. Also, VR games didn't really evolve because it can't really evolve - the fundamental thing that makes it attractive (immersion in a digital space) can't work well because of motion sickness. So, the only way to make an immersive VR game is to have an extremely tiny game world or an on-rails experience, and that drastically reduces the appeal. Of course, you could make all sorts of traditional top-down or isometric games work well without motion sickness - but no one is going to pay for VR to play Civilization or Star Craft or Baldur's Gate 3, since these would be fundamentally the exact same experience as playing on PC or console, but with a display strapped to your head.
    - 1y ago
intrasight 1y ago
> the only ones VR actually works well for I had really expected a different "only one"
thepryz 1y ago
In my experience, the biggest obstacle to broader AR and VR adoption beyond reducing the price, size, and weigh of the hardware will always be the lack of good content creation tools. I've been involved with two VR projects that were ultimately cancelled because, while we developed a sexy tech demo that showed the potential, building things out into something sustainable required too many resources and took too much time to maintain.
tempodox 1y ago
Games are not a prolific spy tentacle for hoovering up all kinds of data. They may have changed their name, but this is still the facebook company.
numpad0 1y ago
No offense, but there it this chart, and what this tells me, maybe just me, is that gaming is a niche within VR, not even majority use case. Zuck is probably right about VR/AR being the next big social media, only he's wrong that it'll be like Facebook/Instagram type of social media; it's old Twitter type of social media. [1]: Most played VR games Rank Name Curr 24h pk All-time 1. VRChat 33,032 46,652 66,824 2. War Thunder 26,388 65,589 121,318 3. PAYDAY 2 23,513 31,619 247,709 4. No Man's Sky 22,509 46,010 212,613 5. OBS Studio 11,434 22,388 27,334 6. Phasmophobia 7,716 22,789 112,717 7. Forza Hz 5 4,940 13,617 81,096 8. Assetto Corsa 3,885 13,598 19,796 9. OVR Adv. Sett. 3,030 4,299 6,418 10. Tabletop Sim. 2,902 7,755 37,198 1: https://steamdb.info/charts/?tagid=21978 https://steamdb.info/charts/?tagid=21978
- croes 1y ago
  To me the chart shows that VR is mainly used for games. And the steam chart don't include the games played directly on the Quest headsets.
  - numpad0 1y ago
    That's certainly one useful spin, but the red flag here is that these don't correlate well with games known as best VR games to VR communities. What I believe to be a more accurate interpretation is, there's nothing but VRChat in VR, and gaming demand in VR can be ~10x smaller per title relative to it.
jayd16 1y ago
Well it's clearly a first gen product. They could ship Snake and Tetris on it, probably, but I'm certain they're thinking about how to get apps and games on it.

bee_rider 1y ago

VR gaming seems like it is a bit of a niche, though. I think they want to sell glasses in quantities more like cellphones than gaming peripherals. I agree they are reaching (and not finding) for an application.

ubb_server 1y ago
I agree that VR gaming is a niche, but I think it could be explosively improved if we had the kind of all-in idealism that the previous commenter referred to. I think because VR gaming IS niche, we haven't yet delved into what VR/AR could do in non-gaming. An idea that I've had before is like 'augmented curated experiences' for all kinds of things--for example imagine playing a Magic the Gathering (or similar) card game, and watching your cards come to life on the board in hologram-esque 3D. Or while watching a sports match, being able to pull up the stats or numbers of any players, or flip through channels of POV camera from helmets. Car navigation that shows you what turns to make by augmenting lanes or signs with highlighting. Brick and mortar stores having a live wayfinding route to products in their store based on your grocery list, recognizing and highlighting items you like.
- Aeolun 1y ago
  We should re-watch Dennou Coil every few years to be reminded of what we’re working towards :)
- jdprgm 1y ago
  I remain convinced VR gaming is niche because despite these companies being willing to drop boatloads of money on all kinds of things they for some reason never decided to just allocate a few billion to create a handful of true AAA games and jumpstart the industry. I think even just 3 proper games with several hundred mil budgets and VR gaming might be in an entirely different space than it is now.
  - tsimionescu 1y ago
    I think this is extremely doubtful. The reality remains that it's impossible to make a first person or even third person VR game with free movement, because of fundamental limitations in how human brains process movement. Having your eyes tell you are moving but your muscles and inner ear tell you that you are not makes you extremely sick very quickly, and technology can't actually fix this. The better and more immersive the visual illusion of movement, the worse the movement sickness you'll experience. And without free movement, you can't build any of the mainstream game genres. You can't build and get people excited in a Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed or Fortnite or Elden Ring or Zelda where movement works like Riven, the sequel to Myst. Valve actually tried with the first Half-Life game in a decade, and even that didn't work. Add to this massive gameplay limitation the second massive issue that you can't get a mass audience to pay hundreds of dollars extra for a peripheral without which they can't play your 70-80 dollar game.
    - xdfgh1112 1y ago
      Those games literally exist now. Almost all new VR games use free movement not teleportation. It is frustrating that you seem to be talking confidently when your knowledge is 5 years out of date.
      - swalsh 1y ago
        10 years out of date. Free motion has been the norm for indie games since HTC vive. The bigger studios kept using teleportation because that was the "best practice" gamers got their VR legs and preferred free motion.
    - WhiteNoiz3 1y ago
      > Valve actually tried with the first Half-Life game in a decade, and even that didn't work. Half Life Alyx is still considered to be one of the best VR games ever made and one that is still consistently recommended to new users even years after release. IMO people buy hardware because of the exclusive content. If a standard game console came out and it only had one AAA game on it, I probably wouldn't bother buying it. But if there were 3-4 games that looked really interesting it starts to look more worth the investment. Playing VR games takes a lot of committment (time / physical space / $$$) so the payoff has to be worth it or you'll lose people. With the huge amount of money spent on R&D for new hardware I think it's a valid argument to say that maybe funding content would have been a better investment in terms of ensuring platform growth. Also, side note but not every game requires free motion. Plenty of hits had no movement or teleport etc. A lot of these were completely new (sub-)genres that didn't exist or hit the same as they would in a traditional pancake game. Plus lots of kids seem unaffected by free movement (maybe as high as 50% of users by my rough estimate).
- tsimionescu 1y ago
  > for example imagine playing a Magic the Gathering (or similar) card game, and watching your cards come to life on the board in hologram-esque 3D This is the kind of thing that buries VR ideas. It's very cute in a demo, but as an actual product, the cost of coming up with 3D models and animations for all MTG cards currently being played is many orders of magnitude more than the total number of people who would pay for this. Ultimately this is completely unnecessary fluff for the game, like chess games where the pieces actually fight: irrelevant, and it actually detracts from the game because it interrupts the flow of what you're actually doing.

bayarearefugee 1y ago

As a gamer, in my experience people don't want to play VR games either. Beat Saber as a social party experience with friends in the same room, sure, that's fun... but for day to day gaming the amount of people who want to play VR games on the regular is nearly zero. If they really want to lean into the VR use case that people want, its porn, but I suspect they won't put that front and center.

swalsh 1y ago
I LOVED VR gaming, but after playing the same 2 games for 10 years, it never really evolved. They stopped innovating and went all in on AR.
- SchemaLoad 1y ago
  I had a HTC Vive and I really loved playing VR games, particularly a shooter called Pavlov. Felt pretty social with a ton of absurd custom maps where the actual game was almost secondary to experiencing the immersive and strange maps. But since I moved I didn't want to screw the base stations in to the walls again and haven't played in a long time. I feel like I probably still would like VR gaming but haven't been tempted enough to buy any of the newer systems since it seems like Meta has fully captured the market and it all seems pretty distasteful now.
- tsimionescu 1y ago
  I think you're very much in the minority. Also, VR games didn't really evolve because it can't really evolve - the fundamental thing that makes it attractive (immersion in a digital space) can't work well because of motion sickness. So, the only way to make an immersive VR game is to have an extremely tiny game world or an on-rails experience, and that drastically reduces the appeal. Of course, you could make all sorts of traditional top-down or isometric games work well without motion sickness - but no one is going to pay for VR to play Civilization or Star Craft or Baldur's Gate 3, since these would be fundamentally the exact same experience as playing on PC or console, but with a display strapped to your head.
  - 1y ago

intrasight 1y ago

> the only ones VR actually works well for I had really expected a different "only one"

thepryz 1y ago

In my experience, the biggest obstacle to broader AR and VR adoption beyond reducing the price, size, and weigh of the hardware will always be the lack of good content creation tools. I've been involved with two VR projects that were ultimately cancelled because, while we developed a sexy tech demo that showed the potential, building things out into something sustainable required too many resources and took too much time to maintain.

tempodox 1y ago

Games are not a prolific spy tentacle for hoovering up all kinds of data. They may have changed their name, but this is still the facebook company.

numpad0 1y ago

No offense, but there it this chart, and what this tells me, maybe just me, is that gaming is a niche within VR, not even majority use case. Zuck is probably right about VR/AR being the next big social media, only he's wrong that it'll be like Facebook/Instagram type of social media; it's old Twitter type of social media. [1]: Most played VR games Rank Name Curr 24h pk All-time 1. VRChat 33,032 46,652 66,824 2. War Thunder 26,388 65,589 121,318 3. PAYDAY 2 23,513 31,619 247,709 4. No Man's Sky 22,509 46,010 212,613 5. OBS Studio 11,434 22,388 27,334 6. Phasmophobia 7,716 22,789 112,717 7. Forza Hz 5 4,940 13,617 81,096 8. Assetto Corsa 3,885 13,598 19,796 9. OVR Adv. Sett. 3,030 4,299 6,418 10. Tabletop Sim. 2,902 7,755 37,198 1: https://steamdb.info/charts/?tagid=21978 https://steamdb.info/charts/?tagid=21978

croes 1y ago
To me the chart shows that VR is mainly used for games. And the steam chart don't include the games played directly on the Quest headsets.
- numpad0 1y ago
  That's certainly one useful spin, but the red flag here is that these don't correlate well with games known as best VR games to VR communities. What I believe to be a more accurate interpretation is, there's nothing but VRChat in VR, and gaming demand in VR can be ~10x smaller per title relative to it.

jayd16 1y ago

Well it's clearly a first gen product. They could ship Snake and Tetris on it, probably, but I'm certain they're thinking about how to get apps and games on it.