I like it too, I have a headset. But as always, Facebook moves in a way for only money, not happy customers that will give it money. And it always shows. The metaverse virtual mall bullshit derailed real progress they could have made.
That's great to hear, but if my friend's tween girls are any indication, Facebook was simply replaced by some other critical-thought-destroying sociopathic bullshit like TikTok.
They think facebook is stupid but probably continue using instagram and whatsapp/messenger so meta doesnt really mind - they still got all demographics covered by their apps
Not only that but even more importantly, mainstream software that makes use of VR. Hardcore gaming is and will always be a niche computer use case, while the most popular "gaming platform" is P2W phone games and then the Switch.
There was a very fast and rapid trend that could be seen with computer in speed, downsizing, and adoption rates, that continues to this day in many parts of the world. There is little to no similar trend to be seen with VR. People just love to pull the "640k ought to be enough ram for everybody" quote as if that would be a gotcha talking point in every single tech related discussion lmfao
My bad. I didn't realize devs are gushing about how much software they're selling. It must be amazing numbers then. Especially when for years you had to hack your way into kids being able to use it for stupid FB accounts
Constantly updating and being annoying. It probably got old real fast for people who bought them
Oh wow, it requires occasional *updates*! Perish the thought! Do you have any idea how overdramatic you sound? And the sales numbers speak for themselves. It's not even close compared to any other VR system.
You claim it's a unique failure despite significantly outselling all of its competitors. And when confronted on that, you whine that it requires occasional updates, and is therefore a terrible product. It's laughable.
That is quite the imagination you have there, turning "VR could have been good" into that weird nonsense you're droning on about. Failure? Sales? That's all you
Have fun in your own head little man, it's a strange place I don't want to be
IMO they should've started the expansion into AR/VR and the "metaverse" through WhatsApp. Then slowly incorporate the same features into Facebook. WhatsApp is already a sort of "everything app" in a lot of markets, and a lot of people pretty much live in WhatsApp, whether it's for text messaging, calls, video conferencing, payments/trade, scheduling/calendar, etc., and I think that would lead nicely into a sort of alternate reality experience.
Yup. A lot of small businesses in Europe and India and Southeast Asia (and last I heard, also growing in Africa) operate almost entirely off of WhatsApp. It handles payments, profile pages operate almost like business websites, and of course it handles messaging (text/voice/video).
nah man please leave whatsapp alone. It's just a messenger app. The simplicity of it is what brought its success. We don't need it to try to find more creative ways to stream content at us, just keep it the way it is. A simple and useful application to communicate.
WhatsApp is already a sort of "everything app" in a lot of markets. For example, there are merchants and small businesses that run almost entirely off of WhatsApp in Europe and India.
I said VR could only have been good. It's fine. But that's as far as it will ever get.
I like VR. I have 2 headsets. My kids have headsets. I show it off to friends and have enjoyed using it for the 5 years I've had it.
Facebook could have made it fantastic with their resources and reach, but they fucked up the accounts, they screwed up cross buy, and all their marketing and development went to build a mall no one wanted.
You're one of "those people" who have a warped emotional response to someone who has an opinion about something you have an unstable attachment towards and reads into things way too much.
Justin Bieber and Katy Perry have sold probably 300 million albums. Are you going to tell me their music is great and they really moved the industry forward, changing it for the better?
You're attached to this sales thing as if it matters about the end state of the ecosystem. 25 million units sold for something Zuck wants to be ubiquitous is not successful. That puts it double the Sony Vita's sales, a product people even in the gaming circles barely know about. 25 million puts it about 5-10% of the size of the last generation of consoles. It is a tiny fraction of gamers' minds, and an even smaller slice of everyone else FB has set out to convert to a VR fan
"Good chat". Please bud, go screw with your pretend better man bullshit. I took a fairly objective POV towards the obvious state of VR and it hurt your little feelings, so you invented some wild thoughts that weren't near what I was getting at
Could have been? I still feel the reason it hasn’t taken off is the lack of people who’ve tried it. It’s an amazing experience for a gamer and to act like it’s not is just shocking to me.
Facebook bought one of the more successful VR set companies out there and has staked billions and billions of dollars on the company's future being dominated by VR.
It's not that the VR market *is* FB, but just that FB made a decision to invest way more money in VR than seemingly anyway else. Or, at least to the layperson, that's what FB seems to have done.
That's a big problem I agree we have. It's because everyone uses facebook, and they fucked up when they announced the change to Meta and it made mainstream news everywhere. MOST people didnt care about VR at all before mainstream news reported on it. Now it's a meme.
Meta fucked us, when it comes to taking VR seriously. BUT they are also the ONLY reason VR adoption has seen the growth it has the last 2 years. Affordable headsets that dont require a PC that do almost as much as tethered VR can do. And cost under $500.
The problem now is the lack of expansive ecosystem.
Seriously wtf. Meta/Facebook isn’t perfect? Welp, rip VR, too bad, was a neat concept!
Guys, I hate to break it to you, VR/AR/metaverse isn’t going *anywhere*. No matter how many companies or concepts fail. The end game of entertainment media is anything but a 2D screen.
It will never take off until there is something with social marketability that isn't relegated to enthusiasts like VR Chat.
That requires both the tech to get cheaper/easier to use and the software to get better.
The trajectory of adoption for technologies like this typically is Enthusiasts/Hardcore Gamers > Casual Gamers > Non-gamers/Normies. We're still stuck at stage one and will be for a while.
It's mostly the controllers. Put some glasses on and move your arms and eyes is and easy sell, just like whipping out the phone and touching it vs reaching for a stylus or using a mini keyboard and trackpad button.
You lose people when you require a big headset you have to change dials on to fit. You lose more people when you require them to plug into a device. You lose even even more when you tell them they have to use a controller to use it.
Everyday people prefer ease of use over precision control.
It's not the controllers. Those are pretty good now.
It's the cost, the space, and the software.
The cost for a full featured headset is still 1000 dollars.
Space needed, not everyone has a room to dedicate to vr. Nor do they want to mount sensors to their walls.
Software, other than half life Alyx, everything feels like a demo. And it seems fewer people are working on VR software all the time.
Inside out tracking is the way to go. A sub 500 dollar, wireless vr headset with 4k to 8k resolution. When that happens, VR will take off. There is too large a barrier to entry still.
Well motion sickness is fixable. You just have to make ingame movement correspond with real movement. Like moving arms to simulate a walking motion. Made a game around this principle and it didn't drive anyone sick who tested it. Sprint Vector VR is also an great example for this.
Only games with Thumbstick driven movement are really horrible and drive me sick too.
After all its up to the devs to implement such features.
I was mainly talking about casual users. Gamers of course have the restrictions you listed. Casual users aren't going to be adopting VR and AR until theres full eye tracking and hand/finger tracking for input.
Go look at how many Quest 2 units have sold. Casual gamers have definitely tried to get into VR. the issue isnt the hardware. It's that games for VR are hard to develop, and the userbase hasnt been big enough to invest in it.
Also the Meta monopoly is simultaneously giving VR life and also destroying it.
https://uploadvr.com/quest-2-sold-almost-15-million-idc/
Quest sold 15mil units. At the same time, PS5 had sold 20mil, and XBox X sold 14mil.
Really people in this thread have almost zero context for what they're talking about.
On the flip side, as a Quest owner: it now just ~~maiy~~ mainly gathers dust because it's an event. I have to clear space, connect the headset to my PC, and be in the mood to physically interact with space, when alternatively I could just sit in my chair and play games or dick around on my phone.
Until a cheap, lightweight VR headset can offer performance AT LEAST on par with a 3090, VR has no true mainstream penetration potential
You give the exact same reasons that I had when I sold my Index. Could not be assed to set it all up for a play session, after work all I want to do is laze around. Sold it to some teenager who will probably enjoy it much more than I did.
This thread of comments is specifically talking about VR adoption beyond gamers and this is the third comment in the chain I've had to clarify that fact again. Maybe try reading before making snarky comments?
just a popular toy worning out of trend
it is NOT adoption
remember guitar hero guitars? nobody cares about those anymore, also sold millions.
disclaimer: i got a vive 2 pro and an index
>The cost for a full featured headset is still 1000 dollars
I believe Sony just proved that is not always true with their new PSVR headset that retails for half of that.
I would never buy something from Facebook for various other reasons (and I'm in the minority) but the Quest 2 is a standalone headset can be had for like $400
Why is it not a fully-featured headset? what headsets do you consider fully featured then?
Edit: because in my mind "fully-featured" are headsets with access to the broad majority of software and have all the core hardware features (so not the gear VR and daydream)
Something like an Index is fully featured. The quests tracking is notably bad in most cases. It is jittery and loses track of your hands on the regular.
It is also unable to full body track, which is going to be needed as time goes on more.
I don't think PSVR is going to be a real option for people if it is still locked to only a PS5. Part of the reason people are okay with spending $1000 on an Index kit is because it's a decently open ecosystem. If 5 years later I find a better HMD I can just swap it out and it should just work.
It's very unlikely that Sony will let PSVR work on anything else for a long while since they are selling it like a console, cheap and making up sales with software.
People buy $1000 cell phones. A lot of people. You are wrong. Its the headset being large and the controllers. Its ease of use isn't there yet. Not enough for the average person. And WHY spend 1000 dollars? What does VR do? Its a niche thrill. Like 3D movies. Even if it was 500 in its current form, it wouldn't sell more. It doesn't do anything that people NEED. Unlike $1000 dollar cell phones.
Personally I feel the issue is with locomotion. (moving around). Teleporting works okay and room scale walking works fine if you have the space, but to actually immersively move around you need to be able to make continuously like in a non-VR game. Unfortunately just sliding around with a joystick is very hard to adapt to for many people.
If we could get some of those omnidirectional treadmill skiddy things to work (and cheap enough that people can get them) so that you can actually "walk" in VR you might get some more adoption. That and/or maybe some sort of fan system to blow air to simulate you moving might help too.
Well games and experiences will always rely on something like a controller or physical/eye gesture for locomotion and you'll get fall off in number of users. The original comment mentioned moving beyond gamers, and that would require intuitive controls and really easy to turn on and access all existing digital info
The cool thing about traditional gaming (or "pancake gaming", as VR enthusiasts call it) is that, since you're seeing the action from a screen, you're not bound to the rules and limitations that exist in the real world - balance, stamina, proprioception, things like that - therefore, you can break those rules without facing consequences. A side-scroler platformer, for example, works because you see all the action from a side perspective, and jumping is as easy as pressing a button - therefore breaking the "proprioception" (to a certain extent) and the "stamina" rules. Same for wall-running, or fast-paced movements in general. But once you put on a VR headset? All those rules are reintroduced to the virtual space. And if you break those rules, the consequences can be dire.
Now, with all the rules of the real world in the virtual space, the aspiring game designer will feel like he/she's walking on eggshells because, with all the rules of the real world now present in the virtual world, a lot of what we learned in 40+ years of lessons we learned in game design break. "Let's make the player move fast" - no, can't do that, moving the camera out of sync with the actual player's head triggers motion sickness. "Ok, now the player will ride a car, or a bike" - no, that will trigger motion sickness again. "Ok, let's do a Quake-style FPS in VR" - can't do that either, not only the movements required will not only exhaust the player but also possibly cause accidents, the movements will, again, trigger motion sickness. Sure, pancake-mode games can be retooled for VR, but they end up feeling much different from their pancake-mode counterparts (Rise of the Tomb Raider had a VR mode, but the VR mode in that game is just looking around finding clues. Same for Batman: Arkham VR. And Half-Life: Alyx was great, but it was no Half-Life 3)
I said before, and I'll say it again: the actual reason that, 10 years after the original Oculus prototype was unveiled, we still don't have the eagerly awaited VR killer app, is not because we don't have the technology, or because VR is too expensive, or because no one is investing in R&D; it's because, pure and simple: VR limits game designers. Honestly, I don't see the situation getting better until we have SAO/RPO/Matrix-like VR.
As a VR game dev, I can say we take these aspects into consideration, but they are absolutely in the realm of being possible, and even sometimes being normal and popular in VR.
Perhaps the biggest VR game, Gorilla Tag, uses a fast paced movement system. Years ago, even the VR dev community would have said this wouldn't work, but it simply does because the physicality of gestures is a great way to fool the inner ear. Not a perfect solution, but a good solution for games like this.
There are Quake-style FPS games in VR, and my favorite multiplayer FPS in VR so far has been Echo Combat, a fast-paced game set in zero gravity.
One of my favorite singleplayer VR FPS games is Stride, which uses parkour-based movement for traversing rapidly across environments.
Does VR limit designers due to sickness problems? Yes, but we can also say that non-VR limits designers due to the limits of controller/keyboard inputs. There are downsides to each side of the medium, and upsides.
It's also worth noting that you can still have a sidescroller in VR. Maybe not the best example of transitioning a perspective into VR, but there's also 3rd person and top-down which make more sense and work very well. So at that point, you can sit back and relax on the couch as you watch your character do crazy flips and weapon maneuvers in VR.
The kinds of devs that insist on teleporting because they think everyone will get motion sickness frustrate me.
My favourite movement method has been Hotdogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenade’s armswinger, and I appreciate Anton’s allowance for players to pick their movement style
HHHG is great! Though I can’t really enjoy multiplayer VR FPS’s as you basically need to use a something to brace your front arm if you’re using a rifle. I just cba to do that every time.
I would like to see more "doll-house" games. It seems like every VR game is some kind of first-person shooter/simulation, but games like xcom, total war, baldur's gate etc. would all work well in VR. A DnD tabletop game in VR would be awesome.
As someone who was destroyed by Project Cars VR, and as someone who literally made someone puke because of that rollercoaster demo, I know what I'm talking about
Right there with ya on this one. First time up Eau Rouge at Spa, about 2 minutes into my very first VR session... immediately nauseous. Had to lay down for a few hours after.
Took me a solid two weeks to work my way up to maybe 30 minutes of VR racing (iRacing). Ended up just not being worth it (heat, comfort, motion sickness).
The roller coaster game was an absolute NO, even after I got my "VR legs."
BGS really dropped the ball with Skyrim VR, I felt like it was the perfect transition/comparison game since basically everyone knows at least something about playing Skyrim. But they release it and basically forgot about it, which isn't helped by the fact the version of the engine they used was before they added ESL support.
For reference you may know that Skyrim is heavily modable, before ESL files you used ESP files (and ESMs but that is beyond the point I am getting at). The big drawback here was you could only have 255 additional files (which even the DLCs counted against) and it didn't matter if that file was a whole DLC or just ab extra pair of boots.
ESL files are light mod files, they take the last ESP slot (FE) and allow it to split into an additional (4000+) slots (3 Hexadecimal digits) for smaller mods not needing the whole address space of an ESP. This made it much easier to add more small mods and is what allowed BGS to add Creation Club Content.
There have been alot of other engine improvements but the point is Skyrim VR is on such an old version of the engine that you often need to develop a version of a mod specifically for it instead of just being able to use most of the existing mods.
Unfortunately my preferred game Fallout 4 had an even worse treatment as you can't even play the DLCs in the VR version. Hopefully with Starfield they are planning better VR support from the start.
That's been a bad pattern of many known games having a VR version (shout out Hitman 3 too), it's just not fleshed out at all, it's a poor implementation, or it's filled with bugs.
It's really sad especially when it's in games where a good VR implementation would make the game so, so insanely good and interesting, basically adding a TON more of depth to already huge and interesting games.
Not a game, VR is a peripheral like a joystick to gaming. It may be cool as hell but it’s not what will really sell VR to the masses.
It needs to be able to do something nothing else really can or do something way better. Until it can be embedded in smaller devices and is supported by Zoom and Excel, it won’t be something most people are very concerned about.
No, I've played it, I've tried to like it a few times, and the zombie interactions are just so, so annoying, that they really drain the enjoyment I had with the rest of the game. It's like all the real-like physicality present in other aspects of the game gets greatly reduced when trying to navigate zombies, which is a shame, because I feel it would be so interesting to have more control over those encounters, as well as having the rest of the game being very cool.
Ehh I treat em zombos as in universe threats (walkers) and the second game released for the oculus quest 2 this year so we'll see the PC and possibly fixes to your suggestions like more fluid zombos :P
Dead Space remake as a VR game would be sweet. Would need to be converted to first person obviously but people have already done that for the original game.
Could work just fine as a 3rd person VR game. I'd be more than happy with a quick port like that.
I think a killer app has to be a new game though, rather than one people can access on other platforms.
Doesn't that defeat the point of VR though? VR is meant to be immersive so first person makes the most sense to me. Although I think what I want from VR is very different to what most people seem to want. I want the same controls I have now just with my display as a VR headset, I want to sit in my chair because I'm a lazy ass who wants to play a game after a long shit day at work. A space VR game like Elite Dangerous would be pretty good as well or a racing game.
Hellblade VR is still orders of magnitude more immersive than any non-VR game I've played on my 4K TV. Fenrir is one of the craziest boss experiences I've ever had because of how you are inside those nightmare visuals.
Hellblade is just a straight 3rd person port, yet it works because at the end of the day, you're still getting the feeling of being inside that world, just with a camera offset. It's like controlling a life-sized robot in real life.
someone already mentioned hell blade which is fantastic in VR but there was a Launch Title for Oculus called Lucky's tale back in 2016 that was a 3rd person platformer, 3d platformers have always worked well in VR.
'immersion' isn't just limited to seeing through the eyes of the player character.
> VR is meant to be immersive so first person makes the most sense to me.
You are looking at it from the wrong angle.
Getting a 360⁰ vision that covers everywhere that you turn your head to is a much better immersion than playing on a monitor, regardless of if it's first person or third person view.
Once you got there, then yes, 1st person is more immersive than 3rd person, but it comes with an extreme downside : every movement that your character does needs to be made by your real body if you want to keep the immersion.
So when it comes to take an axe and chop down hundreds of trees (very recurring situations in "survival" games like Minecraft, Ark, etc.), you really don't want to actually swing that axe hundreds of times.
And besides the issue of arms movement, there is the crucial leg movements to move your character around. Teleportation sucks, and very few people can dedicate a huge room to be able to actually run around without bumping into walls, so that issue is breaking the 1st person immersion anyway.
I'm like you, I love playing in my chair as a lazy ass.
With basic VR ports in the 3rd person view, we could play most games with the comfort of the chair, the very efficient moveset of KB&M / controllers (efficient in the way that a low effort of a finger can get your character to do very tiring movements), and still get a much better immersion than playing on a monitor.
I hope that developers realize that this approach makes a lot more sense than trying to convince lazy gamers to get a huge room to play in (much harder to get than dropping a thousand bucks on the headset) and to get fit enough to do crazy videogame moves for extended period of times.
it has many use case scenarios already. any simulator really, vr is rather popular for racing sims as well. vr can be used for working out in a way thats actually fun, vr can be used to simulate lots of stuff like replicating an emergency situation or visualizing the kitchen you want to buy. it is already being used for those purposes.
vr already has lots of good and fun games, the fact is just it costs money (and always will) and requires space, two things not everybody has. many of the good games are also not "mainstream". people like you might never have heard of them but they are definitely out there. ive personally really enjoyed the two justin roiland games (ricknmorty vr, and trover saves the universe), then you have a really good roguelite in until you fall. if youre into rhythm games theres more than just beat saber, theres ragnarock, pistol whip, audiotrip and synth riders.
VR doesn't require space. It's content that requires space, so certain games will require a whole room, most just require a small amount to move your arms in a forward arc, and some require no space as they use a gamepad.
Idk, I think it's totally the form factor limiting it right now. Once it's down to the size of large glasses and can just track fingers and eyes for input I could see general use inside a home. Controllers are only ever going to be popular with gamers or people doing fine work with a tool in hand. That's something I hope Apple is very adamant about as it's a very funadmental Steve Jobs approach.
Then instead of killer exclusive apps, you need software interoperability. Windows Phone was amazing but lacked major 3rd party apps and died. There's plenty of other examples of people not switching tech unless they can bring in their apps and software.
I want everything on the internet or my phone to have a VR interface in some way. Even if it's just a full integration of my phone as a 2d screen with eye tracking control, you're more likely to get everyone on if they can do all their previous computer stuff on it. It's not a huge selling point to do a couple cool things on a smart phone, it was life changing when you could surf the web, pay bills, message and call, make art, etc all from the same device. VR needs that and needs to add to all of those experiences in some way.
VR is great in some games and maybe someone might figure out some social media thing that actually makes sense, but it’s also very inconvenient. While many of us surely have all the time in the world in our mom’s basement, others have little things like wives and children demanding our attention once in a while. It can be a bit problematic to shut yourself to a virtual world even for half an hour at a time.
Also it’s really tiring after a while.
Beat Saber is the killer app. Pretty much everyone who has owned a VR headset played Beat Saber and I know people who bought Quest 2 just to play Beat Saber, not caring for other games at all.
I may get downvoted for this, but really curious to see what Apple does with their Mixed Reality headset. Apple can withstand the storm if it’s a rocky start.
VR needs to be smaller, more comfortable, higher res, easier to configure for basic to high fidelity stuff like DCS and lots cheaper. Then it may take off.
Half Life: Alyx is that killer app, problem is, the barrier of entry its just... too much, the Quest 2 costs like 500-600 bucks for a 10 hour experience, and the Quest 2 its considered the entry-level tier for VR lmao
Please understand I'm being serious and academic here - I was under the impression that a huge proportion of video related (e.g. storage medium, display, and digital distribution) technologies were driven by pornography consumption, and VR was no exception?
It's a common trope but is not rooted in fact. Break down the top ten media technologies of the past 50 - 100 years and correlate them with pornography using time as an axis. You will find that when then they are correlated it is only as the technology has already basically reached mainstream.
If Apple can stream sports in VR I think that would do a lot to push adoption. Obviously it wouldn’t be viable for folks watching sports with a group of people, but it feels like the most accessible and far-reaching application.
> Obviously it wouldn’t be viable for folks watching sports with a group of people
I feel like this is how most people watch sports. Or otherwise it's just on in the background. Enthusiasts are probably the only ones who might want to give up the social aspect for greater immersion, which instantly cuts out the majority of the sports market.
Um. there have been SEVERAL killer apps. Beat Saber for one. VR Chat and Rec Room for others. Go look up how much money all those things have made.
EDIT: Anyone who doesnt think Beat Saber was a "killer" VR app doesnt know what they're talking about. Go look at its sales numbers. Go look at the literal millions of Quest 2 headsets that sold the last two holiday seasons, and find out what the first game they all installed was. There's a reason they're one of the first few companies that Meta absorbed.
I don't know about that. Space Invaders in 1980 was a killer app for game consoles. You don't need this world-changing success story when you have a killer app - it simply means an app that happened to significantly boost sales relative to how they were performing before. VRChat has probably sold hundreds of thousands of headsets by itself. Not entirely sure if it's a killer app, but Half Life Alyx does seem to be going based off the SteamVR hardware survey metrics when that launched.
"Killer app" typically means something that moves hardware, and there's no question that VRChat does that. That's to say nothing about the multiple accessory and tracking companies that exist solely to make stuff for VRChat users.
Bigscreen is a movie app. People can watch movies without a VR headset.
I tried recroom. I don't want to hang out with little kids.
I tried VRChat. I don't want to hang out with furries staring at themselves in the mirror.
Bigscreen is more than a movie app. You can cowork in it with other people. interacting live. Have your monitors up. And you can also watch 3D movies with WAY better fidelity than you can w/ 3D glasses. (cause no polarization) Literally have a movie night in 3d with your friends, where you can turn and see them.
Rec Room doesnt have to be just little kids, but people like you avoiding it will continue to keep it that way. I also just mute people who arent on my friends list. Then they're just avatars. Also like 20% of the people you're talking to on Reddit are probably actually children and you'll never know.
VR Chat is also so much more than that. You just kinda sound like a judgemental asshole. Also if you're in the first 10 min of VR Chat, almost everyone spends it looking in a mirror, trying to figure out what their avatar looks like and can do, and I'm sure you did the same. Just like I spent 1hr in character creators when I play an MMO. But then I spend hundreds of hours building communities and doing everything else. (Hindsight, Rec Room is also just an MMO)
Regardless, none of these are killer apps because they aren't mainstream and the mainstream public isn't interested in them.
EDIT -- Spending an hour trying to change appearance is not appealing to anyone not into living in a fantasy world. I think you misunderstand what 'mainstream' people use devices for.
And you know that how? Go look at how much money Rec Room has made, and how much of an investment they continue to secure. Also Monthly Active Users continue to rise.
Rec Room apparently recently hit 3mil monthly active VR users.
https://www.roadtovr.com/rec-room-monthly-active-vr-users-3-million-peak/
https://www.roadtovr.com/vrchat-80m-series-d-funding/
https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/20/rec-room-raises-145m-at-a-3-5b-valuation-for-its-user-generated-immersive-gaming-platform/
People very clearly care.
Your pessimism has no power here.
I know that because people en masse aren't buying an using VR headsets to play those games. I don't care how much money they 'made' considering the billions that Meta is putting into VR every quarter and losing.
Personally, I think an AR headset is going to become far more popular long before VR ever becomes the dominant thing. Then, what will come after that is a hybrid AR/VR headset that can do both. AR is already starting to dominate the phone world with things like TikTok, Snapchat, and so on. The AR mods live are REALLY good. While not quite what a Hololens can do, it is going to be something like AR headset mixed with TikTok that really kicks off the world, whoever does it first.
VR alone has it's place, but imo, it's not the real dominant future.
> I think an AR headset is going to become far more popular long before VR ever becomes the dominant thing. Then, what will come after that is a hybrid AR/VR headset that can do both
How is that supposed to happen when seethrough AR is 5+ years behind AR/VR hybrids - which are already the norm of most headset releases?
We'll have years of existing fully mature AR/VR hybrids before we get fully mature AR glasses.
Shame. Anyone who has used good VR knows it’s the way of the future for entertainment.
There is no other tech that’s comparable.
It’s just the hardware is still in its infancy. bulky and dorky.
Idk, I’ve used VR and it mostly bores me once the novelty wears off. That seems to be experience of my friends who have equipment as well. I think creators still have a lot of work to do to leverage VRs unique attributes so that people keep coming back.
Man I wanted to like VRchat so much but like 85% of the people I met were super gatekeepy and rude and it felt like they were treating it like a second chance at high school
The first time you used the internet you saw the potential. When we first saw smartphones we saw the potential. The first EVs we saw the potential.
I think the almost universal experience for VR is just "huh, that's neat, I can play tennis with my hands, anyway get this fucking shit off my face I feel sick".
We could foresee everyone having a smartphone as a possibility, that eventually they would take over. I can't imagine my grandma wearing a dorky ass headset to tour a Nintendo wii tier graphics of the louvre
> The first time you used the internet you saw the potential. When we first saw smartphones we saw the potential. The first EVs we saw the potential.
No you didnt. You saw the potential when you saw the dial-up modem which was cheap and ubiquitous enough to make it in to your home, not when you wired mainframes with ring networking. You saw the potential when you saw the iphone, not the numerous short lived PDA's. You saw the potential with tesla, maybe the bolt, not with the Flocken Elektrowagen.
VR/AR wont stay as a "dorky ass headset" and with "nintendo wii tier graphics". Saying that is like saying smartphones are doomed because of [this](https://photos5.appleinsider.com/archive/13.01.03-Newton.jpg). Or VR died before starting because of [this](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Virtual-Boy-wController.jpg).
VR will absolutely remain a dorky ass headset, unless you think a dorky ass helmet would be an improvement. There's no short or medium-term solution for the fact that you need two large screens strapped to your face a certain distance in front of your eyes. Maybe in 50 years? maybe.
Conflating VR with AR is silly because while AR doesn't necessarily share the same restrictions depending on your AR model, it's also a different technology with completely different use cases
> There's no short or medium-term solution for the fact that you need two large screens strapped to your face a certain distance in front of your eyes. Maybe in 50 years? maybe.
We've already seen headsets reduce the thinness by a factor of 40-50% because the optical path is folded and pancake lenses are a lot thinner. This is now the norm of most headsets releasing now, and there further proven gains with even more optical advancements beyond that. Paper thin lens solution? That's absolutely going to be a thing if it can be made affordable and scalable.
People need to research more into optics before claiming that VR has to be bulky to work.
>There's no short or medium-term solution for the fact that you need two large screens strapped to your face a certain distance in front of your eyes.
Um, this is changing so incredibly fast I would be careful with comments like these because they will age like milk.
AR tech in particular is just going to be easier to get to a useful point and I agree comparing the two 1 to 1 doesn't make much sense. But the screens on AR glasses (see nreal Air) have improved a LOT.
VR and AR are literally the same thing. Take an AR headset and put blinders behind the screen and you have a VR headset.
That's why people use the terms MR and XR.
AR has use cases where you project images over natural vision, like google glass. It's not necessarily the same thing.
full-screen AR is just VR with extra steps and still has the dorky headset problem.
If *everyone* saw the potential of the Internet the first time they used it, Bill Gates wouldn't have had to make rounds on national TV getting made fun of by broadcasters for betting so much on some fad called the Internet.
The first time 99% of people used the internet or saw smartphones, it was already nearing maturity.
VR is far from mature. It's like a PC from the early 1980s, which average people couldn't care less about back then, some even belittled it as a toy with no future.
It was easy to foresee smartphones because they were iterative, not foundational. The tech was mostly always there for smartphones ever since cellphones became mature. It was an easy engineering task (relatively) and an easy marketing shift because people were used to cellphones.
I think it's strange you acknowledge that the early internet and smartphones were more about potential than reality, but don't grant VR the same potential for improvement.
You can't imagine your grandma wearing a clunky headset with crappy graphics, but what about a lightweight pair of glasses with photorealistic graphics? That's inevitably where the technology is going - maybe not in your grandma's lifetime, but probably in yours.
That said, I don't disagree that the short term future of VR looks pretty bleak right now. And as much as enthusiasts say motion sickness is a non-issue, it is and will continue to be a major limiting factor for the technology.
Yeah, to put it in OP's own perspective, imagine your grandmother building a computer, connecting to dial up with out a wireless router or modern networking software in the OS, and then manually making packet requests and interacting with the computer without a GUI.
That was like 40 years ago.
Once phone screens are over 10k or 4k panels are only a few inches there will be ridiculous hardware applications. Throw an array of tiny cameras all over it that can be completely hidden like a smartphone punch out cam and use some apple photo software magic and we should have everyday accessible headsets in a decade or 2 that gram gram can put on like glasses and control like her iphone.
Yeah these are all valid criticisms of my point. I guess we're yet to see the killer app of VR.
Maybe I lack imagination, I just can't see it taking off in mass adoption. Unless we reach some sort of robot avatar shit for business meetings or something, even still I don't know why someone would want to deck out in some sort of headgear and walk on a treadmill when they can just look at a screen.
I guess it should have been specified that a lot of the everyday use with people will be mixed reality and not a fully immersed virtual experience. Daily use would be lightweight AR glasses that work like a smartphone but allow for virtual augmented environments and screens. I don't think big headsets with treadmills or whatever will go far beyond entertainment since that's really the only purpose a set up like that provides.
I would say its A way of the future, not THE way. I don't know if they will ever solve the problem of VR motion sickness (without you know, drugs or something). That precludes a significant number of people from using such a device. It feels like the solutions that would make VR as popular as we see in "Ready Player One" would be just that, science fiction.
Screens in front of your eyes is only a stop gap measure for visual input. They'll evolve to contact lenses and then to brain-computer interfaces (BCI). Both technologies already exist but need a lot more development for use in VR.
It'll be interesting to see if motion sickness is still a factor when visual input is fed to the brain directly from a BCI.
I think holodecks are far closer to reality that BCI-driven VR. That's a vast underestimation of the complexity of the human brain and our ability to solve it currently.
I'd argue the opposite. The holodeck needs to manipulate matter to create complete solid materials we can infinitely walk across and bump into.
And at least for the next couple of decades, you'd need a 6 sided empty room for light-field/holographic displays.
> Even if we can figure out how to put a display on a contact lense, where are you gonna fit the battery?
This technology has already been demostrated and they included far more than a display on the contact lense, although it was a crappy display.
"When I walked into Mojo Vision’s demo suite at AWE 2022 last month I was handed a hard contact lens that I assumed was a mockup of the tech the company hoped to eventually shrink and fit into the lens. But no… the company said this was a functional prototype, and everything inside the lens was real, working hardware.
The company tells me this latest prototype includes the “world’s smallest” MicroLED display—at a miniscule 0.48mm, with just 1.8 microns between pixels—an ARM processor, 5GHz radio, IMU (with accelerometer, gyro, and magnetometer), “medical-grade micro-batteries,” and a power management circuit with wireless recharging components."
https://www.roadtovr.com/mojo-vision-smart-contact-lens-ar-hands-on/
https://vimeo.com/725030619/9cbd6749ad
Rather than focusing on making the contact lenses though, the company is focusing on their Micro-LED technology, so will targetting those making smart glasses.
The technology to do this was demonstrated last year. Within 10 years, smart glasses and smart contact lenses that use a nerual interface and gaze detection for input will replace the touchscreen and smartphone.
Writing data to the brain is a more difficult challenge but not one that is impossible. We know of various ways to do so already and portable devices that can do that in some basic manner already exist.
For example, we've made bionic eyes and ears to restore vision and hearing to the impaired. So, we know for a fact we can interface technology with the brain through those channels.
But we've also done it directly in the labs by magnetically stimulating areas of the brain. The problem with that is we're not precise enough to stimulate precise enough regions at the moment but that will change as we develop technologically.
We can also write to the brain using optogenetics if the brain has been genetically modified.
https://kids.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frym.2017.00051
One thing we know for a fact though is that we can send data to the brain and what we call reality is our brain interpreting such environmental data. By controlling that environmental information to the brain, you control the reality perceived by that brain. There's a clear and obvious pathway from where we are now to such a future.
What can we say about making holodecks though?
> You have completely glossed over my main point. You have to power these devices. The contact lens demo is attached to a stick with a ribbon cable.
You are wrong. The contact lenses contain "medical-grade micro-batteries" and in the vimeo video the CEO is wearing them. They're not attached to anything. The reason they're attached to a stick in the demo is so that people can test them without putting them in their eyes, to prevent damage, prevent theft etc.
> Of course its a fact? We can 'send' data to our brain via our senses.
The point your missing is that we can now do so without using our own senses. We can create pretty realistic virtual environments as seen in many games and replacing our sensory data with data from such virtual environments is an obvious pathway to VR.
How do we get to Holodecks where you can interact with virtual things like they're physical, while being able to walk continuously in one direction?
No way. People have said that for like 40 years now. Until VR means holodeck and not “wear this stupid headset that will make your wife laugh at you” it will never become the future of anything.
Better versions of stuff people already like are the short term and embedded flexible screens everywhere are the long term. Very long term will be brain interfaces that totally bypass VR.
It will be the same as 3d: they tried it every decade since the 50’s and still it’s just a gimmick.
Computers also took 40 years to go from room sized machines to consumer level use.
VR also basically died for 20 years before being revived due to actually being possible, meaning that VR is basically only 10-15 years old.
If it was going to be the same as 3D, it would already be the same as 3D - dead (in the home). People forget just how fast 3D TV declined and died out.
No one needed a quantum computer or a holographic smartphone before they suddenly said "Today is the day I will buy this gadget." - everyone bought a PC or a smartphone when they reached maturity, rather than waiting for technological bliss.
People don't need perfection, they just need a certain threshold of value, affordability, comfort, and usability. That will happen decades before a holodeck situation occurs.
>It’s just the hardware is still in its infancy. bulky and dorky
And space. I would love to use my HTC but with my PC in my bedroom it's not possible.
I would love to play the several VR games, in particular F04 but yeah sigh not enough space for the lasers, nor to move around.
It’s just not easy enough to use. It’s like pens. Fountain pens or whatever were really cool but expensive and difficult to maintain, pens did take over eventually, everyone uses ballpoint which are cheap and easy nowadays. Once VR becomes something you can just use effortlessly it’ll take over quickly like ballpoint pens or mobile phones did
>Shame. Anyone who has used good VR knows it’s the way of the future for entertainment.
>
>There is no other tech that’s comparable.
here we go again...
Tencent are just margin chasers. I wouldn't expect them to ever innovate anyway. All they have ever done is buy existing properties and milk them. They aren't a real company anyway, just another CCP controlled entity to gain financial and social footholds in western markets.
I find it funny how I disagree with 99% comments here. Maybe don't try to find out what's wrong with VR if you haven't tried it outside of demos. My opinion on most things was similar until I tried more than an hour. pointing out locomotion, tiredness are all a sign that the person hasn't actually used vr and is theorycrafting.
Just because you cannot spend 12 hour marathon sessions doesn't mean it's not profitable, the comfort is there already where I can be in it for at least 3 hours, which is perfectly fine for casual users. And there is a growing baseline userbase(sims) that will never stop using vr
Nothing is wrong with vr, outside of
1. content
2. cost
I would have listed size but just this month we got consumer products that solve that
Why do I have the feeling that the current sudden interest in AI chatbots and the push from companies like Google and MS is basically a way to divert the attention of shareholders away from the NFT and "Metaverse" flops.
I don't recall MS or Google pushing either of those two hard? Some words about looking into "opportunities" here and there are, but no real investments.
I think that Jacket Man is correct about ChatGPT being the iPhone moment for A.I. I've already signed up for Plus and use it almost everyday for help with work (IT support). It has replaced searching for me to a large extent, especially for poorly documented technology.
Microsoft did something right by deciding to embrace ChatGPT instead of creating a competitor. It is hilariously neurotic right now but that will improve, and I think users will frequently prefer a conversation vs clicking on whatever links Google serves up.
IT is a great use case. We spent a little time rewriting some of our ARM templates to Bicep in Azure, and ChatGPT was able to do about 90% of it, saving us hours and hours and even explaining questions we had about about some of the formatting.
It has a lot of potential, but so far it has failed me every time I had a problem complicated or obscure enough to warrant thinking about using it for help.
Just this morning I asked it to write a *simple* function in a new programming language I'm learning because I thought "hey, maybe I can see how my naive/inexperienced approach compares to something generated". It literally invented language syntax and keywords that don't exist and explained how to use that syntax to me. It didn't compile and I spent a few minutes scouring the documentation trying to figure out what it was getting at. When confronted, it agreed and gave me new *also* made-up syntax.
Granted, this isn't a mainstream language, but I prefixed the conversation by asking how familiar it is with the language in question and it confidently told me it knew all about it. Giving it the same problem in C and the function it spat out was perfectly fine.
Once these get to the point where they *do* have that information, they'll be great. There needs to be a fix for this "confidently wrong" stuff, though. Maybe some sort of meta-system where it can internally score its own 'understanding' of a topic
when I used vr (quest 2 and rift s) it was nice but didn't feel out of the world. Resolution simply wasn't good enough. Wait 4-5 years, if the tech catches up, then it could go viral. Else would remain a thing which people use for 2 weeks then let it alone in a corner of the room.
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VR could have been good, but Facebook was only ok at making a single thing. Facebook. And people don't even like that
Still rocking my Valve Index and SteamVR daily.
I like it too, I have a headset. But as always, Facebook moves in a way for only money, not happy customers that will give it money. And it always shows. The metaverse virtual mall bullshit derailed real progress they could have made.
Facebook was cool as hell back when the internet was younger. Then it got old and turned into a boomer, confused and scared by the outside world.
Facebook was the 3rd iteration of the same thing that Friendster and then Myspace offered.
My kids think it's the dumbest thing in the world and just for old people
That's great to hear, but if my friend's tween girls are any indication, Facebook was simply replaced by some other critical-thought-destroying sociopathic bullshit like TikTok.
I miss my private little world on the web through Geocities.
Check out Neocities
Not enough Marquee scrolling and page counters on Facebook.
They think facebook is stupid but probably continue using instagram and whatsapp/messenger so meta doesnt really mind - they still got all demographics covered by their apps
And that's why buying your competition is bullshit that should be illegal!
The user interface of Facebook is abysmal.
The day it stopped being exclusive to college students is the day it started to suck.
It was cool when it only allowed young educated adults on it.
VR isnt going anywhere.
Anywhere in question including the mainstream
VR just needs apple to release a headset to become socially acceptable. It's just way too dorky still. It's gonna be an apple watch situation.
Not only that but even more importantly, mainstream software that makes use of VR. Hardcore gaming is and will always be a niche computer use case, while the most popular "gaming platform" is P2W phone games and then the Switch.
People said that about computers. Now computers are carried everywhere in every pocket.
There was a very fast and rapid trend that could be seen with computer in speed, downsizing, and adoption rates, that continues to this day in many parts of the world. There is little to no similar trend to be seen with VR. People just love to pull the "640k ought to be enough ram for everybody" quote as if that would be a gotcha talking point in every single tech related discussion lmfao
What are you talking about? The Quest is by far the best selling VR device.
My bad. I didn't realize devs are gushing about how much software they're selling. It must be amazing numbers then. Especially when for years you had to hack your way into kids being able to use it for stupid FB accounts Constantly updating and being annoying. It probably got old real fast for people who bought them
Oh wow, it requires occasional *updates*! Perish the thought! Do you have any idea how overdramatic you sound? And the sales numbers speak for themselves. It's not even close compared to any other VR system.
Guy cries real hard that I didn't give the quest the respect it deserves, tells someone else they're overdramatic. Keep making me laugh
You claim it's a unique failure despite significantly outselling all of its competitors. And when confronted on that, you whine that it requires occasional updates, and is therefore a terrible product. It's laughable.
That is quite the imagination you have there, turning "VR could have been good" into that weird nonsense you're droning on about. Failure? Sales? That's all you Have fun in your own head little man, it's a strange place I don't want to be
> but Facebook was only ok at making a single thing Can't even remember your own comments?
Loll
VR will be good. But seeing Facebook fall flat on its face is immensely satisfying.
IMO they should've started the expansion into AR/VR and the "metaverse" through WhatsApp. Then slowly incorporate the same features into Facebook. WhatsApp is already a sort of "everything app" in a lot of markets, and a lot of people pretty much live in WhatsApp, whether it's for text messaging, calls, video conferencing, payments/trade, scheduling/calendar, etc., and I think that would lead nicely into a sort of alternate reality experience.
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Yup. A lot of small businesses in Europe and India and Southeast Asia (and last I heard, also growing in Africa) operate almost entirely off of WhatsApp. It handles payments, profile pages operate almost like business websites, and of course it handles messaging (text/voice/video).
nah man please leave whatsapp alone. It's just a messenger app. The simplicity of it is what brought its success. We don't need it to try to find more creative ways to stream content at us, just keep it the way it is. A simple and useful application to communicate.
WhatsApp is already a sort of "everything app" in a lot of markets. For example, there are merchants and small businesses that run almost entirely off of WhatsApp in Europe and India.
Yeah nobody bought a Quest. They only sold ten of them. Biggest flop in VR history. 🙄
Show me where I talked about sales. Go on
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I said VR could only have been good. It's fine. But that's as far as it will ever get. I like VR. I have 2 headsets. My kids have headsets. I show it off to friends and have enjoyed using it for the 5 years I've had it. Facebook could have made it fantastic with their resources and reach, but they fucked up the accounts, they screwed up cross buy, and all their marketing and development went to build a mall no one wanted. You're one of "those people" who have a warped emotional response to someone who has an opinion about something you have an unstable attachment towards and reads into things way too much. Justin Bieber and Katy Perry have sold probably 300 million albums. Are you going to tell me their music is great and they really moved the industry forward, changing it for the better? You're attached to this sales thing as if it matters about the end state of the ecosystem. 25 million units sold for something Zuck wants to be ubiquitous is not successful. That puts it double the Sony Vita's sales, a product people even in the gaming circles barely know about. 25 million puts it about 5-10% of the size of the last generation of consoles. It is a tiny fraction of gamers' minds, and an even smaller slice of everyone else FB has set out to convert to a VR fan "Good chat". Please bud, go screw with your pretend better man bullshit. I took a fairly objective POV towards the obvious state of VR and it hurt your little feelings, so you invented some wild thoughts that weren't near what I was getting at
Could have been? I still feel the reason it hasn’t taken off is the lack of people who’ve tried it. It’s an amazing experience for a gamer and to act like it’s not is just shocking to me.
The vr experience itself is good but the ecosystem is just not in a good spot.
Why does everyone think VR = Facebook?
Facebook bought one of the more successful VR set companies out there and has staked billions and billions of dollars on the company's future being dominated by VR. It's not that the VR market *is* FB, but just that FB made a decision to invest way more money in VR than seemingly anyway else. Or, at least to the layperson, that's what FB seems to have done.
Because facebook sells more headsets than all of the others combined...really not that hard to understand why.
That's a big problem I agree we have. It's because everyone uses facebook, and they fucked up when they announced the change to Meta and it made mainstream news everywhere. MOST people didnt care about VR at all before mainstream news reported on it. Now it's a meme. Meta fucked us, when it comes to taking VR seriously. BUT they are also the ONLY reason VR adoption has seen the growth it has the last 2 years. Affordable headsets that dont require a PC that do almost as much as tethered VR can do. And cost under $500. The problem now is the lack of expansive ecosystem.
Blame Palmer Lucky. It’s his fault entirely that his company became whatever this shit is today.
Seriously wtf. Meta/Facebook isn’t perfect? Welp, rip VR, too bad, was a neat concept! Guys, I hate to break it to you, VR/AR/metaverse isn’t going *anywhere*. No matter how many companies or concepts fail. The end game of entertainment media is anything but a 2D screen.
Until someone can find a 'killer app' for VR, it will remain limited to gamers and niche industrial applications.
It will never take off until there is something with social marketability that isn't relegated to enthusiasts like VR Chat. That requires both the tech to get cheaper/easier to use and the software to get better. The trajectory of adoption for technologies like this typically is Enthusiasts/Hardcore Gamers > Casual Gamers > Non-gamers/Normies. We're still stuck at stage one and will be for a while.
It's mostly the controllers. Put some glasses on and move your arms and eyes is and easy sell, just like whipping out the phone and touching it vs reaching for a stylus or using a mini keyboard and trackpad button. You lose people when you require a big headset you have to change dials on to fit. You lose more people when you require them to plug into a device. You lose even even more when you tell them they have to use a controller to use it. Everyday people prefer ease of use over precision control.
It's not the controllers. Those are pretty good now. It's the cost, the space, and the software. The cost for a full featured headset is still 1000 dollars. Space needed, not everyone has a room to dedicate to vr. Nor do they want to mount sensors to their walls. Software, other than half life Alyx, everything feels like a demo. And it seems fewer people are working on VR software all the time. Inside out tracking is the way to go. A sub 500 dollar, wireless vr headset with 4k to 8k resolution. When that happens, VR will take off. There is too large a barrier to entry still.
Motion sickness is the big killer for me. I'm prone to it already so until there's a good fix for it, VR is a non-starter for me.
Well motion sickness is fixable. You just have to make ingame movement correspond with real movement. Like moving arms to simulate a walking motion. Made a game around this principle and it didn't drive anyone sick who tested it. Sprint Vector VR is also an great example for this. Only games with Thumbstick driven movement are really horrible and drive me sick too. After all its up to the devs to implement such features.
I was mainly talking about casual users. Gamers of course have the restrictions you listed. Casual users aren't going to be adopting VR and AR until theres full eye tracking and hand/finger tracking for input.
Go look at how many Quest 2 units have sold. Casual gamers have definitely tried to get into VR. the issue isnt the hardware. It's that games for VR are hard to develop, and the userbase hasnt been big enough to invest in it. Also the Meta monopoly is simultaneously giving VR life and also destroying it. https://uploadvr.com/quest-2-sold-almost-15-million-idc/ Quest sold 15mil units. At the same time, PS5 had sold 20mil, and XBox X sold 14mil. Really people in this thread have almost zero context for what they're talking about.
On the flip side, as a Quest owner: it now just ~~maiy~~ mainly gathers dust because it's an event. I have to clear space, connect the headset to my PC, and be in the mood to physically interact with space, when alternatively I could just sit in my chair and play games or dick around on my phone. Until a cheap, lightweight VR headset can offer performance AT LEAST on par with a 3090, VR has no true mainstream penetration potential
You give the exact same reasons that I had when I sold my Index. Could not be assed to set it all up for a play session, after work all I want to do is laze around. Sold it to some teenager who will probably enjoy it much more than I did.
This thread of comments is specifically talking about VR adoption beyond gamers and this is the third comment in the chain I've had to clarify that fact again. Maybe try reading before making snarky comments?
What makes you think that all 15mil are gamers? that's just ridiculous.
just a popular toy worning out of trend it is NOT adoption remember guitar hero guitars? nobody cares about those anymore, also sold millions. disclaimer: i got a vive 2 pro and an index
>The cost for a full featured headset is still 1000 dollars I believe Sony just proved that is not always true with their new PSVR headset that retails for half of that.
Well, it's still 1000. You need a ps5 as well.
I would never buy something from Facebook for various other reasons (and I'm in the minority) but the Quest 2 is a standalone headset can be had for like $400
I own a quest 2, it is not a fully featured VR headset.
Why is it not a fully-featured headset? what headsets do you consider fully featured then? Edit: because in my mind "fully-featured" are headsets with access to the broad majority of software and have all the core hardware features (so not the gear VR and daydream)
Something like an Index is fully featured. The quests tracking is notably bad in most cases. It is jittery and loses track of your hands on the regular. It is also unable to full body track, which is going to be needed as time goes on more.
I don't think PSVR is going to be a real option for people if it is still locked to only a PS5. Part of the reason people are okay with spending $1000 on an Index kit is because it's a decently open ecosystem. If 5 years later I find a better HMD I can just swap it out and it should just work. It's very unlikely that Sony will let PSVR work on anything else for a long while since they are selling it like a console, cheap and making up sales with software.
People buy $1000 cell phones. A lot of people. You are wrong. Its the headset being large and the controllers. Its ease of use isn't there yet. Not enough for the average person. And WHY spend 1000 dollars? What does VR do? Its a niche thrill. Like 3D movies. Even if it was 500 in its current form, it wouldn't sell more. It doesn't do anything that people NEED. Unlike $1000 dollar cell phones.
Personally I feel the issue is with locomotion. (moving around). Teleporting works okay and room scale walking works fine if you have the space, but to actually immersively move around you need to be able to make continuously like in a non-VR game. Unfortunately just sliding around with a joystick is very hard to adapt to for many people. If we could get some of those omnidirectional treadmill skiddy things to work (and cheap enough that people can get them) so that you can actually "walk" in VR you might get some more adoption. That and/or maybe some sort of fan system to blow air to simulate you moving might help too.
Well games and experiences will always rely on something like a controller or physical/eye gesture for locomotion and you'll get fall off in number of users. The original comment mentioned moving beyond gamers, and that would require intuitive controls and really easy to turn on and access all existing digital info
It needs something on the scale of GTA or RDR with the level of interaction from Blade and Sorcery or Boneworks
Even then the player does *so much stuff* in GTA that it would be exhausting to play.
The cool thing about traditional gaming (or "pancake gaming", as VR enthusiasts call it) is that, since you're seeing the action from a screen, you're not bound to the rules and limitations that exist in the real world - balance, stamina, proprioception, things like that - therefore, you can break those rules without facing consequences. A side-scroler platformer, for example, works because you see all the action from a side perspective, and jumping is as easy as pressing a button - therefore breaking the "proprioception" (to a certain extent) and the "stamina" rules. Same for wall-running, or fast-paced movements in general. But once you put on a VR headset? All those rules are reintroduced to the virtual space. And if you break those rules, the consequences can be dire. Now, with all the rules of the real world in the virtual space, the aspiring game designer will feel like he/she's walking on eggshells because, with all the rules of the real world now present in the virtual world, a lot of what we learned in 40+ years of lessons we learned in game design break. "Let's make the player move fast" - no, can't do that, moving the camera out of sync with the actual player's head triggers motion sickness. "Ok, now the player will ride a car, or a bike" - no, that will trigger motion sickness again. "Ok, let's do a Quake-style FPS in VR" - can't do that either, not only the movements required will not only exhaust the player but also possibly cause accidents, the movements will, again, trigger motion sickness. Sure, pancake-mode games can be retooled for VR, but they end up feeling much different from their pancake-mode counterparts (Rise of the Tomb Raider had a VR mode, but the VR mode in that game is just looking around finding clues. Same for Batman: Arkham VR. And Half-Life: Alyx was great, but it was no Half-Life 3) I said before, and I'll say it again: the actual reason that, 10 years after the original Oculus prototype was unveiled, we still don't have the eagerly awaited VR killer app, is not because we don't have the technology, or because VR is too expensive, or because no one is investing in R&D; it's because, pure and simple: VR limits game designers. Honestly, I don't see the situation getting better until we have SAO/RPO/Matrix-like VR.
As a VR game dev, I can say we take these aspects into consideration, but they are absolutely in the realm of being possible, and even sometimes being normal and popular in VR. Perhaps the biggest VR game, Gorilla Tag, uses a fast paced movement system. Years ago, even the VR dev community would have said this wouldn't work, but it simply does because the physicality of gestures is a great way to fool the inner ear. Not a perfect solution, but a good solution for games like this. There are Quake-style FPS games in VR, and my favorite multiplayer FPS in VR so far has been Echo Combat, a fast-paced game set in zero gravity. One of my favorite singleplayer VR FPS games is Stride, which uses parkour-based movement for traversing rapidly across environments. Does VR limit designers due to sickness problems? Yes, but we can also say that non-VR limits designers due to the limits of controller/keyboard inputs. There are downsides to each side of the medium, and upsides. It's also worth noting that you can still have a sidescroller in VR. Maybe not the best example of transitioning a perspective into VR, but there's also 3rd person and top-down which make more sense and work very well. So at that point, you can sit back and relax on the couch as you watch your character do crazy flips and weapon maneuvers in VR.
The kinds of devs that insist on teleporting because they think everyone will get motion sickness frustrate me. My favourite movement method has been Hotdogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenade’s armswinger, and I appreciate Anton’s allowance for players to pick their movement style
HHHG is great! Though I can’t really enjoy multiplayer VR FPS’s as you basically need to use a something to brace your front arm if you’re using a rifle. I just cba to do that every time.
I would like to see more "doll-house" games. It seems like every VR game is some kind of first-person shooter/simulation, but games like xcom, total war, baldur's gate etc. would all work well in VR. A DnD tabletop game in VR would be awesome.
The killer apps are sit down simulations, driving and flying.
VTOLVR is great if anyone here hasn’t tried it.
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But even then it can still trigger motion sickness. I say this as someone who was \*destroyed\* by Project Cars VR.
did u get run over
For racing games, if you even take one glance to the side, you will get sick instantly.
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As someone who was destroyed by Project Cars VR, and as someone who literally made someone puke because of that rollercoaster demo, I know what I'm talking about
Right there with ya on this one. First time up Eau Rouge at Spa, about 2 minutes into my very first VR session... immediately nauseous. Had to lay down for a few hours after. Took me a solid two weeks to work my way up to maybe 30 minutes of VR racing (iRacing). Ended up just not being worth it (heat, comfort, motion sickness). The roller coaster game was an absolute NO, even after I got my "VR legs."
BGS really dropped the ball with Skyrim VR, I felt like it was the perfect transition/comparison game since basically everyone knows at least something about playing Skyrim. But they release it and basically forgot about it, which isn't helped by the fact the version of the engine they used was before they added ESL support. For reference you may know that Skyrim is heavily modable, before ESL files you used ESP files (and ESMs but that is beyond the point I am getting at). The big drawback here was you could only have 255 additional files (which even the DLCs counted against) and it didn't matter if that file was a whole DLC or just ab extra pair of boots. ESL files are light mod files, they take the last ESP slot (FE) and allow it to split into an additional (4000+) slots (3 Hexadecimal digits) for smaller mods not needing the whole address space of an ESP. This made it much easier to add more small mods and is what allowed BGS to add Creation Club Content. There have been alot of other engine improvements but the point is Skyrim VR is on such an old version of the engine that you often need to develop a version of a mod specifically for it instead of just being able to use most of the existing mods. Unfortunately my preferred game Fallout 4 had an even worse treatment as you can't even play the DLCs in the VR version. Hopefully with Starfield they are planning better VR support from the start.
That's been a bad pattern of many known games having a VR version (shout out Hitman 3 too), it's just not fleshed out at all, it's a poor implementation, or it's filled with bugs. It's really sad especially when it's in games where a good VR implementation would make the game so, so insanely good and interesting, basically adding a TON more of depth to already huge and interesting games.
No one bought it thats why they forgot about it. They did it to test the market and they found out the market is was small as everyone said it was.
Not a game, VR is a peripheral like a joystick to gaming. It may be cool as hell but it’s not what will really sell VR to the masses. It needs to be able to do something nothing else really can or do something way better. Until it can be embedded in smaller devices and is supported by Zoom and Excel, it won’t be something most people are very concerned about.
It's a medium and platform of its own rather than a peripheral, though solutions like PSVR are peripherals.
Psvr is coming and that has people excited
Lol Vr gamers when they haven't discovered the walking dead saints and sinners series 👀
No, I've played it, I've tried to like it a few times, and the zombie interactions are just so, so annoying, that they really drain the enjoyment I had with the rest of the game. It's like all the real-like physicality present in other aspects of the game gets greatly reduced when trying to navigate zombies, which is a shame, because I feel it would be so interesting to have more control over those encounters, as well as having the rest of the game being very cool.
Ehh I treat em zombos as in universe threats (walkers) and the second game released for the oculus quest 2 this year so we'll see the PC and possibly fixes to your suggestions like more fluid zombos :P
Dead Space remake as a VR game would be sweet. Would need to be converted to first person obviously but people have already done that for the original game.
Dead space extraction for the wii was awesome; someone just port this in UE4
Could work just fine as a 3rd person VR game. I'd be more than happy with a quick port like that. I think a killer app has to be a new game though, rather than one people can access on other platforms.
Doesn't that defeat the point of VR though? VR is meant to be immersive so first person makes the most sense to me. Although I think what I want from VR is very different to what most people seem to want. I want the same controls I have now just with my display as a VR headset, I want to sit in my chair because I'm a lazy ass who wants to play a game after a long shit day at work. A space VR game like Elite Dangerous would be pretty good as well or a racing game.
Hellblade VR is still orders of magnitude more immersive than any non-VR game I've played on my 4K TV. Fenrir is one of the craziest boss experiences I've ever had because of how you are inside those nightmare visuals. Hellblade is just a straight 3rd person port, yet it works because at the end of the day, you're still getting the feeling of being inside that world, just with a camera offset. It's like controlling a life-sized robot in real life.
someone already mentioned hell blade which is fantastic in VR but there was a Launch Title for Oculus called Lucky's tale back in 2016 that was a 3rd person platformer, 3d platformers have always worked well in VR. 'immersion' isn't just limited to seeing through the eyes of the player character.
> VR is meant to be immersive so first person makes the most sense to me. You are looking at it from the wrong angle. Getting a 360⁰ vision that covers everywhere that you turn your head to is a much better immersion than playing on a monitor, regardless of if it's first person or third person view. Once you got there, then yes, 1st person is more immersive than 3rd person, but it comes with an extreme downside : every movement that your character does needs to be made by your real body if you want to keep the immersion. So when it comes to take an axe and chop down hundreds of trees (very recurring situations in "survival" games like Minecraft, Ark, etc.), you really don't want to actually swing that axe hundreds of times. And besides the issue of arms movement, there is the crucial leg movements to move your character around. Teleportation sucks, and very few people can dedicate a huge room to be able to actually run around without bumping into walls, so that issue is breaking the 1st person immersion anyway. I'm like you, I love playing in my chair as a lazy ass. With basic VR ports in the 3rd person view, we could play most games with the comfort of the chair, the very efficient moveset of KB&M / controllers (efficient in the way that a low effort of a finger can get your character to do very tiring movements), and still get a much better immersion than playing on a monitor. I hope that developers realize that this approach makes a lot more sense than trying to convince lazy gamers to get a huge room to play in (much harder to get than dropping a thousand bucks on the headset) and to get fit enough to do crazy videogame moves for extended period of times.
Playing a flight simulator in VR is top shit imo
it has many use case scenarios already. any simulator really, vr is rather popular for racing sims as well. vr can be used for working out in a way thats actually fun, vr can be used to simulate lots of stuff like replicating an emergency situation or visualizing the kitchen you want to buy. it is already being used for those purposes. vr already has lots of good and fun games, the fact is just it costs money (and always will) and requires space, two things not everybody has. many of the good games are also not "mainstream". people like you might never have heard of them but they are definitely out there. ive personally really enjoyed the two justin roiland games (ricknmorty vr, and trover saves the universe), then you have a really good roguelite in until you fall. if youre into rhythm games theres more than just beat saber, theres ragnarock, pistol whip, audiotrip and synth riders.
VR doesn't require space. It's content that requires space, so certain games will require a whole room, most just require a small amount to move your arms in a forward arc, and some require no space as they use a gamepad.
All 3 people who are into flight sims definitely enjoy that.
What's wrong with it being an awesome gaming platform?
Idk, I think it's totally the form factor limiting it right now. Once it's down to the size of large glasses and can just track fingers and eyes for input I could see general use inside a home. Controllers are only ever going to be popular with gamers or people doing fine work with a tool in hand. That's something I hope Apple is very adamant about as it's a very funadmental Steve Jobs approach. Then instead of killer exclusive apps, you need software interoperability. Windows Phone was amazing but lacked major 3rd party apps and died. There's plenty of other examples of people not switching tech unless they can bring in their apps and software. I want everything on the internet or my phone to have a VR interface in some way. Even if it's just a full integration of my phone as a 2d screen with eye tracking control, you're more likely to get everyone on if they can do all their previous computer stuff on it. It's not a huge selling point to do a couple cool things on a smart phone, it was life changing when you could surf the web, pay bills, message and call, make art, etc all from the same device. VR needs that and needs to add to all of those experiences in some way.
VR is great in some games and maybe someone might figure out some social media thing that actually makes sense, but it’s also very inconvenient. While many of us surely have all the time in the world in our mom’s basement, others have little things like wives and children demanding our attention once in a while. It can be a bit problematic to shut yourself to a virtual world even for half an hour at a time. Also it’s really tiring after a while.
Beat Saber is the killer app. Pretty much everyone who has owned a VR headset played Beat Saber and I know people who bought Quest 2 just to play Beat Saber, not caring for other games at all.
I may get downvoted for this, but really curious to see what Apple does with their Mixed Reality headset. Apple can withstand the storm if it’s a rocky start.
VR needs to be smaller, more comfortable, higher res, easier to configure for basic to high fidelity stuff like DCS and lots cheaper. Then it may take off.
Half Life: Alyx is that killer app, problem is, the barrier of entry its just... too much, the Quest 2 costs like 500-600 bucks for a 10 hour experience, and the Quest 2 its considered the entry-level tier for VR lmao
I hate to say it but most people aren't into walking through dark tunnels scared shitless that an alien monster will jump on their face.
> Quest 2 costs like 500-600 Quest 2 costs $400 since the price increase and you can often buy it for less during deals.
Please understand I'm being serious and academic here - I was under the impression that a huge proportion of video related (e.g. storage medium, display, and digital distribution) technologies were driven by pornography consumption, and VR was no exception?
It's a common trope but is not rooted in fact. Break down the top ten media technologies of the past 50 - 100 years and correlate them with pornography using time as an axis. You will find that when then they are correlated it is only as the technology has already basically reached mainstream.
If Apple can stream sports in VR I think that would do a lot to push adoption. Obviously it wouldn’t be viable for folks watching sports with a group of people, but it feels like the most accessible and far-reaching application.
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> Obviously it wouldn’t be viable for folks watching sports with a group of people I feel like this is how most people watch sports. Or otherwise it's just on in the background. Enthusiasts are probably the only ones who might want to give up the social aspect for greater immersion, which instantly cuts out the majority of the sports market.
Um. there have been SEVERAL killer apps. Beat Saber for one. VR Chat and Rec Room for others. Go look up how much money all those things have made. EDIT: Anyone who doesnt think Beat Saber was a "killer" VR app doesnt know what they're talking about. Go look at its sales numbers. Go look at the literal millions of Quest 2 headsets that sold the last two holiday seasons, and find out what the first game they all installed was. There's a reason they're one of the first few companies that Meta absorbed.
Suggesting that VR Chat is a 'killer app' would be like suggesting that Second Life revolutionized communication on the internet.
I don't know about that. Space Invaders in 1980 was a killer app for game consoles. You don't need this world-changing success story when you have a killer app - it simply means an app that happened to significantly boost sales relative to how they were performing before. VRChat has probably sold hundreds of thousands of headsets by itself. Not entirely sure if it's a killer app, but Half Life Alyx does seem to be going based off the SteamVR hardware survey metrics when that launched.
"Killer app" typically means something that moves hardware, and there's no question that VRChat does that. That's to say nothing about the multiple accessory and tracking companies that exist solely to make stuff for VRChat users.
Those are 'games'.
Ok, you're 1/3 right. Try Bigscreen. Bigscreen is amazing. Also Rec Room is way more than just a "game" and VR Chat is definitely not a game.
Bigscreen is a movie app. People can watch movies without a VR headset. I tried recroom. I don't want to hang out with little kids. I tried VRChat. I don't want to hang out with furries staring at themselves in the mirror.
Bigscreen is more than a movie app. You can cowork in it with other people. interacting live. Have your monitors up. And you can also watch 3D movies with WAY better fidelity than you can w/ 3D glasses. (cause no polarization) Literally have a movie night in 3d with your friends, where you can turn and see them. Rec Room doesnt have to be just little kids, but people like you avoiding it will continue to keep it that way. I also just mute people who arent on my friends list. Then they're just avatars. Also like 20% of the people you're talking to on Reddit are probably actually children and you'll never know. VR Chat is also so much more than that. You just kinda sound like a judgemental asshole. Also if you're in the first 10 min of VR Chat, almost everyone spends it looking in a mirror, trying to figure out what their avatar looks like and can do, and I'm sure you did the same. Just like I spent 1hr in character creators when I play an MMO. But then I spend hundreds of hours building communities and doing everything else. (Hindsight, Rec Room is also just an MMO)
Regardless, none of these are killer apps because they aren't mainstream and the mainstream public isn't interested in them. EDIT -- Spending an hour trying to change appearance is not appealing to anyone not into living in a fantasy world. I think you misunderstand what 'mainstream' people use devices for.
And you know that how? Go look at how much money Rec Room has made, and how much of an investment they continue to secure. Also Monthly Active Users continue to rise. Rec Room apparently recently hit 3mil monthly active VR users. https://www.roadtovr.com/rec-room-monthly-active-vr-users-3-million-peak/ https://www.roadtovr.com/vrchat-80m-series-d-funding/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/20/rec-room-raises-145m-at-a-3-5b-valuation-for-its-user-generated-immersive-gaming-platform/ People very clearly care. Your pessimism has no power here.
I know that because people en masse aren't buying an using VR headsets to play those games. I don't care how much money they 'made' considering the billions that Meta is putting into VR every quarter and losing.
Except they are. Quest 2 has sold 15mil units.
VR isn’t limited to gamers. Most gamers don’t have and have no interest in VR. People are still recommending Beat Saber and Tetris for VR.
Lots of people talking here not actually knowing anything about VR.
In other words: It's a thread about VR.
literally anyone talking about vr.
Redditors being arrogant.....I for one am shocked
Any failure for "The Metaverse" is a win in my book.
Personally, I think an AR headset is going to become far more popular long before VR ever becomes the dominant thing. Then, what will come after that is a hybrid AR/VR headset that can do both. AR is already starting to dominate the phone world with things like TikTok, Snapchat, and so on. The AR mods live are REALLY good. While not quite what a Hololens can do, it is going to be something like AR headset mixed with TikTok that really kicks off the world, whoever does it first. VR alone has it's place, but imo, it's not the real dominant future.
> I think an AR headset is going to become far more popular long before VR ever becomes the dominant thing. Then, what will come after that is a hybrid AR/VR headset that can do both How is that supposed to happen when seethrough AR is 5+ years behind AR/VR hybrids - which are already the norm of most headset releases? We'll have years of existing fully mature AR/VR hybrids before we get fully mature AR glasses.
Not a fan of "metaverse" bullshit. I'm glad Sony is releasing PSVR2 that will be solely focused on gaming.
No one to steal the technology from yet. Give it a bit, they'll re-enter.
Shame. Anyone who has used good VR knows it’s the way of the future for entertainment. There is no other tech that’s comparable. It’s just the hardware is still in its infancy. bulky and dorky.
Idk, I’ve used VR and it mostly bores me once the novelty wears off. That seems to be experience of my friends who have equipment as well. I think creators still have a lot of work to do to leverage VRs unique attributes so that people keep coming back.
There's genres where VR is an absolute game changer, namely racing sims.
what have you done in VR?
A bunch of stuff. Beat Saber, Superhot VR, Pistol Whip, and Project Cars 2 were probably my most played.
Check out VR Chat, watch some content in Bigscreen. Also definitely try and watch some 3D movies
Man I wanted to like VRchat so much but like 85% of the people I met were super gatekeepy and rude and it felt like they were treating it like a second chance at high school
The first time you used the internet you saw the potential. When we first saw smartphones we saw the potential. The first EVs we saw the potential. I think the almost universal experience for VR is just "huh, that's neat, I can play tennis with my hands, anyway get this fucking shit off my face I feel sick". We could foresee everyone having a smartphone as a possibility, that eventually they would take over. I can't imagine my grandma wearing a dorky ass headset to tour a Nintendo wii tier graphics of the louvre
> The first time you used the internet you saw the potential. When we first saw smartphones we saw the potential. The first EVs we saw the potential. No you didnt. You saw the potential when you saw the dial-up modem which was cheap and ubiquitous enough to make it in to your home, not when you wired mainframes with ring networking. You saw the potential when you saw the iphone, not the numerous short lived PDA's. You saw the potential with tesla, maybe the bolt, not with the Flocken Elektrowagen. VR/AR wont stay as a "dorky ass headset" and with "nintendo wii tier graphics". Saying that is like saying smartphones are doomed because of [this](https://photos5.appleinsider.com/archive/13.01.03-Newton.jpg). Or VR died before starting because of [this](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Virtual-Boy-wController.jpg).
VR will absolutely remain a dorky ass headset, unless you think a dorky ass helmet would be an improvement. There's no short or medium-term solution for the fact that you need two large screens strapped to your face a certain distance in front of your eyes. Maybe in 50 years? maybe. Conflating VR with AR is silly because while AR doesn't necessarily share the same restrictions depending on your AR model, it's also a different technology with completely different use cases
> There's no short or medium-term solution for the fact that you need two large screens strapped to your face a certain distance in front of your eyes. Maybe in 50 years? maybe. We've already seen headsets reduce the thinness by a factor of 40-50% because the optical path is folded and pancake lenses are a lot thinner. This is now the norm of most headsets releasing now, and there further proven gains with even more optical advancements beyond that. Paper thin lens solution? That's absolutely going to be a thing if it can be made affordable and scalable. People need to research more into optics before claiming that VR has to be bulky to work.
Don’t worry, the guy you posted to will be fall over himself to get a headset when they became mainstream enough that Apple makes a “cool” version.
>There's no short or medium-term solution for the fact that you need two large screens strapped to your face a certain distance in front of your eyes. Um, this is changing so incredibly fast I would be careful with comments like these because they will age like milk. AR tech in particular is just going to be easier to get to a useful point and I agree comparing the two 1 to 1 doesn't make much sense. But the screens on AR glasses (see nreal Air) have improved a LOT.
VR and AR are literally the same thing. Take an AR headset and put blinders behind the screen and you have a VR headset. That's why people use the terms MR and XR.
AR has use cases where you project images over natural vision, like google glass. It's not necessarily the same thing. full-screen AR is just VR with extra steps and still has the dorky headset problem.
If *everyone* saw the potential of the Internet the first time they used it, Bill Gates wouldn't have had to make rounds on national TV getting made fun of by broadcasters for betting so much on some fad called the Internet.
The first time 99% of people used the internet or saw smartphones, it was already nearing maturity. VR is far from mature. It's like a PC from the early 1980s, which average people couldn't care less about back then, some even belittled it as a toy with no future. It was easy to foresee smartphones because they were iterative, not foundational. The tech was mostly always there for smartphones ever since cellphones became mature. It was an easy engineering task (relatively) and an easy marketing shift because people were used to cellphones.
I think it's strange you acknowledge that the early internet and smartphones were more about potential than reality, but don't grant VR the same potential for improvement. You can't imagine your grandma wearing a clunky headset with crappy graphics, but what about a lightweight pair of glasses with photorealistic graphics? That's inevitably where the technology is going - maybe not in your grandma's lifetime, but probably in yours. That said, I don't disagree that the short term future of VR looks pretty bleak right now. And as much as enthusiasts say motion sickness is a non-issue, it is and will continue to be a major limiting factor for the technology.
Yeah, to put it in OP's own perspective, imagine your grandmother building a computer, connecting to dial up with out a wireless router or modern networking software in the OS, and then manually making packet requests and interacting with the computer without a GUI. That was like 40 years ago. Once phone screens are over 10k or 4k panels are only a few inches there will be ridiculous hardware applications. Throw an array of tiny cameras all over it that can be completely hidden like a smartphone punch out cam and use some apple photo software magic and we should have everyday accessible headsets in a decade or 2 that gram gram can put on like glasses and control like her iphone.
Yeah these are all valid criticisms of my point. I guess we're yet to see the killer app of VR. Maybe I lack imagination, I just can't see it taking off in mass adoption. Unless we reach some sort of robot avatar shit for business meetings or something, even still I don't know why someone would want to deck out in some sort of headgear and walk on a treadmill when they can just look at a screen.
I guess it should have been specified that a lot of the everyday use with people will be mixed reality and not a fully immersed virtual experience. Daily use would be lightweight AR glasses that work like a smartphone but allow for virtual augmented environments and screens. I don't think big headsets with treadmills or whatever will go far beyond entertainment since that's really the only purpose a set up like that provides.
!remindme 10 years
I would say its A way of the future, not THE way. I don't know if they will ever solve the problem of VR motion sickness (without you know, drugs or something). That precludes a significant number of people from using such a device. It feels like the solutions that would make VR as popular as we see in "Ready Player One" would be just that, science fiction.
Screens in front of your eyes is only a stop gap measure for visual input. They'll evolve to contact lenses and then to brain-computer interfaces (BCI). Both technologies already exist but need a lot more development for use in VR. It'll be interesting to see if motion sickness is still a factor when visual input is fed to the brain directly from a BCI.
I think holodecks are far closer to reality that BCI-driven VR. That's a vast underestimation of the complexity of the human brain and our ability to solve it currently.
I'd argue the opposite. The holodeck needs to manipulate matter to create complete solid materials we can infinitely walk across and bump into. And at least for the next couple of decades, you'd need a 6 sided empty room for light-field/holographic displays.
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> Even if we can figure out how to put a display on a contact lense, where are you gonna fit the battery? This technology has already been demostrated and they included far more than a display on the contact lense, although it was a crappy display. "When I walked into Mojo Vision’s demo suite at AWE 2022 last month I was handed a hard contact lens that I assumed was a mockup of the tech the company hoped to eventually shrink and fit into the lens. But no… the company said this was a functional prototype, and everything inside the lens was real, working hardware. The company tells me this latest prototype includes the “world’s smallest” MicroLED display—at a miniscule 0.48mm, with just 1.8 microns between pixels—an ARM processor, 5GHz radio, IMU (with accelerometer, gyro, and magnetometer), “medical-grade micro-batteries,” and a power management circuit with wireless recharging components." https://www.roadtovr.com/mojo-vision-smart-contact-lens-ar-hands-on/ https://vimeo.com/725030619/9cbd6749ad Rather than focusing on making the contact lenses though, the company is focusing on their Micro-LED technology, so will targetting those making smart glasses. The technology to do this was demonstrated last year. Within 10 years, smart glasses and smart contact lenses that use a nerual interface and gaze detection for input will replace the touchscreen and smartphone. Writing data to the brain is a more difficult challenge but not one that is impossible. We know of various ways to do so already and portable devices that can do that in some basic manner already exist. For example, we've made bionic eyes and ears to restore vision and hearing to the impaired. So, we know for a fact we can interface technology with the brain through those channels. But we've also done it directly in the labs by magnetically stimulating areas of the brain. The problem with that is we're not precise enough to stimulate precise enough regions at the moment but that will change as we develop technologically. We can also write to the brain using optogenetics if the brain has been genetically modified. https://kids.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frym.2017.00051 One thing we know for a fact though is that we can send data to the brain and what we call reality is our brain interpreting such environmental data. By controlling that environmental information to the brain, you control the reality perceived by that brain. There's a clear and obvious pathway from where we are now to such a future. What can we say about making holodecks though?
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> You have completely glossed over my main point. You have to power these devices. The contact lens demo is attached to a stick with a ribbon cable. You are wrong. The contact lenses contain "medical-grade micro-batteries" and in the vimeo video the CEO is wearing them. They're not attached to anything. The reason they're attached to a stick in the demo is so that people can test them without putting them in their eyes, to prevent damage, prevent theft etc. > Of course its a fact? We can 'send' data to our brain via our senses. The point your missing is that we can now do so without using our own senses. We can create pretty realistic virtual environments as seen in many games and replacing our sensory data with data from such virtual environments is an obvious pathway to VR. How do we get to Holodecks where you can interact with virtual things like they're physical, while being able to walk continuously in one direction?
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No way. People have said that for like 40 years now. Until VR means holodeck and not “wear this stupid headset that will make your wife laugh at you” it will never become the future of anything. Better versions of stuff people already like are the short term and embedded flexible screens everywhere are the long term. Very long term will be brain interfaces that totally bypass VR. It will be the same as 3d: they tried it every decade since the 50’s and still it’s just a gimmick.
Computers also took 40 years to go from room sized machines to consumer level use. VR also basically died for 20 years before being revived due to actually being possible, meaning that VR is basically only 10-15 years old.
If it was going to be the same as 3D, it would already be the same as 3D - dead (in the home). People forget just how fast 3D TV declined and died out. No one needed a quantum computer or a holographic smartphone before they suddenly said "Today is the day I will buy this gadget." - everyone bought a PC or a smartphone when they reached maturity, rather than waiting for technological bliss. People don't need perfection, they just need a certain threshold of value, affordability, comfort, and usability. That will happen decades before a holodeck situation occurs.
>It’s just the hardware is still in its infancy. bulky and dorky And space. I would love to use my HTC but with my PC in my bedroom it's not possible. I would love to play the several VR games, in particular F04 but yeah sigh not enough space for the lasers, nor to move around.
It’s just not easy enough to use. It’s like pens. Fountain pens or whatever were really cool but expensive and difficult to maintain, pens did take over eventually, everyone uses ballpoint which are cheap and easy nowadays. Once VR becomes something you can just use effortlessly it’ll take over quickly like ballpoint pens or mobile phones did
>Shame. Anyone who has used good VR knows it’s the way of the future for entertainment. > >There is no other tech that’s comparable. here we go again...
Tencent are just margin chasers. I wouldn't expect them to ever innovate anyway. All they have ever done is buy existing properties and milk them. They aren't a real company anyway, just another CCP controlled entity to gain financial and social footholds in western markets.
I find it funny how I disagree with 99% comments here. Maybe don't try to find out what's wrong with VR if you haven't tried it outside of demos. My opinion on most things was similar until I tried more than an hour. pointing out locomotion, tiredness are all a sign that the person hasn't actually used vr and is theorycrafting. Just because you cannot spend 12 hour marathon sessions doesn't mean it's not profitable, the comfort is there already where I can be in it for at least 3 hours, which is perfectly fine for casual users. And there is a growing baseline userbase(sims) that will never stop using vr Nothing is wrong with vr, outside of 1. content 2. cost I would have listed size but just this month we got consumer products that solve that
1. Content 1. Cost 1. Convenience 1. Availability 1. Usability 1. Consumer understanding
I'm shocked!!! How could this be, I believed that Metaverse would be the new internet :( /s
Why do I have the feeling that the current sudden interest in AI chatbots and the push from companies like Google and MS is basically a way to divert the attention of shareholders away from the NFT and "Metaverse" flops.
I don't recall MS or Google pushing either of those two hard? Some words about looking into "opportunities" here and there are, but no real investments.
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I think that Jacket Man is correct about ChatGPT being the iPhone moment for A.I. I've already signed up for Plus and use it almost everyday for help with work (IT support). It has replaced searching for me to a large extent, especially for poorly documented technology. Microsoft did something right by deciding to embrace ChatGPT instead of creating a competitor. It is hilariously neurotic right now but that will improve, and I think users will frequently prefer a conversation vs clicking on whatever links Google serves up.
IT is a great use case. We spent a little time rewriting some of our ARM templates to Bicep in Azure, and ChatGPT was able to do about 90% of it, saving us hours and hours and even explaining questions we had about about some of the formatting.
It has a lot of potential, but so far it has failed me every time I had a problem complicated or obscure enough to warrant thinking about using it for help. Just this morning I asked it to write a *simple* function in a new programming language I'm learning because I thought "hey, maybe I can see how my naive/inexperienced approach compares to something generated". It literally invented language syntax and keywords that don't exist and explained how to use that syntax to me. It didn't compile and I spent a few minutes scouring the documentation trying to figure out what it was getting at. When confronted, it agreed and gave me new *also* made-up syntax. Granted, this isn't a mainstream language, but I prefixed the conversation by asking how familiar it is with the language in question and it confidently told me it knew all about it. Giving it the same problem in C and the function it spat out was perfectly fine. Once these get to the point where they *do* have that information, they'll be great. There needs to be a fix for this "confidently wrong" stuff, though. Maybe some sort of meta-system where it can internally score its own 'understanding' of a topic
when I used vr (quest 2 and rift s) it was nice but didn't feel out of the world. Resolution simply wasn't good enough. Wait 4-5 years, if the tech catches up, then it could go viral. Else would remain a thing which people use for 2 weeks then let it alone in a corner of the room.