I very much think that folks on HN are jaded by the long wait and the unfulfilled promises of VR. I recently picked up a Quest 2 as my first VR headset and I am blown away and convinced it is the future. The thing is, I also recognize that while it is already an incredible achievement, it's still probably 5-20 years from hitting its iPhone moment. By then, my initial excitement will have gone away and I'll have tired of waiting too.
But for all you jaded folks out there, let me tell you that this is an absolutely unstoppable evolution of computing. All entertainment since sung epic poetry has aimed to briefly take us into another world. Plays, novels, movies, theme parks, and video games have always offered immersive fantasy. This is the ultimate fufilment of that very human impulse, to consciously enter another world. If we lose sight of that, then it will be up to the next generation of technologists to create it.
There will never be an iphone moment because its not a product useful to literally every person. Gaming consoles and PCs have not had an "iphone moment" after decades because their market is and always will be limited.
I don't see why people are so obsessed with instant and explosive growth. Almost no recreational product has seen this kind of growth and they have all continued to exist just fine.
VR is ready today if its something you want. Its fun, cheap enough and has loads of games. If you hold out for something better you will always be waiting because there will always be something much better in 5 years.
Education (language learning, geography, biology, engineering...), real estate, porn, psychology, situational training (firemen), scientific visualization and collaboration, spatial painting and other artforms, social interaction, movie shots planning, etc.
Once upon a time, the iPod wasn't useful to every person, because not everyone wanted to take music with them wherever they went. Nowadays, if you don't have a phone in your pocket that can play music, you're in the minority of the world population.
I think that at some point there will be an iPhone moment for VR. However, I think we're still far enough away from it to not know what it'll look like.
I'm not sure why there's an expectation that the consumer VR market is going to grow by orders of magnitude. I think the market is basically what it's going to be.
It's a great demo but not something I want to spend much time in.
The headsets are pretty cool - I’ve played with all of them except for the Valve Index.
Though there’s something unpleasant about them that keeps me from going back when the novelty wears off. I think it might be because I don’t want to be standing and moving around when playing a game and if you’re not doing that, the motion is kind of unpleasant.
I’m not sure this is something it can really overcome. I think an AR overlay of our actual world is more likely to be the next real platform (assuming the hardware is possible to pull off something like this).
Being in VR is just kind of an unpleasant/isolating experience for me and I’m a pretty early adopter of most things.
In other people I’ve mostly seen a small number of games (mostly beat saber) keep people coming back, but I haven’t seen most people keep using it once the novelty wears off outside of that.
I think there are probably some narrow applications where it’s clearly better than not having it, but I’m skeptical of VR as a platform.
Maybe when the hardware is 10x better/lighter it’ll be a difference experience? We are pretty early on in the medium, movies and tv were pretty bad for the first fifty years. It might just take a while for people to figure out how to use VR well.
> I think there are probably some narrow applications where it’s clearly better than not having it, but I’m skeptical of VR as a platform.
Fitness. It is much easier to grind in a VR game for an hour than it is to grind on a treadmill for the same amount of time.
I have a Quest, the games suck, but the fitness experience is paradigm changing. Beat Saber was and still is the Quest's killer app, but there are lot of similar games that keep the experience somewhat fresh (not to mention new beat saber music packs, I also use FitXR more than Beat Saber).
I bought my Quest back in May 2019, it died around June 2020, but I was already using it a couple of hours a day by then so had to get a new one from a scalper (during the Pandemic, Quest units were hard to get). I really don't want to go back to life without it.
Long time PC gamer, DK1, DK2, CV1, Index, Quest 1, and Quest 2 owner here.
I understand where you're coming from, but I disagree.
When I first got into VR back in 2013 it was cool for a minute, then the novelty wore off. I dabbled with it over the years, but it never stuck. I felt like you do.
2016 the CV1 came out and I was briefly reunited with a strong interest in VR which, eventually, faded. The next few years I didn't play much, and when I did, it wasn't for very long.
The problem was entirely CONTENT and it is FINALLY in 2020 starting to come around.
We have seen some absolutely excellent AAA games released that are loads of fun and not just glorified tech demos (though to be sure, those still exist).
- POPULATION:ONE
- Metal of Honor: Above and Beyond
- Half Life: Alyx
- Asgard's Wrath
Any many more. I'm finally finding myself using my VR headsets DAILY. In fact my Oculus CV1 which came out 4 years ago is still my all around favorite!
I think as content improves (especially multiplayer content) and the headsets get more comfortable and easy to put on / take off, we will hopefully see continued expansion of this medium. It's THE way to game, if you ask me. Nothing is more engaging then jumping off a building, spreading my arms to fly, then pulling them together to grip my gun and land a quick snipe on someone in mid air. Keyboard and mouse can suck it.
Hypothesis: The reason having to stand up (or more generally put physical effort) on games turns you off is because you're looking for a different thing in games, probably just turning off your brain.
The appeal, unarguably I believe, is in being immersed in the fantasy, which I think is a different kind of appeal from what you seek. I actively dislike "abnegation" type games, but the idea of being transported to somewhere else, exploring different realities, amazes me (I'm dying to try Myst on VR), and putting physical effort on it adds to the fantasy. So maybe VR isn't for you, simple as that.
I've seem lots of people (online, yes, but still) keep coming back for Pavlov, Population One, Half-Life Alyx, Star Wars Squadron, VR Chat... I really think there's something there.
> I think it might be because I don’t want to be standing and moving around when playing a game and if you’re not doing that, the motion is kind of unpleasant.
Could this be because of the missing resistance while moving / throwing / touching VR objects?
>because I don’t want to be standing and moving around when playing a game and if you’re not doing that, the motion is kind of unpleasant.
This is what stops me from buying VR. I don’t want a new form of gaming(r)(tm), I just need 3D display and my chair, kbd & mouse to play my regular AAA games as-is, but with depth perception and appropriate fov. Instead they suggest you to stand and waive your arms in few pretty average if not crappy games. Also, finding a VR-enabled game that will actually work with your headset is not as easy as one may think.
> I think it might be because I don’t want to be standing and moving around when playing a game and if you’re not doing that, the motion is kind of unpleasant.
Project Cars 2 and DCS make it worth the headset alone - throw in Elite Dangerous and No Man Sky and I have enough VR entertainment to keep me busy for the foreseeable.
> I think it might be because I don’t want to be standing and moving around when playing a game and if you’re not doing that, the motion is kind of unpleasant.
I'm the exact opposite. I enjoy that a lot more. It's more immersive, and I've already lost about 15 lbs just playing VR. imo it's a fitness machine disguised as a video game peripheral
Facebook's Quest 2 is an impressive piece of tech.
One of the biggest reasons to be skeptical of VR taking off is that Facebook is one of the major players. Between the login shenanigans and their anti-competitive dealings with developers, they have an opportunity to single-handedly tank the industry.
It's the ONLY player on the "stand-alone" headset space.
There's some competition on PC headsets, Rift headsets are not even the best, feature-wise. But just like the quest, they score very high on the cost-benefit analysis (I guess we pay with a combination of cash and data).
I agree. For tech to take off you really need a significant "platform" player to emerge - someone that is able to position themselves as a middleman where the value made by 3rd parties significantly outweighs the value made by the middleman. That is what causes a technology to really bloom and get broadscale uptake. Facebook just isn't interested in that. They'd rather have a smaller pie where they own it all than capture a larger piece of a giant pie but be just one part of it.
I feel the biggest thing that FB brings to the table is multiplayer and social. Because their device is both capable, inexpensive, and easy to setup; it's the most democratic. I can almost always find others to play with or against compared to Steam, where only a few games have a lot of players.
I'm not even sure we are at the compelling apps stage yet. I think there are still very difficult hardware and software platform issues to solve first that are going to take tons of basic research. I expect the first 100 million unit headset to include extremely accurate eye-tracking that is used to drive foveated rendering, varifocal active lenses and neural network interpolated facial expressions for high fidelity social avatars. Facebook Research seems to be making good progress on all of that, but it will still take many years of additional research to perfect.
Facebook wants to be the company to invent the first mainstream VR Metaverse, but that doesn't mean they won't invent the hardware and get beaten to market on the software. They are about to release Horizons which is clearly in this vein, but I expect they are still too early.
Microsoft has a good track record with making games, but yes all of FAANG is terrible at this. I have a little more hope for Facebook now that they've started acquiring studios and letting them run independently, instead of the previous combination of publishing\funding and having few internal game teams (which generally doesn't work in big tech anyway). This could lead to a model that looks more like Microsoft Game Studios.
> it's that people who work at giant companies suck at making games.
I don't understand this statement. The Oculus store is open to developers and is filled with third party games. All of the games I personally play are not Oculus/Facebook games.
> The real problem isn't technology or even adoption, it's that people who work at giant companies suck at making games.
Many companies besides Facebook have developed games for the Quest. I guess you could say Facebook sucks at working with game developers, but I’m not sure if that’s true either. Unreal and Unity have well-developed integrations with Oculus [0].
I think where Facebook really falls down is tying customers’ FB account to their Oculus Store purchases (and ability to use the Quest at all). They’re applying a social media platform’s aggressive algorithms to suspend or ban accounts which violate their expansive TOS, which is wrong in consumer product and digital marketplace space. For that reason, mixed with personal experience at the hands of Facebook's algorithms, I have no interest in developing for Oculus.
> Ironically, by getting acquired by a giant company, Quest development was set back by that many years.
What does this mean? We likely wouldnt even have a Quest (or really even a 3rd headset imo) from Oculus if not for Facebook. The Oculus founders were all almost completely about building high end enthusiast hardware, which wouldve almost surely made the market die off again.
FB mostly publishes games and what that have published include some excellent games. Lone Echo is probably the mostly complete example of a AAA quality VR title for years until HL:Alyx launched.
Wouldn’t have been possible without a large enough company to bankroll it.
I also recently got a Quest 2 and it's changed everything for me. I'm usually that jaded person but today's VR tech really has me gushing. This is the first time I've been truly excited about video games since I was a teenager 15 years ago (despite playing a lot of games in that time).
The feeling of vertigo and momentum in games like Jet Island that makes you weak in the knees, looking out your cockpit and being awestruck by planets and stations in Star Wars Squadrons or Elite Dangerous, dodging bullets in Pistol Whip and Superhot. The dream of the 90's is alive - the technology is here! It's so good and I can't wait until quarantine is over to share this with more people.
Previously I'd used a friend's Oculus DK1 (not good) and then later a friend's HTC Vive (getting there). The Quest 2 is a major improvement and I look forward to the next generation of headsets.
Given that VR requires an interface, it seems a stretch to say it's the "ultimate fulfilment" of entering another world. Before even getting to the philosophical inquiry about what would truly constitute an Us and its actual, for real entering of another world, that it's mediated by a big headset seems to put it still many iterations prior to its ultimate realisation.
I said it 10 years ago and I'll say it again, putting a screen and lenses on your face is not "virtual reality". It's just a gimmick (although fun in it's own way). The real VR revolution will not come until we have true BCIs that can hijack and isolate your vision and all attempted actions. Neuralink is on the right track but not even close to working. We'll need 50 more years maybe.
That is actually the magic moment I've had, tech without an interface. Or to put it another way, it has moments of seamlessly using the interface I was born into, natural kinesthetic movement and realistic physics.
The real world has plenty of interfaces too. Surely VR will eventually approach the same level of seemingly physical interfaces as the distinction between the real and the virtual starts to break down.
I played with a really nicely Oculus set up the other day, it was totally amazing and immersive. In particular this was a racing sim, and when I was headed toward a wall I got the feeling like in a real car when you're about to hit something. It was very cool.
Unfortunately, I lost my lunch after 5 minutes or so and had to lay in a dark room for a couple hours to get over a bout of nausea. Excited for the future though if they can solve that problem for people like me (I also get seasick easily).
I'm not surprised you got nausea from a racing sim. It takes time to get your "VR legs" and anything with artificial locomotion is absolutely terrible for this. I started with about 2 weeks of games where the only movement was with my own two feet and the VR world always matched up to my real body movements. Then I was able to gradually handle more and more intense artificial movement. Jumping, heights, speed, and smooth turning are the worst of the bunch and still make me a bit uneasy if I overdo it. Jumping right into something with intense movement is going to program you brain to have a very negative association with VR and will take you backwards on VR acclimatization.
I used to get massive nausea after playing fps games on my 10' projector screen - solved it by using a pair of acupressure wrist bands. Not sure if that would work for VR but probably worth a try. Plenty of studies behind it: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7575310/
With everything happening with major movies going direct to streaming, I actually am expecting a big development somewhat related to VR in the next year or two. It's a device much smaller than a VR headset you wear on your face that gives you a theatrical quality audio-visual viewing experience, and only allows you to purchase/rent and not sideload anything. I'm thinking it could sell for around $500 and I'm pretty sure there's a company in Cupertino taking a close look at this.
I remember not too long ago when the Wii and the Kinect were supposed to be the future of gaming (they were hugely popular at some point) before everyone got sick of standing playing games and went back to their couches.
Wondering if the same thing is not going to happen with VR as well.
i'm still on quest 1 and it's honestly amazing, it's a great workout for me, someone that is/was fairly unfit and hates exercise. Using FitXR and Beat saber (with some additional handles that add a bit of weight) really get my heart rate u p and feeling great and most of all I really enjoy it. It's amazing.
I also enjoy watching movies in it as well, I don't watch a lot and was considering buying a TV but this has really delayed me doing so.
Fair point and I can as well. It takes a great book, time, a good atmosphere, a nice state of mind and the page can disappear and I enter that other world. The last book that did this to me was The City and the Stars and it was just incredible. But with VR you are instantly, automatically and with zero effort just THERE. The immersive pull is probably thousands of times stronger if you could quantify it by number of seconds till you stop caring about the real world.
Also, the tech may enable wonders but the implementation may suck. If you have an amazing technology but the scenario of all the movies / games using this technology turn out to be the Nth version of the same story (like basically every movie on Netflix) then it is subpar compared to a book.
I think a domain where it can exceptionally shine is the adult entertainment industry.
It looks the consensus here is pretty much that anyone who tried the latest tech understands that we have went beyond a certain point here.
Comparing to phones, I think this is the point where we have keypad-phones. Content is still limited, but using your imagination you can create good experiences.
Personally, I switched to VR/Quest gaming from PC this autumn, and I feel good about it. I feel healthier than sitting in front of PC. I also feel less isolated with the family, as we have more 'playing together' now. As a developer, I'm exited to try out to create new kind of experiences, like I did 16 years ago with phone SDK's.
If you think yourself as a creator, I think you feel a fool if you wait another ten years - seeing the times when a single person could do something meaningful, going past.
I have watched a lot of products come and go. It's been quite a while since I saw a product and realized that it would not be silly to pivot my career to take advantage of the opportunity. VR is one of those things.
While I agree with you, and am a HUGE fan of VR, the undeniable truth is these headsets collect dust after a week or two. Always. I've convinced a ton of my friends to buy one and they always end up with the same fate :(
I mean, I guess it depends. I have an Hour or 2 a week to game. For the past 4 years I've spent that exclusively in VR. I recently picked up some new pancake games, but I keep going back. The VR experience is so much more enjoyable to me.
I think you're right -- new technology is overestimated (overhyped) in the short term, and underestimated in the long term. I think of speech recognition over the years where the promise never met reality and then it quietly started answering most corporate phones.
I have tried VR many times over the years (I vividly recall there was an interesting arcade game back around 1990 that used it). I got a vive. I tried others.
But after using it for a while, I returned to a monitor and keyboard as my preferred way of interacting. There's still something sort of self-limiting/tiring about VR.
For me the kinds of games I mostly play do not translate well to VR. Or at least yet. But for stuff that does translate like shooters, its unreal how much better they are in VR.
So many comments to yours are all sceptical and saying "never" a lot. Maybe in 20 years you'll be vindicated. I'm with you.
It's surprising how much imagination people lack.
It's like people who told me "humans will never fall I'm love with an artificial human". Lo and behold, that Chinese AI has 600M users. Now the discussion have moved to " they shouldn't " and then it will change to "I want one too".
I also was blown away by my first VR experience and convinced it was the future. It was when I played Dactyl Nightmare in 1992.
Your second paragraph is compelling, except there are exceptions. Remember 3d tv?
I think once the need for a headset is eliminated (like Star Trek's holodeck) it will take off. Until then, having to strap something over your face is asking too much. It's too isolating.
^ This a thousand times over. Everyone forgets VR has been 5-10 years away since the 1960s![0]
You can't obstruct people's eyes - glasses get a pass because they're a handicap, and folks with sunglasses communicate by wearing them.
We will need to live many more rounds of evolution to give up the idea that covering your eyes to 'go somewhere else' won't be a survivally threatening move...
and what's more, we're just starting to fully appreciate how smells and air (quality, pressure, etc) play a role in 'us being there' - don't even begin to think about the small gravitational pull between all of our bodies at a concert.
Long story short, it will take a long time and a lot of generations to die off before we appreciate VR as much as a physical experience.
> let me tell you that this is an absolutely unstoppable evolution of computing.
If that's the case, the sales are hardly convincing. If this was such a revolution you'd see more people buying them. Beyond head tracking and movement tracking, the fact that you cant feel anything (no feedback) in the world you are supposed to be in makes it illusion breaking.
>I am blown away and convinced it is the future. The thing is, I also recognize that while it is already an incredible achievement, it's still probably 5-20 years from hitting its iPhone moment.
Except for the iPhone part, I bet this exact comment was made in 1991.
> If we lose sight of that, then it will be up to the next generation of technologists to create it.
It's not clear this generation of technologists will be able to get there even keeping it in sight. Which isn't to say it's not worth plugging away at.
ya it's a slow burn, but I think the September '20 - September '21 period will end up seeing roughly the unit sales mentioned in their bet. Quest 2 is making a large impact.
Flying simulators seem make a comeback and they sound great for VR. MS Flight Simulator was well received. A colleague of mine praised Star Wars Squadrons as a great VR game.
Predicting the future of technology isn't too hard, it's predicting the timing accurately that people tend to fail at. I don't have a lot of experience with all the headset variations, mostly Oculus and PS, but it's clear to me that we're still in a hype stage and the hardware has a long, long way to go. I'm guessing 10-20 years before it starts approaching what we're after.
On same note, developing VR from inside is incredible and it quickly turned into my #1 hobby. At first you are surrounded with blank space, then you slowly fill it out with whatever reality rules you can think of.
I went with code-only approach (no binary assets) and built a primitive development environment that works in VR. Now I have a neat little virtual shed with different experiments and demo projects. Geometrical landscapes, driving & flying, teleporting, various gizmos...
Currently I'm tweaking physics engine to work with hand tracking skeleton. Masses connected with springs turn out to be amazingly palpable even without any haptic feedback and with simple cartoonish visuals.
VR is already fun and we're in for a wild ride once AR hits the market.
> VR is already fun and we're in for a wild ride once AR hits the market.
I, personally, see VR as being much more exciting than AR, from an entertainment and capabilities perspective. I don't want to be limited to my small living room or whatever setting I'm in. When I'm in the real world outside of my house, I can't imagine what AR would bring that wouldn't be completely utilitarian, like replacing my phone/watch with a virtual device, holochat calls, maybe add more trees, etc. But, I'm also not very imaginative.
We won't get VR force feedback for a long time. With AR you could turn a laser tag arena into almost any scenario and incorporate a lot of physical elements.
AR lets you bring virtual experiences into a more ad hoc setting. You can't really play a VR game while waiting for the bus but you could be feeding your AR pet.
For a long time I've wanted VR-like games, but played in the freedom of AR, where it maps and adapts to your environment. This would allow you to actually move around and interact with your space.
I briefly played the HoloLens AR game where you have to shoot at robotic bugs that crawl out from your walls.[1] The fact that I could duck behind my office partition was awesome. The fact that when I blew a hole in my wall I could see the "studs" behind it was similarly cool.
In an ideal world, I could trace out my house and play up and down the stairs. Or go to a field or forest and play in a whole other world.
To focus on positive potential: Augmented hearing, like tuning into parts of frequency spectrum and directional amplification. Augmented vision with integrated maps, 'scouting' around with street view. Visualizing music with colors. Remote socializing with even less friction. Surrounding yourself with contextual spatial information - food recipes next to stove and PDFs around working desk. Completely new forms of media content, like TV series that follows you around.
It's predictable that big players will want to control every aspect of AR because it gets them complete attention while device is on. Facebook has already pounced. I'm more interested in VR/AR that is in service of user and that means open source.
VR is simply a stepping stone. AR is the real future.
But that's not to say that fully immersive experiences have no future. I just don't think VR will fully take off until it's available in a small form-factor, and likely combined with AR in the same device.
I was an early video game developer, publishing games in '82. I found then that making the games was far and away a more creative and productive and lucrative way to spend my time. Beyond the while developing testing of the several dozens games I made when I made games professionally, I've not played a video game out of interest in the game itself since "Robotron 1984".
Or you could build actual things in an actual shed? This is the same impulse that drives people to build furniture, boats, and model train layouts. To me, the real physical objects are much more fulfilling.
I like making furniture too (it's a stereotype for many devs), but I don't look down my nose and pretend that there's some objective reason that my hobby is "more fulfilling" than someone else's (particularly when that person's hobby also involves being creative and using their brain). I mean, sheesh.
Yeah, why weave animate things out of pure thoughtstuff in cyberspace, bounded only by your imagination and compute resources, when you could be messing with plywood in a shed?
Flashback to 1995. I'm a 17 year old PFY invited to beta test a VR headset from a local company. My Uncle was an investor and I was technically savvy and the target market.
I had a copy of Descent that supported VR, and while it was a bit of a hassle to get setup, I got it working. The experience was incredible. After the first use I said to myself "this is the future". I had permission to test the headset for two weeks, and I wanted my friends to see it as well.
So I invited them over that weekend. And that's where the problem set in. When one person was using the headset, they were gone. You couldn't interact with them in any way. They might as well have been in a different room. Then I said to myself "this is not the future", and haven't touched VR since.
There is no amount of technology that can get over this problem. It's not about FOV or resolution or immersion. It's a social problem. If you live alone at home, and want to plugin then great. But if you live with someone, its distant, weird, and kinda creepy, to have the other person in a headset and unreachable.
That depends entirely on your living situation. If you live on your own, a VR headset becomes just the opposite - you go from being isolated to being in a room full of people. Those people can be on the opposite side of the world, but you're carrying on a conversation and playing mini-golf with them.
Or for local play, there are one-vs-many party games where one player wears a headset and interacts with a group of people in the same room who aren't in VR.
Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes is a great example of this where the other players are referring to a paper manual to help you defuse a bomb. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqelfBKuiic
There's Acron: Attack of the Squirrels where one person has a headset and other people play against them as the squirrels with their phones. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP29BxhvHfc
Or Davigo, maybe a less social one because it's VR vs PCs and not likely to be in one room, where the VR player is a giant trying to swat at the tiny humans who are playing a 3rd person game where they team up and throw bombs at the giant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL7a63MMx6Q
Even if you don't have a game where other people can be involved, you can still cast the headset view to TVs and tablets. It can be plenty of fun to pass a single headset around taking turns in Beat Saber if everyone else can see what's happening.
I'm guessing none of that was the case in 1995, so I wouldn't be so quick to stick to a 25 year old judgement of what the technology can do.
And on the other end of the spectrum, sometimes you just accept that isolation for a while because you get to fly an X-Wing. A Quest V1 with Oculus Link is far from an optimal PC VR setup, but even with that Star Wars: Squadrons is an experience I’ve been waiting for since I first saw A New Hope. It’s hard to convey how cool it is to be sitting in a spaceship cockpit, dodging through asteroids and chasing down TIE fighters with the pew pew pew of four KX9 laser cannons on your wingtips. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vE90KIBlWyk
Would I play it in VR mode for hours on end every night and stop talking to real people? No. But not all my activities need to be social either. I can go for a four hour hike in the woods by myself and no one gives me a hard time for being too isolated. Or maybe they do, but I don’t care because sometimes that’s how I want to spend my time. To each their own.
One other feature of the Quest that I should mention - you can double-tap the side of the headset at any time to turn the game world off and immediately switch to "passthrough" mode where you see through the headset's tracking cameras. This obviously works best with single player games that can pause themselves until you tap back in, but in those games it makes it no big deal to drop out of the game for a moment to interact with people and things in the real world. A bit weird to talk to you while you have a big headset on your face, sure. But this was added in a software update well after launch, and it's way better for staying available to the real world than needing to take the headset on and off.
>That depends entirely on your living situation. If you live on your own, a VR headset becomes just the opposite - you go from being isolated to being in a room full of people.
That is a really depressing and dystopian future that I am not sure if I want to live in. Yes, MMOs and games like GTA-O, Roblox, or Fortnite are in the same area already now available. But in my opinion this only increases the actual isolation and I would believe that the post VR experience emotional drop down could be severe. It also brings up the backdrop of Ready Player One, where everybody is occupied by the VR while living in decrepit containers seemingly without a desire to fix it.
Even single player VR games can be fun in a party setting. In our group we sometimes let one person play VR and mirror it on a TV. The rest of us continue talking while casually watching and taking turns.
The player is not isolated because they know they are being watched. Works good with BeatSaber, SuperHot, etc.
It's basically the same as a group taking turns at an arcade machine — not solitary.
My experience is that people are getting increasingly isolated anyway, so VR is great in this regard for more and more people. Even when people are social they're increasingly glued to their phones, and distant from each other.
A friend and I bought quests and we both loved them except for one really annoying problem: space
At least as of early 2020, there was a huge market mismatch with VR: the people that have 6'x6' or more space to play in live far out in the suburbs, but the people that have the disposable income to just by a quest just for fun tend to live in apartments in the city. My friend and I both had pretty spacious living conditions for living in a city, but we perpetually joked about the dream of one day having enough room that the occulus didn't warn about having less space than required.
But with the sudden migration of many people out of cities and into more spacious suburban housing I'm curious if this will create an increase demand for VR. If you have an extra 10'x10' room that can dramatically change how fun the VR experience is.
Yes, and even if the room is large there are tables and break-y things that invariably interact with shins, swinging controllers and your ability to just fully immerse.
I stopped playing VR mostly because I was tired of re-arranging furniture and re-calibrating the Index when I did so.
I guess if you live in a house and have a basement or 'rec room' with no furniture, it's less of a hassle to play ping pong or Beat Sabre in VR. Otherwise it's VR Poker with its random social toxicity where I can sit on the couch and interact with people if I find a table without kids or mean people in it.
I live in house with larger room, but I don't want to use the room now because the room is cold and I need to warm the room before I use Quest. So I use Quest in my small room.
The Oculust Quest 2 is my first VR headset, and it can cast to the TV. That helps tremendously with the social aspect, rest of the room can see what you're doing and give feedback. In addition we've been playing Eleven - a table tennis game - in multiplayer with two people in the same room (with two headsets) which is tremendous fun, but requires a second headset.
Most multiplayer video games today don't ship with splitscreen co-op, people just play with their friends remotely over the internet.
I agree VR isn't great for a party game or hanging out with your friends in your living room, but that's OK because that's not the experience most people are having today.
When I had a headset, I think the main thing that kept me from using it was the inconvenience. You have to keep part of a room clear, deal with a mass of cables, the weight of the headset, its positioning on your head, finding somewhere in reach to store it, etc. The lightweight wireless headsets of the future will help a lot. Smartphone vr is promising from this angle
Honestly, the privacy policy made me a bit uncomfortable too
I did a bit of VR around 1995. I added CAVE support for the molecular visualization program VMD and had a key to UIUC's CAVE to test it out.
The CAVE approach projects images onto wall-sized screens (eg, via back-projection), and can be 1-wall up to 5- or 6- walls, if the floor/ceiling is categorized as a "wall".
This is massively expensive compared to the VR that's widespread/affordable these days.
But it's also far more social, where multiple people can be present, though at least in the 1990s the head-tracker only followed one person. And they could easily see each other.
Handwaving, with the right synchronization on the glasses and high frame rates, I could imagine multiple head-trackers. Back then our frame rate was limited by the decay rate of the green phosphor in the projector. These days I suppose a wall of large displays, edge-to-edge, with very high frame rates interleaved for multiple users, might work. Again, I haven't followed what's going on in VR, but it might be a technology which addresses at least some of what you correctly point out.
Carolina Cruz-Neira, the developer of the CAVE (and at the time with the email address "cavewoman"), has some lectures on the social VR and her research, on YouTube. Don't remember which ones specifically talk about it, and couldn't find one in a quick look.
> Then I said to myself "this is not the future", and haven't touched VR since.
Yeah, nothing has changed in social VR in 25 years.
/s.
There are multiplayer async party games that can be played with 10 people (I've done this a lot!). There is online multiplayer. Dismissing VR because you played descent on a 3dof box 25 yrs ago is kind of lame.
> There is no amount of technology that can get over this problem. It's not about FOV or resolution or immersion
This is frustratingly dismissive and easily disproven. Look at Acron: Attack of the Squirrels! Look at Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes!
Now compared to 1995, gaming in general seems a lot closer to the VR experience you describe. Local multiplayer is uncommon, shared gaming spaces like arcades and LANs are gone and people are playing games on their own devices alone.
I'm as isolated playing Counter-Strike on my PC as when I am on the Oculus Quest.
That's a great story. I remember being blown away by Descent - probably the second 3D-type game I played after Doom. The thought of free spaceship movement through caves with 6-axis control was amazing - though IIRC the level design was carefully done to keep mostly 2D-ish with a clear up-down orientation. Must have been mind-blowing in VR in 1995.
All that said, I think people playing alone is a big enough demographic to support a VR breakout, if the killer app comes along.
I've logged over 200 hours in Beat Saber, mostly playing with friends. What you're talking about is definitely a real problem, but the solution is to just have the game rendered to the TV as well as the headset. Everyone sees and hears what the person is doing, even though they're the one in VR.
My wife watched me play the entirety of Half Life Alyx that way, and she enjoyed it a lot. And were were able to talk and share the experience the entire time.
There's a basic usability problem I found with my VR experience that I cannot see what I am doing in my room, unless you have a large dedicated space its easy to injure yourself by accident because the real world is still there with AR you can literally still see what you are doing in the physical world while interacting with the tech.
That's an interesting take. I have some contradictory anecdata, though, in that my friends and I love getting together and taking turns playing VR games. And I'm not talking about nerdy hard core gamer friends. Pre-COVID we used to get together every few months or so for a "VR Night" at my buddy's place because he owned an Oculus w/ a living room TV set-up. And we'd just spend a few hours taking turns cycling through the game library and playing all sorts of stuff, and everybody loved it.
> So I invited them over that weekend. And that's where the problem set in. When one person was using the headset, they were gone.
That sounds like a "not enough headsets" problem.
Also, that is like lamenting the lack of co-op split-screen games. Many games supported that mode back in the day, they don't anymore. Because people are either playing over the internet OR bringing their own consoles.
It's a great opportunity to prank people though. There was someone testing some kind of VR app in a co-working space I used to frequent, and people would do things like sprinkle confetti on them or move things around on their desk while they were jacked in.
Ha, the first time I tried VR it was a multi-person experience. Back in the early 90s, I played Dactyl Nightmare at some tourist location. All 4 members of my family were in the same "world" and could see each other. It was, like most VR games today, fun for about 10 minutes. There's still some interesting experiences being developed at portable venues (ie, thevoid.com).
But I'd also say that FOV is really, really important. Right now the experience is just like putting a little TV on your face with an IMU. Immersion requires peripheral vision and spatial audio.
I was playing VR shovelware and pavlov pretty regularly for a while, we just put mirror the game to the monitor so the spectators can spectate, and the headphones float off the ear a couple inches so they can hear us.
It helps to have at least two friends for that scenario. for Just one friend you're probably better off playing a non-vr game and trading the controller.
these days we're farther apart and one friend has a child so he's worried about covid. we play "ghosts" (Phasmophobia) once in a while.
in summary:
2 friends required (minimum)
mirror the screen
headphones off the ear
There are all kinds of technological solutions to that:
Both have headsets (used to be a cost issue, gradually getting solved) and play the same thing.
Or one has AR glasses and can peek into what the other is doing and communicate with them.
An internal camera captures the face under the headset and presents it on the outside with correct parallax (could be presented with AR or with auto stereo display), AI in the headset can tell when someone is wanting attention etc. and use other cameras with depth reconstruction or depth sensors to fade them into the VR player's world.
We’re talking about widespread adoption of consumer technology. Everything you just mentioned is a niche workaround, and to be blunt, not very good ones. Sure, there are always going to be people who love VR, and it’s really cool! But there’s no way it becomes as popular as TVs or smartphones.
I agree that technology isn't the problem. I don't know if the problem is exactly what you describe or something else along those lines. But I think you are on the right track.
You can do have a sort of VR studio akin to a gym. The spots in these "gyms" would accommodate for everything that is needed, space and equipment wise.
That would solve the problem the parent is stating.
Monthly membership. You go there to play, later to socialize at the "space bar" exchanging tales of lore with other like-minded people.
Physically sitting in the same room with a bunch of people who are not in VR is not the use case for VR. You might as well say that telephones are useless unless they are speakerphones.
The Valve Index and the Quest have been sold out for just about the entire year. Half Life: Alyx is one of the best gaming experiences I've had in my life. I have witnessed everyone who tried Beat Saber completely fall in love with it after about 10 minutes, including people who were 100% positive that they hated video games and would not enjoy it. It is obvious, if you have the right system and you do the right things, that VR is mind blowing.
BUT, the VR ecosystem is a shitshow. So many manufactures are making crappy headsets and wondering why they don't sell. The HTC Cosmos Elite, for example, ships with old base stations and clunky-as-hell Vive wands, and costs almost as much as an Index. Windows Mixed Reality is, for one, not "mixed reality" at all, and the tracking is so fucking broken I'm honestly surprised we haven't seen class action lawsuits. Most VR games are just normal 2d games with VR tacked on, or if they are made for VR they're tiny.
Valve made a good headset and it's been sold out since launch. They made a good game and it's won awards and sold to pretty much every single person who can play it. Facebook (as much as I hate they're a major player here) made a good headset with the Quest (not with the Rift), and it's been sold out since it launched as well.
Just make good products and we'll buy them FFS. It's not that complicated.
I didn't think I'd love my Quest as much as I do. I got it on a whim because someone here on HN was offering theirs for sale at a discount.
I wish I had more time to play it! I'll put it on and start playing, and two hours later I'm still going, I'm exhausted from the workout, and I don't want to stop.
And my six year old loves it too! She loves to draw in 3D. She loves the YouTube VR roller coasters, especially because she isn't big enough for the biggest coasters just yet.
And every other person whose tried it loves it too (sadly with lockdowns I don't get a chance to share very often because I don't see a lot of people and have to quarantine the unit for two days every time I loan it out).
My sister in law is an artist so I dropped her into the 3D paint program. In 10 minutes she had made a beautiful 3D sculpture from nothing. My brother refused to give it up for days because he couldn't stop playing.
And I just got a second unit from Amazon to participate in a virtual world experience for re:invent, and it was the most awesome way to have a remote meeting! The sound is directional, so you have an idea of who is talking, and the avatars have hands, so you can see people's hand movements as well as their head and body movements. It adds so much to the conversation to see body language.
Let's just say I'm a bigger fan than I thought I'd ever be. Especially since the last time I tried it it got really motion sick, but that was years ago. The tech has come a long way.
I think VR will become mainstream when it's good enough to replace large screens in productive work. It should leave large screens in dust, if done right.
Productivity is quite strongly correlated with screen size, so I'm expecting quite a leap in this regard when the right software is matched with the right hardware.
Yep, this is one of those threshold type things that makes future predictions wrong all the time. Currently the resolution is just too low - I really gave it a good try with a lot of motivation but it just doesn't cut it. You can make text readable but only if you size the virtual monitor to be huge and the effective resolution is way less in the end than a pretty cheap external monitor.
But once it hits the point of being usable I don't see why we won't see a complete domino effect where people start setting up complete virtual offices in VR. And that will ripple through whole teams flipping to VR a sa way of working. Putting aside sheer "size", you can make VR monitors any shape and in any position you want. So I can actually have a gigantic monitor with a complex technical diagram on it, then a vertical one next to it with a code listing - and these can be floating in space in a totally unrealistic way. Then I can have email floating in the air behind me ...
I actually considered this when I was buying a new monitor. "This thing will be obsolete pretty soon".
Headsets are still a little bulky (and not enough resolution) for that to happen. Once that's fixed (and more importantly, with many people shifting to work from home, so they don't have to care about people staring), I expect it to become a pretty popular thing.
If the virtual monitor is overlaying a camera feed of your environment(AR style), this will be amazing. Imagine a headset not much heavier than sunglasses sitting on your desk, rather than a big (or multiple!) monitors. Put it on, you have as much screen real state as you would like, and can be made to look like an actual monitor.
That's with our current 2D thinking. We can probably do more useful visualizations in 3D.
Exactly. And you can fill your whole room with interactive information. You could have hundreds or more files open at the same time and see how they interact. Human brain is pretty good at complex visual/spatial things and I don't think we are aware of the limits yet.
The resolution is pretty good already and rapidly getting better.
What I'm excited about is hand tracking [i] so that I can use a real keyboard (and interact with real objects e.g. coffee cup) to type while I'm wearing a headset.
thats true, but for most headsets, resolution still isn't high enough to read bodies of text without eye fatigue. until that is solved, I don't think VR will move from entertainment to productivity.
Varjo is getting closer to that resolution level, but their headsets are priced for enterprise ($8k i think?)
Perhaps part of the problem was a premature switch from exploration to exploitation?
When Facebook bought Oculus for $$$$, the collaborative community which had been pushing the envelope, exploring for possibilities, rapidly died. People took it as a hint to switch modes. And eye-tracking rent seekers, already in low-volume high-cost exploitation mode, weren't then incentivized to support exploration.
Gaming had dollars, and so became a dominating focus. But it also had challenging constraints, which further pruned exploration. Do you want higher resolution, to allow text and programming in VR? Well, a panel existed, but gaming standards of immersion and such were too GPU intensive for the market at that resolution, so ... feel free to diy it yourself. In an environment where diy was no longer a supported thing. Programmers - a niche market.
Facebook et al, even Chinese OEMs, aren't interested in niche, or in making "commodity" hardware. Consumer platforms, and lock-in, and unicorn dreams. Even while that further cripples exploration.
Nreal light AR glasses are a laptop-comparable 1080p 3D screen at 2 meters. As with their dev kit, consumer availability is now first in China, SK, and Japan, then later in Europe, and eventually in the US. So asia now, and maybe US late next year. And the glasses are developed on linux, but you can't have that - no unicorns there.
Here's this amazing tech, and instead of an exploratory ferment, we wait for a few large companies to navigate patent thickets, to eventually meet the severe constraints of creating mass-market consumer devices. And then we'll dig in to exploring.
Facebook has already released two mass market targeted VR headsets with moderate success. It's not console numbers yet, but then again, there's still plenty of low-hanging fruit to grab when it comes to technical improvements (and unlike early video game consoles, the market always has plenty of mature ecosystems for interactive games).
Yeah, sorry I was less than clear. The idea was that capabilities become available to us for exploration, via mass consumer and gaming products. A rather narrow and higher-latency channel. Rather than say a dynamic market of small companies and a diy community. Leaving plenty of low-hanging fruit not yet grabbed.
A less concentrated industry might have been more interested, creative, and effective, at gathering such fruit, and exploring for accessible markets. Perhaps yielding a less slow takeoff. A counter argument is that Intel's RealSense does exist to build on, and Leap Motion's hand tracker and Project NorthStar. A counter^2 argument is these are outliers, with LM's work only remaining available, because they dropped IIRC three separate acquisition attempts by Apple. Most work hasn't remained available to use and build on.
But perhaps a healthy commercial-diy blended market was never an option. Given a patent regime optimized for pharma-shaped industry. There seemed a long-term pre-concentration pattern of patent dodging via non-commercial software, and hardware "kits". Leaving many capabilities already unavailable, because a bit of commercially-motivated effort was needed, but discouraged by a too-small community market and/or associated patents.
The current concentration of effort may well get us more quickly to eventual phone-scale broad consumer adoption of XR. It has motivated the supply and R&D tech chain in a way a small market never could. But perhaps it has also contributed to a less-diverse flatter takeoff. And perhaps, if XR encounters difficulties with mass consumer adoption, it maybe have added a fragility risk of larger delays.
I should have made a bet like that with the "thought leader" who threatened to ban me from his blog after I said VR looked to be the next 3D TV.
The problem isn't the cost. It's that moving around while wearing VR headgear is only safe in either customized environments, like the Star Wars location based entertainment system, or when movement is in a small area, like Beat Saber. Which is why Beat Saber is the #1 VR game.
Read the setup and cautions for full-body tracking in VRChat.[1] It can be done, but it's not popular. Partly because it requires the agility of a dancer to use properly.
Wearing VR headgear while sitting down isn't worth the trouble. Plus about 10% of the population gets nauseated when visual and actual motion differ.
On the other hand, make an AR headset that sells for $79.95 and runs Pokemon Go, and you have a hit.
Even current Oculus Quest can detect and show objects in your environment. It doesn't seem that hard for VR in the future to utilize that and adapt the environment around you to mimic your obstacles. Another possibility is games that create infinite impossible maze (Tea For God). You can walk around in that game for hours without hitting anything.
You don't need customized environments, you need some free space around yourself. I live in a small apartment and I do just fine.
One of basic aspects of VR is setting up a virtual "play area" that the headset warns when you are close to leaving so I don't see how most of the complaints are valid.
> The problem isn't the cost. It's that moving around while wearing VR headgear is only safe in either customized environments, like the Star Wars location based entertainment system, or when movement is in a small area, like Beat Saber. Which is why Beat Saber is the #1 VR game.
You are on point with most VR systems. However, you should try the Oculus Quest 2. All you need to do is clean a room regularly. That said, Oculus Quest 2 has excellent and obstacle detection compared to other VR systems, as long as you're more conservative making your boundary (leave extra space between the boundary and an actual obstacle like your couch) you should be fine.
yes pokemon is 1000% the consumer XR killer app so far. People who have a conception of 'what is VR for' that doesn't make space for niantic are probably looking at it wrong.
the cheap hardware is coming, though not at that price level for a while. I think tilt5's board game AR is dropping sometime this year.
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But for all you jaded folks out there, let me tell you that this is an absolutely unstoppable evolution of computing. All entertainment since sung epic poetry has aimed to briefly take us into another world. Plays, novels, movies, theme parks, and video games have always offered immersive fantasy. This is the ultimate fufilment of that very human impulse, to consciously enter another world. If we lose sight of that, then it will be up to the next generation of technologists to create it.
I don't see why people are so obsessed with instant and explosive growth. Almost no recreational product has seen this kind of growth and they have all continued to exist just fine.
VR is ready today if its something you want. Its fun, cheap enough and has loads of games. If you hold out for something better you will always be waiting because there will always be something much better in 5 years.
Education (language learning, geography, biology, engineering...), real estate, porn, psychology, situational training (firemen), scientific visualization and collaboration, spatial painting and other artforms, social interaction, movie shots planning, etc.
Edit: gaming is larger than the movie and music industries combined
I think that at some point there will be an iPhone moment for VR. However, I think we're still far enough away from it to not know what it'll look like.
56% of US households have at least one gaming console.
It's a great demo but not something I want to spend much time in.
Though there’s something unpleasant about them that keeps me from going back when the novelty wears off. I think it might be because I don’t want to be standing and moving around when playing a game and if you’re not doing that, the motion is kind of unpleasant.
I’m not sure this is something it can really overcome. I think an AR overlay of our actual world is more likely to be the next real platform (assuming the hardware is possible to pull off something like this).
Being in VR is just kind of an unpleasant/isolating experience for me and I’m a pretty early adopter of most things.
In other people I’ve mostly seen a small number of games (mostly beat saber) keep people coming back, but I haven’t seen most people keep using it once the novelty wears off outside of that.
I think there are probably some narrow applications where it’s clearly better than not having it, but I’m skeptical of VR as a platform.
Maybe when the hardware is 10x better/lighter it’ll be a difference experience? We are pretty early on in the medium, movies and tv were pretty bad for the first fifty years. It might just take a while for people to figure out how to use VR well.
Fitness. It is much easier to grind in a VR game for an hour than it is to grind on a treadmill for the same amount of time.
I have a Quest, the games suck, but the fitness experience is paradigm changing. Beat Saber was and still is the Quest's killer app, but there are lot of similar games that keep the experience somewhat fresh (not to mention new beat saber music packs, I also use FitXR more than Beat Saber).
I bought my Quest back in May 2019, it died around June 2020, but I was already using it a couple of hours a day by then so had to get a new one from a scalper (during the Pandemic, Quest units were hard to get). I really don't want to go back to life without it.
I understand where you're coming from, but I disagree.
When I first got into VR back in 2013 it was cool for a minute, then the novelty wore off. I dabbled with it over the years, but it never stuck. I felt like you do.
2016 the CV1 came out and I was briefly reunited with a strong interest in VR which, eventually, faded. The next few years I didn't play much, and when I did, it wasn't for very long.
The problem was entirely CONTENT and it is FINALLY in 2020 starting to come around.
We have seen some absolutely excellent AAA games released that are loads of fun and not just glorified tech demos (though to be sure, those still exist).
- POPULATION:ONE
- Metal of Honor: Above and Beyond
- Half Life: Alyx
- Asgard's Wrath
Any many more. I'm finally finding myself using my VR headsets DAILY. In fact my Oculus CV1 which came out 4 years ago is still my all around favorite!
I think as content improves (especially multiplayer content) and the headsets get more comfortable and easy to put on / take off, we will hopefully see continued expansion of this medium. It's THE way to game, if you ask me. Nothing is more engaging then jumping off a building, spreading my arms to fly, then pulling them together to grip my gun and land a quick snipe on someone in mid air. Keyboard and mouse can suck it.
The appeal, unarguably I believe, is in being immersed in the fantasy, which I think is a different kind of appeal from what you seek. I actively dislike "abnegation" type games, but the idea of being transported to somewhere else, exploring different realities, amazes me (I'm dying to try Myst on VR), and putting physical effort on it adds to the fantasy. So maybe VR isn't for you, simple as that.
I've seem lots of people (online, yes, but still) keep coming back for Pavlov, Population One, Half-Life Alyx, Star Wars Squadron, VR Chat... I really think there's something there.
Could this be because of the missing resistance while moving / throwing / touching VR objects?
This is what stops me from buying VR. I don’t want a new form of gaming(r)(tm), I just need 3D display and my chair, kbd & mouse to play my regular AAA games as-is, but with depth perception and appropriate fov. Instead they suggest you to stand and waive your arms in few pretty average if not crappy games. Also, finding a VR-enabled game that will actually work with your headset is not as easy as one may think.
Project Cars 2 and DCS make it worth the headset alone - throw in Elite Dangerous and No Man Sky and I have enough VR entertainment to keep me busy for the foreseeable.
I'm the exact opposite. I enjoy that a lot more. It's more immersive, and I've already lost about 15 lbs just playing VR. imo it's a fitness machine disguised as a video game peripheral
One of the biggest reasons to be skeptical of VR taking off is that Facebook is one of the major players. Between the login shenanigans and their anti-competitive dealings with developers, they have an opportunity to single-handedly tank the industry.
There's some competition on PC headsets, Rift headsets are not even the best, feature-wise. But just like the quest, they score very high on the cost-benefit analysis (I guess we pay with a combination of cash and data).
Ironically, by getting acquired by a giant company, Quest development was set back by that many years.
The real problem isn't technology or even adoption, it's that people who work at giant companies suck at making games.
Facebook wants to be the company to invent the first mainstream VR Metaverse, but that doesn't mean they won't invent the hardware and get beaten to market on the software. They are about to release Horizons which is clearly in this vein, but I expect they are still too early.
I don't understand this statement. The Oculus store is open to developers and is filled with third party games. All of the games I personally play are not Oculus/Facebook games.
Many companies besides Facebook have developed games for the Quest. I guess you could say Facebook sucks at working with game developers, but I’m not sure if that’s true either. Unreal and Unity have well-developed integrations with Oculus [0].
I think where Facebook really falls down is tying customers’ FB account to their Oculus Store purchases (and ability to use the Quest at all). They’re applying a social media platform’s aggressive algorithms to suspend or ban accounts which violate their expansive TOS, which is wrong in consumer product and digital marketplace space. For that reason, mixed with personal experience at the hands of Facebook's algorithms, I have no interest in developing for Oculus.
[0] https://developer.oculus.com/get-started/
What does this mean? We likely wouldnt even have a Quest (or really even a 3rd headset imo) from Oculus if not for Facebook. The Oculus founders were all almost completely about building high end enthusiast hardware, which wouldve almost surely made the market die off again.
Wouldn’t have been possible without a large enough company to bankroll it.
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The feeling of vertigo and momentum in games like Jet Island that makes you weak in the knees, looking out your cockpit and being awestruck by planets and stations in Star Wars Squadrons or Elite Dangerous, dodging bullets in Pistol Whip and Superhot. The dream of the 90's is alive - the technology is here! It's so good and I can't wait until quarantine is over to share this with more people.
Previously I'd used a friend's Oculus DK1 (not good) and then later a friend's HTC Vive (getting there). The Quest 2 is a major improvement and I look forward to the next generation of headsets.
Unfortunately, I lost my lunch after 5 minutes or so and had to lay in a dark room for a couple hours to get over a bout of nausea. Excited for the future though if they can solve that problem for people like me (I also get seasick easily).
Nausea is heavily tied to framerate and latency -- a really beefy machine with a Valve Index should be a lot easier on your lunch.
Wondering if the same thing is not going to happen with VR as well.
I also enjoy watching movies in it as well, I don't watch a lot and was considering buying a TV but this has really delayed me doing so.
Maybe it is just me but I can achieve perfectly satisfactory immersion with a good book.
I think a domain where it can exceptionally shine is the adult entertainment industry.
Comparing to phones, I think this is the point where we have keypad-phones. Content is still limited, but using your imagination you can create good experiences.
Personally, I switched to VR/Quest gaming from PC this autumn, and I feel good about it. I feel healthier than sitting in front of PC. I also feel less isolated with the family, as we have more 'playing together' now. As a developer, I'm exited to try out to create new kind of experiences, like I did 16 years ago with phone SDK's.
If you think yourself as a creator, I think you feel a fool if you wait another ten years - seeing the times when a single person could do something meaningful, going past.
I have tried VR many times over the years (I vividly recall there was an interesting arcade game back around 1990 that used it). I got a vive. I tried others.
But after using it for a while, I returned to a monitor and keyboard as my preferred way of interacting. There's still something sort of self-limiting/tiring about VR.
Is it just me?
It's surprising how much imagination people lack.
It's like people who told me "humans will never fall I'm love with an artificial human". Lo and behold, that Chinese AI has 600M users. Now the discussion have moved to " they shouldn't " and then it will change to "I want one too".
The same will happen with VR and AR.
Your second paragraph is compelling, except there are exceptions. Remember 3d tv?
I think once the need for a headset is eliminated (like Star Trek's holodeck) it will take off. Until then, having to strap something over your face is asking too much. It's too isolating.
You can't obstruct people's eyes - glasses get a pass because they're a handicap, and folks with sunglasses communicate by wearing them.
We will need to live many more rounds of evolution to give up the idea that covering your eyes to 'go somewhere else' won't be a survivally threatening move...
and what's more, we're just starting to fully appreciate how smells and air (quality, pressure, etc) play a role in 'us being there' - don't even begin to think about the small gravitational pull between all of our bodies at a concert.
Long story short, it will take a long time and a lot of generations to die off before we appreciate VR as much as a physical experience.
[0]https://virtualspeech.com/blog/history-of-vr
If that's the case, the sales are hardly convincing. If this was such a revolution you'd see more people buying them. Beyond head tracking and movement tracking, the fact that you cant feel anything (no feedback) in the world you are supposed to be in makes it illusion breaking.
Except for the iPhone part, I bet this exact comment was made in 1991.
It's not clear this generation of technologists will be able to get there even keeping it in sight. Which isn't to say it's not worth plugging away at.
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I went with code-only approach (no binary assets) and built a primitive development environment that works in VR. Now I have a neat little virtual shed with different experiments and demo projects. Geometrical landscapes, driving & flying, teleporting, various gizmos...
Currently I'm tweaking physics engine to work with hand tracking skeleton. Masses connected with springs turn out to be amazingly palpable even without any haptic feedback and with simple cartoonish visuals.
VR is already fun and we're in for a wild ride once AR hits the market.
I, personally, see VR as being much more exciting than AR, from an entertainment and capabilities perspective. I don't want to be limited to my small living room or whatever setting I'm in. When I'm in the real world outside of my house, I can't imagine what AR would bring that wouldn't be completely utilitarian, like replacing my phone/watch with a virtual device, holochat calls, maybe add more trees, etc. But, I'm also not very imaginative.
What do you see in the future with AR?
AR lets you bring virtual experiences into a more ad hoc setting. You can't really play a VR game while waiting for the bus but you could be feeding your AR pet.
I briefly played the HoloLens AR game where you have to shoot at robotic bugs that crawl out from your walls.[1] The fact that I could duck behind my office partition was awesome. The fact that when I blew a hole in my wall I could see the "studs" behind it was similarly cool.
In an ideal world, I could trace out my house and play up and down the stairs. Or go to a field or forest and play in a whole other world.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29xnzxgCx6I
It's predictable that big players will want to control every aspect of AR because it gets them complete attention while device is on. Facebook has already pounced. I'm more interested in VR/AR that is in service of user and that means open source.
But that's not to say that fully immersive experiences have no future. I just don't think VR will fully take off until it's available in a small form-factor, and likely combined with AR in the same device.
I saw similar thing from Mr.doob[3]. Few years ago Carmack talked about live-coding VR[4], but code was on 2D monitor.
[0] https://twitter.com/j_miskov/status/1312701109232902144 [1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/mqw1s04z70dm3y4/vr-physics.mp4?dl=... [2] https://github.com/jmiskovic/indeck [3] https://twitter.com/mrdoob/status/1263498538316636162 [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30wNPgx6D8E
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWbm9AzgDxw
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqI_j6pDdjg (start here if you're a developer)
3. https://youtu.be/STZN6qTGRbQ
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XafA4WeppxM
I for one can't wait for full field of vision pop up adds to infest our daily lives. How exiting.
I'll take advantage of it just as soon as uBlock Origin VR is released.
Flashback to 1995. I'm a 17 year old PFY invited to beta test a VR headset from a local company. My Uncle was an investor and I was technically savvy and the target market.
I had a copy of Descent that supported VR, and while it was a bit of a hassle to get setup, I got it working. The experience was incredible. After the first use I said to myself "this is the future". I had permission to test the headset for two weeks, and I wanted my friends to see it as well.
So I invited them over that weekend. And that's where the problem set in. When one person was using the headset, they were gone. You couldn't interact with them in any way. They might as well have been in a different room. Then I said to myself "this is not the future", and haven't touched VR since.
There is no amount of technology that can get over this problem. It's not about FOV or resolution or immersion. It's a social problem. If you live alone at home, and want to plugin then great. But if you live with someone, its distant, weird, and kinda creepy, to have the other person in a headset and unreachable.
Or for local play, there are one-vs-many party games where one player wears a headset and interacts with a group of people in the same room who aren't in VR.
Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes is a great example of this where the other players are referring to a paper manual to help you defuse a bomb. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqelfBKuiic
There's Acron: Attack of the Squirrels where one person has a headset and other people play against them as the squirrels with their phones. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP29BxhvHfc
Or Davigo, maybe a less social one because it's VR vs PCs and not likely to be in one room, where the VR player is a giant trying to swat at the tiny humans who are playing a 3rd person game where they team up and throw bombs at the giant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL7a63MMx6Q
Even if you don't have a game where other people can be involved, you can still cast the headset view to TVs and tablets. It can be plenty of fun to pass a single headset around taking turns in Beat Saber if everyone else can see what's happening.
I'm guessing none of that was the case in 1995, so I wouldn't be so quick to stick to a 25 year old judgement of what the technology can do.
Would I play it in VR mode for hours on end every night and stop talking to real people? No. But not all my activities need to be social either. I can go for a four hour hike in the woods by myself and no one gives me a hard time for being too isolated. Or maybe they do, but I don’t care because sometimes that’s how I want to spend my time. To each their own.
One other feature of the Quest that I should mention - you can double-tap the side of the headset at any time to turn the game world off and immediately switch to "passthrough" mode where you see through the headset's tracking cameras. This obviously works best with single player games that can pause themselves until you tap back in, but in those games it makes it no big deal to drop out of the game for a moment to interact with people and things in the real world. A bit weird to talk to you while you have a big headset on your face, sure. But this was added in a software update well after launch, and it's way better for staying available to the real world than needing to take the headset on and off.
That is a really depressing and dystopian future that I am not sure if I want to live in. Yes, MMOs and games like GTA-O, Roblox, or Fortnite are in the same area already now available. But in my opinion this only increases the actual isolation and I would believe that the post VR experience emotional drop down could be severe. It also brings up the backdrop of Ready Player One, where everybody is occupied by the VR while living in decrepit containers seemingly without a desire to fix it.
The player is not isolated because they know they are being watched. Works good with BeatSaber, SuperHot, etc.
It's basically the same as a group taking turns at an arcade machine — not solitary.
A friend and I bought quests and we both loved them except for one really annoying problem: space
At least as of early 2020, there was a huge market mismatch with VR: the people that have 6'x6' or more space to play in live far out in the suburbs, but the people that have the disposable income to just by a quest just for fun tend to live in apartments in the city. My friend and I both had pretty spacious living conditions for living in a city, but we perpetually joked about the dream of one day having enough room that the occulus didn't warn about having less space than required.
But with the sudden migration of many people out of cities and into more spacious suburban housing I'm curious if this will create an increase demand for VR. If you have an extra 10'x10' room that can dramatically change how fun the VR experience is.
I stopped playing VR mostly because I was tired of re-arranging furniture and re-calibrating the Index when I did so.
I guess if you live in a house and have a basement or 'rec room' with no furniture, it's less of a hassle to play ping pong or Beat Sabre in VR. Otherwise it's VR Poker with its random social toxicity where I can sit on the couch and interact with people if I find a table without kids or mean people in it.
I agree VR isn't great for a party game or hanging out with your friends in your living room, but that's OK because that's not the experience most people are having today.
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Honestly, the privacy policy made me a bit uncomfortable too
The CAVE approach projects images onto wall-sized screens (eg, via back-projection), and can be 1-wall up to 5- or 6- walls, if the floor/ceiling is categorized as a "wall".
This is massively expensive compared to the VR that's widespread/affordable these days.
But it's also far more social, where multiple people can be present, though at least in the 1990s the head-tracker only followed one person. And they could easily see each other.
Handwaving, with the right synchronization on the glasses and high frame rates, I could imagine multiple head-trackers. Back then our frame rate was limited by the decay rate of the green phosphor in the projector. These days I suppose a wall of large displays, edge-to-edge, with very high frame rates interleaved for multiple users, might work. Again, I haven't followed what's going on in VR, but it might be a technology which addresses at least some of what you correctly point out.
Carolina Cruz-Neira, the developer of the CAVE (and at the time with the email address "cavewoman"), has some lectures on the social VR and her research, on YouTube. Don't remember which ones specifically talk about it, and couldn't find one in a quick look.
Yeah, nothing has changed in social VR in 25 years.
/s.
There are multiplayer async party games that can be played with 10 people (I've done this a lot!). There is online multiplayer. Dismissing VR because you played descent on a 3dof box 25 yrs ago is kind of lame.
> There is no amount of technology that can get over this problem. It's not about FOV or resolution or immersion
This is frustratingly dismissive and easily disproven. Look at Acron: Attack of the Squirrels! Look at Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes!
I'm as isolated playing Counter-Strike on my PC as when I am on the Oculus Quest.
Wouldn’t each person in the room having a VR head seat solve this problem?
All that said, I think people playing alone is a big enough demographic to support a VR breakout, if the killer app comes along.
My wife watched me play the entirety of Half Life Alyx that way, and she enjoyed it a lot. And were were able to talk and share the experience the entire time.
You just need a VR headset for everybody...
https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/2345082335516570
https://takelings.com/
You can also stream the VR game to your television if it's a single player experience.
You're also discounting the fact that we have the internet now and we can do multiplayer online.
That sounds like a "not enough headsets" problem.
Also, that is like lamenting the lack of co-op split-screen games. Many games supported that mode back in the day, they don't anymore. Because people are either playing over the internet OR bringing their own consoles.
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But I'd also say that FOV is really, really important. Right now the experience is just like putting a little TV on your face with an IMU. Immersion requires peripheral vision and spatial audio.
It helps to have at least two friends for that scenario. for Just one friend you're probably better off playing a non-vr game and trading the controller.
these days we're farther apart and one friend has a child so he's worried about covid. we play "ghosts" (Phasmophobia) once in a while.
in summary: 2 friends required (minimum) mirror the screen headphones off the ear
Both have headsets (used to be a cost issue, gradually getting solved) and play the same thing.
Or one has AR glasses and can peek into what the other is doing and communicate with them.
An internal camera captures the face under the headset and presents it on the outside with correct parallax (could be presented with AR or with auto stereo display), AI in the headset can tell when someone is wanting attention etc. and use other cameras with depth reconstruction or depth sensors to fade them into the VR player's world.
That would solve the problem the parent is stating.
Monthly membership. You go there to play, later to socialize at the "space bar" exchanging tales of lore with other like-minded people.
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BUT, the VR ecosystem is a shitshow. So many manufactures are making crappy headsets and wondering why they don't sell. The HTC Cosmos Elite, for example, ships with old base stations and clunky-as-hell Vive wands, and costs almost as much as an Index. Windows Mixed Reality is, for one, not "mixed reality" at all, and the tracking is so fucking broken I'm honestly surprised we haven't seen class action lawsuits. Most VR games are just normal 2d games with VR tacked on, or if they are made for VR they're tiny.
Valve made a good headset and it's been sold out since launch. They made a good game and it's won awards and sold to pretty much every single person who can play it. Facebook (as much as I hate they're a major player here) made a good headset with the Quest (not with the Rift), and it's been sold out since it launched as well.
Just make good products and we'll buy them FFS. It's not that complicated.
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I wish I had more time to play it! I'll put it on and start playing, and two hours later I'm still going, I'm exhausted from the workout, and I don't want to stop.
And my six year old loves it too! She loves to draw in 3D. She loves the YouTube VR roller coasters, especially because she isn't big enough for the biggest coasters just yet.
And every other person whose tried it loves it too (sadly with lockdowns I don't get a chance to share very often because I don't see a lot of people and have to quarantine the unit for two days every time I loan it out).
My sister in law is an artist so I dropped her into the 3D paint program. In 10 minutes she had made a beautiful 3D sculpture from nothing. My brother refused to give it up for days because he couldn't stop playing.
And I just got a second unit from Amazon to participate in a virtual world experience for re:invent, and it was the most awesome way to have a remote meeting! The sound is directional, so you have an idea of who is talking, and the avatars have hands, so you can see people's hand movements as well as their head and body movements. It adds so much to the conversation to see body language.
Let's just say I'm a bigger fan than I thought I'd ever be. Especially since the last time I tried it it got really motion sick, but that was years ago. The tech has come a long way.
Productivity is quite strongly correlated with screen size, so I'm expecting quite a leap in this regard when the right software is matched with the right hardware.
But once it hits the point of being usable I don't see why we won't see a complete domino effect where people start setting up complete virtual offices in VR. And that will ripple through whole teams flipping to VR a sa way of working. Putting aside sheer "size", you can make VR monitors any shape and in any position you want. So I can actually have a gigantic monitor with a complex technical diagram on it, then a vertical one next to it with a code listing - and these can be floating in space in a totally unrealistic way. Then I can have email floating in the air behind me ...
Headsets are still a little bulky (and not enough resolution) for that to happen. Once that's fixed (and more importantly, with many people shifting to work from home, so they don't have to care about people staring), I expect it to become a pretty popular thing.
If the virtual monitor is overlaying a camera feed of your environment(AR style), this will be amazing. Imagine a headset not much heavier than sunglasses sitting on your desk, rather than a big (or multiple!) monitors. Put it on, you have as much screen real state as you would like, and can be made to look like an actual monitor.
That's with our current 2D thinking. We can probably do more useful visualizations in 3D.
The resolution is pretty good already and rapidly getting better.
What I'm excited about is hand tracking [i] so that I can use a real keyboard (and interact with real objects e.g. coffee cup) to type while I'm wearing a headset.
[i] https://youtu.be/XnG1l0qQW9k
Varjo is getting closer to that resolution level, but their headsets are priced for enterprise ($8k i think?)
When Facebook bought Oculus for $$$$, the collaborative community which had been pushing the envelope, exploring for possibilities, rapidly died. People took it as a hint to switch modes. And eye-tracking rent seekers, already in low-volume high-cost exploitation mode, weren't then incentivized to support exploration.
Gaming had dollars, and so became a dominating focus. But it also had challenging constraints, which further pruned exploration. Do you want higher resolution, to allow text and programming in VR? Well, a panel existed, but gaming standards of immersion and such were too GPU intensive for the market at that resolution, so ... feel free to diy it yourself. In an environment where diy was no longer a supported thing. Programmers - a niche market.
Facebook et al, even Chinese OEMs, aren't interested in niche, or in making "commodity" hardware. Consumer platforms, and lock-in, and unicorn dreams. Even while that further cripples exploration.
Nreal light AR glasses are a laptop-comparable 1080p 3D screen at 2 meters. As with their dev kit, consumer availability is now first in China, SK, and Japan, then later in Europe, and eventually in the US. So asia now, and maybe US late next year. And the glasses are developed on linux, but you can't have that - no unicorns there.
Here's this amazing tech, and instead of an exploratory ferment, we wait for a few large companies to navigate patent thickets, to eventually meet the severe constraints of creating mass-market consumer devices. And then we'll dig in to exploring.
A less concentrated industry might have been more interested, creative, and effective, at gathering such fruit, and exploring for accessible markets. Perhaps yielding a less slow takeoff. A counter argument is that Intel's RealSense does exist to build on, and Leap Motion's hand tracker and Project NorthStar. A counter^2 argument is these are outliers, with LM's work only remaining available, because they dropped IIRC three separate acquisition attempts by Apple. Most work hasn't remained available to use and build on.
But perhaps a healthy commercial-diy blended market was never an option. Given a patent regime optimized for pharma-shaped industry. There seemed a long-term pre-concentration pattern of patent dodging via non-commercial software, and hardware "kits". Leaving many capabilities already unavailable, because a bit of commercially-motivated effort was needed, but discouraged by a too-small community market and/or associated patents.
The current concentration of effort may well get us more quickly to eventual phone-scale broad consumer adoption of XR. It has motivated the supply and R&D tech chain in a way a small market never could. But perhaps it has also contributed to a less-diverse flatter takeoff. And perhaps, if XR encounters difficulties with mass consumer adoption, it maybe have added a fragility risk of larger delays.
The problem isn't the cost. It's that moving around while wearing VR headgear is only safe in either customized environments, like the Star Wars location based entertainment system, or when movement is in a small area, like Beat Saber. Which is why Beat Saber is the #1 VR game.
Read the setup and cautions for full-body tracking in VRChat.[1] It can be done, but it's not popular. Partly because it requires the agility of a dancer to use properly.
Wearing VR headgear while sitting down isn't worth the trouble. Plus about 10% of the population gets nauseated when visual and actual motion differ.
On the other hand, make an AR headset that sells for $79.95 and runs Pokemon Go, and you have a hit.
[1] https://docs.vrchat.com/docs/full-body-tracking
You don't need customized environments, you need some free space around yourself. I live in a small apartment and I do just fine.
One of basic aspects of VR is setting up a virtual "play area" that the headset warns when you are close to leaving so I don't see how most of the complaints are valid.
You are on point with most VR systems. However, you should try the Oculus Quest 2. All you need to do is clean a room regularly. That said, Oculus Quest 2 has excellent and obstacle detection compared to other VR systems, as long as you're more conservative making your boundary (leave extra space between the boundary and an actual obstacle like your couch) you should be fine.
the cheap hardware is coming, though not at that price level for a while. I think tilt5's board game AR is dropping sometime this year.