Anybody that says vr is a gimmick haven’t tried a vr racing rig. Not only the fun factor but I’m definitely a better driver now for it.
Flight in VR is truly something else. Not even a simpit can provide that level of immersion. You think jumping into a white dwarf system is spooky in Elite Dangerous? Try doing it with a headset on. When your cockpit is smoking, alarms are blaring, and the panic sets in, you will finally understand.
Yeah but I’d have to play elite dangerous
Fair lol. There are other games with good support but it’s the one I played the most in VR
where are the vr holographs? i want a star trek holodeck in my house
holograph - A document written wholly in the handwriting of the person whose signature it bears.
I think you meant hologram. In which case, check it out: https://axiomholographics.com/devices/hologram-room/
It’s been difficult so far to make beams of light decide to stop middair, but maybe you have some ideas?
The force fields that allow you to walk in one direction without actually moving and hitting the wall also seem to still be missing in our RL tech tree.
The work these folks are doing is pretty cool. They utilize polarized light to allow for multiple viewing angles of holograms. https://axiomholographics.com/
Let’s be honest, any manufacturers/developers willing to embrace porn will successful. Everyone else is just picking gnat shit out of pepper, hoping it’ll turn to gold.
just picking gnat shit out of pepper
Thank you for this wonderful phrase that I will be using from now on.
Hardware and content is still the big issue. The good porn games still suck in VR, and there’s not a lot of them. The equipment is just too inconvenient.
Your hands are occupied, your positions are restricted, your tethered to the PC, and I don’t want to get a thousand dollars of delicate hardware nutted on. It’s just not there yet.
I think the fundamental flaw in VR proponent thinking is that they think you need a first person perspective to be immersed.
I think that the biggest problem is the lack of investment and willingness to take on risk. Every company just seems to want a quick cash grab “killer app” but doesn’t want to sink in the years of development of practical things that aren’t as flashy but solve real-world problems. Because that’s hard and isn’t likely to make the line go up every quarter.
It’s mostly the price. If you have 500 or even 1000 to invest to play games, first that puts you squarely in the top 1% worldwide but more importantly a VR headset is the worst choice in terms of breadth of games you can play. So the first choice will always be a PC or a console which leave the VR headset for the people who actually have 2k+ to spend for gaming and actually want one. A tiny tiny minority.
If you add on top of it that you still have a 50/50 chance of getting nausea each time you play and that it’s a pain in the ass (or an additional expense) if you wear glasses, and the space requirement. It’s not a surprise if the market is stalled.
As for useful implementation, my cousin is an orthopedic surgeon and they use VR headset and 3D x-ray scanner, 3d printers and a whole bunch of sci-fi stuff to prep for operation, but they are not using a meta quest2, we’re talking 50k headset and million dollar equipment. None of that does anything to the gaming market.
My though is that the tech need to get a couple of order of magnitude better and be usable as a day to day computer for work. When I can code in one 10 hours a day without fucking up my eyes, vomiting myself, sweating like a pig and getting neck strain it will have the possibility to take over the computer market, until then, it’s a gimmick.
As for useful implementation, my cousin is an orthopedic surgeon and they use VR headset and 3D x-ray scanner, 3d printers and a whole bunch of sci-fi stuff to prep for operation, but they are not using a meta quest2, we’re talking 50k headset and million dollar equipment. None of that does anything to the gaming market.
That’s really awesome and I love seeing that the tech is actually seeing good uses.
Yeah. A lot of what you’re saying parallels my thoughts. The PC and console gaming market didn’t exist until there were more practical, non-specialty uses for computing and, importantly, affordability. To me, it seems that the manufacturers are trying to skip that and just try to get to the lucrative software part, while also skipping the part where you pay people fair wages to develop (the games industry is super exploitative of devs) or, like The Company Formerly-known as Facebook, use VR devices as another tool to harvest personal information for profit (head tracking data can be used to identify people, similar to gait analysis), rather than having interest in actually developing VR long-term.
Much as I’m not a fan of Apple or the departed sociopath that headed it, a similar company to its early years is probably what’s needed; people willing to actually take on some risk for the long-haul to develop the hardware and base software to make a practical “personal computer” of VR.
When I can code in one 10 hours a day without fucking up my eyes, vomiting myself, sweating like a pig and getting neck strain it will have the possibility to take over the computer market, until then, it’s a gimmick.
Absolutely agreed. Though, I’d note that there is tech available for this use case. I’ve been using Xreal Airs for several years now as a full monitor replacement (Viture is more FOSS friendly at this time). Bird bath optics are superior for productivity uses, compared to waveguides and lensed optics used in VR. In order to have readable text that doesn’t strain the eyes, higher pixels-per-degree are needed, not higher FOV.
The isolation of VR is also a negative in many cases as interacting and being aware of the real world is frequently necessary in productivity uses (both for interacting with people and mitigating eye strain). Apple was ALMOST there with their Vision Pro but tried to be clever, rather than practical. They should not have bothered with the camera and just let the real world in, unfiltered.
Even your hypothetical perfect headset would be useless in so many situations where you can game today, can’t use it in public, can’t use it while watching children, can’t use it while talking to other adults in your household,…
Also, I think the idea that you even need that first person perspective for immersion is deeply flawed, lots of games make you feel immersed without that. Not to mention that it severely limits possible UI elements if you don’t want to break the immersion again.
Oh I agree. Once you already have a PC or a console the added experience of a VR headset isn’t a great value proposition for the price.
Wildly overpriced, except for the options owned by the devil. For fuck’s sake, “even with this Apple’s hilariously expensive flop” underlines how hard companies refuse to get it. To reach a wider audience - charge less. Reduce cost. Simplify and add lightness. the only company even trying is god-damned Facebook, and they’re still fumbling it.
You need low-latency 6DOF. Everything else is negotiable. Everything.
And for god’s sake, have an intermediate format. Ship a VR gizmo that only renders ten million floating dots… and guarantees it can show them at 200 Hz, with up-to-the-millisecond tracking. Disconnect that performance from computing power. And latency. Let an absolute potato, on the other side of the world, be capable of producing the magical dreamscape you’re standing in, without making you throw up.
I personally don’t feel like spending 700 or how many euros to play beat saber on my ps5.
Other games that might be awesome in this is ones were you don’t need to move around but benefit from being able to look around, so flight sims, driving sims, but there the chair setups are better imo.
Can’t really think of much else, that’s why VR is on the decline, really limited number of fun games to be had, or it would require some paradigm shift, like a strategy game but you are playing on the inside of a globe, but then that game would have to survive on being a VR exclusive.
A VR mech game could be so baller. Also a remake of Black and White would work well. But generally yeah it’s just not a great medium for most games and while we have a lot of promising hardware we’re struggling to find ways to use it intuitively
I think after the bubble breaks it does down a bit well see some groups take their time to build really functional stuff. We don’t have good standards on how to interact in VR and it shows. We don’t have enough data on how to make people less motion sick. Basically the hardware is there but the software isn’t and that’ll take more time than we’ve been giving it, imo
Realistically though I think the fundamental limits on how you can interact in VR means while there may be a strong niche market, I don’t expect it to be a mainstream thing. Even if the prices drop a lot and the headsets get smaller there’s still a lot working against them
The whole hand thing already felt like a gimmick in the regular version of Black & White. How would a god game benefit in any way from VR?
UNDERDOGS is amazing. And I’m not saying that just because I’m in the credits as one of the testers =D
A remake of Black and White would just be amazing, period
Armored Core could have been a baller VR game
More games and a Matrix-esque visual file manager where you could walk through various libraries of documents, files, videos or pictures in 3D space, or proportional size like WinDirStat would be cool.
The lack of good games has really made VR hard to enjoy. I have five good evergreen titles and not much else.
Because we would all love it if a large folder meant we had to run for a few hundred meters to get to the next one instead of just hitting a single key on a keyboard or moving the mouse by a few pixels…
I would use that for sorting my porn folder (C:\Games\JazzJackrabbit)
That’s just making a community reference with extra steps https://youtu.be/NMTQxCzStuw?si=3HIeDCTcgaFmBKGj
VR always seemed like a gimmick to me. I ended up with a wii instead of a PS3 or 360 as a teenager and it made me bitter and resolved to avoid anything like motion controls or gimmicks in future purchases.
Not that the wii was a bad console but I ended up playing the virtual console and gamecube backwards compatibility more than anything else.
I enjoyed my Wii well enough, but my PS3 got the most play out of the three.
VR is absolutely incredible though. It’s hella expensive for a nice kit, but my mind is blown every time I strap into my Index.
Antis have been killing VR for years already, Asgard Wrath 2 came out in December.
What do you mean by this?
There’s just too many edge cases in VR for it to be a real platform. Movement is hard, there needs to be a lot of space around a person, form factors aren’t great for the hardware, there’s more graphical requirements, etc.
It’d legitimately be easier to fit an arcade cabinet in my house than space for proper VR play.
I think it would take off if Facebook wasn’t involved
I’m not going to lie: I would own a Quest 3 already if it didn’t have Meta all over it.
Saaame and I have an index and a WMR kit hahaha. But in my house, no Facebook hardware or code on any machines.
…I miss beat saber. I’ve been too lazy lately but I have all the parts I need for a quarantined beat saber computer.
Same. I want to use it as a huge desktop display at work for those days when I need like 40 things visible at once
That’s how I feel about it. I don’t know if I would buy one but independence from Facebook is a prerequisite. Can these even be used without logging in?
Yes, I have no facebook account. It hasn’t been a problem. Other than the logo on the headset, I haven’t seen any other downside to it being a meta ptoduct. The money they have put in to make sure they are and remain ahead of everyone else for tech means that until there is an actual downside, I pretty much have to use their headsets. But I will have no trouble jumping ship if there ever is a downside, or if anyone else even comes close to catching up.
They’ve sunk ungodly amounts of cash to create unrealistic expectations for the VR market. Nobody can compete for the low end, and there’s no way meta is profiting, so what’s their end game?
Presumably, they want to get everyone used to their environment so that when their hardware lead doesn’t mean as much in the future, there will be hesitation to leave. We know they aren’t currently doing anything untoward as there is plenty of overlap between paranoid tech experts and people interested in pioneering new tech. Can’t hide from them. The software and network traffic has been thouroughly vetted and everything is so far doing exactly what it would need to or purports to do.
As long as you go into it knowing you will be changing platforms at some point in the future and hedge all software purchases against that in your mind, the only remaining downside is whether you can stomache giving them your money.
And if that ever changes, it won’t go hidden.
There is also something to be said for the fact that everyone in the Meta community see VR as thriving and growing, and everyone that is outside of it sees VR as stagnating or shrinking. So their money is doing that too presumably.
Their ultimate main goal is also, of course, marrying the tech from VR headsets to the tech from AR glasses. Which will be a true ubiquitous product. Being the first one there will be a huge pay day.
I’ve long been skeptical about VR as a mainstream platform. I think the technology is quite cool, but much like those people who used to say “In ten years everyone will have a 3D printer!” and the like, no, I just don’t see it happening. The hassle factor is too great for it to be for everyone. Hell, most people seem to be fine with stereo sound, even though surround sound setups have been available for decades.
Whether it’s space, cost, or lack of software support, it all seems to combine to make it a bit of hobbyist kit at best. If your goal is to sell millions of copies then you need to target a broader market than hobbyists, and it looks like a lot of companies have ploughed enough cash into this that hobbyist sales aren’t going to be enough.
It will always be 1993 for vr.
It will always be the future.
It will always suck.
VR seems like one of those things that sounds amazing to the person who first has the idea and maybe even looks amazing in tech demo but once you think about it for a few minutes or have to actually use it for anything practical it just doesn’t live up to that.
My flight sim would say otherwise if it had a mouth. Also if it had a mouth… Uhhhhh… It might be another kind of sim…
I mean the hype has died down but I think it’s rather that VR is too expensive right now. I want VR but I don’t want it $500 much to get a novelty item.
I think using it as a big ass screen would be nice and I really want to Serious Sam and Subnautica on VR. The immersion is really good for VR and I’ve liked it a lot every time I’ve played it.
Still, you need a decent space in the living room. A good graphics card for the frame rate and the expensive headset and motion trackers to get the full experience. That’s a lot to ask for with the current economy.
You probably couldn’t pay me to use VR. The whole way of shutting yourself away from the world just to be stuck with a shitty UI that resembles RL interactions instead of the multitude of UI options abstraction can give you feels entirely unappealing.
You should try it when you get the chance, it’s absolutely bonkers. I had my reservations about it before I tried it and it was much better than I expected.
I mean I am absolutely open to try it at some demo event or something like that, just can’t see myself using it regularly because it is such a hassle to put on, take off, do anything else while you use it, limits so much what you can do while gaming both in an out of the game,… and I already very rarely use first person perspective in existing games that do have the option not to. I also like automation and streamlined UIs so the idea of doing every little shitty thing manually is utterly unappealing.
I sometimes use VR. I have a Quest 2. I just don’t really care for any of it outside of linking it up to my PC and playing custom tracks on Beat Saber or getting my wheel out for racing games.
One of the scariest experiences was getting Wreckfest (not sure if it supports VR now but it didn’t when I used it), stretching the 2D screen around me, jacking up the POV and having a heart attack when getting side swiped by a bus. That’s probably the most fun I’ve had with a VR Headset 😂
I’ve also played Civ V on VR just for shits and giggles because why not.
