> "Mass adoption remains impeded by the hardware required to run it, in my opinion. Take videogames - you need a very powerful PC, a good amount of space, sensors set up around it, and of course the VR helmet itself.
> "The cost runs to thousands and for most it is completely impractical not to mention too expensive.
The Oculus Quest is about 50$ more than a PS4 Pro / Xbox X at launch. Still expensive but not in the thousands.
I think it's the same issue that's happening with electric cars. People remember only the disadvantages of old technology and aren't aware of new tech being much better and more user friendly. With VR, people think it's cables, bulky PC's and complex setup, because that's their first and only experience with it. With electric cars, it's range anxiety, slow charging and degrading batteries. Meanwhile, the media tends to strengthen this bias with articles like this one and reporting every single incident with a Tesla.
The only way to change people's minds is to let them experience the alternative, I see this both with my Quest and my Tesla. We recently had a game night at work, where multiple people brought VR headsets, but mine was the only tetherless one. I let people play Tea for God, which is a procedurally generated game that lets people walk a long distance in a restricted play area. Many of them had played VR games before, but nobody experienced anything like this and many people asked me more about it, even days later, because they weren't aware that the technology existed.
> A major issue is that the price of headsets has remained very expensive.
They mention it in passing in a later paragraph, but the cost of the headset is peanuts compared to the cost of a system that can provide a consistent, high-framerate, high-quality image. While cheaper options exist (Daydream/Gear VR, Oculus Quest, PSVR) they just don't have the quality or framerate to really send home the "future of gaming" VR has been sold as.
I'd argue we're still minimum three years away from seeing mass adoption of VR in the household/consumer market. With raytracing still being in its infancy and software optimizations for many-core CPUs just beginning, it'll still be some time before mid-level <$800 systems are capable of providing a good VR experience.
> they just don't have the quality or framerate to really send home the "future of gaming" VR has been sold as
Have you actually played with the Quest? I've had many people use mine, also people who used Vive or Rift before and nobody was disappointed with the quality of it. If realism and frame rate were the most important part of gaming, then Pokemon Go and Candy Crush wouldn't be as profitable as they are. The majority of people want simple, arcade style entertainment, not hyper realistic sagas that take hours to finish.
> The majority of people want [X current product] not [Y under active development].
I've lost count of the number of times people have used that template and turned out to be humerously wrong. My favourite is probably when people tried to use it for Japanese phones > iPhones then the next generation iPhone wiped the competition in Japan.
People want good entertainment more than they want their senses stimulated, but it seems very likely that good entertainment which stimulates the senses more effectively will have a massive market.
We're dealing with something where the output can be strictly better than video in a fairly meaningful way. It'll turn out people want that when someone makes a compelling and high quality game/app. Sure, nobody is going to move over just because the visuals are good; but there is artistic space in VR that hasn't been touched before and some of it is going to be amazing.
I suppose the short version is you are right but we've seen people say that before and it presaged massive changes.
I'm not predicting though, I'm just observing. The most popular free games on mobile are consistently low quality arcade games. Also, I'm not saying it's the only thing people play, GTA and RDR are super high grossing franchises and they are high quality sagas. I'm mostly rebutting against the notion that lack of quality is holding back consumer grade VR.
I think performance in terms of keeping things consistent and smooth is really important, but visual realism or duplicating reality is overrated. Not only do you get into uncanny valley territory but more stylized art is often more compelling than imitation of reality. Beat Saber, Superhot, Sprint Vector, or I Expect You To Die for example have varying levels of unrealistic stabilization but are still immersive.
Call of Duty on consoles has long been described as feeling better than other shooters, partially because of it's 60fps target since Call of Duty 2. At the time few people would care if "60fps!" was a feature printed on the box, it was more behind the curtain magic.
Good VR isn't just about graphics quality. Mobile phone GPUs can deliver a high enough frame rate to deliver an immersive experience. The Oculus Quest is proof of that.
The only downside is that the graphical content has to be stylized. But in games, stylized looks can be a boon instead of a hindrance. A typical good gaming experience is extremely stylized and over the top, anyway (especially in these "realistic" militaristic FPS games).
I suspect the software has an effect too. There's certainly some neat stuff you can experience with VR headsets now, and apps have been made for it, but none of the things released so far have been a big enough hit to make people want go out and buy the systems to experiece them.
They just don't have their Super Mario Bros/Tetris/Wii Sports/Minecraft/whatever equivalent yet, the thing that'll set the world on fire enough that people will be all like "I'll have to buy a VR headset now, to experience this product everyone else is talking about"
The Valve Index (by Steam) has been sold out in December after they announced Half-Life Alyx which is included with every Index. This is won't be the time everyone goes VR yet but the market is expanding.
Yeah, the market certainly is. And Valve making a Half-Life game for their system was probably the best move they could make as far as increasing demand goes too.
>They just don't have their Super Mario Bros/Tetris/Wii Sports/Minecraft/whatever equivalent yet, the thing that'll set the world on fire enough that people will be all like "I'll have to buy a VR headset now, to experience this product everyone else is talking about"
vr is just expensive and requires fairly high end hardware still. There are also are all kinds of software issues with it. like when i was playing a well known racing game, very often the camera would be somewhere other than the driver's seat. And those are the kind of games that really are quite heavy on vr adoption and are the natural fit for this type of control.
many games do not naturally lend themself to vr, and by those i mean the most popular genres, like fps, rpg, action-adventure. Basically every game that requires your feet to move about in a virtual world. I don't think it is suitable for strategy or management games either. So that leaves simulation, racing and some very old genres like on-rails-shooters. which is a sizeable market, but not the mainstream gaming market.
> the most popular genres, like fps, rpg, action-adventure
I'm not sure why you think so. I can't think of a genre where VR wouldn't work in some form, but especially anything first-person should work just fine.
edit: Downvoting, classy. Yeah, let's ignore first-person games like Sairento, Budget Cuts, Boneworks, etc. which are fantastic because they're first person and how immersive it is to be inside a game as the player. It couldn't ever work. The proof is right there (not really).
Being downvoted for an uncontroversial opinion is also boring and quite shitty, and becoming quite typical of this site. Wish the site would finally get rid of the fucking downvote system. If people disagree, they should actually comment and talk about it, instead of blindly downvoting whatever opinion they happen to disagree with.
(See, there could actually be something wrong/worth of critics with this downvote system but discussions about that are always downvoted.)
edit: This comment will also most likely be seen as unsubstantial as most of the HN user base is not capable of understanding and reacting to satiric comments.
> the HN user base is not capable of understanding and reacting to satiric comments.
"the HN user base" comprises people from many different walks of life and many different cultural backgrounds, not all of which jive with your idea of "fun".
Add to that our medium is static text, a format which is widely known to cause misunderstanding. Back when I was young in the 90s we had a term for respecting this kind of thing, it was called "netiquette".
Perhaps, rather than demanding that everybody else jump on board your boat, you should just familiarise yourself with the house rules (there aren't many) and simply abide by them!
I can understand being upset by downvotes. It irks me from time to time too. But you just have to accept that perhaps you didn't formulate your argument clearly enough, or that not enough people agreed with you to upvote and cancel out the downvotes ...
Downvotes can be a little cruel but they do work well at helping to eliminate noise. It's not an ideal system but it is simple and effective.
i personally do not see the value in downvotes affecting your karma either. i agree with having a system to prevent some fanatical minority opinion from dominating, but right now it's just encouraging bullying.
Not exactly sure why you are being downvoted here.
Oculus Quest really does not require an external computer (ie High-End Hardware), and it _is_ a really good experience (it's also really cheap compared to alternatives), specially the "tetherless" part of it. [You can see a lot of people in this exact thread talk about their experiences with it]
While there is still a lot to improve in terms of quality, not every game needs to look realistic (see: Fortinite - cartoon style).
FPS is actually the one amazing genre in VR... when it works right.
Maybe someone will finally revive the First/Third Person RPG/RTS niche (not top down), which I really loved in BattleZone 1/2. I think it will work great in VR.
But yeah, really resource intensive, Pimax says you'll need 2 GPUs (one per eye) to get the most performance out of their 8K headset.
Since we're in the early days theres quite a bit of experimentation. While there is usually traditional move/strafe on the left joystick, some games have options like:
Point-to-teleport (worst option, IMO, but good for people really sensitive to motion sickness)
Arm waving - Basically move your arms back and forth like you would when running.
Head-directed, or hand-directed movement direction.
Physical movement in your room with no artificial movement option. This is typically in genres like wave shooters where you can move to dodge and such but not really expected to navigate a whole level.
Some games combine multiples of the above. From a game design perspective, still very much the wild west in VR.
this is what i meant. to me these feel like somewhat of a hack, breaking the vr promise of natural movement through a game world. but i suppose it could still be enjoyable.
I agree. I bought the Gear VR and actually only got the quest because Samsung stopped supporting Gear VR on new phones. I didn't expect to be much better but it solves every single high order problem with the low end headsets. It's a completely different thing.
it evens transmits telemetry to facebook 24x7 when you are not using the headset itself. I have no idea what it is saying, but since I got an oculus, I can see traffic to graph.oculus.com more or less constantly.
Same here, the Quest is a game changer. It seems like most comments here have tried some limited or light VR gears, when everybody I demo the Quest to is amazed at the thing.
What I think virtual reality would be immediately useful right now: for anyone working on 3D modeling/animating/CAD. It is very finicky to view and manipulate 3d data on a flat 2d monitor, VR headsets and manipulation devices should be a godsend to those professions. (Also, they have a lot more money to throw than ordinary consumers, they would be willing to pay thousands on a superior workflow.) If VR software developers would focus on those programs first, I would see VR being a must-buy for certain niche groups of people (which would be a solid foundation for the VR industry.) Too bad that many of the VR developers are tunnel-visioned and only care about flashy games/entertainment, where the real gold might be somewhere else.
I will admit that I am not a professional, but in my spare time I have designed some parts in CAD software (Fusion 360) which I've then 3D printed. My experience was once I understood the key bindings to manipulate the view, it was very easy to spacially understand what was going on, even with parts that had layers hidden below other layers (you just turn off the layers you don't care about). I'm not really sure how a VR headset would have helped in my case, but as I said, maybe this is just because the work I was doing was simple.
Back in the ol' cyberpunk 90s, the vision of VR always included gloves for fine-grained manipulation of the virtual space.
I still believe that the combination of VR goggles and gloves (can't forget the wrist keyboard!) with the right software would lead to a quantum leap in 3D modeling. Guess we'll see what happens.
I currently hack together a mini mesh modelling tool in VR for very specific reasons. I find that creating a UI for something moderately complex isn't all that easy. The common idiom is to treat your controllers as laser pointers, but precision is limited. So you need big UI elements to have easy to hit targets. With the number of simultaneous UI elements thus limited, you need to create hierarchies and menus fast, making interaction cumbersome.
Also, using VR controllers in thin air for a prolonged time becomes a workout. The human body isn't quite made for keeping arms in these poses for extended periods of time.
However, being able to view and manipulate a virtual object directly in 3d space is pretty darn sweet. Just bending your head or moving your hand beats manipulating virtual canera perspectives and gizmos for precision 3d interaction on a screen.
I nearly forgot: the Unreal Engine editor has a VR mode that brings in the nornal 2D GUI as floating windows. I didn't like that very much, but people seem to be OK with it. I don't know any other DCC software that has VR support.
I'm going to get the Valve Index with the new knuckles controllers, and do some UI experiments with these. It's pretty cool if you can use the individual finger movements to extend hand gestures. I'm also sure it will take years until the UI converges to something optimal..
Good observations. CAD users typically have one hand on the keyboard and one on the mouse or 3D mouse. If you took out the mouse-screen translation and directly manipulated the object/scene with your mouse hand, I think you'd have the best of old and new. This calls for mixed reality, or visibility of your keyboard in VR.
I used to be a casual PC gamer, with a fairly good spec build. Then one day I played some VR games at a friend’s house on PSVR, which blew my mind - not only how much fun I had, but how much fun our non gamer friends had!
After that my wife and me got a second hand Vive for 350, and it’s been amazing. I never play regular games any more, and even she (who never played any games) now enjoys it a lot and plays with me from time to time.
All this is to say that I do think VR is here to stay, it just blows regular gaming out of the water... but it definitely is at its infancy - games look and feel the way PC games did 10 years ago..
The vive is so non casual though. I always felt like it was a big production to clear the space, launch steamvr, often wait for updates. Plus I’m moving around when I’d prefer to be relaxed on the couch.
On the other hand VR is amazing. I’ve since switched to the quest which helps with most of those issues I mentioned.
The most accurate description that I've heard is that we're at the point where GUIs were in the 80s. The tech was just good enough for it and there were already several products on the market, but designers were still exploring the space and had not agreed on common metaphors yet. Which is exciting to witness, but shows that we're still squarely in the "early-adopter" phase of the curve.
(As for myself, I tried a friend's Oculus Quest extensively two weeks ago. Now I'm sitting at home, drawing up plans in Inkscape for how to rearrange my furniture to accommodate a room-scale VR area.)
VR-devices are good but still not good enough. New generations are much better than last that it completely ruins the experience with older hardware.
I tested VR-headset directed at professional use: VR-2 Pro https://varjo.com/products/vr-2-pro/
Now every VR headset directed at consumers feels like utter crap. PSVR and Vive experience is ruined.
If you are willing to cough up €5995, you get really blown away until something better comes along and there is still long way to go. Field of view is just 87 degrees for example.
The very main reason VR isn't taking off is because it has no killer app, that is, an app that other platforms can't have, and that people love. End-of-story.
What's to understand here is that it's not said that this killer app "exists". If VR is only a cooler screen, then it will sell like cooler screens. Now maybe it's a killer screen, that is a screen that everybody wants. I guess there is a competitive advantage of thinking like that, but right now, vendors think they are making a software/hardware platform when they have no killer app.
I'm gonna argue that VR does have a killer-app: Beat Saber. It was a top seller on Steam in 2019 and it's only just been overtaken by Asgarth's Wrath in terms of popularity, after about a year and a half. It has also sold more than a million copies and is multi platform. I've seen kids play it, adults, even seniors: everybody can do this. If you wouldn't consider that a killer app, what would be in your eyes? :)
I don't know if it will happen, but a killer app that ought to exist is exercise. I've never found anything that gamified exercise the way the Occulus Quest does. The kind of
full body workout I get from ducking, weaving, dodging and swinging at fast
moving opponents, all at 6:30am in the morning without leaving my home,
is simply amazing.
You don't need VR for that, only motion controls. Some people have exercise streaks that go on for years on Nintendo's Wii Fit, and Ring Fit Adventure is on the same path.
I've never managed to stick with exercise until the Beat Saber (upper body) and Pistol Whip (lower body) combo. There's something particularly compelling about it - I can get my heart rate waaaaaay up without really noticing I'm working hard.
Beat Saber has been a killer app for a lot of people.
VR still has a lot of room to improve tech-wise before it's a mature platform, though. Resolution remains not that great, ditto for FoV, physical feedback is meh, most headsets are pretty bulky, etc.
I have a Rift CV1 and a Quest, they're fun platforms for enthusiasts, but it doesn't feel ready to go fully mainstream yet.
Far from a gimmick. You need to try it. My girlfriend who is not even a gamer has put down hundreds of hours and she didn't even want to try it at first.
When the first ps3 motion controllers came out, we played <that game with the swords and shields> until our hands hurt. I'm still surprised we didn't break any furniture or the controllers.
Lasted like 3 days though.
The fact that I do actual sports, including stuff with swords occasionally, might contribute to my "gimmick" opinion :)
> [killer app] an app that other platforms can't have, and that people love.
Thinking about art. VR has spatial painting and animation, things completely impossible on non-VR platforms. And, this is where many people fail to grasp what VR killer app really means, they are not a VR way of doing something we used to do on flat screens. Painting in VR is as much a different art form as painting is from sculpting in the real world.
Thus it may not interest ALL existing artists, because it has a learning curve. Just like painters aren't necessarily drawn to try sculpture, not all artists want to invest time discovering what painting in space can unlock.
What will happen in my opinion is that a number of young people that haven't picked their preferred art form yet will decide to spend their 10 000 hours of training in VR, and develop their expertise there. This hasn't happened yet simply because it has only been a few years and in constant flux.
The same may be true in other areas. The very first VR-native people are just growing up.
For me personally VR it feels still weird, too cartoonish, not an immersive experience as expected. What I'd argue people would want is AR instead. That one is way more fun when done right
I think this depends upon the system you use and what you're viewing. I was underwhelmed by a couple of VR headsets (Samsung Gear plus something I forget) but changed my mind after using a Rift, as that was so much better. The media/game matters too. Anything trying to look real does indeed still look cartoonish, but it's a different story for games where looking like the real world isn't the goal. Then you can enjoy the immersion without comparing to reality.
One big problem is what people expect, and what VR advocates describe, is basically the Holodeck from Star Trek. The immersivity of the experience is basically like being there. That's what people want, to jack in to the Matrix or some kind of old-school cyberpunk experience.
Except your brain knows it's looking at a display and not an actual 3D space, and the cognitive dissonance between what it sees and proprioception are always going to limit how immersive VR can be. And that's not even getting into the other senses that VR can't simulate. Sight and sound are actually less important in terms of immersion than taste, touch and smell.
Sensationalist article that is completely out of touch with reality on both social and technical levels. Oculus quest is a game changer - obvious to anyone that puts it on - and the fact that it’s not even mentioned says a lot. I doubt she has even tried it.
On a social level, it is comical how myopic her vision for VR is and how far off the mark the focus on VR arcades lies. The big selling point of VR in the near and not so near future is not expensive social experiences on somebody else’s commercial infrastructure but escapism and social experiences including work in the comfort of your own home.
Global warming, rising populations, terrorist attacks, widespread decoherence, pollution and decay in our urban centers are all powerful accelerators and extremely synergistic for the future of VR.
Truly immersive VR experiences are great. The park I went to in Tokyo recently had some fun licensed ones:
+ A Shin Godzilla themed helicopter raid which required a customized "cockpit" to ride in with rumble capabilities,
+ A Dragon Quest free-roaming VR adventure which required a LOT of space to enable
+ A Mario Kart race which, again, required a customized "kart" to ride in which simulated the physics of every sharp turn I took.
The first and third attractions were about five minutes long each. I don't doubt that there was a lot of engineering effort required to even get to that much content nor the fact that I would likely grow very tired of having to play an extended version of each for, say, an hour or two.
I think for at least the time being, this is how VR is going to be adopted: As a theme park experience where short novelty experiences people want to have is made available with the space and props already provided to enjoy it.
While the graphics and sensor capabilities have undoubtedly come a very long way ...
I'm pretty sure I played a VR racing game in a similar sort of setup in the 80s! There were only ever a handful of games, and they were only found in a very few places, but foir my birthday one year when I was a kid I was taken to the Trocadero centre in London where they had a few of these machines. They weren't massively responsive but they were good fun and for the time they were amazing.
But given just how long VR tech has been around, I do wonder if it will ever be mainstream in any way.
Stuff like The Void[1], where a complete arena is built to supplement the visuals, with physical features that match the VR ones (like physical buttons on walls that match the VR projected ones, moving platforms), smells, wind, sounds, etc.
The future of this is going to be incredibly cool, I think. Just subtle stuff like blowing cold air on your face when you're standing on top of a VR mountain, will do wonders for the immersion.
I tried the Dirt Rally game with my Lenovo VR kit.
Super, super fun ... until my stomach revolted.
As opposed to Elite Dangerous where I could go on for hours, I merely lasted 10 minutes before I had to stop.
Most people can reportedly get used to the discrepancy between the vision and balance senses and be rid of the motion sickness (with some training: keep playing until you start feeling uncomfortable, wait until the next day, go again).
Ginger can also help delay onset.
It can also be noted that motion sickness really only is a problem where the game character moves while you stand still physically (e.g. using a joystick to move around). Other forms of locomotion (like teleportation) are usually fine.
These are, unfortunately, falsehoods that keep getting perpetuated despite efforts to the contrary.
While you can become slightly more tolerant with repeated exposure (as you can with anything noxious), the the discomfort never goes away.
And it's not just game character motion. Any camera movement can trigger it, at different levels for different people. If you don't get triggered, count yourself lucky, and don't tell the rest of us to "just practice" or attempt to explain away that it's only X and not ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWYZ. Listen to what we're actually SAYING.
I still remember Valve responding to complaints of motion sickness in Half Life 2 with the lame excuse "It's because our technology is so amazingly lifelike." I wanted to punch the guy in the face and ask him if that was lifelike enough for him.
I think there isn't any recent scientific research on how many people are affected and how many of those see improvement after they get their 'vr legs'. I would like to see some rather than anecdotal evidence.
I get nauseous watching handheld video footage for just a few minutes, if the screen is big enough. Obviously VR is going to be a problem (I've tried it, Project Cars in a dedicated VR cabinet setup at a mall, was sick as a dog within minutes).
> I still remember Valve responding to complaints of motion sickness in Half Life 2 with the lame excuse "It's because our technology is so amazingly lifelike."
That's interesting you bring adaptation and immersion together. I do feel motion sickness in VR in extreme cases. Interestingly I managed to become more tolerant of it but it came with a significant loss of immersion.
Oh and the "amazingly lifelike" argument for justifying motion sickness is indeed complete bullshit. If you experience motion sickness, it is because it is not lifelike. Bad framerates, high latency, unnatural camera movement, etc... all contribute to motion sickness.
I get sick and feel dead for the entire day if I play an FPS on a typical screen for more than 5 minutes. I've tried getting over this for years, even beating a few games like Deus Ex and Half Life in intervals of a few minutes at a time.
I've got no hope of ever adapting to VR. Just thinking about it raises my heart rate.
I've had very different experiences with different games too. I thought playing sims or Jet Island and being fine was proof I'd gotten my VR legs, but Boneworks and it's bouncy camera got me pretty good.
Yup. Borrowed a PSVR, no one in my family could play for more than 15-30 min. We had a stack of different games to try so it's not just one particular title.
(a) even with latest gen headsets (eg: Occulus Quest)
(b) even with applications where you are completely stationary?
I ask because I've shown my quest to probably 15 people now and nobody has had a problem with it in any of the applications where there is no motion of the external frame.
For example, it's tough to beat Wipeout VR as a future racing experience. The fact that you can look around/through the corners the way you do in the real world when you're driving a vehicle really changes the way the game plays and makes it much more immersive.
OTOH some games do seem to cause quite severe motion sickness (I forget the name of the one I'm particularly thinking of because I haven't played it in ages, for obvious reasons).
The other problem is that ergonomically it's an absolute arse-ache. I have the first gen PSVR which is just an festooning nightmare of cables. The lenses are also way too prone to fogging.
I believe the second gen headsets are better but there are still cable management issues.
It's also, frankly, not that comfortable to wear. It's not painful or anything like that, but I'm no fan of wearing hats because they tend to make me feel too hot, so you can imagine what having a bulky conglomeration of plastic and electronics strapped to my face for long periods feels like.
Really these things need to be wireless and rechargeable but then, of course, you open the system up to more latency issues.
One area I haven't had so many issues, which is touched on in the article, is the drop in quality, and in particular graphical fidelity.
Wipeout VR, I think, runs at 4K on a PS4 Pro but only 1080P with PSVR. I haven't found this to be something that bothers me at all, or at least not with this game.
On the other hand I have found the drop in quality with Driveclub VR to be noticeable to the point where it does detract from the experience.
It really does very much depend on the game though.
Still, overall impressions of the experiences on offer are fairly positive.
The PSVR is basically the worst "high end" VR headset out there, and is on the underpowered PS4 hardware, with poor controller tracking and lots of motion blur and downsampling to make the games even run.
You really ought to try an Oculus Quest or Rift S/Vive Pro. PSVR has 1080 vertical pixels, Quest has 1600 vertical pixels, much better lenses, and much better controllers. Not to mention the games run much more smoothly
I had a GearVR and it was pretty fun for a while but the battery life, overheating and lack of great apps made me lose interest.
I then got a mixed reality headset and Beat Saber was a game-changer for me. The controls are so simple and are perfectly suited to VR. No motion sickness etc. It's a great game. I've picked up loads of the best selling VR games on Steam and although some have been fun, none quite match up to Beat Saber.
Google Earth with room-scale VR is stunning. Being able to walk around your hometown as if you were a couple of hundred feet tall is an incredible experience.
I'm looking forward to MS Flight Simulator 2020 and it looks like the devs are making VR a priority. This could be a winner for me.
I am concered about the upcoming accessibility disaster. Granted, most games are likely not really essential for say, blind people, to play. But the future will bring UIs to VR. And I doubt that companies will think about accessibility from the start. It is already hard to maintain screen readers for typical GUIs. But it will be almost impossible to have meaningful assistive technologies in VR as long as they are designed as add-ons.
VR won’t ever be more than niche because there is no way to fake tactile feedback or motion. Games need to design around this. Beat Sanger is the best selling VR game because your character doesn’t move and there is nothing to touch. God games, like black and white or the sims, and 4x games might work well too. Also if graphics get better people can set up virtual desk spaces and get rid of screens. Ultimately though the reason most games don’t work is the tactile feedback and motion issues, which I can’t imagine ways of solving at the moment.
>there is no way to fake tactile feedback or motion
Why not? There are quite a few companies working on these with some success. Virtuix for example (disclosure: I'm an investor) are seeing some steady commercial success in regards to addressing motion[0]. And in terms of feedback, there's a lot of interesting work done Fl around gloves in particular, including by Apple [1].
On this note I also feel inclined to mention Teslasuit [0].
I recently learned about this company and their product, they are developing (I think some of it is even already available) a full-body tracking suit with feedback zones. Pairing this with a VR headset and immersion would go way up compared to most (if not all) things we have nowadays.
I meant more like swinging a sword will never meet another sword. Punching someone in the face will never hurt your hand, etc. and then when you swing through air as your in-game hand stops, it feels kinda lame.
I don't quite understand what you mean. I can come up with several different engineering approaches to make a sword controlle suddenly stop. And I can come up with even more ways to inflict mild pain (e.g. electrical stimulation).
What makes you say "never"? If there are people willing to pay for better immersion, I believe the technology won't be that far behind.
How would you make a "sword" stop mid-air? A companion sword-fighting robot that mimics the movements of the enemy you're seeing? I'm not saying never, just without nano-bots and a fully mutable IRL environment to go with the headset. Electrical stimulation wouldn't stop your hand moving forward, nor would it simulate hitting something in any way (unless it was stimulating your brain's pain and motor centers I guess).
How about this as a very early idea: start with something like the Virtuix Omni that allows the player to freely move and rotate. Add 3 thin metallic pillars surrounding the device, going up to about 2m, which would rotate with the player. At 2 different heights on each of these pillars there would be a pully controlling a slightly elastic cord via fast acting actuators. The other end of each of these ropes would be connected to the sword controller.
Most of the time, there wouldn't be much tension coming from the cords (other than perhaps representing gravity pulling on the sword's mass), but when a hit needs to be simulated, the right cords would rapidly tense, according to the simulated properties of the object being hit.
The haptic feedback on some VR controllers (think Iphone 7 home button or switch joycons) is surprisingly good at imitating resistance or passing through something. Games with dedicated peripherals (racing wheels, flight/mech sticks) work really well too.
Haptic feedback might have been the wrong phrase. I meant that there is a lack of literally anything physical to interact with despite your eyes constantly telling you otherwise. You can’t rest your arm on a table, put your hand on a wall, lock swords with an enemy, etc. You have to constantly remind yourself that what you see isn’t real so that you can stop your hand from swinging wildly in real life while your in game hand just locks in place.
This would actually be pretty solvable in a well-done VR arcade, but I agree that in-home true haptics are a big barrier for certain game genres and interaction types. Any direct-contact/resistance based interaction is going to feel weird and need some form of workaround that can hurt immersion. However anything with indirect interaction is generally very good (shooting arrows/guns, throwing/catching objects, etc)
The Void experiences do a pretty good job of this, with a mix of physical props/effects like switches and heat fans and hand and body tracking. Another fun one is the skyscraper plank at VR Zone Shinjuku, complete with wobbling and a prop cat. VR Star Park is worth a look too.
Designing around it is possible in some cases too. In Gorn your weapons are floppy so it makes sense when they bend when hitting an enemy, and in Superhot VR you punch through or shatter enemies when hitting them giving more of a sense of being really powerful than hitting air.
VR is the uncanny valley of immersion. Visually everything works so well that you are constantly jarred back to reality every time you try and interact with something. Traditional games work well because they require minimal movement to get what you’re thinking to happen on screen. So once you’re focused, there is not much that can happen to bring you out of it.
Something about vr systems makes it not feel real to me. I’m thinking it’s that I can’t change the focus of my eyes. Everything is in the same focus. I forget what that’s called but it makes it feel fake to me.
Magic Leap said they had solved this for their device (maybe they did, not that it makes up for the rest).
Probably not solveable unless we do eye tracking and adapt the screen content to that or change the model from being small screens in front of your eyes altogether.
I agree though. I cannot relate at all to people who say VR is immersive.
Varifocal VR headsets are in the R&D stage. A year or two ago Oculus showed off a headset called Half-dome that had varifocal displays. It'll get there.
Also, Valve will release Half-Life: Alyx [1] in March 2020. It's the first game in the much-loved HL series released since Portal 2 in 2011.
I don't own a VR headset and I don't intend to any time soon - it's too expensive and nothing looks enjoyable enough to justify the cost. But once enough big-name games like Alyx get released, gamers previously on the fence (like me) will start to purchase VR headsets, and VR will eventually become the new gaming platform that publishers wants to release on.
> and VR will eventually become the new gaming platform that publishers wants to release on.
I predict the opposite. It will sell a few headsets maybe (a peak), but that alone will not change the course of the technology at all in 2020. Plus, Half Life's popularity in 2020 has nothing to do with its popularity 20 years ago.
It pretty much stole social media headlines with just a post saying "tune in a few days for our next VR game". Valve have plenty of clout still, and Half-Life still draws plenty of eyes.
So they say, anyway. It's best to take any Valve announcements about actual games with a grain of salt.
Some YouTube streamers that I watch did a big run of VR games over the past year or so, and without exception they were gimmicky experiences that would have been better with a more conventional setup. Of course needing the equivalent of a GTX 1080 is a big barrier too.
My prediction is that when and if this new Half-Life game comes out, there won't be enough of a user-base actually using VR gear to sustain it; I hope that they have planned for that case and will release it as a normal PC shooter as well.
Valve has started taking money for the game and given a concrete release date. I think you can count on it actually being released with little if any schedule slippage.
Yeah, the evidence they cite for VR declining seems to be entirely within the space of 3DoF VR, like Google's Daydream and VR video:
> Many big name adopters have abandoned their VR projects. Google recently halted sales of Daydream, its VR headset, admitting that "there just hasn't been the broad consumer or developer adoption we had hoped".
> Meanwhile, the BBC has announced it is ending the funding for its VR hub, less than two years after it was founded.
6DoF VR with tracked controllers (Quest, Valve Index) is a whole different beast, and actually seems to be gaining momentum lately.
> Yeah, the evidence they cite for VR declining seems to be entirely within the space of 3DoF VR, like Google's Daydream and VR video:
If VR were such a hot market surely you would not see the Google Daydream news and Samsung killing off GearVR. You have to take in account all news, positive and negative, to get an actual view of how the market is doing. And also the investment. And investment in VR has been in the decline for a couple of years now after an initial peak.
To me, Google killing off Daydream and Samsung killing off GearVR is akin to TV manufacturers killing off their black-and-white TV models because everyone has moved on to colour.
A first gen product has more than 10% of the sales of a eight gen product? That's absolutely amazing. I expected it to be a failure because it has limited performance.
How is the quest 1st gen? There have been headsets for VR for quite a while already, including phone-based VR prior to that, so it's hardly a "first gen" product at all unless you narrow down the definition to mean exactly what you want it to mean.
Most people in the VR industry would strongly argue (myself included) that the Quest is the first legit attempt at a consumer VR headset. Before the Quest I never told anyone to go out and buy a VR headset. Now, if they ask, I recommend buying it. The one rough edge with the Quest is the weight. If they knock it down a few ounces I'd argue the Quest is basically the MVP for some startup to create a breakout killer app for VR.
What killer app for VR though? It is not like nobody tried to do VR games yet. The lack of any real worthy software after years of developing games is a sign that it is probably far from obvious that VR games will be a thing beyond a gimmick.
Quest may as well be the first VR headset ever, PC VR was never ever going to take off. Normal people don't want tower PCs in their homes in 2020 and VR needs 6DOF headset and controller tracking to actually be good anyway.
Silly to compare it to literally the most prolific games console manufacturer ever.
Yeah, I'm not even a gamer, but a relative got a Quest for Christmas, I tried it, and I was like "OK, this is pretty awesome." Without being too cliche it felt like the holodeck to me. Could easily imagine me playing games on it frequently, let alone a true gamer.
Really surprised that neither the article nor the comments here mention the #1 barrier to entry. Your average person doesn’t want to strap a big, heavy, sweaty contraption on their face that blocks their vision entirely. Analysts and enthusiasts seem to miss this point constantly.
Got my neither analyst or enthusiast sister the quest this christmas, she and the kids were constantly playing beat saber and pistol whip without stopping.
The quest 100% is less bulky and sweaty, and it includes cameras if people are in your field of control or need to do setup.
It really is much better than the last generation in terms of UX and I have the vive and the entire setup.
People will do things that they aren't used to if the benefits outweigh the costs.
And of the list of things preventing people from doing VR right now, I doubt strapping the headset on is anywhere near the top (things like cost, PC, space, etc are).
> I doubt strapping the headset on is anywhere near the top
For me personally, a side effect of that is the reason I'm not excited about VR: it's anti-social. I'm shutting myself off from anyone else in my apartment in a way a normal video game doesn't do. It makes me way, way less excited about the potential of VR.
Interestingly, I've had the most impressive social experience in VR. I got the Oculus Go when it came out and bought Catan (the board game, but in VR). I then launched a game online, and ended up playing for an hour with a finish kid and a canadian dude. We talked like we were all together, and at the end I couldn't just leave without saying goodbye (usually I just quit a game, but here I felt some social pressure to do the right thing). We even shook hand.
Sure but don’t you do the same when you are watching a movie or playing a videogame?
There are games to interact with other people in the room btw and they are super fun as well! Check “keep talking and nobody explodes” and “acron: attack of the squirels ”.
You’re talking about a very specific type of game: single player games. Not to mention most people don’t play games the way you are describing and the appeal of games certainly isn’t just to be able to talk to people in the room with you while you’re playing (even if it is appealing for some).
That's the entire point. At least for me, it doesn't make sense if my vision isn't entirely blocked and my input from "reality" isn't completely replaced for a virtual reality; That's the point;
I think everyone's experience has been ruined by crappy. The 90s had a VR far but they sucked. Of you're putting a phone across your face, it sucks. The market was spoiled by crappy imitators and gimicks.
Anytime someone tries a real VR headset for the first time, they are usually amazed. I have personally sold 3 headsets just by having friends of mine try mine for a few minutes.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 239 ms ] thread> "The cost runs to thousands and for most it is completely impractical not to mention too expensive.
The Oculus Quest is about 50$ more than a PS4 Pro / Xbox X at launch. Still expensive but not in the thousands.
The only way to change people's minds is to let them experience the alternative, I see this both with my Quest and my Tesla. We recently had a game night at work, where multiple people brought VR headsets, but mine was the only tetherless one. I let people play Tea for God, which is a procedurally generated game that lets people walk a long distance in a restricted play area. Many of them had played VR games before, but nobody experienced anything like this and many people asked me more about it, even days later, because they weren't aware that the technology existed.
They mention it in passing in a later paragraph, but the cost of the headset is peanuts compared to the cost of a system that can provide a consistent, high-framerate, high-quality image. While cheaper options exist (Daydream/Gear VR, Oculus Quest, PSVR) they just don't have the quality or framerate to really send home the "future of gaming" VR has been sold as.
I'd argue we're still minimum three years away from seeing mass adoption of VR in the household/consumer market. With raytracing still being in its infancy and software optimizations for many-core CPUs just beginning, it'll still be some time before mid-level <$800 systems are capable of providing a good VR experience.
Have you actually played with the Quest? I've had many people use mine, also people who used Vive or Rift before and nobody was disappointed with the quality of it. If realism and frame rate were the most important part of gaming, then Pokemon Go and Candy Crush wouldn't be as profitable as they are. The majority of people want simple, arcade style entertainment, not hyper realistic sagas that take hours to finish.
I've lost count of the number of times people have used that template and turned out to be humerously wrong. My favourite is probably when people tried to use it for Japanese phones > iPhones then the next generation iPhone wiped the competition in Japan.
People want good entertainment more than they want their senses stimulated, but it seems very likely that good entertainment which stimulates the senses more effectively will have a massive market.
We're dealing with something where the output can be strictly better than video in a fairly meaningful way. It'll turn out people want that when someone makes a compelling and high quality game/app. Sure, nobody is going to move over just because the visuals are good; but there is artistic space in VR that hasn't been touched before and some of it is going to be amazing.
I suppose the short version is you are right but we've seen people say that before and it presaged massive changes.
Call of Duty on consoles has long been described as feeling better than other shooters, partially because of it's 60fps target since Call of Duty 2. At the time few people would care if "60fps!" was a feature printed on the box, it was more behind the curtain magic.
The only downside is that the graphical content has to be stylized. But in games, stylized looks can be a boon instead of a hindrance. A typical good gaming experience is extremely stylized and over the top, anyway (especially in these "realistic" militaristic FPS games).
They just don't have their Super Mario Bros/Tetris/Wii Sports/Minecraft/whatever equivalent yet, the thing that'll set the world on fire enough that people will be all like "I'll have to buy a VR headset now, to experience this product everyone else is talking about"
That'd be Beat Saber, in my opinion.
many games do not naturally lend themself to vr, and by those i mean the most popular genres, like fps, rpg, action-adventure. Basically every game that requires your feet to move about in a virtual world. I don't think it is suitable for strategy or management games either. So that leaves simulation, racing and some very old genres like on-rails-shooters. which is a sizeable market, but not the mainstream gaming market.
I'm not sure why you think so. I can't think of a genre where VR wouldn't work in some form, but especially anything first-person should work just fine.
edit: Downvoting, classy. Yeah, let's ignore first-person games like Sairento, Budget Cuts, Boneworks, etc. which are fantastic because they're first person and how immersive it is to be inside a game as the player. It couldn't ever work. The proof is right there (not really).
Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
(See, there could actually be something wrong/worth of critics with this downvote system but discussions about that are always downvoted.)
edit: This comment will also most likely be seen as unsubstantial as most of the HN user base is not capable of understanding and reacting to satiric comments.
"the HN user base" comprises people from many different walks of life and many different cultural backgrounds, not all of which jive with your idea of "fun".
Add to that our medium is static text, a format which is widely known to cause misunderstanding. Back when I was young in the 90s we had a term for respecting this kind of thing, it was called "netiquette".
Perhaps, rather than demanding that everybody else jump on board your boat, you should just familiarise yourself with the house rules (there aren't many) and simply abide by them!
Downvotes can be a little cruel but they do work well at helping to eliminate noise. It's not an ideal system but it is simple and effective.
Not true with Oculus Quest which completely turned me from a skeptic to a believer. Just put it on and start playing. No external hardware required.
Oculus Quest really does not require an external computer (ie High-End Hardware), and it _is_ a really good experience (it's also really cheap compared to alternatives), specially the "tetherless" part of it. [You can see a lot of people in this exact thread talk about their experiences with it]
While there is still a lot to improve in terms of quality, not every game needs to look realistic (see: Fortinite - cartoon style).
Maybe someone will finally revive the First/Third Person RPG/RTS niche (not top down), which I really loved in BattleZone 1/2. I think it will work great in VR.
But yeah, really resource intensive, Pimax says you'll need 2 GPUs (one per eye) to get the most performance out of their 8K headset.
Point-to-teleport (worst option, IMO, but good for people really sensitive to motion sickness)
Arm waving - Basically move your arms back and forth like you would when running.
Head-directed, or hand-directed movement direction.
Physical movement in your room with no artificial movement option. This is typically in genres like wave shooters where you can move to dodge and such but not really expected to navigate a whole level.
Some games combine multiples of the above. From a game design perspective, still very much the wild west in VR.
Counterintuitively, I think large-scale strategy games are pretty awesome candidates for VR.
Third person games are also pretty amazing. If you have VR and haven't tried the free VR mode released for Hellblade, you're missing out.
I think it's futile to analyse the market pre-Quest and I'm excited of what's to come.
Not that I agree with it, but the general public doesn't care.
I still believe that the combination of VR goggles and gloves (can't forget the wrist keyboard!) with the right software would lead to a quantum leap in 3D modeling. Guess we'll see what happens.
Also, using VR controllers in thin air for a prolonged time becomes a workout. The human body isn't quite made for keeping arms in these poses for extended periods of time.
However, being able to view and manipulate a virtual object directly in 3d space is pretty darn sweet. Just bending your head or moving your hand beats manipulating virtual canera perspectives and gizmos for precision 3d interaction on a screen.
I nearly forgot: the Unreal Engine editor has a VR mode that brings in the nornal 2D GUI as floating windows. I didn't like that very much, but people seem to be OK with it. I don't know any other DCC software that has VR support.
After that my wife and me got a second hand Vive for 350, and it’s been amazing. I never play regular games any more, and even she (who never played any games) now enjoys it a lot and plays with me from time to time.
All this is to say that I do think VR is here to stay, it just blows regular gaming out of the water... but it definitely is at its infancy - games look and feel the way PC games did 10 years ago..
On the other hand VR is amazing. I’ve since switched to the quest which helps with most of those issues I mentioned.
For some people, this is a good thing.
(As for myself, I tried a friend's Oculus Quest extensively two weeks ago. Now I'm sitting at home, drawing up plans in Inkscape for how to rearrange my furniture to accommodate a room-scale VR area.)
The difference is incredible, and even cellphone VR was pretty cool.
I think most people haven't tried PC gaming and are stuck with cheap VR knockoffs.
I tested VR-headset directed at professional use: VR-2 Pro https://varjo.com/products/vr-2-pro/ Now every VR headset directed at consumers feels like utter crap. PSVR and Vive experience is ruined.
If you are willing to cough up €5995, you get really blown away until something better comes along and there is still long way to go. Field of view is just 87 degrees for example.
What's to understand here is that it's not said that this killer app "exists". If VR is only a cooler screen, then it will sell like cooler screens. Now maybe it's a killer screen, that is a screen that everybody wants. I guess there is a competitive advantage of thinking like that, but right now, vendors think they are making a software/hardware platform when they have no killer app.
https://www.half-life.com/en/alyx
VR-Goggles, high-end PC, good steering wheel (G27 at minimum) racing seat, ... and ideally dedicated room for the setup
it was great fun (did it for 2 years) but got rid of it because it consumed too many hours
VR still has a lot of room to improve tech-wise before it's a mature platform, though. Resolution remains not that great, ditto for FoV, physical feedback is meh, most headsets are pretty bulky, etc.
I have a Rift CV1 and a Quest, they're fun platforms for enthusiasts, but it doesn't feel ready to go fully mainstream yet.
If you're genuinely interested in forming an opinion, some of the larger computer stores will have the Oculus Quest available for customers to demo.
Lasted like 3 days though.
The fact that I do actual sports, including stuff with swords occasionally, might contribute to my "gimmick" opinion :)
Thinking about art. VR has spatial painting and animation, things completely impossible on non-VR platforms. And, this is where many people fail to grasp what VR killer app really means, they are not a VR way of doing something we used to do on flat screens. Painting in VR is as much a different art form as painting is from sculpting in the real world.
Thus it may not interest ALL existing artists, because it has a learning curve. Just like painters aren't necessarily drawn to try sculpture, not all artists want to invest time discovering what painting in space can unlock.
What will happen in my opinion is that a number of young people that haven't picked their preferred art form yet will decide to spend their 10 000 hours of training in VR, and develop their expertise there. This hasn't happened yet simply because it has only been a few years and in constant flux.
The same may be true in other areas. The very first VR-native people are just growing up.
Except your brain knows it's looking at a display and not an actual 3D space, and the cognitive dissonance between what it sees and proprioception are always going to limit how immersive VR can be. And that's not even getting into the other senses that VR can't simulate. Sight and sound are actually less important in terms of immersion than taste, touch and smell.
On a social level, it is comical how myopic her vision for VR is and how far off the mark the focus on VR arcades lies. The big selling point of VR in the near and not so near future is not expensive social experiences on somebody else’s commercial infrastructure but escapism and social experiences including work in the comfort of your own home.
Global warming, rising populations, terrorist attacks, widespread decoherence, pollution and decay in our urban centers are all powerful accelerators and extremely synergistic for the future of VR.
+ A Shin Godzilla themed helicopter raid which required a customized "cockpit" to ride in with rumble capabilities, + A Dragon Quest free-roaming VR adventure which required a LOT of space to enable + A Mario Kart race which, again, required a customized "kart" to ride in which simulated the physics of every sharp turn I took.
The first and third attractions were about five minutes long each. I don't doubt that there was a lot of engineering effort required to even get to that much content nor the fact that I would likely grow very tired of having to play an extended version of each for, say, an hour or two.
I think for at least the time being, this is how VR is going to be adopted: As a theme park experience where short novelty experiences people want to have is made available with the space and props already provided to enjoy it.
I'm pretty sure I played a VR racing game in a similar sort of setup in the 80s! There were only ever a handful of games, and they were only found in a very few places, but foir my birthday one year when I was a kid I was taken to the Trocadero centre in London where they had a few of these machines. They weren't massively responsive but they were good fun and for the time they were amazing.
But given just how long VR tech has been around, I do wonder if it will ever be mainstream in any way.
Stuff like The Void[1], where a complete arena is built to supplement the visuals, with physical features that match the VR ones (like physical buttons on walls that match the VR projected ones, moving platforms), smells, wind, sounds, etc.
The future of this is going to be incredibly cool, I think. Just subtle stuff like blowing cold air on your face when you're standing on top of a VR mountain, will do wonders for the immersion.
[1] https://www.thevoid.com/
Ginger can also help delay onset.
It can also be noted that motion sickness really only is a problem where the game character moves while you stand still physically (e.g. using a joystick to move around). Other forms of locomotion (like teleportation) are usually fine.
While you can become slightly more tolerant with repeated exposure (as you can with anything noxious), the the discomfort never goes away.
And it's not just game character motion. Any camera movement can trigger it, at different levels for different people. If you don't get triggered, count yourself lucky, and don't tell the rest of us to "just practice" or attempt to explain away that it's only X and not ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWYZ. Listen to what we're actually SAYING.
I still remember Valve responding to complaints of motion sickness in Half Life 2 with the lame excuse "It's because our technology is so amazingly lifelike." I wanted to punch the guy in the face and ask him if that was lifelike enough for him.
That's interesting you bring adaptation and immersion together. I do feel motion sickness in VR in extreme cases. Interestingly I managed to become more tolerant of it but it came with a significant loss of immersion.
Oh and the "amazingly lifelike" argument for justifying motion sickness is indeed complete bullshit. If you experience motion sickness, it is because it is not lifelike. Bad framerates, high latency, unnatural camera movement, etc... all contribute to motion sickness.
I've got no hope of ever adapting to VR. Just thinking about it raises my heart rate.
(a) even with latest gen headsets (eg: Occulus Quest) (b) even with applications where you are completely stationary?
I ask because I've shown my quest to probably 15 people now and nobody has had a problem with it in any of the applications where there is no motion of the external frame.
For example, it's tough to beat Wipeout VR as a future racing experience. The fact that you can look around/through the corners the way you do in the real world when you're driving a vehicle really changes the way the game plays and makes it much more immersive.
OTOH some games do seem to cause quite severe motion sickness (I forget the name of the one I'm particularly thinking of because I haven't played it in ages, for obvious reasons).
The other problem is that ergonomically it's an absolute arse-ache. I have the first gen PSVR which is just an festooning nightmare of cables. The lenses are also way too prone to fogging.
I believe the second gen headsets are better but there are still cable management issues.
It's also, frankly, not that comfortable to wear. It's not painful or anything like that, but I'm no fan of wearing hats because they tend to make me feel too hot, so you can imagine what having a bulky conglomeration of plastic and electronics strapped to my face for long periods feels like.
Really these things need to be wireless and rechargeable but then, of course, you open the system up to more latency issues.
One area I haven't had so many issues, which is touched on in the article, is the drop in quality, and in particular graphical fidelity.
Wipeout VR, I think, runs at 4K on a PS4 Pro but only 1080P with PSVR. I haven't found this to be something that bothers me at all, or at least not with this game.
On the other hand I have found the drop in quality with Driveclub VR to be noticeable to the point where it does detract from the experience.
It really does very much depend on the game though.
Still, overall impressions of the experiences on offer are fairly positive.
Nope. Maybe "of course", if they just lazily hack something together. But the tech is there, today, for low latency.
You really ought to try an Oculus Quest or Rift S/Vive Pro. PSVR has 1080 vertical pixels, Quest has 1600 vertical pixels, much better lenses, and much better controllers. Not to mention the games run much more smoothly
but more importantly this is a BBC news article so lets all face it, its a load od bull
I then got a mixed reality headset and Beat Saber was a game-changer for me. The controls are so simple and are perfectly suited to VR. No motion sickness etc. It's a great game. I've picked up loads of the best selling VR games on Steam and although some have been fun, none quite match up to Beat Saber.
Google Earth with room-scale VR is stunning. Being able to walk around your hometown as if you were a couple of hundred feet tall is an incredible experience.
I'm looking forward to MS Flight Simulator 2020 and it looks like the devs are making VR a priority. This could be a winner for me.
Why not? There are quite a few companies working on these with some success. Virtuix for example (disclosure: I'm an investor) are seeing some steady commercial success in regards to addressing motion[0]. And in terms of feedback, there's a lot of interesting work done Fl around gloves in particular, including by Apple [1].
[0] https://www.virtuix.com/ [1] https://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2020/01/apple-a...
I recently learned about this company and their product, they are developing (I think some of it is even already available) a full-body tracking suit with feedback zones. Pairing this with a VR headset and immersion would go way up compared to most (if not all) things we have nowadays.
[0] https://teslasuit.io/
What makes you say "never"? If there are people willing to pay for better immersion, I believe the technology won't be that far behind.
Most of the time, there wouldn't be much tension coming from the cords (other than perhaps representing gravity pulling on the sword's mass), but when a hit needs to be simulated, the right cords would rapidly tense, according to the simulated properties of the object being hit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cML814JD09g
Magic Leap said they had solved this for their device (maybe they did, not that it makes up for the rest).
Probably not solveable unless we do eye tracking and adapt the screen content to that or change the model from being small screens in front of your eyes altogether.
I agree though. I cannot relate at all to people who say VR is immersive.
[0] https://www.slashgear.com/panasonic-vr-glasses-are-a-steampu...
I don't own a VR headset and I don't intend to any time soon - it's too expensive and nothing looks enjoyable enough to justify the cost. But once enough big-name games like Alyx get released, gamers previously on the fence (like me) will start to purchase VR headsets, and VR will eventually become the new gaming platform that publishers wants to release on.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/546560/HalfLife_Alyx/
I predict the opposite. It will sell a few headsets maybe (a peak), but that alone will not change the course of the technology at all in 2020. Plus, Half Life's popularity in 2020 has nothing to do with its popularity 20 years ago.
Some YouTube streamers that I watch did a big run of VR games over the past year or so, and without exception they were gimmicky experiences that would have been better with a more conventional setup. Of course needing the equivalent of a GTX 1080 is a big barrier too.
My prediction is that when and if this new Half-Life game comes out, there won't be enough of a user-base actually using VR gear to sustain it; I hope that they have planned for that case and will release it as a normal PC shooter as well.
> Many big name adopters have abandoned their VR projects. Google recently halted sales of Daydream, its VR headset, admitting that "there just hasn't been the broad consumer or developer adoption we had hoped".
> Meanwhile, the BBC has announced it is ending the funding for its VR hub, less than two years after it was founded.
6DoF VR with tracked controllers (Quest, Valve Index) is a whole different beast, and actually seems to be gaining momentum lately.
If VR were such a hot market surely you would not see the Google Daydream news and Samsung killing off GearVR. You have to take in account all news, positive and negative, to get an actual view of how the market is doing. And also the investment. And investment in VR has been in the decline for a couple of years now after an initial peak.
And don't ignore how active the porn industry is in the VR space.
Silly to compare it to literally the most prolific games console manufacturer ever.
I hope it's a lot more than 400 000 units (see https://qz.com/1739575/strong-oculus-quest-sales-boost-faceb...) because that's not a large number at all compared to all other gadgets sold at the same time.
The quest 100% is less bulky and sweaty, and it includes cameras if people are in your field of control or need to do setup. It really is much better than the last generation in terms of UX and I have the vive and the entire setup.
And of the list of things preventing people from doing VR right now, I doubt strapping the headset on is anywhere near the top (things like cost, PC, space, etc are).
For me personally, a side effect of that is the reason I'm not excited about VR: it's anti-social. I'm shutting myself off from anyone else in my apartment in a way a normal video game doesn't do. It makes me way, way less excited about the potential of VR.
There are games to interact with other people in the room btw and they are super fun as well! Check “keep talking and nobody explodes” and “acron: attack of the squirels ”.
I think everyone's experience has been ruined by crappy. The 90s had a VR far but they sucked. Of you're putting a phone across your face, it sucks. The market was spoiled by crappy imitators and gimicks.
Anytime someone tries a real VR headset for the first time, they are usually amazed. I have personally sold 3 headsets just by having friends of mine try mine for a few minutes.