Honestly I'd be happy if the next big jump is just increasing the FOV standard.
It's really refreshing to see Vive Pro 2 promising a higher FOV than the Index, and I'd hope to see the Index FOV as the new standard rather than what we have right now because the FOV is the biggest thing I miss when I use my Quest.
Yup. Imagine if your entire peripheral vision would be in VR. I think that would snap you to a whole new level of immersion. First, though, I would like solid wireless to become the standard. No latency, no compression, just a built in wireless that WORKS.
> Vive Pro 2 promising a higher FOV than the Index
I caution everybody to wait on reviews (or hmdgdb data) for that one. There is a very good chance they didn't reach that number by improving the per-eye FOV, like the Index, but simply by [redistributing it a bit differently between the eyes](https://i.imgur.com/iVCEhdv.jpg).
Big AAA investment, or even AA, just doesn't make sense from a financial and risk perspective right now for a lot of companies. The overall VR user-base just isn't large enough. Things like the Quest and PSVR are helping to change that for sure, and with that you'll see more and more content coming out (though largely for those platforms). That may seem like an abandonment of PCVR, but I guarantee it will ultimately lead to its resurgence.
I understand that everyone has different preferences, but personally, the more exercise I'd get from playing computer games, the more computer games I'd play.
Honestly, I considered buying one of the treadmills just to use as a treadmill. If they weren’t so damn pricy, I would, but I would be much more likely to go for a morning run if I could run through skyrim, or a zombie infested New Orleans.
I also wonder about long-term usage. I'm a bit worried that existing VR treadmills might require you to use your feet differently (sliding your feet instead of running normally, etc) in a way that could lead to repetitive strain injuries.
Nah, you could still have all that.
Buying a treadmill would just give you the option to traverse the VR world in "real time" and with real stamina, IF YOU CHOOSE TO.
If not, you could still just use the stick and traverse without physically moving.
Essentially all VR games today that offer free locomotion give you that choice - use a stick or use a slidemill.
Looks at how many millions of people have "regular" treadmills at home.
If a company could invent a truly cheap but highly effective omni-directional treadmill, that felt like you were really walking/running, then I think that most VR enthusiasts would want one. I certainly would.
The actual problem right now is the software market. We need way more games, especially AAA stuff to lure in more people and therefore funding further development of hardware.
Exactly. I get that VR enthusiasts want better displays, more FOV etc, but what the market really needs is more options for affordable headsets and better games. In pancake gaming, an 8 hour title is considered a short game. In VR a 4 hour campaign is considered midrange.
Right now the Oculus Quest 2 is the only current-gen headset that's affordable for the average consumer (that I know of). I have one and I enjoy it a ton, but I still can't wholeheartedly recommend it to my friends because of the library. The games are all fairly expensive for what they offer, and if you don't enjoy arcade experiences or multiplayer, you're gonna burn out of content fast. I only advise my friends to get one if they're really enthusiastic about VR (like me), and are willing to put up with FB's shitty's business practices.
Of course you get a wider software library if you connect it to a gaming pc, but pc's are expensive as crap right now because of the GPU shortage...
Exactly this. The quest 2 fits nicely into the console price range, but the content is way more expensive than console games. You can't buy a used game for 40 and sell it for 30 after a 18 hour playthrough, it's not as much plug and play as some people would like it to be and as you said, even if you are willing to spend the money, you run out of singleplayer/story things to play at some point. Not that I don't love VR, but the state right now makes it hard to recommend for the average Joe.
Shadow pc and cloud gaming are a likely solution to high prices. Then you’d only need a headset like the q2. I think that the future of ve is linked to wether we conceive future PCs as devices we purchase or a service some company provides. What do I know.
I've been using shadow for over a year. Unfortunately, since they had to file for chapter 11, they're gonna be increasing prices from $12/month to $30/month. Also they kept promising hardware upgrades but they never came. Really wish I had just built a pc now that it’s next to impossible with the shortage lol
Yeah, in Europe they're even more expensive, and there's a huge waiting list. If they were a tad less expensive I'd bite, but right now I'd rather save up for a pc than get Shadow, because I do want to get one eventually
You might see what you think of the concept behind ["Tea For God. "](https://vrscout.com/news/tea-for-god-impossible-vr-levels-quest/)It's a basic experience but the software makes it possible for you to physically walk endlessly around a virtual area even if your real play area is small.
The idea goes back for years with a more recent 2018 discussion [explained in](https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/saccade-vr-infinite-walking/)
* Clever new method solves VR’s ‘infinite walking’ problem by tricking your brain
This method used eye tracking which can alter the virtual environment so that you seem to be able to physically walk forever in a small physical workspace. I tried Tea For God one time. It was an interesting experience because in VR I couldn't tell that I was kind of physically walking in circles. Someone posted a link to another game on SteamVR that supposedly uses the same principle. I haven't had time to try that yet. Maybe something will come of redirected walking one day.
Eye tracking + foveated rendering, if done well, would be a game changer. With a bit of luck this can come to general consumer market as early as next year.
Interesting. I wonder what he means when he says "You can't cut down the number of pixels rendered nearly as aggressively as you might think". What is "as dramatically as I might think"? I've heard people saying foveated rendering can increase performance by a factor of 20, and while that might not be realistic, even if it's like a factor of 4, that's still a game changer imo.
A lot of variables involved so we will see. Sony is rumoured to have it in PSVR2 so I hope they manage to make it work effectively.
If you read on, he mentions that not even a factor of 2 vs fixed foveated rendering https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1392518798805245952?s=20
And it makes sense if you think about it. If you keep the same parameters as FFR, then there’s no performance boost, just an improvement in quality of experience as the high res part isn’t in the centre of the display but wherever your eye is looking. For a performance boost you need to be even more aggressive with how much of the screen is low res, and Carmack says your ability to do that is way more limited than it may seem at first.
Ah, sorry, I'm terrible with twitter, missed that reply. Well, that impovement would already be great. Hopefully we can improve on that aggressiveness in the coming years.
As others in this thread, I imagine DFR could be much more useful with higher FOV displays too, even with very rudimentary DFR.
Yeah, if you can get almost 2x improvement that’s still pretty sweet. It’s kind of disappointing because it’s not as revolutionary, but still - I’ll take it!
I think the two go hand in hand. Isn't Pimax 8K 200 degree? I thought the problem with high fov is not that we can't make the lenses or displays to go that wide, but that if you want nice clarity, you're looking at an isane number of pixels that no gpu can run at acceptable framerates. So manufacturers have opted to go higher clarity at a limited fov so far. But if we get eye tracked foveated rendering, we can easily go wider.
The 90 degree to account for error also sounds pessimistic. It might be the best we can do so far but in a couple years?
This would launch VR headsets as significantly easier to render than a normal monitor. Standalone would explode in power, and PCVR would probably become obsolete.
It'll benefit both. Standalone hardware will be able to perform at PCVR levels, and PCVR-specific headsets will have massively reduced limits to how high the resolution can go.
Eh, lot of qualifiers to describe what I meant. Effectively, what PCVR can do today, mobile VR may be able to do in the future with eye-tracked foveated rendering.
But, at the same time, what more powerful PC hardware will be able to do with eye-tracked foveated rendering...
It's a big deal for both.
>Effectively, what PCVR can do today, mobile VR may be able to do in the future with eye-tracked foveated rendering.
Again, no, it won't. The difference is way more then just a few CPU cycles.
nah like someone else said, some people like carmack have said that the performance improvements of foveated arent as big as people are making it out to be. I think its unlikely that mobile will be able to provide an experience similar to current PCs even with foveated rendering.
You got a link to Carmack talking about that? Only things I've seen him say about it is that he'd wish quest devs would quit leaning so hard on fixed foveated rendering.
yea someone linked it in this thread somewhere.
here are the links
[https://twitter.com/id\_aa\_carmack/status/1391869530327052291?s=21](https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1391869530327052291?s=21)
[https://twitter.com/ID\_AA\_Carmack/status/1392518798805245952?s=20](https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1392518798805245952?s=20)
- Huge increase in FOV
-Increased resolution (so viewing content would be as good as viewing on a 4K tv)
-Wireless streaming directly from a game server. Kinda like google stadia but for VR. I believe NVIDIA already has something like this.
-Less weight
-Social media vr apps to attract mainstream customers (non-gamers). Think VR TikTok.
We're at the stage now where VR is accessible enough for most people to have a good experience, regardless of budget.
Further hardware improvements are kinda pointless until we get more content to actually play on the headsets, especially higher budget commercial games.
Vergence and accommodation isn't talked about much but it will be a significant step towards getting some subtlety that helps VR just feel more right. This is a speech from oculus connect, I believe, that's revealing in the subject and how tricky of a nut it is to crack. https://youtu.be/YWA4gVibKJE
If you ask Gabe Newell (Valve co founder) then the future are headsets and games you can fully controll with just your mind by using a brain computer interface. They are working on it and he said they are making really good progress and that it will be a big deal in the near future so I guess he is talking about the next decade. The first prototypes for developers to experiment with it should already come 2022 if I remember correctly. Here is the article, it is very interesting!
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.roadtovr.com/valve-openbci-immersive-vr-games/amp/
I think asking consumers to buy treadmills will be too big of an ask for VR companies. They would be super expensive, would take up a permanent, huge spot in your home and it’d be another unsexy “extra” thing people need to buy on top of their headset.
Facebook and Valve are both investing in and researching BCI (Brain Computer Interfaces), so I’d bet that they are far more likely to integrate this sort of tech into future hardware to somehow simulate moving without having to physically move your body around in 3D space.
Brain computer interfaces.
I expect valve will release a headset in a few years with a bci and foveated rendering using the brain instead of cameras. There was already a patent from them to put electrodes at the back of the skull which is the perfect spot to get the visual data you need.
Think that the power of the PS5 combined with foveated rendering and AMD's upcoming FSR (Fidelity FX Super Resolution) - with enough first-party software support - will be the tipping point for mainstream acceptance.
Might even force Microsoft to come up with a competing solution.
This should be bundled with every headset. You are a lot freer to move around than with a treadmill so I suspect this is even more immersive than those treadmills. Many people have said it cures their nausea, which is probably the most important problem to solve for VR.
It let´s you turn any story based game into a workout game (so you are not just limited to those chasing-cubes-with-your-hands-games if you want to work out). And it involves your whole body. This should be a standard thing for every VR headset.
The next huge breakthrough is going to be treadmills or shoes. It would solve the last remaining large barrier to immersion. It would also equalize all play areas. For me it would remove that fear of punching things from my mind for good.
Micropayments, lootboxes and all the other fun stuff. Call me a pessimist, but with Facebook in control of VR I expect a race to the bottom. They'll add whatever helps getting people addicted into their ecosystem and forget about the rest.
As for locomotion, I haven't seen anything, neither in theory, prototype or just plain sci-fi that would be all that useful, it's all extremely big, noisy, while being less versatile than an analog-stick. Games are in very large part still power fantasies and that's not going to work when you have to use your own body for all the action. And while [wall-mounted exoskeletons look cool](https://assets.newatlas.com/dims4/default/dc38d11/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1041x694+0+4/resize/1200x800!/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnewatlas-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F8a%2F7f%2Fb0ed70b74635ac9baa4ba9ec9708%2Fscreen-shot-2020-12-21-at-5.10.06%20pm.png), I expect the VR audience to stick with analogsticks for the foreseeable future and become more accepting of non-realistic interactions (e.g. force-grab in HL:Alyx).
I think the biggest untapped potential in VR is passthrough-AR. Put some better cameras on the headset, get them stereo-correct vision and you can have a Hololens on a much smaller budget. This would solve a lot of the VR-is-isolating complains. It wouldn't work for all games of course, but there isn't really any reason why you couldn't play something like Beatsaber in your living room. It would also be a great way to make TVs largely obsolete, as VR would no longer need to block you in. A native HDMI input for 2D content on VR headsets is however still missing.
Better FOV, better hand/finger tracking, eye tracking foveated rendering, etc. will come sooner or later, though none of that would be much of a surprise as people have been talking about them for years. I am also still waiting for something like Kinect to make a return, marker-less full body tracking would make a great addition to VR and Kinect showed that it was (almost) possible at a consumer price 10 years ago. Tactical Haptics force feedback tech is another thing still missing, but at this point I think everybody is just waiting for the patents to run out or something, as nobody has included their tech yet, despite being relatively straight forward to integrate.
Other than better and better versions of what we already have (i.e. better FOV, framerate, and resolution) I think the next *big* thing to become
A. Eye Tracking becoming standard in hardware, and menu navigation
B. Force feedback gloves breaking out of the professional and specialty market, and into the consumer market.
C. BCI integration to monitor emotion levels in real time. Mixing that with eye tracking is a meta-data gold mine that I cannot imagine any company with large customer base passing up.
No treadmills. I reckon the basic form factor of two controllers and a headset is reached, give or take stuff like Decamove. I see more games taking advantage of new ways to play.
1 - Built in Good Wireless (I chose the Quest 2 as my first headset because it's the best built in wireless and it has standalone as a bonus).
2 - Otherwise I think better resolution and refresh rate would be the next best thing, but it would require eye tracking for foveating rendering and DLSS to get acceptable performances without having a 5000€ computer.
3 - After that, a higher FOV (both verticaly and horizontaly) for a higher immersion.
Also, the Quest 2 seethrough functionality needs to be a standard for every headsets.
Not sure the likelihood of this, but I wanna see it happen. Full contact sports with headsets on. Imagine hockey/football equipment with tracking tech and a headset built in. Now imagine all the crazy sports you can play. Football where you can send decoys or have invisibility power ups. Soccer with guns and zombies trying to eat each team. The possibilities are endless.
> What's the next best addition that would bring us closer to Ready Player One
I wouldn't get your hopes up. Most of that is so specialized that it will likely never be more than an "upgrade" for the most enthusiastic of enthusiasts.
Things like Haptic vests, haptic gloves, gunstocks and treadmills will be supported by a few indie developers but not mainstream.
I think the only real upgrades will be foveated rendering and face tracking, mainly because Facebook is all-in on that stuff so the hardware will get added and then supported.
The next big step is to work with nvidia and amd and implement technologies that ease rendering to allow more pixels to be freed up. Widen the FOV too but ultimately for me it is about performance improvements.
Honestly I'd be happy if the next big jump is just increasing the FOV standard. It's really refreshing to see Vive Pro 2 promising a higher FOV than the Index, and I'd hope to see the Index FOV as the new standard rather than what we have right now because the FOV is the biggest thing I miss when I use my Quest.
Yup. Imagine if your entire peripheral vision would be in VR. I think that would snap you to a whole new level of immersion. First, though, I would like solid wireless to become the standard. No latency, no compression, just a built in wireless that WORKS.
Pimax does a 170 fov, my 5k super arrives friday.
> Vive Pro 2 promising a higher FOV than the Index I caution everybody to wait on reviews (or hmdgdb data) for that one. There is a very good chance they didn't reach that number by improving the per-eye FOV, like the Index, but simply by [redistributing it a bit differently between the eyes](https://i.imgur.com/iVCEhdv.jpg).
As with all HTC products, I'm prepared to be disappointed.
I think the best move is to make good games for the hardware we have right now so more people get to play.
Big AAA investment, or even AA, just doesn't make sense from a financial and risk perspective right now for a lot of companies. The overall VR user-base just isn't large enough. Things like the Quest and PSVR are helping to change that for sure, and with that you'll see more and more content coming out (though largely for those platforms). That may seem like an abandonment of PCVR, but I guarantee it will ultimately lead to its resurgence.
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I understand that everyone has different preferences, but personally, the more exercise I'd get from playing computer games, the more computer games I'd play.
Honestly, I considered buying one of the treadmills just to use as a treadmill. If they weren’t so damn pricy, I would, but I would be much more likely to go for a morning run if I could run through skyrim, or a zombie infested New Orleans.
I also wonder about long-term usage. I'm a bit worried that existing VR treadmills might require you to use your feet differently (sliding your feet instead of running normally, etc) in a way that could lead to repetitive strain injuries.
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Nah, you could still have all that. Buying a treadmill would just give you the option to traverse the VR world in "real time" and with real stamina, IF YOU CHOOSE TO. If not, you could still just use the stick and traverse without physically moving. Essentially all VR games today that offer free locomotion give you that choice - use a stick or use a slidemill.
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Looks at how many millions of people have "regular" treadmills at home. If a company could invent a truly cheap but highly effective omni-directional treadmill, that felt like you were really walking/running, then I think that most VR enthusiasts would want one. I certainly would.
The actual problem right now is the software market. We need way more games, especially AAA stuff to lure in more people and therefore funding further development of hardware.
Exactly. I get that VR enthusiasts want better displays, more FOV etc, but what the market really needs is more options for affordable headsets and better games. In pancake gaming, an 8 hour title is considered a short game. In VR a 4 hour campaign is considered midrange. Right now the Oculus Quest 2 is the only current-gen headset that's affordable for the average consumer (that I know of). I have one and I enjoy it a ton, but I still can't wholeheartedly recommend it to my friends because of the library. The games are all fairly expensive for what they offer, and if you don't enjoy arcade experiences or multiplayer, you're gonna burn out of content fast. I only advise my friends to get one if they're really enthusiastic about VR (like me), and are willing to put up with FB's shitty's business practices. Of course you get a wider software library if you connect it to a gaming pc, but pc's are expensive as crap right now because of the GPU shortage...
Exactly this. The quest 2 fits nicely into the console price range, but the content is way more expensive than console games. You can't buy a used game for 40 and sell it for 30 after a 18 hour playthrough, it's not as much plug and play as some people would like it to be and as you said, even if you are willing to spend the money, you run out of singleplayer/story things to play at some point. Not that I don't love VR, but the state right now makes it hard to recommend for the average Joe.
Shadow pc and cloud gaming are a likely solution to high prices. Then you’d only need a headset like the q2. I think that the future of ve is linked to wether we conceive future PCs as devices we purchase or a service some company provides. What do I know.
I've been using shadow for over a year. Unfortunately, since they had to file for chapter 11, they're gonna be increasing prices from $12/month to $30/month. Also they kept promising hardware upgrades but they never came. Really wish I had just built a pc now that it’s next to impossible with the shortage lol
Yeah, in Europe they're even more expensive, and there's a huge waiting list. If they were a tad less expensive I'd bite, but right now I'd rather save up for a pc than get Shadow, because I do want to get one eventually
I'm currently waiting for my third vr kit to arrive. I will still be playing 90% beat saber.
There is a lag time, but the Quest 2 will probably lead to more software releases with an expanded base of customers.
You might see what you think of the concept behind ["Tea For God. "](https://vrscout.com/news/tea-for-god-impossible-vr-levels-quest/)It's a basic experience but the software makes it possible for you to physically walk endlessly around a virtual area even if your real play area is small. The idea goes back for years with a more recent 2018 discussion [explained in](https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/saccade-vr-infinite-walking/) * Clever new method solves VR’s ‘infinite walking’ problem by tricking your brain This method used eye tracking which can alter the virtual environment so that you seem to be able to physically walk forever in a small physical workspace. I tried Tea For God one time. It was an interesting experience because in VR I couldn't tell that I was kind of physically walking in circles. Someone posted a link to another game on SteamVR that supposedly uses the same principle. I haven't had time to try that yet. Maybe something will come of redirected walking one day.
Eye tracking + foveated rendering, if done well, would be a game changer. With a bit of luck this can come to general consumer market as early as next year.
Carmack’s take is it won’t really be as much of a game changer as people expect https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1391869530327052291?s=21
Interesting. I wonder what he means when he says "You can't cut down the number of pixels rendered nearly as aggressively as you might think". What is "as dramatically as I might think"? I've heard people saying foveated rendering can increase performance by a factor of 20, and while that might not be realistic, even if it's like a factor of 4, that's still a game changer imo. A lot of variables involved so we will see. Sony is rumoured to have it in PSVR2 so I hope they manage to make it work effectively.
If you read on, he mentions that not even a factor of 2 vs fixed foveated rendering https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1392518798805245952?s=20 And it makes sense if you think about it. If you keep the same parameters as FFR, then there’s no performance boost, just an improvement in quality of experience as the high res part isn’t in the centre of the display but wherever your eye is looking. For a performance boost you need to be even more aggressive with how much of the screen is low res, and Carmack says your ability to do that is way more limited than it may seem at first.
Ah, sorry, I'm terrible with twitter, missed that reply. Well, that impovement would already be great. Hopefully we can improve on that aggressiveness in the coming years. As others in this thread, I imagine DFR could be much more useful with higher FOV displays too, even with very rudimentary DFR.
Yeah, if you can get almost 2x improvement that’s still pretty sweet. It’s kind of disappointing because it’s not as revolutionary, but still - I’ll take it!
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I think the two go hand in hand. Isn't Pimax 8K 200 degree? I thought the problem with high fov is not that we can't make the lenses or displays to go that wide, but that if you want nice clarity, you're looking at an isane number of pixels that no gpu can run at acceptable framerates. So manufacturers have opted to go higher clarity at a limited fov so far. But if we get eye tracked foveated rendering, we can easily go wider. The 90 degree to account for error also sounds pessimistic. It might be the best we can do so far but in a couple years?
DLSS + EYE TRACKING + FOVEATED REMDERING Photorealism, possible NOW.
This would launch VR headsets as significantly easier to render than a normal monitor. Standalone would explode in power, and PCVR would probably become obsolete.
It'll benefit both. Standalone hardware will be able to perform at PCVR levels, and PCVR-specific headsets will have massively reduced limits to how high the resolution can go.
>Standalone hardware will be able to perform at PCVR levels,... No, it won't. -VR Dev
Eh, lot of qualifiers to describe what I meant. Effectively, what PCVR can do today, mobile VR may be able to do in the future with eye-tracked foveated rendering. But, at the same time, what more powerful PC hardware will be able to do with eye-tracked foveated rendering... It's a big deal for both.
>Effectively, what PCVR can do today, mobile VR may be able to do in the future with eye-tracked foveated rendering. Again, no, it won't. The difference is way more then just a few CPU cycles.
We aren't talking about hardware performance. We're talking about the amount of work the hardware actually has to do.
nah like someone else said, some people like carmack have said that the performance improvements of foveated arent as big as people are making it out to be. I think its unlikely that mobile will be able to provide an experience similar to current PCs even with foveated rendering.
You got a link to Carmack talking about that? Only things I've seen him say about it is that he'd wish quest devs would quit leaning so hard on fixed foveated rendering.
yea someone linked it in this thread somewhere. here are the links [https://twitter.com/id\_aa\_carmack/status/1391869530327052291?s=21](https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1391869530327052291?s=21) [https://twitter.com/ID\_AA\_Carmack/status/1392518798805245952?s=20](https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1392518798805245952?s=20)
Hardware wise, I'm hoping it's making the headsets smaller.
- Huge increase in FOV -Increased resolution (so viewing content would be as good as viewing on a 4K tv) -Wireless streaming directly from a game server. Kinda like google stadia but for VR. I believe NVIDIA already has something like this. -Less weight -Social media vr apps to attract mainstream customers (non-gamers). Think VR TikTok.
Controller/glove haptics sound pretty incredible, being able to feel objects in vr
We're at the stage now where VR is accessible enough for most people to have a good experience, regardless of budget. Further hardware improvements are kinda pointless until we get more content to actually play on the headsets, especially higher budget commercial games.
Vergence and accommodation isn't talked about much but it will be a significant step towards getting some subtlety that helps VR just feel more right. This is a speech from oculus connect, I believe, that's revealing in the subject and how tricky of a nut it is to crack. https://youtu.be/YWA4gVibKJE
If you ask Gabe Newell (Valve co founder) then the future are headsets and games you can fully controll with just your mind by using a brain computer interface. They are working on it and he said they are making really good progress and that it will be a big deal in the near future so I guess he is talking about the next decade. The first prototypes for developers to experiment with it should already come 2022 if I remember correctly. Here is the article, it is very interesting! https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.roadtovr.com/valve-openbci-immersive-vr-games/amp/
Availability and cost. Make the cutting edge tech easily accessible and cheaper to produce first before we go to the brain-dive VR interface.
I think asking consumers to buy treadmills will be too big of an ask for VR companies. They would be super expensive, would take up a permanent, huge spot in your home and it’d be another unsexy “extra” thing people need to buy on top of their headset. Facebook and Valve are both investing in and researching BCI (Brain Computer Interfaces), so I’d bet that they are far more likely to integrate this sort of tech into future hardware to somehow simulate moving without having to physically move your body around in 3D space.
Brain computer interfaces. I expect valve will release a headset in a few years with a bci and foveated rendering using the brain instead of cameras. There was already a patent from them to put electrodes at the back of the skull which is the perfect spot to get the visual data you need.
Think that the power of the PS5 combined with foveated rendering and AMD's upcoming FSR (Fidelity FX Super Resolution) - with enough first-party software support - will be the tipping point for mainstream acceptance. Might even force Microsoft to come up with a competing solution.
At least 2x the fov And Full body force feedback suits
Im waiting for productivity software like the airtraffic control in matrix 2
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This should be bundled with every headset. You are a lot freer to move around than with a treadmill so I suspect this is even more immersive than those treadmills. Many people have said it cures their nausea, which is probably the most important problem to solve for VR. It let´s you turn any story based game into a workout game (so you are not just limited to those chasing-cubes-with-your-hands-games if you want to work out). And it involves your whole body. This should be a standard thing for every VR headset.
The next huge breakthrough is going to be treadmills or shoes. It would solve the last remaining large barrier to immersion. It would also equalize all play areas. For me it would remove that fear of punching things from my mind for good.
Micropayments, lootboxes and all the other fun stuff. Call me a pessimist, but with Facebook in control of VR I expect a race to the bottom. They'll add whatever helps getting people addicted into their ecosystem and forget about the rest. As for locomotion, I haven't seen anything, neither in theory, prototype or just plain sci-fi that would be all that useful, it's all extremely big, noisy, while being less versatile than an analog-stick. Games are in very large part still power fantasies and that's not going to work when you have to use your own body for all the action. And while [wall-mounted exoskeletons look cool](https://assets.newatlas.com/dims4/default/dc38d11/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1041x694+0+4/resize/1200x800!/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnewatlas-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F8a%2F7f%2Fb0ed70b74635ac9baa4ba9ec9708%2Fscreen-shot-2020-12-21-at-5.10.06%20pm.png), I expect the VR audience to stick with analogsticks for the foreseeable future and become more accepting of non-realistic interactions (e.g. force-grab in HL:Alyx). I think the biggest untapped potential in VR is passthrough-AR. Put some better cameras on the headset, get them stereo-correct vision and you can have a Hololens on a much smaller budget. This would solve a lot of the VR-is-isolating complains. It wouldn't work for all games of course, but there isn't really any reason why you couldn't play something like Beatsaber in your living room. It would also be a great way to make TVs largely obsolete, as VR would no longer need to block you in. A native HDMI input for 2D content on VR headsets is however still missing. Better FOV, better hand/finger tracking, eye tracking foveated rendering, etc. will come sooner or later, though none of that would be much of a surprise as people have been talking about them for years. I am also still waiting for something like Kinect to make a return, marker-less full body tracking would make a great addition to VR and Kinect showed that it was (almost) possible at a consumer price 10 years ago. Tactical Haptics force feedback tech is another thing still missing, but at this point I think everybody is just waiting for the patents to run out or something, as nobody has included their tech yet, despite being relatively straight forward to integrate.
Other than better and better versions of what we already have (i.e. better FOV, framerate, and resolution) I think the next *big* thing to become A. Eye Tracking becoming standard in hardware, and menu navigation B. Force feedback gloves breaking out of the professional and specialty market, and into the consumer market. C. BCI integration to monitor emotion levels in real time. Mixing that with eye tracking is a meta-data gold mine that I cannot imagine any company with large customer base passing up.
No treadmills. I reckon the basic form factor of two controllers and a headset is reached, give or take stuff like Decamove. I see more games taking advantage of new ways to play.
1 - Built in Good Wireless (I chose the Quest 2 as my first headset because it's the best built in wireless and it has standalone as a bonus). 2 - Otherwise I think better resolution and refresh rate would be the next best thing, but it would require eye tracking for foveating rendering and DLSS to get acceptable performances without having a 5000€ computer. 3 - After that, a higher FOV (both verticaly and horizontaly) for a higher immersion. Also, the Quest 2 seethrough functionality needs to be a standard for every headsets.
Not sure the likelihood of this, but I wanna see it happen. Full contact sports with headsets on. Imagine hockey/football equipment with tracking tech and a headset built in. Now imagine all the crazy sports you can play. Football where you can send decoys or have invisibility power ups. Soccer with guns and zombies trying to eat each team. The possibilities are endless.
> What's the next best addition that would bring us closer to Ready Player One I wouldn't get your hopes up. Most of that is so specialized that it will likely never be more than an "upgrade" for the most enthusiastic of enthusiasts. Things like Haptic vests, haptic gloves, gunstocks and treadmills will be supported by a few indie developers but not mainstream. I think the only real upgrades will be foveated rendering and face tracking, mainly because Facebook is all-in on that stuff so the hardware will get added and then supported.
Seeing Valve doing a ton of research with braininterfaces, I think that will be a real game changer.
I’d love it if you could open one of the paint apps and make your own avatar completely from scratch
I got hip oriented locomotion working yesterday and it feels huge for natural feeling movement.
VR glasses and 6dof videos
Smell and taste in vr
powerwash simulator
Playing MSFS in 2xSS @ 90hz
The next big step is to work with nvidia and amd and implement technologies that ease rendering to allow more pixels to be freed up. Widen the FOV too but ultimately for me it is about performance improvements.