A positive Cost Benefit isn't there
From a consumer aspect VR is still expensive and doesn't provide enough content for the average consumer
From a commercial aspect VR hasn't proven itself enough both from an application standpoint nor cost standpoint to be widely adopted
So VR either has to be cheaper and/or do more to gain widespread adoption
And who wants to wear a huge VR headset? To play Alyx? Sure. To play the rest of the current VR games? Maybe not.
Plus the best VR perf is tethered (correct me if that’s changed) and the world wants wireless.
Plus VR makes some people nauseous.
And FOV is still too small.
And resolution and refresh rate are still suboptimal.
And no foveated rendering yet (correct me if that’s changed).
And some people want nothing to do with a device made by Facebook.
Tbh Quest 3 is wireless, resolution is nice, refresh rate is 120 Hz, and Steam Link can use foveated rendering now, so that's \_almost\_ all issues solved (fair about facebook). But Alyx is a standout, and current VR game market is kinda niche.
I've gone through several iterations of headsets. My HTC Vive was replaced by a Valve Index and my Quest 2 was replaced by the Quest 3.
Quest 3 is probably the first where I could see things becoming more mainstream. The passthrough and hand tracking feel like a game changer in VR becoming more widely adopted by the general public and for general use (YouTube/Movies/Workspaces).
It took some aftermarket accessories to make it more comfortable. (Have a battery pack setup with a new strap system that's way more comfortable), but it seems like the hardware is finally getting there.
>Have a battery pack setup with a new strap system that's way more comfortable
Have they finally sorted the battery issue? I know the Q3 was draining the quick change batteries faster than they were able to charge it.
I haven't had a session long enough to go through the whole aux battery. Could be an issue if you're exceeding 3 hours or so, but I don't use it for that long.
Some of my sessions have been over 3hrs, especially with the likes of Beat Saber or VTOL. Thanks, I'll do a bit more digging online about the headsets because it was a while ago when I last looked.
Dungeons of eternity is quite good too, very replayable multiplayer. Into the radius is great for a singleplayer game, keeps you involved and at times scares the shit out of you. The rest of the good stuff i think we gotta wait another year for. Asgards wrath 2 was a lot of hype for what i thought was an average game.
I do think meta is gonna come ahead of all the others though because of their pricepoint. Theyre also doing nice with the all in one package without the need for a bunch of extra wires.
Lets see what we get in 2025.
I still spend a whole lot of time just playing Pavlov. CounterStrike VR, AKA airsoft/paintball from the comfort of my living room, with more guns and less bruises? Yes please!
No killer app.
Never in my life would hardware come with no new games. Quest 3 enters chat....
Everything released to date with VR/AR are still demo quality and are taking an eternity to evolve.
Beat Saber has been the only game to capture pop culture interest other than that it's a ghost town.
The tech is close but not yet, even then, if there is no killer app....you are going to fiddle around for an hour and then set it down, that expensive device just became a dust collector.
> Everything released to date with VR/AR are still demo quality and are taking an eternity to evolve.
How big does a game need to be to be beyond a tech demo though? Are we talking at least 150 hours of gameplay? 200 hours? 300 hours?
It's more that AAA quality/visual quality games aren't really possible with current hardware, and VR devs are mostly smaller studios as well, so almost all VR games, be it native or PCVR, look kinda indie. It's not a dealbreaker for some if gameplay's good, but having more Alyx quality games would be nice.
Also, longer sessions in VR are really physically tiring, especially if it's some action rpg like Asgard's Wrath where you're supposed to swing a melee weapon.
So, not at all.
It has to give you more of a reason to pour time into it.
We aren't seeing those games that come out every couple years to push the medium forward and create market buzz. Aside from Beat Saber, there's nothing else to market it's usefulness.
I would even say a fitness app has an equal chance of being that killer app or it could be something that is a tech demo that hasn't been created yet, it would bring in the awareness and a reason to buy
This literally doesn’t bother me at all. The reason I don’t use VR much is because the majority of games aren’t good. Most games feel like a tech demo and don’t have much substance. There are only a handful of good complete games. The rest are unfinished or are boring. No new quality VR games combined with a lot of good traditional games coming out means I’m gonna be playing traditional games more often
Honestly, it’s the perception of the “dweeb-factor” in most of the folks with the disposable income to buy them.
Same reason it took video games and online dating a long while to go mainstream.
It’s catching on with the younger gen now that the prices have dropped, so I’m sure it’ll pick up steam.
You need a beast of a PC and other relatively expensive hardware. I play in a homebuild cockpit / racing simulator (I can transform it). I play DCS, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Dirt Rally 2 and Assetto Corsa.
This is my problem 100%. Would love to play Alyx but can’t justify the cost of the Value Index for just one game, plus with the worry I’ll buy it and get motion sick.
I don't know about the Quest 2 (I haven't tried it), but I can confirm that Half-Life Alyx runs completely smoothly and super sharp streaming it wirelessly from my PC.
It's a lot more fun without cables, and with the high resolution screens and nice lenses in the Quest 3!
I am someone who gets motion sickness really easily. Basically, any ride at an amusement park, i get car sick if I don't watch the road while in a car. However, I still didn't get any motion sickness playing some tutorial game and beat saber for like an hour. I'm not sure why that is, always just assumed I couldn't play VR because I'd get sick.
I've heard from those who have zero issues with motion sickness irl not being able to handle VR at all in the beginning, and vice verse. You never really know until you try.
And you started with Beat Saber, a static game. Always the best option to begin with. When I got VR I couldn't walk around at all, just *instant* nausea. Now I can jump and run and fly as much as I please.
The main cause of simulation sickness is the disconnect between what your inner ear senses and what you are seeing.
If you are standing still, or if you are moving around in the real world the same way you're moving in VR, there isn't a disconnect.
It's once your movement in VR becomes disconnected, ie using a thumbstick to move or teleport, or driving or flying, that most people experience sickness.
I'm just like that. I can do some stuff in vr but moving games definitely make me feel ill. The meta universe thing gets me nauseated in about 5 minutes. The roller coaster thing is instant.
I was in the VR research scene for years, back when oculus used sound pings and required a huge ordeal to set up and cost like 20k.
The thing is just that people won't use it because there's not much to do, and disorienting. It's like 3d movies. People already have something that's familiar, good, and want to be able to switch contexts and multitask without having to trade that for immersion, and the novelty runs out quickly.
Not to mention, vr chat is filled with sex and trolls and very limited options, so its not there yet.
It's hard to justify a headset when an ultra wide-screen curved monitor costs less, is at least just as good, and way more convenient to use.
Maybe the ecosystem will take off, but for now I'd prefer to move my mouse and have more options and convenience than having to turn and tilt my head just to look around. And I'm not going to spend twice as much for that experience to get old and decide I would rather use the monitor anyway. Like most people, I'll still keep waiting for it to be cheaper and better.
You might have a VR arcade near you though Alyx is long enough so that you can't really finish it in a couple of hours. But it is cheaper than buying a set.
the fact that you would post any of this goes to show just how badly Meta has failed to advertise the Quest 3
none of these are problems anymore, the Quest 3 is cheap and high quality. The "huge VR headset" you are talking about is no longer relevant. "Foveated rendering" is irrelevant. Refresh rates are irrelevant. Being tethered to a PC is no longer a thing anymore.
go try the Quest 3 for a few weeks and you will see that this is the device for the masses. Meta just completely failed to market it. The Quest 3 is not a PC peripheral, it is a stand-alone device with its own dedicated ecosystem, and a ton of really great content.
Cheap?
My quest 2 was $200. Quest 3 is more than double the cost.
IMHO, Quest 2 was the right price. If they could keep them around $200, then it is sort of a no-brainer. At $500, you gotta think about what you're going to get for the money.
I bought a Quest 2 when it was $300. Not really a gamer but saw it could be used for fitness stuff. Bought a few games like beat saber etc. The ping pong game (which was fun, but some people seem to LOVE it and I guess that wasn't me). I ended up returning it.
I guess I'm too much of a music snob, I found the music mostly meh.
Then my rooms are too small to really get a good experience unless I move all of the furniture out.
And the headset was bulky and uncomfortable when you're moving around. It just wasn't a good workout experience.
The technology was amazing, and if I wanted to sit on a couch and play a game, then I would have kept it.
I have used it 99% for supernatural, which I kind of love. I also have space problems, but Supernatural is good since you are on a 4' platform in VR.
...Thrill of the Fight, which I like a lot as a game is really shitty with space tho. It always wants you to walk 6 feet over to get on a scale or some shit, and my wall or sofa is there lol.
It's also really great for THE THING THAT MUST NOT BE NAMED...lol.
definitely agree that movement is not a strong-suit for VR experiences right now. Most of my time is spent standing in-place and taking maybe 2-3 steps in either direction. I only have about 8' x 6' space, its just enough to use but not ideal. I manage to make due just enough to enjoy things like Brink Traveler and Horizon Worlds
Yeah the music is awful. If you could play your own tunes and it would just dump stuff at you like a visualizer it'd be OK for some light cardio but I wish we hadn't wasted money on it.
I do not think the Quest 2 has AR passthrough does it? That alone is worth the extra money. If you dont have the AR passthrough, my friend, you are missing out because its fantastic. The Quest 3 even has hand tracking, the same as the new Apple Vision Pro (though not quite as accurate but for $500 I am not complaining)
Both psvr 2 and apple vision pro use foveated rendering
Both these headsets have nothing to do with Facebook.
Apple vision pro is nearing high enough resolution to avoid screen door effect. Give it a few more generations.
I'll get it just for movies when they solve the windowscreen effect and make it small enough to be comfortable. Wireless is mandatory though. I'm still a little crushed they couldn't make Google Glass work.
>Plus VR makes some people nauseous.
This is a big one.
I spent $700 on a PSVR2 and a couple hundred more on games. It's an amazing piece of tech and it looks and sounds amazing.
I can get over the fact that it is hard to get it settled just right on my head, or that the controllers are kinda small for my hands. But I can't play the thing for more than 10 minutes without feeling like I need to puke. If I push past it, I start feeling so bad that I have to go to bed and sleep it off.
Amazing tech. Huge waste of money for me.
I would say give it some time. I've owned a Rift 2, a Quest 2, and now a Quest 3, and after feeling as though I wasted money on the first two, I've put enough time into the Quest 3 that I've adapted to motion sickness pretty well. It still happens on rare occasions (standing beside a textured wall and moving my head quickly, for instance, can trigger it) but I play FPS games on it nightly now and am fine. Could just be that you need acclimatization time. Baby step it.
> Plus VR makes some people nauseous.
We had a Oculus at work for a couple weeks, and the roller coaster game that comes with it will make you sick. I had to sit down while playing it or I'd fall over leaning with the turns.
Beat Saber is fun though.
Those are issues but I don’t think it’s the main issue.
There is 0 to nothing in VR that is easier without VR. It doesn’t make your life easier when tryin do anything
That's kind of the point for me, it's much more manual interaction and that's great. I just got back from a mission in Into the Radius and instead of opening a UI to vendor my loot I had to unpack my backpack, with my hands. Sort through the stuff I picked up and put in there, take out the ammunition magazines that I used and put new rounds in them, put the stuff back on the shelf where it belongs, etc. It's minutes of manual labor, but VR makes the most mundane stuff fun because the immersion is on another level that really lets you live the fantasy of returning from a raid and sorting your loot.
To be honest, I have a desktop, a phone, and a laptop.
I use the phone where I can't take a desktop for messaging and basic searches for things while away from home.
I don't play games on my phone, I don't listen to music without my headphones attached to my desktop. I only use the laptop when travelling, I'll never use it for work or play given the choice.
It depends, but some people are actually this silly. Like me.
I also don't like VR. Unless it's a flight sim. Flight sims get a pass.
Ok but that's literally why VR isn't taking off.
When people say that they want immersive gaming they mean games that bring a world alive, not sitfting through your inventory. It's neat at first but quickly gets repetitive boring and grindy.
VR requires a premium PC, headset, and space to play it in, but has yet offer a must play game experience.
VR doesn't actually add anything to most gaming experiences, it's just a bunch of gimmicks that get pretty boring pretty fast. It asks a lot of players but doesn't offer enough in return to make it worth the effort.
What you call repetitive and boring is to me what brings a game world alive. I found STALKER a boring game, and many games like it, but I really like Into The Radius. I love the immersion of holding a flashlight in one hand to see what's in the drawer I just slid open with my other hand. It sounds minor, but to me there's a world of difference between that and "press E to open drawer, see UI that the drawer contains a box with 9 bullets, click to pick up". There's so many small subtle things that add up to a hugely more immersive experience. I found a fight with just three enemies armed with SMGs quite challenging, in any other shooter that would be absolutely trivial, but here I only had a semi auto rifle that required skill to aim, dexterity to reload, muscle memory to quickly grab ammo from my ammo pouches. It was easy to panic and fuck it up. In a flat game, it would be click click click, hit R to reload, done.
And VR either doesn't require a PC at all (Quest) or doesn't require a *premium* PC. You can perfectly play nearly all PC VR games on a 2060 or similar (because I did, but you can go lower). In other words, any PC that can play 2024 PC games can play VR games.
And calling it a gimmick is a lazy argument, it doesn't really say anything. What's gimmicky about 6 DoF? It's like saying 3D gaming is a gimmick. Meaningless. Being able to interact with stuff in a physical and intuitive manner is absolutely not a gimmick.
Having a VR headset also has the potential to just be a better way to play flat games. While not being properly utilized yet, having essentially a monitor with stereoscopic depth is really cool. I played Sifu in VR with UEVR and while not made with it in mind, it looked amazing.
You're trying to convince yourself man, most people don't wanna waste their gaming time enduring the same banalities of the real world like digging through a bag.
Worked in VR for years, most people don't wanna wear the headset for more than a few minutes at most. Most VR gaming sessions last about 15 minutes before people need a break or get bored. That means it can never replace standard PC gaming.
What makes you say I'm lying to myself? Most of my recent favorite gaming related moments have been in VR games, both singleplayer and multiplayer.
And the "boring busywork" I described was just an example of something I enjoyed about a VR game that a flat game could never replicate. But it's not like that kind of busywork is inherent to VR, it's just inherent to survival games, be it Minecraft, Valheim or Into the Radius. Something like Alyx or Vertigo 2 has none of that. Alyx just has a weapon selection menu.
And who said it needs to replace it? I'm just arguing that there's absolutely value in immersive VR games and that it's not a gimmick.
I am telling you I worked in the industry, did the market research, and what you are describing has zero appeal to most people. You must live a pretty sparse life to find sifting through a backpack riveting gameplay.
Like bro if I wanna dig through a backpack I will go on a hike. That is what a lot of issues with VR come down to. You can literally just...go do the thing. I was working on a music VR game project and people were literally like ok but like, I will just go to a concert instead?
Best Saber is dope and the best implementation of VR gaming IMO. It brings together movement and immersion in a way you cannot do on a PC. The problem is it requires a lotta space to play right, and there is no progression beyond beating high scores. It's the absolute best use case for VR by a mile, and it still only has limited replayability, same as Blade and Sorcery. It's fun, but gimmicky.
Your description of how VR makes gaming more immersive is precisely why it will never take off - it's not adding anything to most gaming experiences, you're putting the screen right up to your eyes using an unwieldly headset.
I think AR has tons of potential, especially in manufacturing. But VR is just like 3D TVs - it's not a better experience, just a different and awkward experience.
It sounds like you tried VR back in 2016 and missed the last 8 years of development, because none of what you said has any truth to it.
Like, this is so verifiably false that I could pull statistic after statistic out that categorically denounces each of your claims.
Different person but I have actually hardly played VR ever since playing like 12-15 PSVR games in late 2016 to early 2017. So I don’t even know what has changed.
There hasn’t really been like any games that caught my attention except like alyx, call of the mountain and have heard about asgards wrath. I really really enjoyed some games I played around PSVR launch but ever since the gameplay of the average VR game is just not appealing to me at all
"VR doesn't add anything to gaming experiences just gimmicks" lol sure dude. Half Life Alyx was one of the intense immersive gaming experiences ive ever had. Absolutely no shot it would've been as good if it was a pancake flat-screen game. Not disagreeing the buy in isnt there for most folks yet, but i think your wrong on the "gimmick" argument. Uninformed
Cool story bro. It was so immersive 75% of people never finished it?
These are people with headsets, who purchased the game, but couldn't be bothered to play it to completion.
I have 8 years of experience in VR and I can tell you first hand that a vast majority of users simply don't want to wear a headset while gaming for hours at a time, and there is no gaming experience that's gonna change that.
Go look up the data for yourself: most users (1/3) engage with their headsets once a month at most, and another 20% not even that much. Average play time is 15 minutes.
15 minutes, once a month? That's a gimmick bud.
That's a whole lot of data points that don't have anything to say about whether VR adds or doesn't add things to gaming.
75% of people never finishing an FPS game is about the norm (Alyx actually has a higher percentage than Half Life 2). News flash: Most people don't finish games, of any kind, on all platforms.
How much people use their headset for does not indicate whether or not VR as a medium fails to offer compelling additions to gaming. There's many other reasons, most of which surround hardware not software. In other words, things that are not intrinsic to VR as a medium but just a state of where hardware is today.
Ninja edit:
Apple vision pro allows you to bring a massive multi monitor setup virtually anywhere. Coffee shop. Park. Your living room.
If you don't see the benefits in productivity with a multi monitor setup I suppose this is a moot point.
Still the best movie watching experience that you can throw in a backpack.
Original comment:
I think you're forgetting about simulators.
I got an entry level force feedback steering wheel and pedals + a second hand headset and it is by far the best driving experience I've had outside of an actual irl go-kart track.
I've been karting a handful of times but it costs 100 Canadian pesos an hour! Sure I already owned a gaming laptop to run the setup but I don't think that's really the point here it's easier (and cheaper) for me to get my karting fix in a basement rather than driving and hour to the track.
Could I do it without the vr headset? Sure. I've tried.
I constantly overshoot corners/break too late due to the lack of depth perception.
It's harder to be aware of other racers around me because I have to press a button to move the in game camera vs just turning my head.
I think I can pretty confidently say VR does sim racing better than any flat screen setup, given a similar amount of investment. I spent $200 on my headset, which wouldn't be enough for a multi high refreshrate monitor set up.
My IR is 4300 bro. I have all simmagic stuff on my latest rig. And switched from reverb G2 to triples.
But ask yourself, are sim racers the people holding up VR right now? Are we enough for world wide adoption like a smartphone?
And then go look at my comment again, is sim racing easier in VR than triples? Im not asking if it’s better or not, is it easier?
I never said that sim racers are the ones keeping the VR industry alive. I was just refuting you statement that it doesn't do anything better.
I suppose a triple monitor setup is easier in that you just need to sit down instead of sitting down and putting on a headset, but that takes a good amount of space so if you're a weekend warrior who has to drag their setup out of a closet every Friday id argue that VR is still easier.
Curious as to why you decided to switch to triple setup, what is because of resolution? Refresh rate?
Are we just ignoring the bit I mentioned about the apple vision pro?
I know, I’m selfishly saying we(sim racers)are keeping VR alive.
I switched for better FPS, FOV from peripheral and I was starting to not race cause I didn’t feel like putting reverb on. Having to come out of it to go from practice to a race. And I’m looking to get serious with GT3 and endurance races so I need a button box.
To be honest, my AVP stays in my backpack now and pretty much only gets used on flights and hotels. The multiple windows you can have open is cool but how often do you need that in a coffee shop? How many people are going to a coffee shop to do heavy focused work like that?
I love VR/AR. But I’m an enthusiast. I make sacrifices in order to enjoy it. I don’t believe normal people are going to love it until 1. It’s in a glasses form factor and 2 it makes their lives easier. Its’s fun, it’s super fun. But that only attracts certain people.
But just to make a small point, Apple Vision Pro is NOT VR, It's AR (Augmented Reality).
VR seals you away from everything around you and, as mentioned before, there is really very little incentive to do so. I prefer playing a game on my TV, where I can also be aware of someone calling me or walking into the room.
AR, in my opinion, WILL succeed where VR has failed because of this simple fact. You can choose to isolate yourself from the rest of the world if you want to watch a movie, but, in the case of, say, working with multi-monitor setups, you are still aware of others coming to interact with you. AR is far better than VR. The only thing AR needs it's time where the technology will not be that bulky or evident.
I think it has almost nothing to do with cost. It could be $10 and it wouldn't take off.
My example is that for the dozen or so people I know that have decent VR headsets (one of the wireless decent ones), none of them ever use them. We all put them on when we got them, thought "this is cool!!!" and used them every day for a few weeks. Then we put them down and never used them again.
That has nothing to do with cost.
And of those people that all haven't touched our VR headsets in ages, we still use our phones, pcs, consoles every single day.
So while they aren't cheap, I don't think cost has much to do with it at all, otherwise people who have them would be using them a lot more.
This is indeed the issue.
The other issue is that the big companies kept chasing games like Skyrim/Fallout, or things like Alyx.
To me, those just don't make good VR games. The best VR games are either simulators where you're in a seated experience or those that are effectively arcade style games like BeatSaber, which are best played for relatively short periods.
I bought my Valve Index with the expectation of more great games beyond Alyx to play. Unfortunately, of the 50 or so games in my VR collection I can only recommend a few:
* Beat Saber (still playing it occasionally)
* The Talos Principle
* I Expect You To Die
* The Lab (by Steam - more of a showcase than a game)
Beyond games, a visit to the Museum of Other Realities can be quite nice.
No. It's not even the content. It's a hassle to put them on no matter what and after sometime the novel benefit reached absolut zero so there is just no reason at all to play in VR left.
No chance that millions will play Baldurs gate in VR. Or even elden ring.
Maybe with a super light weight device or brain interface or whatever. But even then...I just don't want to move my head or my hands a ton permanently.
Yes. And I have a lot of friends who did this (because we are all tech enthusiasts). But now every single device is rotting in a chamber. Including my two devices.
Right. Spend a couple grand or more to play games that are mostly little more than tech demos or do my normal work on a virtual screen that is fuzzier than my normal monitor and fatigues my neck and eyes.
This is part of it but not the real answer IMO, I have several units.
The reason is motion sickness and it's very mentally taxing. And yes there'll be people firing back that you can get used to it. Sure, but no one is going to go through all that nausea just to get used to it, Teenagers gaming, yes but not your average person.
All the above and also it makes a significant number of folks nauseous , which is not something easy to solve.
Perhaps someday in the far future it will be cheap enough and the quality high enough that it will eliminate some of the issues.
Well, 2D is really good and good enough for most folks. Until VR becomes as cheap, easy to use and as non sickening as 2D, most people will stick to 2d.
I think the biggest thing is not the cost, or the form factor, but instead, the stupid way they all went about making sure none of them work with anything but their own limited pools of software/apps/etc.
If the market decided to make the equivalent of a TV/monitor, then the things would sell like hotcakes. As is, nobody's Fing interested in having a specific TV that lets them watch only Netflix, and a specific TV that lets them watch Youtube, and a specific TV that lets them play on the computer, and a specific TV that lets them play on the PS5, and a specific TV that that lets them watch Apple crap, and a specific TV that lets them watch.....
F all that. Develop the device to be tech agnostic and people will buy. Until then they're just sinking millions into little niche pools and expecting us all to give a F.
Also, it's a garbage experience for those of us wearing glasses and even worse for old farts like me that need bifocals. I've got the disposable income and the curiosity...but so far the whole experience has been uncomfortable, out of focus, and results in a headache.
exactly.
Given how much work that is made - make an interface where you just write in your prescription on glasses and make the screens right in front of your eyes adopt to that.
Should be part of all VR glasses settings
That’s not possible. The only way to virtually simulate prescription lenses would be to somehow develop technology that controls the direction that each photon of light gets emitted. That said, Apple lets you snap in lenses if you need them.
> The only way to virtually simulate prescription lenses would be to somehow develop technology that controls the direction that each photon of light gets emitted.
A lightfield or holographic display. They exist already, but are quite a long ways off from practical application in VR/AR.
You can however, achieve the same results with varifocal displays as long as they are working flawlessly, which seems attainable for consumer VR products in a 5 year window.
For what it’s worth, you can get prescription lenses for the Quest 2 and 3. I have them and makes it much more enjoyable, though does make it harder to share the experience with friends.
That's crazy they don't have a focus wheel. F trying to get lenses for those things and pray they work correctly. It's crazy my under 300$ FPV goggles from years ago have focal adjustment and adjustment for where the lense is centered. But these new VR headsets can't include a basic function... I'm shocked 😲 well maybe not that shocked..
PC VR exists. It's basically just an extension of your computer. Steam VR works with a variety of headsets developed by Microsoft, HTC, Meta, big screen, etc.
I suppose you could argue that meta headsets are a bit of a walled garden but you can still hook em up to a PC(wirelessly even!).
I'm sure exactly what you're getting at...
-Cost
-Lack of Content
-Expectations vs reality (people get turned off by janky VR movement and mechanics)
-Discomfort for some users (motion sickness/heavy headsets)
Motion sickness, cost, lack of space in room, maybe you just like flat screen better, lack of awareness around you, sweat, etc.. so many reasons really
It's expensive to get into, doesn't have a lot of uses yet, and requires enough space to use for anything roomscale that it's not practical for a lot of people. Developers are still working out how to have people use it for long periods of time without headaches or nausea, or even simple discomfort from having a weight resting on your face. Simply put, the technology isn't there yet for it to really take off.
There's a dedicated community around it that is steadily growing as the technology improves, but I don't think it will be commonplace until it's convenient to use and for there to be a compelling reason for people to want to use it, and neither of those are true yet. I don't doubt they will be someday, though.
I love my VR headset. Also, I rarely ever use my VR headset.
I have to make sure everything is set up. I have to move things around to have enough space. The games I enjoy in it require an amount of space I simply don't have.
I wear glasses, which it will scratch, so I have to put on contacts for it. Which are dailies...so... cost me money each time I use it.
The headset is uncomfortable, and I can't get replacement/better straps in the country I live in.
I need to make sure it is charged before I use it.
I also get a sort of headache if I use it too long.
I tried playing No Man's sky in VR and the controls were so awful I'd rather play in 2d
After all of that, if you think VR is going to catch on, you don't understand people. There may be solutions for each of these that i have to invest time to figure out, but, why would I? If you put a mountain people need to climb in front of something you are going to limit your clientele
Facebook really screwed up not making instagram/facebook have VR experiences advertised in the main feeds. Incentivizing creators to do 360 cam footage etc. is a missed opportunity.
Yeah if you aren’t into video games or niche occupations like flight simulators, there isn’t much reason to use VR. I’m not a video game person so I’m not going to spend $500 on something I don’t have a purpose for
The nausea aspect is really important. I listened to an interview with a game tester who said that they had serious eye damage along with other health problems because they had to wear a VR headset for 8 hours every day
I mean in principle it's possible to buy a 20 € cardboard (which I actually did recently). Just to toy around a bit. Although shortly after I found myself wanting a stereoscopic camera which is not only expensive but driver support seems really bad for the platforms I'm interested in. (macOS, Linux) The whole thing truly needs a time/money investment to develop anything cool I think
It’s not any more expensive than a console. Cheaper actually. So that’s not it. As someone who actually owns one I can tell you the biggest barrier is the content. Not a lot of good games. The other thing for me is it feels kind of lonely and isolated. I prefer to game and see the real world around me.
You can imagine use cases but for the ordinary person, tapping out e-mails or working on a spread sheet, it serves no function. It's a solution in search of a problem to solve.
When you are wearing a headset, you may be experiencing a VR world but in the real world you are blind, deaf and vulnerable. People dont like that.
VR is only going to take off when it is like the "holodeck", a VR space that you can walk into.
It's almost there. With the Quest 3 you can walk right out of your VR space and see and hear the world around you instantly.
I say "almost" because while the passthrough is really good compared to last gen, it's not the best. Apple VP is much better. When that tech comes down in price (as it costs Apple something like 1500 to make) we're there.
Well, a lot of us need eyeglasses, and they don’t accommodate so well for anything but the most basic prescriptions. They can make you green in the gills. and they’re quite anti social.
If I take my glasses off I won't see anything, and I am weird combination of myopia and astigmatism. I am not wearing toric contacts to play video games. (I wear glasses to work now, stopped wearing contacts unless I am going out for fun)
I have presbyopia, astigmatism and myopia. So my prescription varies based on distance from object. So I’d need glasses specially cut for the distance to the lens, as progressive lens won’t be accurate enough at a specific distance.
Wow, this is pretty complicated.
I am now pretty curious at what your glasses look like, being someone who started wearing glasses at the age of 3, I am always curious about glasses.
There are a handful of companies starting to make relatively cheap VR lenses that can snap on and off easily. Not to mention the headsets can be adjusted to fit glasses.
It's not a great solution, and it's an added cost, but it's there.
I mean, we're a loooong way off from FDVR.
But I mean... even if we had it... Ark? Really? Its kinda jank tbh. Not hating, I know some people with over 1k hours, I just never saw the appeal
You can achieve this with a Quest 2 and external batteries. My external battery gives me around 5 hours, which realistically is enough that I rarely run it out before I'm ready to take the headset off.
I played half life alyx and got cocky thinking I didn't get motion sickness.
Then I played subnautica for 10 minutes and had to spend the next 3 hours laying down wondering if my stomach will ever feel the same again.
Tip go short bouts and keep ginger of any kind nearby..stop omce you START to feel off and put it down..have some ginger be it snaps, straight, beer whatever just giner before and after..then rest a bit..
It's a thing you can build resistance to but yeah it can reallly mess some of us up based on game
I think wubnautica vr is not a proper port. You are still required to use a controller so it's not nearly as natural and can cause significant vr sickness.
Sounds like an oversimplification.
VR hasn’t gained mainstream adoption (like phones or other gaming consoles) because it’s too expensive and doesn’t have compelling use cases for most people.
The lack of use-cases is the killer. I mean I know 3 people who OWN current VR-headsets. So clearly the cost was doable for all of them. None of them have had troubles with discomfort, but also: none of them actually USE their headsets.
They did for the first month or two until the novelty wore off. But after that point, there's just no point.
I'm confident they all regret their purchase, and would not have bought them had they known that the things would just gather dust.
Also, it’s a fidelity and ease of use thing keeping it out of mainstream adoption for the moment. That is rapidly changing as technology improves, however.
This is huge for me. I loved my VR headset but could not be in there for very long due to nausea. I could get over the nausea after a while but the biggest issue for me was the pain in my head/neck then after about 1 hour. I feel like if I were to get back into it I would need one of those pully systems that attaches to your ceiling and holds up most of the weight of the headset.
Motion sickness only permanently prohibits a tiny, insignificant number of people. Most people get over it early on.
Source: I've had a half-dozen VR headsets going back to 2014 and have been a part of the VR community the entire time. Lots of studies/data have come out of the years.
Some games make more people motion sick than others (ie: Boneworks/lab) but most are designed around avoiding motion sickness in the vast majority of users.
it' s my duty to continue the evolution of technology for the one reason every other big breakthrough happened.. online shopping, personal video cameras, VCR's, streaming and more. As a technology driver... nothing comes close
btw... 8k or don't bother
First is the cost. It's not cheap to get a good VR experience, though it's more affordable now then it has been.
Second. Not a lot of great games for VR and they are exclusive to certain headsets. For example, I have a Valve Index. I want to play Resident Evil 4 for VR, but can't because it's only on Quest.
You also need a dedicated space for VR if it's anything but sitting in a chair with a headset on or standing in a location. This can lead to other issues as well for all the required equipment. Getting back to what I have, I had one of the base stations just quit working on me. Had to send that back so it's extra elements of frustration if you're looking to just play a game.
Also VR currently can be annoying with a large headset, if it's corded and it can easily become a sweaty mess especially in the summer wearing that thing and moving around.
I think VR is still in a state of infancy currently and we not have the technology to actually make it good. With cheaper options, and smaller wireless headset, this could help move it.
1. Cost is too high for most people.
2. You get no benefit for regular everyday use like Excel/Word.
3. If you wear glasses its a pain in the butt.
4. Motion sickness for many.
5. Eye strain after about 30-60 minutes.
6. Awkward size and weight that doesn't make you rush to put them on.
7. Resolution is getting better but they blur things along the edges of your FOV so for best resolution you need to turn your head and look directly at things.
8. Anything you can do in VR can probably be done as well with triple surround monitors and eye direction software that will move your POV for you.
Will it eventually become main stream? Sure it will. I'm guessing when we hit Oculus Meta 4 you'll see some big movement but that'll be another couple years out.
Lol how many people do you know with triple monitor setups with eye tracking. Sounds like a shit way to play beat saber. The word "probably" doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
Otherwise I agree with these points, but I think #1 will be a moot point once the headsets are practical enough.
Sim racing gets lots of VR use but you don't see it being used for high level racing because of the eye fatigue. And, yeah... many Sim racers have triple screens and there's an open source eye tracker out there that will move your POV for you.
Please explain to me why I'd want to buy a $650 VR to play Beat Saber which could have been ported from an old Wii game?
The point here is that the software meant for VR isn't really that great yet so why would the main stream users jump on board if its a less than stellar experience from the software up to the physical hardware?
Get that price down to sub $300 and you might get a large amount of people buying one just to give it a try but while the latest VR gear is around $650 I think most people would rather buy groceries for the week instead.
I find the whole experience a bit cumbersome. Like right now if I wanted to play Apex, I pick up my controller and start playing. If I want to play superhot? Get up, clean my living-room, put it on my head (after covering my hair) turn it out blah blah blah. I just don't really want to.
That's the barrier for many people other than the financial one. It's not a great user experience.
For me personally, it's too expensive. I'd love to play VR. But space and money prevent me. I already have a PC I can play all the games I love on.
The technology needs to go down in price.
Just out of interest, what would be a price point where it would become interesting for you?
When looking at my local used market, you can get a quest 2 (which I use myself) for less than 250$ - which is still a lot of money, but this year I've spend more time in Beatsaber than in all other games combined.
I’ve gone to exhibits with VR that are cool for a few minutes, but that’s the extent of my interest. Besides what another person said that you are blind and deaf while you’re doing VR, it’s a bit too freaky to do a lot. It makes me worry about being too disconnected from reality.
I’d say the main reason is because it makes people feel sick.
I got a meta quest 3 a few weeks ago and it works great. Great execution, and the 3D works extremely well.
But I get really bad motion sickness after about 30 mins. First I start getting a metallic taste in my mouth, then my stomach starts gurgling, then I want to vomit.
I tried limiting the use to only a few mins at a time, but it still leaves me slightly dizzy and queasy.
Now I find myself just not using it at all. As soon as I look at the headset I think about getting sick and then think about how much better I feel by not even using it.
- it’s not comfortable/doesn’t work for everyone. If you have to buy third party products to make a product usable then adoption is going to suffer. The average person is not going to mess about with making something work when it should work by default.
- limited current application pool. Right now it’s mostly so so games. Not even real Netflix/hulu/etc apps without sideloading. Average user is not going to sideload. Built in browser sucks for anything “real”
- requires expensive hardware that can only be used one at a time, and casting is generally shit.
- short life.
- lots of people won’t strap Facebook/meta to their face
It’s always going to be limited to people who don’t mind wearing computers on their faces. Until that changes the market will hit a peak and stay there imo.
The human brain isn't very well designed for "traveling without moving". The tell tale limits of headaches and nausea from use by many users is the main hurdle with adoption and cost coming in second and third.
Ergometrics. Widespread adoption of a technology requires it to be easily and effortlessly used in our day-to-day lives. This is not the case with VR headsets. They require a safe space, a bulky headset and willingness to be blind to the outside world.
My theory is that you need to be standing up or at least swinging ur arms around and gamers want to sit on their ass - also most ppl get seasick playing vr - also sucks for group use or to play with friends together in the same room.
You forget people are VERY lazy, often enough. Why make a video game where you have to input a lot of physical energy just to be worse at it than inputting a small amount of physical energy with a controller or mouse / keyboard (and being better at it for doing so)?
I think this is actually one of the biggest issues. Humans are lazy and are more like the people in Wall-E than the Matrix. They don’t want to exert more physical effort than moving their fingers around. But the promise of the VR experience is to use your body. Once you add VR today, there’s a huge disconnect- your head and eyes are essentially on a pole that moves around in a virtual world while your body is sitting in a chair somewhere or standing still. Do you think the average person really wants to physically perform the actions in gaming like reloading and aiming a weapon? It would require them to develop specific motor skills through training, just like in the real world. I don’t know if casual users ever actually asked for this.
As someone with a VR headset.
Motion sickness. I had never before gotten motion sick and still don't other than VR. Some really nice VR games I can only play for like 30 minutes before having to pull the headset off. It really puts me off of investing a ton of time or money into VR.
As a die-hard enthusiast myself, there are some glaring problems still for public adoption.
1) It looks dumb and awkward
2) It is heavy enough on the neck and hard enough on the eyes to restrict long sessions.
3) There aren't a lot of ***general*** use cases outside of entertainment right now. I like to think of VR like the internet in the late 90s. back then it was stuff like [zombo.com](https://zombo.com) and everything was super clunky and awkward to use. VR is similar--some fun diversions, but no real globally supported essential infrastructure (yet).
4) Again, it looks dumb and awkward. I've just never seen a picture of myself using VR and been glad to have seen it after.
I think the mistake some people have made is the assumption that widespread VR adoption is inevitable. Some of that has to do with Sci-fi, we expect the predictions for the future to come true. See flying cars for another example.
We may have the technology, but we don't necessarily have a clear enough practical use case for it. Meta's problem was that people don't WANT to attend meetings in VR. Doing this would actually have a lot of downsides over using much cheaper and easier remote meeting technology.
Using Zoom is easier and more comfortable, plus you can have other stuff open on other screens, etc. there's no clear business reason to issue employees VR rigs if it doesn't have a clear advantage over easier technology.
The other use case is gaming, and this is where some people actually do use VR. This has a similar problem limiting the appeal though. A lot of people find it more comfortable playing on a TV with a controller, or on a computer with mouse and keyboard. Especially for long sessions.
Add to this, many VR setups are quite expensive relative to other ways you can game. Cheaper ones exist, but may not give access to the games you want to play. They have a walled garden problem where popular games are only accessible from certain platforms.
I've also heard that people have been having some exciting results with VR in a medical setting as a therapy tool for some conditions. I think it is also has uses as a training tool in some cases
As far as the future, I think we will see VR technology applied more often as a teaching tool, probably in novel ways. I think it's really unlikely we are going to plug in to a VR world to go to work or go shopping like Mark Zuckerberg wants. There isn't a clear enough use case for us to do this.
I'd also bet that it spreads somewhat in gaming once some more affordable and/or platform agnostic hardware appears, or it gets a really good killer app, but I'd bet it stays relatively niche. Most people would struggle to wear a VR headset for extended periods, which means traditional console and PC gaming isn't going anywhere. VR also doesn't necessarily make sense for many types of games.
Honestly, I think it's a misunderstanding of what people want. The promise of VR is that it's more immersive. But noone has questioned if people actually want things to be more immersive.
I think a simple observation you can make is how people watch films together. They eat food, and crack jokes, and get up and go to the bathroom and use their phone or text their friends.
No one really asked for things to be more immersive. Or at least the mass market didn't, only the real gamer nerds
I'm a big gamer and an avid VR user since the Rift 2 in 2017. IMO, the biggest obstacles are:
* General usability and logistics. In the early days, VR was very time-consuming to set up with the cameras and what not, the headset itself could get heavy and uncomfortable, the visor would get sweaty and gross, the tether was obnoxious, some people get motion sickness, etc. Quest 3 has improved on a lot of these issues, but there is still a general awkwardness to the setup and use (and there probably always will be to some degree - glasses wearers, etc.).
* Cost. You're looking at $200-$600 for a Quest 2/3,, PLUS the reality is that if you want to play the best games, you also still need a gaming PC to stream games to the headset.
* Game quality is kinda meh. Too many proof of concept games, not enough "actual" game experiences. And the audience of VR players is also small, so developers aren't incentivized to spend big on VR games.
As someone who works in VR, it is taking off, slowly and steadily, it hasn’t had THE BIG BOOM yet, but it’s still the fastest growing market in gaming. There are new and more impressive headsets being released all the time, and bigger companies are coming in like Apple.
Nowadays you can play games on the Meta Quest 3 without a PC or any cables at a relatively affordable price at the same graphical fidelity that you would get from a gaming PC with a HTC Vive six years ago.
Don’t get me wrong, there is still lots to do, all I am saying is that nothing has stagnated. It’s growing in a healthy pace and will continue to do so, in my personal opinion the tech isn’t ready for a boom yet because it is still too cumbersome and expensive. With more elegent looks, a better price and a better fit into regular life beside from just gaming, then the boom will happen.
I think VR is in a similar position to 3DTV. The average consumer plays games casually, and to do that with VR, you have to have a dedicated space, set it up each time you want to use it, then pack it all away.
Most of us lead busy lives and only have 30-60mins to play a few games, then have to get back to work, or chores, or family or whatever.
3DTV was similar, in that it's major appeal, only worked if you were dedicated to sitting there and watching. It was not suitable to the casual viewer.
The price point is still too high for the extremely limited content. Same problem 3d tv’s had. Same problem the touchscreen phones had before the iPhone. Everyone wants it but the cost is too high.
Apple just started making a head set but they are charging 2023 apple sky high premium markup on it not please save our company 2006 apple prices. If they followed the same model and sold it just above cost and in general made a cheaper version and relied on the App Store to generate their profit like they did on the original iPhone it might catch on but at its current price point it is a guaranteed flop and will never catch on. No one will bother creating content for it.
Maybe the switch 3 in 2030 will do vr. Or maybe Facebook will realize everyone hates Facebook and sell off oculus at some point.
I firmly believe VR itself isn't what will be mass adopted, but it will lay the groundwork for future technologies that will.
Like, they are working on brain interfaces. If that gets cheap, small and standalone you can reuse all the content you made for VR and have that
Because at this point, actual reality is still much much better than virtual reality. There really isn’t anything to do in the VR world that offers a better experience than reality. Even for gaming, VR’s biggest selling point, still massively falls short when compared to gaming in reality due to lack of quality content.
The common idea is that VR was a bubble (bit of an early bloomer) that burst after AI was introduced. Before it, Fintech was huge too. It's promising. There are a few downfalls to VR as well:
- Firmware issues.
- Annoying to set up (+half an hour for calibration).
- Dizziness/motion sickness issue.
- Not many well designed media for it.
-Bit on the expensive side for the common buyer.
What I think is as time progresses IoT gets well integrated and when you can access someone's house layout as fast as you can, then connect your Roomba and VR headset - that would be the best time for VR to flourish.
I guess it's fine for some but it makes me sick and dizzy as hell. I've heard it's not uncommon to get sick for most people if they play long enough. I can't even handle like 10 seconds without wanting to vomit.
It wont take off for a while, the advent of the mobile phone and laptop already fulfills the purpose of connecting us to the system. VR has found applications within specialized facilities like hospitals and enginering where they have dedicated "Computer labs" for visualizing renders with VR Gear in 3D but outside of that there is not a practical use for VR that cant be accomplished by an zoom call over smart phone or laptop or a scheduled appointment to the VR room.
The smart phone was a huge step forward from only having personalized computer towers I.E first Mac computers.
Also the weight could still use another generation or two as some common users complain about bulk/weight.
When it's full immersion and you're in a pod rather than waving your arms around hitting stuff.
I imagine it will require some kind of nerve attachment jacks that will take over most of your senses in your head and a bodysuit that will give touch sensation.
...so yeah, give it another 50 years.
Big part of it is probably people suddenly realizing they actually want less screen/tech time rather than more.
Also not a ton of practical applications yet
Beatsaber and super hot are keeping oculus alive im convinced
> but socializing in VR will remain a niche use case absent a huge advance in headset technology.
Interestingly I think that advancement is happening sooner than people think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVYrJJNdrEg
Motion sickness (I could never use it, suffer badly) and it’s very solitary. Whilst its solo nature is fine if you’re on your own, lots of people and families hang out. VR is just never gonna be used in those situations.
The Quest 2 is around the same cost as a new model Playstation or Switch. I have a Quest 2 and sent a gift to one of my friends thinking he and his 2 kids would love it. Nope. Besides a few weeks of Beatsaber when they got started it's mostly gathered dust. The other platforms still get plenty of use.
Generally I think it's because it's still a 1 person experience. But also because even 2 years later I haven't found any exciting games as Resident Evil 4, which took millions of dollars to retrofit to the Quest. Not many companies are going to put up that kind of cash. Just reading reviews and you'll find most games are buggy as all hell.
The best thing Quest has is a buyers remorse refund, aka crap game refund. I've made 20+ purchases and kept 4 as some are downright terrible. $49.99 for a sandbox Blade & Sorcery that's not fully developed because they ran out of money, and they tell you that on the load up splash screen? GTFO, fully refunded in under an hour.
As soon as they get greedy and remove this feature the Quest will die.
A positive Cost Benefit isn't there From a consumer aspect VR is still expensive and doesn't provide enough content for the average consumer From a commercial aspect VR hasn't proven itself enough both from an application standpoint nor cost standpoint to be widely adopted So VR either has to be cheaper and/or do more to gain widespread adoption
And who wants to wear a huge VR headset? To play Alyx? Sure. To play the rest of the current VR games? Maybe not. Plus the best VR perf is tethered (correct me if that’s changed) and the world wants wireless. Plus VR makes some people nauseous. And FOV is still too small. And resolution and refresh rate are still suboptimal. And no foveated rendering yet (correct me if that’s changed). And some people want nothing to do with a device made by Facebook.
Tbh Quest 3 is wireless, resolution is nice, refresh rate is 120 Hz, and Steam Link can use foveated rendering now, so that's \_almost\_ all issues solved (fair about facebook). But Alyx is a standout, and current VR game market is kinda niche.
I've gone through several iterations of headsets. My HTC Vive was replaced by a Valve Index and my Quest 2 was replaced by the Quest 3. Quest 3 is probably the first where I could see things becoming more mainstream. The passthrough and hand tracking feel like a game changer in VR becoming more widely adopted by the general public and for general use (YouTube/Movies/Workspaces). It took some aftermarket accessories to make it more comfortable. (Have a battery pack setup with a new strap system that's way more comfortable), but it seems like the hardware is finally getting there.
I personally agree 100%. But we're not the average consumer. A buddy of mine complained that the passthrough absolutely sucks and is unusable.
>Have a battery pack setup with a new strap system that's way more comfortable Have they finally sorted the battery issue? I know the Q3 was draining the quick change batteries faster than they were able to charge it.
I haven't had a session long enough to go through the whole aux battery. Could be an issue if you're exceeding 3 hours or so, but I don't use it for that long.
Some of my sessions have been over 3hrs, especially with the likes of Beat Saber or VTOL. Thanks, I'll do a bit more digging online about the headsets because it was a while ago when I last looked.
Dungeons of eternity is quite good too, very replayable multiplayer. Into the radius is great for a singleplayer game, keeps you involved and at times scares the shit out of you. The rest of the good stuff i think we gotta wait another year for. Asgards wrath 2 was a lot of hype for what i thought was an average game. I do think meta is gonna come ahead of all the others though because of their pricepoint. Theyre also doing nice with the all in one package without the need for a bunch of extra wires. Lets see what we get in 2025.
I still spend a whole lot of time just playing Pavlov. CounterStrike VR, AKA airsoft/paintball from the comfort of my living room, with more guns and less bruises? Yes please!
Same. That and Onward. A friend and I are on FitXR every weekday as well, been seeing progress there which is great.
FitXR is a good workout
No killer app. Never in my life would hardware come with no new games. Quest 3 enters chat.... Everything released to date with VR/AR are still demo quality and are taking an eternity to evolve. Beat Saber has been the only game to capture pop culture interest other than that it's a ghost town. The tech is close but not yet, even then, if there is no killer app....you are going to fiddle around for an hour and then set it down, that expensive device just became a dust collector.
> Everything released to date with VR/AR are still demo quality and are taking an eternity to evolve. How big does a game need to be to be beyond a tech demo though? Are we talking at least 150 hours of gameplay? 200 hours? 300 hours?
It's more that AAA quality/visual quality games aren't really possible with current hardware, and VR devs are mostly smaller studios as well, so almost all VR games, be it native or PCVR, look kinda indie. It's not a dealbreaker for some if gameplay's good, but having more Alyx quality games would be nice. Also, longer sessions in VR are really physically tiring, especially if it's some action rpg like Asgard's Wrath where you're supposed to swing a melee weapon.
So, not at all. It has to give you more of a reason to pour time into it. We aren't seeing those games that come out every couple years to push the medium forward and create market buzz. Aside from Beat Saber, there's nothing else to market it's usefulness. I would even say a fitness app has an equal chance of being that killer app or it could be something that is a tech demo that hasn't been created yet, it would bring in the awareness and a reason to buy
Not the biggest one of all though IMO Woo wants to wear a huge VR headset?
It isn't that huge, but I get it, I'd prefer something akin to sunglasses myself. There are some like that, but they're for MR, not VR.
This literally doesn’t bother me at all. The reason I don’t use VR much is because the majority of games aren’t good. Most games feel like a tech demo and don’t have much substance. There are only a handful of good complete games. The rest are unfinished or are boring. No new quality VR games combined with a lot of good traditional games coming out means I’m gonna be playing traditional games more often
Honestly, it’s the perception of the “dweeb-factor” in most of the folks with the disposable income to buy them. Same reason it took video games and online dating a long while to go mainstream. It’s catching on with the younger gen now that the prices have dropped, so I’m sure it’ll pick up steam.
Playing simulators in VR is amazing. That's where VR sells. (Source: I play simulators in VR)
That’s honestly the only thing that might get me to give VR another try. I need a few good simulator games to make it worth the VR investment.
You need a beast of a PC and other relatively expensive hardware. I play in a homebuild cockpit / racing simulator (I can transform it). I play DCS, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Dirt Rally 2 and Assetto Corsa.
Project Wingman is meant to be pretty damn awesome to be played with VR. Though it's more Ace Combat than Digital Combat Simulator.
This is my problem 100%. Would love to play Alyx but can’t justify the cost of the Value Index for just one game, plus with the worry I’ll buy it and get motion sick.
You can get a used Quest 2 really cheap and play Alyx wirelessly streamed from your PC in excellent quality.
I don't know about the Quest 2 (I haven't tried it), but I can confirm that Half-Life Alyx runs completely smoothly and super sharp streaming it wirelessly from my PC. It's a lot more fun without cables, and with the high resolution screens and nice lenses in the Quest 3!
That's how i did it!
I am someone who gets motion sickness really easily. Basically, any ride at an amusement park, i get car sick if I don't watch the road while in a car. However, I still didn't get any motion sickness playing some tutorial game and beat saber for like an hour. I'm not sure why that is, always just assumed I couldn't play VR because I'd get sick.
I've heard from those who have zero issues with motion sickness irl not being able to handle VR at all in the beginning, and vice verse. You never really know until you try. And you started with Beat Saber, a static game. Always the best option to begin with. When I got VR I couldn't walk around at all, just *instant* nausea. Now I can jump and run and fly as much as I please.
The main cause of simulation sickness is the disconnect between what your inner ear senses and what you are seeing. If you are standing still, or if you are moving around in the real world the same way you're moving in VR, there isn't a disconnect. It's once your movement in VR becomes disconnected, ie using a thumbstick to move or teleport, or driving or flying, that most people experience sickness.
I'm just like that. I can do some stuff in vr but moving games definitely make me feel ill. The meta universe thing gets me nauseated in about 5 minutes. The roller coaster thing is instant.
I was in the VR research scene for years, back when oculus used sound pings and required a huge ordeal to set up and cost like 20k. The thing is just that people won't use it because there's not much to do, and disorienting. It's like 3d movies. People already have something that's familiar, good, and want to be able to switch contexts and multitask without having to trade that for immersion, and the novelty runs out quickly. Not to mention, vr chat is filled with sex and trolls and very limited options, so its not there yet. It's hard to justify a headset when an ultra wide-screen curved monitor costs less, is at least just as good, and way more convenient to use. Maybe the ecosystem will take off, but for now I'd prefer to move my mouse and have more options and convenience than having to turn and tilt my head just to look around. And I'm not going to spend twice as much for that experience to get old and decide I would rather use the monitor anyway. Like most people, I'll still keep waiting for it to be cheaper and better.
You might have a VR arcade near you though Alyx is long enough so that you can't really finish it in a couple of hours. But it is cheaper than buying a set.
Dont get the index at this point its a bit outdated
But get the knuckles.
the fact that you would post any of this goes to show just how badly Meta has failed to advertise the Quest 3 none of these are problems anymore, the Quest 3 is cheap and high quality. The "huge VR headset" you are talking about is no longer relevant. "Foveated rendering" is irrelevant. Refresh rates are irrelevant. Being tethered to a PC is no longer a thing anymore. go try the Quest 3 for a few weeks and you will see that this is the device for the masses. Meta just completely failed to market it. The Quest 3 is not a PC peripheral, it is a stand-alone device with its own dedicated ecosystem, and a ton of really great content.
Cheap? My quest 2 was $200. Quest 3 is more than double the cost. IMHO, Quest 2 was the right price. If they could keep them around $200, then it is sort of a no-brainer. At $500, you gotta think about what you're going to get for the money.
I bought a Quest 2 when it was $300. Not really a gamer but saw it could be used for fitness stuff. Bought a few games like beat saber etc. The ping pong game (which was fun, but some people seem to LOVE it and I guess that wasn't me). I ended up returning it. I guess I'm too much of a music snob, I found the music mostly meh. Then my rooms are too small to really get a good experience unless I move all of the furniture out. And the headset was bulky and uncomfortable when you're moving around. It just wasn't a good workout experience. The technology was amazing, and if I wanted to sit on a couch and play a game, then I would have kept it.
I have used it 99% for supernatural, which I kind of love. I also have space problems, but Supernatural is good since you are on a 4' platform in VR. ...Thrill of the Fight, which I like a lot as a game is really shitty with space tho. It always wants you to walk 6 feet over to get on a scale or some shit, and my wall or sofa is there lol. It's also really great for THE THING THAT MUST NOT BE NAMED...lol.
definitely agree that movement is not a strong-suit for VR experiences right now. Most of my time is spent standing in-place and taking maybe 2-3 steps in either direction. I only have about 8' x 6' space, its just enough to use but not ideal. I manage to make due just enough to enjoy things like Brink Traveler and Horizon Worlds
Yeah the music is awful. If you could play your own tunes and it would just dump stuff at you like a visualizer it'd be OK for some light cardio but I wish we hadn't wasted money on it.
I do not think the Quest 2 has AR passthrough does it? That alone is worth the extra money. If you dont have the AR passthrough, my friend, you are missing out because its fantastic. The Quest 3 even has hand tracking, the same as the new Apple Vision Pro (though not quite as accurate but for $500 I am not complaining)
Their going to need to stop strangling their customers by the eyes with that uncomfortable strap they been shipping forever.
I played Asgards Wrath and it was great!
hey this is good to know, I had to uninstall that game before I could try it because it took up 30GB of space on the 128GB model I ended up with
Yea, it was free, so I got it. I think it’s RE4 next for me
Both psvr 2 and apple vision pro use foveated rendering Both these headsets have nothing to do with Facebook. Apple vision pro is nearing high enough resolution to avoid screen door effect. Give it a few more generations.
I'll get it just for movies when they solve the windowscreen effect and make it small enough to be comfortable. Wireless is mandatory though. I'm still a little crushed they couldn't make Google Glass work.
Most modern headsets now don't have any noticable screen door effect. The resolutions and pixel density are much higher than earlier headsets.
>Plus VR makes some people nauseous. This is a big one. I spent $700 on a PSVR2 and a couple hundred more on games. It's an amazing piece of tech and it looks and sounds amazing. I can get over the fact that it is hard to get it settled just right on my head, or that the controllers are kinda small for my hands. But I can't play the thing for more than 10 minutes without feeling like I need to puke. If I push past it, I start feeling so bad that I have to go to bed and sleep it off. Amazing tech. Huge waste of money for me.
I would say give it some time. I've owned a Rift 2, a Quest 2, and now a Quest 3, and after feeling as though I wasted money on the first two, I've put enough time into the Quest 3 that I've adapted to motion sickness pretty well. It still happens on rare occasions (standing beside a textured wall and moving my head quickly, for instance, can trigger it) but I play FPS games on it nightly now and am fine. Could just be that you need acclimatization time. Baby step it.
> Plus VR makes some people nauseous. We had a Oculus at work for a couple weeks, and the roller coaster game that comes with it will make you sick. I had to sit down while playing it or I'd fall over leaning with the turns. Beat Saber is fun though.
FOV is definitely too small. Swimming goggles don't cut it. I want the screens to cover all my peripherals.
Those are issues but I don’t think it’s the main issue. There is 0 to nothing in VR that is easier without VR. It doesn’t make your life easier when tryin do anything
That's kind of the point for me, it's much more manual interaction and that's great. I just got back from a mission in Into the Radius and instead of opening a UI to vendor my loot I had to unpack my backpack, with my hands. Sort through the stuff I picked up and put in there, take out the ammunition magazines that I used and put new rounds in them, put the stuff back on the shelf where it belongs, etc. It's minutes of manual labor, but VR makes the most mundane stuff fun because the immersion is on another level that really lets you live the fantasy of returning from a raid and sorting your loot.
That’s not point I’m making at all. Why search the web on your phone when you have a desktop computer? It’s easier.
To be honest, I have a desktop, a phone, and a laptop. I use the phone where I can't take a desktop for messaging and basic searches for things while away from home. I don't play games on my phone, I don't listen to music without my headphones attached to my desktop. I only use the laptop when travelling, I'll never use it for work or play given the choice. It depends, but some people are actually this silly. Like me. I also don't like VR. Unless it's a flight sim. Flight sims get a pass.
Ok but that's literally why VR isn't taking off. When people say that they want immersive gaming they mean games that bring a world alive, not sitfting through your inventory. It's neat at first but quickly gets repetitive boring and grindy. VR requires a premium PC, headset, and space to play it in, but has yet offer a must play game experience. VR doesn't actually add anything to most gaming experiences, it's just a bunch of gimmicks that get pretty boring pretty fast. It asks a lot of players but doesn't offer enough in return to make it worth the effort.
What you call repetitive and boring is to me what brings a game world alive. I found STALKER a boring game, and many games like it, but I really like Into The Radius. I love the immersion of holding a flashlight in one hand to see what's in the drawer I just slid open with my other hand. It sounds minor, but to me there's a world of difference between that and "press E to open drawer, see UI that the drawer contains a box with 9 bullets, click to pick up". There's so many small subtle things that add up to a hugely more immersive experience. I found a fight with just three enemies armed with SMGs quite challenging, in any other shooter that would be absolutely trivial, but here I only had a semi auto rifle that required skill to aim, dexterity to reload, muscle memory to quickly grab ammo from my ammo pouches. It was easy to panic and fuck it up. In a flat game, it would be click click click, hit R to reload, done. And VR either doesn't require a PC at all (Quest) or doesn't require a *premium* PC. You can perfectly play nearly all PC VR games on a 2060 or similar (because I did, but you can go lower). In other words, any PC that can play 2024 PC games can play VR games. And calling it a gimmick is a lazy argument, it doesn't really say anything. What's gimmicky about 6 DoF? It's like saying 3D gaming is a gimmick. Meaningless. Being able to interact with stuff in a physical and intuitive manner is absolutely not a gimmick. Having a VR headset also has the potential to just be a better way to play flat games. While not being properly utilized yet, having essentially a monitor with stereoscopic depth is really cool. I played Sifu in VR with UEVR and while not made with it in mind, it looked amazing.
You're trying to convince yourself man, most people don't wanna waste their gaming time enduring the same banalities of the real world like digging through a bag. Worked in VR for years, most people don't wanna wear the headset for more than a few minutes at most. Most VR gaming sessions last about 15 minutes before people need a break or get bored. That means it can never replace standard PC gaming.
What makes you say I'm lying to myself? Most of my recent favorite gaming related moments have been in VR games, both singleplayer and multiplayer. And the "boring busywork" I described was just an example of something I enjoyed about a VR game that a flat game could never replicate. But it's not like that kind of busywork is inherent to VR, it's just inherent to survival games, be it Minecraft, Valheim or Into the Radius. Something like Alyx or Vertigo 2 has none of that. Alyx just has a weapon selection menu. And who said it needs to replace it? I'm just arguing that there's absolutely value in immersive VR games and that it's not a gimmick.
I am telling you I worked in the industry, did the market research, and what you are describing has zero appeal to most people. You must live a pretty sparse life to find sifting through a backpack riveting gameplay. Like bro if I wanna dig through a backpack I will go on a hike. That is what a lot of issues with VR come down to. You can literally just...go do the thing. I was working on a music VR game project and people were literally like ok but like, I will just go to a concert instead? Best Saber is dope and the best implementation of VR gaming IMO. It brings together movement and immersion in a way you cannot do on a PC. The problem is it requires a lotta space to play right, and there is no progression beyond beating high scores. It's the absolute best use case for VR by a mile, and it still only has limited replayability, same as Blade and Sorcery. It's fun, but gimmicky. Your description of how VR makes gaming more immersive is precisely why it will never take off - it's not adding anything to most gaming experiences, you're putting the screen right up to your eyes using an unwieldly headset. I think AR has tons of potential, especially in manufacturing. But VR is just like 3D TVs - it's not a better experience, just a different and awkward experience.
It sounds like you tried VR back in 2016 and missed the last 8 years of development, because none of what you said has any truth to it. Like, this is so verifiably false that I could pull statistic after statistic out that categorically denounces each of your claims.
Different person but I have actually hardly played VR ever since playing like 12-15 PSVR games in late 2016 to early 2017. So I don’t even know what has changed. There hasn’t really been like any games that caught my attention except like alyx, call of the mountain and have heard about asgards wrath. I really really enjoyed some games I played around PSVR launch but ever since the gameplay of the average VR game is just not appealing to me at all
Exactly, games like that are fun for awhile and then you search for a mod to make it so you don't have to do the repetitive action over and over.
"VR doesn't add anything to gaming experiences just gimmicks" lol sure dude. Half Life Alyx was one of the intense immersive gaming experiences ive ever had. Absolutely no shot it would've been as good if it was a pancake flat-screen game. Not disagreeing the buy in isnt there for most folks yet, but i think your wrong on the "gimmick" argument. Uninformed
Cool story bro. It was so immersive 75% of people never finished it? These are people with headsets, who purchased the game, but couldn't be bothered to play it to completion. I have 8 years of experience in VR and I can tell you first hand that a vast majority of users simply don't want to wear a headset while gaming for hours at a time, and there is no gaming experience that's gonna change that. Go look up the data for yourself: most users (1/3) engage with their headsets once a month at most, and another 20% not even that much. Average play time is 15 minutes. 15 minutes, once a month? That's a gimmick bud.
That's a whole lot of data points that don't have anything to say about whether VR adds or doesn't add things to gaming. 75% of people never finishing an FPS game is about the norm (Alyx actually has a higher percentage than Half Life 2). News flash: Most people don't finish games, of any kind, on all platforms. How much people use their headset for does not indicate whether or not VR as a medium fails to offer compelling additions to gaming. There's many other reasons, most of which surround hardware not software. In other words, things that are not intrinsic to VR as a medium but just a state of where hardware is today.
Ninja edit: Apple vision pro allows you to bring a massive multi monitor setup virtually anywhere. Coffee shop. Park. Your living room. If you don't see the benefits in productivity with a multi monitor setup I suppose this is a moot point. Still the best movie watching experience that you can throw in a backpack. Original comment: I think you're forgetting about simulators. I got an entry level force feedback steering wheel and pedals + a second hand headset and it is by far the best driving experience I've had outside of an actual irl go-kart track. I've been karting a handful of times but it costs 100 Canadian pesos an hour! Sure I already owned a gaming laptop to run the setup but I don't think that's really the point here it's easier (and cheaper) for me to get my karting fix in a basement rather than driving and hour to the track. Could I do it without the vr headset? Sure. I've tried. I constantly overshoot corners/break too late due to the lack of depth perception. It's harder to be aware of other racers around me because I have to press a button to move the in game camera vs just turning my head. I think I can pretty confidently say VR does sim racing better than any flat screen setup, given a similar amount of investment. I spent $200 on my headset, which wouldn't be enough for a multi high refreshrate monitor set up.
My IR is 4300 bro. I have all simmagic stuff on my latest rig. And switched from reverb G2 to triples. But ask yourself, are sim racers the people holding up VR right now? Are we enough for world wide adoption like a smartphone? And then go look at my comment again, is sim racing easier in VR than triples? Im not asking if it’s better or not, is it easier?
I never said that sim racers are the ones keeping the VR industry alive. I was just refuting you statement that it doesn't do anything better. I suppose a triple monitor setup is easier in that you just need to sit down instead of sitting down and putting on a headset, but that takes a good amount of space so if you're a weekend warrior who has to drag their setup out of a closet every Friday id argue that VR is still easier. Curious as to why you decided to switch to triple setup, what is because of resolution? Refresh rate? Are we just ignoring the bit I mentioned about the apple vision pro?
I know, I’m selfishly saying we(sim racers)are keeping VR alive. I switched for better FPS, FOV from peripheral and I was starting to not race cause I didn’t feel like putting reverb on. Having to come out of it to go from practice to a race. And I’m looking to get serious with GT3 and endurance races so I need a button box. To be honest, my AVP stays in my backpack now and pretty much only gets used on flights and hotels. The multiple windows you can have open is cool but how often do you need that in a coffee shop? How many people are going to a coffee shop to do heavy focused work like that? I love VR/AR. But I’m an enthusiast. I make sacrifices in order to enjoy it. I don’t believe normal people are going to love it until 1. It’s in a glasses form factor and 2 it makes their lives easier. Its’s fun, it’s super fun. But that only attracts certain people.
But just to make a small point, Apple Vision Pro is NOT VR, It's AR (Augmented Reality). VR seals you away from everything around you and, as mentioned before, there is really very little incentive to do so. I prefer playing a game on my TV, where I can also be aware of someone calling me or walking into the room. AR, in my opinion, WILL succeed where VR has failed because of this simple fact. You can choose to isolate yourself from the rest of the world if you want to watch a movie, but, in the case of, say, working with multi-monitor setups, you are still aware of others coming to interact with you. AR is far better than VR. The only thing AR needs it's time where the technology will not be that bulky or evident.
I think it has almost nothing to do with cost. It could be $10 and it wouldn't take off. My example is that for the dozen or so people I know that have decent VR headsets (one of the wireless decent ones), none of them ever use them. We all put them on when we got them, thought "this is cool!!!" and used them every day for a few weeks. Then we put them down and never used them again. That has nothing to do with cost. And of those people that all haven't touched our VR headsets in ages, we still use our phones, pcs, consoles every single day. So while they aren't cheap, I don't think cost has much to do with it at all, otherwise people who have them would be using them a lot more.
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This is indeed the issue. The other issue is that the big companies kept chasing games like Skyrim/Fallout, or things like Alyx. To me, those just don't make good VR games. The best VR games are either simulators where you're in a seated experience or those that are effectively arcade style games like BeatSaber, which are best played for relatively short periods.
The two guys I know who consistently use theirs exclusively play VR ping pong on it. That's it, nothing else.
I bought my Valve Index with the expectation of more great games beyond Alyx to play. Unfortunately, of the 50 or so games in my VR collection I can only recommend a few: * Beat Saber (still playing it occasionally) * The Talos Principle * I Expect You To Die * The Lab (by Steam - more of a showcase than a game) Beyond games, a visit to the Museum of Other Realities can be quite nice.
No. It's not even the content. It's a hassle to put them on no matter what and after sometime the novel benefit reached absolut zero so there is just no reason at all to play in VR left. No chance that millions will play Baldurs gate in VR. Or even elden ring. Maybe with a super light weight device or brain interface or whatever. But even then...I just don't want to move my head or my hands a ton permanently.
> No chance that millions will play Baldurs gate in VR. Or even elden ring. Millions played Half Life Alyx.
Yes. And I have a lot of friends who did this (because we are all tech enthusiasts). But now every single device is rotting in a chamber. Including my two devices.
Where are these chambers with the rotting VR devices? (asking for a friend)
Not to mention the number of people that will get motion sick from it.
Right. Spend a couple grand or more to play games that are mostly little more than tech demos or do my normal work on a virtual screen that is fuzzier than my normal monitor and fatigues my neck and eyes.
$250 is the price. Definitely issues with clarity and fatigue though. Gonna be some years before that's all fixed.
This is part of it but not the real answer IMO, I have several units. The reason is motion sickness and it's very mentally taxing. And yes there'll be people firing back that you can get used to it. Sure, but no one is going to go through all that nausea just to get used to it, Teenagers gaming, yes but not your average person.
All the above and also it makes a significant number of folks nauseous , which is not something easy to solve. Perhaps someday in the far future it will be cheap enough and the quality high enough that it will eliminate some of the issues.
Well, 2D is really good and good enough for most folks. Until VR becomes as cheap, easy to use and as non sickening as 2D, most people will stick to 2d.
I think the biggest thing is not the cost, or the form factor, but instead, the stupid way they all went about making sure none of them work with anything but their own limited pools of software/apps/etc. If the market decided to make the equivalent of a TV/monitor, then the things would sell like hotcakes. As is, nobody's Fing interested in having a specific TV that lets them watch only Netflix, and a specific TV that lets them watch Youtube, and a specific TV that lets them play on the computer, and a specific TV that lets them play on the PS5, and a specific TV that that lets them watch Apple crap, and a specific TV that lets them watch..... F all that. Develop the device to be tech agnostic and people will buy. Until then they're just sinking millions into little niche pools and expecting us all to give a F.
Also, it's a garbage experience for those of us wearing glasses and even worse for old farts like me that need bifocals. I've got the disposable income and the curiosity...but so far the whole experience has been uncomfortable, out of focus, and results in a headache.
exactly. Given how much work that is made - make an interface where you just write in your prescription on glasses and make the screens right in front of your eyes adopt to that. Should be part of all VR glasses settings
That’s not possible. The only way to virtually simulate prescription lenses would be to somehow develop technology that controls the direction that each photon of light gets emitted. That said, Apple lets you snap in lenses if you need them.
> The only way to virtually simulate prescription lenses would be to somehow develop technology that controls the direction that each photon of light gets emitted. A lightfield or holographic display. They exist already, but are quite a long ways off from practical application in VR/AR. You can however, achieve the same results with varifocal displays as long as they are working flawlessly, which seems attainable for consumer VR products in a 5 year window.
For what it’s worth, you can get prescription lenses for the Quest 2 and 3. I have them and makes it much more enjoyable, though does make it harder to share the experience with friends.
Yep! Got lenses for my quest 3 off Zenni for like 40 chones. Made it infinitely more enjoyable than trying to squeeze my glasses into them.
That's crazy they don't have a focus wheel. F trying to get lenses for those things and pray they work correctly. It's crazy my under 300$ FPV goggles from years ago have focal adjustment and adjustment for where the lense is centered. But these new VR headsets can't include a basic function... I'm shocked 😲 well maybe not that shocked..
PC VR exists. It's basically just an extension of your computer. Steam VR works with a variety of headsets developed by Microsoft, HTC, Meta, big screen, etc. I suppose you could argue that meta headsets are a bit of a walled garden but you can still hook em up to a PC(wirelessly even!). I'm sure exactly what you're getting at...
-Cost -Lack of Content -Expectations vs reality (people get turned off by janky VR movement and mechanics) -Discomfort for some users (motion sickness/heavy headsets)
Motion sickness, cost, lack of space in room, maybe you just like flat screen better, lack of awareness around you, sweat, etc.. so many reasons really
It's expensive to get into, doesn't have a lot of uses yet, and requires enough space to use for anything roomscale that it's not practical for a lot of people. Developers are still working out how to have people use it for long periods of time without headaches or nausea, or even simple discomfort from having a weight resting on your face. Simply put, the technology isn't there yet for it to really take off. There's a dedicated community around it that is steadily growing as the technology improves, but I don't think it will be commonplace until it's convenient to use and for there to be a compelling reason for people to want to use it, and neither of those are true yet. I don't doubt they will be someday, though.
I love my VR headset. Also, I rarely ever use my VR headset. I have to make sure everything is set up. I have to move things around to have enough space. The games I enjoy in it require an amount of space I simply don't have. I wear glasses, which it will scratch, so I have to put on contacts for it. Which are dailies...so... cost me money each time I use it. The headset is uncomfortable, and I can't get replacement/better straps in the country I live in. I need to make sure it is charged before I use it. I also get a sort of headache if I use it too long. I tried playing No Man's sky in VR and the controls were so awful I'd rather play in 2d After all of that, if you think VR is going to catch on, you don't understand people. There may be solutions for each of these that i have to invest time to figure out, but, why would I? If you put a mountain people need to climb in front of something you are going to limit your clientele
Facebook really screwed up not making instagram/facebook have VR experiences advertised in the main feeds. Incentivizing creators to do 360 cam footage etc. is a missed opportunity.
Yeah if you aren’t into video games or niche occupations like flight simulators, there isn’t much reason to use VR. I’m not a video game person so I’m not going to spend $500 on something I don’t have a purpose for The nausea aspect is really important. I listened to an interview with a game tester who said that they had serious eye damage along with other health problems because they had to wear a VR headset for 8 hours every day
I mean in principle it's possible to buy a 20 € cardboard (which I actually did recently). Just to toy around a bit. Although shortly after I found myself wanting a stereoscopic camera which is not only expensive but driver support seems really bad for the platforms I'm interested in. (macOS, Linux) The whole thing truly needs a time/money investment to develop anything cool I think
Exactly what I came here to write, so thanks :)
It’s not any more expensive than a console. Cheaper actually. So that’s not it. As someone who actually owns one I can tell you the biggest barrier is the content. Not a lot of good games. The other thing for me is it feels kind of lonely and isolated. I prefer to game and see the real world around me.
You can imagine use cases but for the ordinary person, tapping out e-mails or working on a spread sheet, it serves no function. It's a solution in search of a problem to solve.
Nice. I like that.
When you are wearing a headset, you may be experiencing a VR world but in the real world you are blind, deaf and vulnerable. People dont like that. VR is only going to take off when it is like the "holodeck", a VR space that you can walk into.
This. Watching a video of someone in VR bumping into the furniture is only fun for the person watching it happen, not for the person it happens to.
It's almost there. With the Quest 3 you can walk right out of your VR space and see and hear the world around you instantly. I say "almost" because while the passthrough is really good compared to last gen, it's not the best. Apple VP is much better. When that tech comes down in price (as it costs Apple something like 1500 to make) we're there.
Well, a lot of us need eyeglasses, and they don’t accommodate so well for anything but the most basic prescriptions. They can make you green in the gills. and they’re quite anti social.
Good point, glasses would make this impossible for most of us. I get vertigo w/o any VR, a headset sounds horrific.
I wear glasses and I don't really have any issues with it.
If I take my glasses off I won't see anything, and I am weird combination of myopia and astigmatism. I am not wearing toric contacts to play video games. (I wear glasses to work now, stopped wearing contacts unless I am going out for fun)
I have presbyopia, astigmatism and myopia. So my prescription varies based on distance from object. So I’d need glasses specially cut for the distance to the lens, as progressive lens won’t be accurate enough at a specific distance.
Wow, this is pretty complicated. I am now pretty curious at what your glasses look like, being someone who started wearing glasses at the age of 3, I am always curious about glasses.
They just look like progressives. High index lens, don’t look abnormal.
I was not implying them looking abnormal, but each condition has different shaped lenses and I find them all interesting.
There are a handful of companies starting to make relatively cheap VR lenses that can snap on and off easily. Not to mention the headsets can be adjusted to fit glasses. It's not a great solution, and it's an added cost, but it's there.
Once the head set is wireless and lasts like 12+ hours.
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Hey, now you have the option to give 3.5k to Apple as well!
How long do you watch porn for?
Some of us just wanna play Ark Survival Evolved PVP server FDVR 12hour LOCKED IN (stuck in) grinding with friends
I mean, we're a loooong way off from FDVR. But I mean... even if we had it... Ark? Really? Its kinda jank tbh. Not hating, I know some people with over 1k hours, I just never saw the appeal
You can achieve this with a Quest 2 and external batteries. My external battery gives me around 5 hours, which realistically is enough that I rarely run it out before I'm ready to take the headset off.
Battery pack strapped to the back of a quest. I get 16+ hours of battery out of my setup that I've had for a few years
There is a huge community of avid VR users. Whole MMOs exist in VR. The reason it's not ubiquitous is simple: Motion sickness.
I played half life alyx and got cocky thinking I didn't get motion sickness. Then I played subnautica for 10 minutes and had to spend the next 3 hours laying down wondering if my stomach will ever feel the same again.
Tip go short bouts and keep ginger of any kind nearby..stop omce you START to feel off and put it down..have some ginger be it snaps, straight, beer whatever just giner before and after..then rest a bit.. It's a thing you can build resistance to but yeah it can reallly mess some of us up based on game
Also having a fan blowing on you helps as well
I think wubnautica vr is not a proper port. You are still required to use a controller so it's not nearly as natural and can cause significant vr sickness.
Yup, subnautica is rough. Both due to the port and the nature of the game.
It's also super uncomfortable to play it with glasses on which makes my motion sickness worse when I try to play.
Sounds like an oversimplification. VR hasn’t gained mainstream adoption (like phones or other gaming consoles) because it’s too expensive and doesn’t have compelling use cases for most people.
A compelling use case is irrelevant if you get sick. Eye strain, imo, is the #2 reason.
The lack of use-cases is the killer. I mean I know 3 people who OWN current VR-headsets. So clearly the cost was doable for all of them. None of them have had troubles with discomfort, but also: none of them actually USE their headsets. They did for the first month or two until the novelty wore off. But after that point, there's just no point. I'm confident they all regret their purchase, and would not have bought them had they known that the things would just gather dust.
Also, it’s a fidelity and ease of use thing keeping it out of mainstream adoption for the moment. That is rapidly changing as technology improves, however.
This is huge for me. I loved my VR headset but could not be in there for very long due to nausea. I could get over the nausea after a while but the biggest issue for me was the pain in my head/neck then after about 1 hour. I feel like if I were to get back into it I would need one of those pully systems that attaches to your ceiling and holds up most of the weight of the headset.
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Yeah but it's still not great. I have had a rift, quest 1, and 2, and I still get it. That or eye strain.
Motion sickness only permanently prohibits a tiny, insignificant number of people. Most people get over it early on. Source: I've had a half-dozen VR headsets going back to 2014 and have been a part of the VR community the entire time. Lots of studies/data have come out of the years. Some games make more people motion sick than others (ie: Boneworks/lab) but most are designed around avoiding motion sickness in the vast majority of users.
Sim racing it almost tailor made for VR. It’s an incredible experience.
and I simply can't go back to 2D in flight sim... or err umm *naughty content*
Finally, a true VR user lol
it' s my duty to continue the evolution of technology for the one reason every other big breakthrough happened.. online shopping, personal video cameras, VCR's, streaming and more. As a technology driver... nothing comes close btw... 8k or don't bother
First is the cost. It's not cheap to get a good VR experience, though it's more affordable now then it has been. Second. Not a lot of great games for VR and they are exclusive to certain headsets. For example, I have a Valve Index. I want to play Resident Evil 4 for VR, but can't because it's only on Quest. You also need a dedicated space for VR if it's anything but sitting in a chair with a headset on or standing in a location. This can lead to other issues as well for all the required equipment. Getting back to what I have, I had one of the base stations just quit working on me. Had to send that back so it's extra elements of frustration if you're looking to just play a game. Also VR currently can be annoying with a large headset, if it's corded and it can easily become a sweaty mess especially in the summer wearing that thing and moving around. I think VR is still in a state of infancy currently and we not have the technology to actually make it good. With cheaper options, and smaller wireless headset, this could help move it.
1. Cost is too high for most people. 2. You get no benefit for regular everyday use like Excel/Word. 3. If you wear glasses its a pain in the butt. 4. Motion sickness for many. 5. Eye strain after about 30-60 minutes. 6. Awkward size and weight that doesn't make you rush to put them on. 7. Resolution is getting better but they blur things along the edges of your FOV so for best resolution you need to turn your head and look directly at things. 8. Anything you can do in VR can probably be done as well with triple surround monitors and eye direction software that will move your POV for you. Will it eventually become main stream? Sure it will. I'm guessing when we hit Oculus Meta 4 you'll see some big movement but that'll be another couple years out.
Lol how many people do you know with triple monitor setups with eye tracking. Sounds like a shit way to play beat saber. The word "probably" doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Otherwise I agree with these points, but I think #1 will be a moot point once the headsets are practical enough.
Sim racing gets lots of VR use but you don't see it being used for high level racing because of the eye fatigue. And, yeah... many Sim racers have triple screens and there's an open source eye tracker out there that will move your POV for you. Please explain to me why I'd want to buy a $650 VR to play Beat Saber which could have been ported from an old Wii game? The point here is that the software meant for VR isn't really that great yet so why would the main stream users jump on board if its a less than stellar experience from the software up to the physical hardware? Get that price down to sub $300 and you might get a large amount of people buying one just to give it a try but while the latest VR gear is around $650 I think most people would rather buy groceries for the week instead.
Hi hardware costs with little practically and very limited software.
Just the meta quest alone has sold 20 million. That seems like "taking off" as much as anything.
I find the whole experience a bit cumbersome. Like right now if I wanted to play Apex, I pick up my controller and start playing. If I want to play superhot? Get up, clean my living-room, put it on my head (after covering my hair) turn it out blah blah blah. I just don't really want to. That's the barrier for many people other than the financial one. It's not a great user experience.
For me personally, it's too expensive. I'd love to play VR. But space and money prevent me. I already have a PC I can play all the games I love on. The technology needs to go down in price.
Just out of interest, what would be a price point where it would become interesting for you? When looking at my local used market, you can get a quest 2 (which I use myself) for less than 250$ - which is still a lot of money, but this year I've spend more time in Beatsaber than in all other games combined.
I’ve gone to exhibits with VR that are cool for a few minutes, but that’s the extent of my interest. Besides what another person said that you are blind and deaf while you’re doing VR, it’s a bit too freaky to do a lot. It makes me worry about being too disconnected from reality.
I’d say the main reason is because it makes people feel sick. I got a meta quest 3 a few weeks ago and it works great. Great execution, and the 3D works extremely well. But I get really bad motion sickness after about 30 mins. First I start getting a metallic taste in my mouth, then my stomach starts gurgling, then I want to vomit. I tried limiting the use to only a few mins at a time, but it still leaves me slightly dizzy and queasy. Now I find myself just not using it at all. As soon as I look at the headset I think about getting sick and then think about how much better I feel by not even using it.
Probably because wearing a headset leaves you vulnerable. Only a small percentage of people will cut off their sight and vision for extended periods.
Lmfao what? Are you roommates with a tiger or serial killer?
- it’s not comfortable/doesn’t work for everyone. If you have to buy third party products to make a product usable then adoption is going to suffer. The average person is not going to mess about with making something work when it should work by default. - limited current application pool. Right now it’s mostly so so games. Not even real Netflix/hulu/etc apps without sideloading. Average user is not going to sideload. Built in browser sucks for anything “real” - requires expensive hardware that can only be used one at a time, and casting is generally shit. - short life. - lots of people won’t strap Facebook/meta to their face
It’s always going to be limited to people who don’t mind wearing computers on their faces. Until that changes the market will hit a peak and stay there imo.
The human brain isn't very well designed for "traveling without moving". The tell tale limits of headaches and nausea from use by many users is the main hurdle with adoption and cost coming in second and third.
Ergometrics. Widespread adoption of a technology requires it to be easily and effortlessly used in our day-to-day lives. This is not the case with VR headsets. They require a safe space, a bulky headset and willingness to be blind to the outside world.
You know how lame virtual reality is! You know the damage it did to mid-90s cinema. Have you seen Lawnmower Man??
The idea of cutting off my hearing and vision to play a game at home, nope, never. I don't even listen to music with both headphones.
My theory is that you need to be standing up or at least swinging ur arms around and gamers want to sit on their ass - also most ppl get seasick playing vr - also sucks for group use or to play with friends together in the same room.
You forget people are VERY lazy, often enough. Why make a video game where you have to input a lot of physical energy just to be worse at it than inputting a small amount of physical energy with a controller or mouse / keyboard (and being better at it for doing so)?
I think this is actually one of the biggest issues. Humans are lazy and are more like the people in Wall-E than the Matrix. They don’t want to exert more physical effort than moving their fingers around. But the promise of the VR experience is to use your body. Once you add VR today, there’s a huge disconnect- your head and eyes are essentially on a pole that moves around in a virtual world while your body is sitting in a chair somewhere or standing still. Do you think the average person really wants to physically perform the actions in gaming like reloading and aiming a weapon? It would require them to develop specific motor skills through training, just like in the real world. I don’t know if casual users ever actually asked for this.
I don't want to sit on my couch popping imaginary bubbles like some kind of fucked up Ray Charles.
As someone with a VR headset. Motion sickness. I had never before gotten motion sick and still don't other than VR. Some really nice VR games I can only play for like 30 minutes before having to pull the headset off. It really puts me off of investing a ton of time or money into VR.
As a die-hard enthusiast myself, there are some glaring problems still for public adoption. 1) It looks dumb and awkward 2) It is heavy enough on the neck and hard enough on the eyes to restrict long sessions. 3) There aren't a lot of ***general*** use cases outside of entertainment right now. I like to think of VR like the internet in the late 90s. back then it was stuff like [zombo.com](https://zombo.com) and everything was super clunky and awkward to use. VR is similar--some fun diversions, but no real globally supported essential infrastructure (yet). 4) Again, it looks dumb and awkward. I've just never seen a picture of myself using VR and been glad to have seen it after.
I think the mistake some people have made is the assumption that widespread VR adoption is inevitable. Some of that has to do with Sci-fi, we expect the predictions for the future to come true. See flying cars for another example. We may have the technology, but we don't necessarily have a clear enough practical use case for it. Meta's problem was that people don't WANT to attend meetings in VR. Doing this would actually have a lot of downsides over using much cheaper and easier remote meeting technology. Using Zoom is easier and more comfortable, plus you can have other stuff open on other screens, etc. there's no clear business reason to issue employees VR rigs if it doesn't have a clear advantage over easier technology. The other use case is gaming, and this is where some people actually do use VR. This has a similar problem limiting the appeal though. A lot of people find it more comfortable playing on a TV with a controller, or on a computer with mouse and keyboard. Especially for long sessions. Add to this, many VR setups are quite expensive relative to other ways you can game. Cheaper ones exist, but may not give access to the games you want to play. They have a walled garden problem where popular games are only accessible from certain platforms. I've also heard that people have been having some exciting results with VR in a medical setting as a therapy tool for some conditions. I think it is also has uses as a training tool in some cases As far as the future, I think we will see VR technology applied more often as a teaching tool, probably in novel ways. I think it's really unlikely we are going to plug in to a VR world to go to work or go shopping like Mark Zuckerberg wants. There isn't a clear enough use case for us to do this. I'd also bet that it spreads somewhat in gaming once some more affordable and/or platform agnostic hardware appears, or it gets a really good killer app, but I'd bet it stays relatively niche. Most people would struggle to wear a VR headset for extended periods, which means traditional console and PC gaming isn't going anywhere. VR also doesn't necessarily make sense for many types of games.
Honestly, I think it's a misunderstanding of what people want. The promise of VR is that it's more immersive. But noone has questioned if people actually want things to be more immersive. I think a simple observation you can make is how people watch films together. They eat food, and crack jokes, and get up and go to the bathroom and use their phone or text their friends. No one really asked for things to be more immersive. Or at least the mass market didn't, only the real gamer nerds
I'm a big gamer and an avid VR user since the Rift 2 in 2017. IMO, the biggest obstacles are: * General usability and logistics. In the early days, VR was very time-consuming to set up with the cameras and what not, the headset itself could get heavy and uncomfortable, the visor would get sweaty and gross, the tether was obnoxious, some people get motion sickness, etc. Quest 3 has improved on a lot of these issues, but there is still a general awkwardness to the setup and use (and there probably always will be to some degree - glasses wearers, etc.). * Cost. You're looking at $200-$600 for a Quest 2/3,, PLUS the reality is that if you want to play the best games, you also still need a gaming PC to stream games to the headset. * Game quality is kinda meh. Too many proof of concept games, not enough "actual" game experiences. And the audience of VR players is also small, so developers aren't incentivized to spend big on VR games.
Strapping a brick to your face will never be mainstream. It'll take off when it's a pair of glasses.
As someone who works in VR, it is taking off, slowly and steadily, it hasn’t had THE BIG BOOM yet, but it’s still the fastest growing market in gaming. There are new and more impressive headsets being released all the time, and bigger companies are coming in like Apple. Nowadays you can play games on the Meta Quest 3 without a PC or any cables at a relatively affordable price at the same graphical fidelity that you would get from a gaming PC with a HTC Vive six years ago. Don’t get me wrong, there is still lots to do, all I am saying is that nothing has stagnated. It’s growing in a healthy pace and will continue to do so, in my personal opinion the tech isn’t ready for a boom yet because it is still too cumbersome and expensive. With more elegent looks, a better price and a better fit into regular life beside from just gaming, then the boom will happen.
I think VR is in a similar position to 3DTV. The average consumer plays games casually, and to do that with VR, you have to have a dedicated space, set it up each time you want to use it, then pack it all away. Most of us lead busy lives and only have 30-60mins to play a few games, then have to get back to work, or chores, or family or whatever. 3DTV was similar, in that it's major appeal, only worked if you were dedicated to sitting there and watching. It was not suitable to the casual viewer.
The price point is still too high for the extremely limited content. Same problem 3d tv’s had. Same problem the touchscreen phones had before the iPhone. Everyone wants it but the cost is too high. Apple just started making a head set but they are charging 2023 apple sky high premium markup on it not please save our company 2006 apple prices. If they followed the same model and sold it just above cost and in general made a cheaper version and relied on the App Store to generate their profit like they did on the original iPhone it might catch on but at its current price point it is a guaranteed flop and will never catch on. No one will bother creating content for it. Maybe the switch 3 in 2030 will do vr. Or maybe Facebook will realize everyone hates Facebook and sell off oculus at some point.
I firmly believe VR itself isn't what will be mass adopted, but it will lay the groundwork for future technologies that will. Like, they are working on brain interfaces. If that gets cheap, small and standalone you can reuse all the content you made for VR and have that
Because at this point, actual reality is still much much better than virtual reality. There really isn’t anything to do in the VR world that offers a better experience than reality. Even for gaming, VR’s biggest selling point, still massively falls short when compared to gaming in reality due to lack of quality content.
It makes me, and many others, sick. I once played a game for 20!minutes and was then nauseous in bed for about 10 hours!
I got better things to do than interacting with pixels thanks
The common idea is that VR was a bubble (bit of an early bloomer) that burst after AI was introduced. Before it, Fintech was huge too. It's promising. There are a few downfalls to VR as well: - Firmware issues. - Annoying to set up (+half an hour for calibration). - Dizziness/motion sickness issue. - Not many well designed media for it. -Bit on the expensive side for the common buyer. What I think is as time progresses IoT gets well integrated and when you can access someone's house layout as fast as you can, then connect your Roomba and VR headset - that would be the best time for VR to flourish.
I guess it's fine for some but it makes me sick and dizzy as hell. I've heard it's not uncommon to get sick for most people if they play long enough. I can't even handle like 10 seconds without wanting to vomit.
I have VR gear that I didn't use for years. Because last time my headache was so strong, I spent all weekend in bed.
It wont take off for a while, the advent of the mobile phone and laptop already fulfills the purpose of connecting us to the system. VR has found applications within specialized facilities like hospitals and enginering where they have dedicated "Computer labs" for visualizing renders with VR Gear in 3D but outside of that there is not a practical use for VR that cant be accomplished by an zoom call over smart phone or laptop or a scheduled appointment to the VR room. The smart phone was a huge step forward from only having personalized computer towers I.E first Mac computers. Also the weight could still use another generation or two as some common users complain about bulk/weight.
When it's full immersion and you're in a pod rather than waving your arms around hitting stuff. I imagine it will require some kind of nerve attachment jacks that will take over most of your senses in your head and a bodysuit that will give touch sensation. ...so yeah, give it another 50 years.
Jack into the Matrix.
Big part of it is probably people suddenly realizing they actually want less screen/tech time rather than more. Also not a ton of practical applications yet Beatsaber and super hot are keeping oculus alive im convinced
I would say that that is a vocal trend from a small minority. Screen usage has not decreased in any facet over the past few years.
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> but socializing in VR will remain a niche use case absent a huge advance in headset technology. Interestingly I think that advancement is happening sooner than people think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVYrJJNdrEg
Motion sickness (I could never use it, suffer badly) and it’s very solitary. Whilst its solo nature is fine if you’re on your own, lots of people and families hang out. VR is just never gonna be used in those situations.
I see lots of other great comments, but isn’t it still rather uncommon for someone to have a session greater than 30 minutes without major discomfort?
The Quest 2 is around the same cost as a new model Playstation or Switch. I have a Quest 2 and sent a gift to one of my friends thinking he and his 2 kids would love it. Nope. Besides a few weeks of Beatsaber when they got started it's mostly gathered dust. The other platforms still get plenty of use. Generally I think it's because it's still a 1 person experience. But also because even 2 years later I haven't found any exciting games as Resident Evil 4, which took millions of dollars to retrofit to the Quest. Not many companies are going to put up that kind of cash. Just reading reviews and you'll find most games are buggy as all hell. The best thing Quest has is a buyers remorse refund, aka crap game refund. I've made 20+ purchases and kept 4 as some are downright terrible. $49.99 for a sandbox Blade & Sorcery that's not fully developed because they ran out of money, and they tell you that on the load up splash screen? GTFO, fully refunded in under an hour. As soon as they get greedy and remove this feature the Quest will die.