That seems high to me as well. Obviously this is anecdotal, but I’ve introduced probably 20 friends/family members to VR and none of them have had issues with motion sickness.
Simulation sickness is real, and more common than most gamers (a population that tends to self-select for people without that trait) think. This prevalence doesn’t surprise me at all. It’s not severe for everyone. You might not notice if a friend had it, except that they might play fewer video games with you. (They might not, some people are fine unless in full VR.) People aren’t generally keen on going “You know that thing that you like doing and that I’ve seen 5-year-olds do on the internet? I can’t do it, it makes me vom.” It doesn’t exactly feel cool.
That’s a true statement. They might just be macho, or they might be just sparing your feelings about a really expensive device you own. I know it made me nauseous, but I didn’t say anything because my buddy was excited and spent a lot of money on it. It’s not like I have to play it forever… it’s just that one time.
Mine’s so bad I can’t even play FPSs without getting sick, but being very open about that means I hear from a lot of people with less severe systems who will power through their nausea for short sessions with friends to avoid embarassment, which is why I think the way I do.
I started by playing while standing and moving smoothly in game and I couldn’t last long before getting sick. Now I play seated with snapping in game movement and I can play for hours without issue. Depending on how you define it, I don’t think it’s surprising to see so many people say VR makes them sick.
The statistic quoted is for “users”, so presumably the measurement was made against randomly selected individuals of the general population (though the article frustratingly fails to cite a source). This is important because the effect is not evenly distributed among demographics, per the article:
What’s more, we don’t know why some people are so much more susceptible to it than others, but we know that there are numerous markers that make us more likely to experience it. Women, as mentioned previously, are more likely than men to get VR sick. Asian people are more likely than other ethnicities to experience motion sickness in general. Age is another factor—we’re more likely to experience it between the ages of 12 and 21 than in our adulthood… until we reach our 50s, upon which the likelihood increases again.
That’s why I basically dropped VR, and even when playing, I only played beat saber. Alyx was a very bad experience for me (mind blowing game, but not if I’m sick after 15 mins) and with that, every other game with movements (no mans sky ship is very bad)
Did you play Alex with the free movement or the jump to location? I can’t do the free movement modes but jump works fine. Similar to beat saber in that you are stationary.
I’ve played with both basically, because the jump mode is a bit confusing sometimes, and it doesn’t work if you want to walk backwards. The VR game i played the most (after beat saber) is Elite Dangerous, because sitting in the spaceship actually makes things better, even when dogfighting
Which headset did you use? I had the same experience with my old Rift. Got a used Quest 2 recently and all my problems just vanished. I can even do smooth locomotion now which was impossible before.
Might be worth checking out some newer tech in case your HMD was first gen
I got super sick the first few times I played. I could only manage 20 mins at most and I would be in bed for the rest of the day due to terrible headache which goes away the next morning.
After a couple of times of experiencing that, I could play for 1-2 hours and without a hint of headache. I understand how everyone is different but I’m kinda amazed how the body works sometimes.
A big part of reducing motion sickness for me was to ensure that the lenses were set to the appropriate pupillary distance. If they’re too wide or to narrow, that can affect your body’s ability to handle VR
I feel like all I see in the VR space is endless articles on new hardware and basically nothing on quality VR games. I always thought I’d upgrade my Vive to an Index or something better one day, but so far the only compelling reason is HL: Alyx and I’m not spending that kind of money on a single game.
I had the same thought when I had a Vive. I ended up just buying the Index Knuckles controllers so I could play HL: Alyx. It really is the only AAA game available that makes it worth it IMO.
there are quite a few games out there that aren’t specifically VR games but are still very well suited for it because they put you in the cockpit of a vehicle. I haven’t really used my VR headset much for VR specific games, but I’ve been putting a lot of hours in Assetto Corsa Competizione because with VR and a wheel, I’m completely immersed. Same goes for people who like flight or space simulators
Ms flight simulator is quite clunky and hard to get good frame rates, but damn if you can put up with that it’s an awesome experience in VR. Also beat saber.
For quite awhile now those have been the reasons for VR. Sad really. Still these two things are compelling.
Because If you were going to spend 1 Million to make a game. Do you make a game that only a select few users can buy? Or do you make it so all gamers can buy it?
I see your point and I agree with it but the “opposite” is also true.
“If you have 1 million to make a game, do you make one in a system that is incredibly saturated with other games or do you do in a a system completely starved of good games?”
So it’s a compromise. I still agree that your point has a bigger weight but there is something on the other side of the scale even if lighter
I haven’t touched my VR headset and over a year. VR games just are not good and have very little contents and very little replayability. What I’m trying to say is it’s still very much a gimmick.
It suffer quite a bit from being “baby’s first VR game”, it’s extremely basic and completely lacking in any interesting mechanics. If it’s your first VR game, it will feel amazing, if you already played other VR games it will feel like a serious downgrade in a lot of areas. Even compared to Half Life 2 it feels like a downgrade, as there is just much less to do in Alyx, less guns, no vehicles, more linear, smaller environments. It’s a great looking game, but the mechanics are just extremely limited due to the focus on teleport.
It’s well suited for anything where you’re seated, eg racing sims, flight sims, euro truck sim etc.
If you’ve got any interest at all in those genres give it another try and it’ll be hard if not possible to go back. Digital Combat Sim in VR is a whole nother game.
Other than that I agree. Just a gimmick and I don’t see the way forward.
I bought a Vive since I was careless and wanted to see what the VR hype was. Considering that I've probably used it less than 100 hours in about 4 years, I think of it as a bad investment.
In its current technologically limited state, VR feels more like a gimmick than a real experience. I think that all of what VR is currently trying to do is still waiting for that uninvented Star Trek holodeck technology to come around anyway. Headsets and wands are unwieldy and breaking down/setting up the system is a PITA.
I’m not sure if even Apple can turn the tides. I can’t see how Apple can succeed if Meta struggle finding a market even with their much cheaper models.
Maybe they will find a market among the most diehard Apple/tech enthusiasts, but it’s probably going to end there.
Meta struggles because their content in trash. Quest2 is a mobile phone strapped to your face, with games that look exactly like what you’d expect from that (overly simplified cartoony graphics, very basic gameplay). And the sad part is, that it’s not even really a technical limitation. Quest2, while slow, is still fast enough to play ~20 year old games in VR and it has a few ports of those games (e.g. Doom3, RE4), but it has nothing new at that level of quality. Even the port of GTA:SA that they announced two years ago hasn’t been heard from since.
Meta just seems unable to both secure quality new content and can’t even manage to get enough of those older games ported either. Despite Meta burning literally a billion dollar on VR each month, nothing interesting is happening in VR gaming, they can’t even manage to keep the existing stuff up and running (e.g. EchoVR servers were just shutdown).
I have more hope for Apple’s approach, as they essentially completely sidestepped the VR content problem by focusing on making their VR headset work for 2D content. VisionPro has enough resolution to work as both monitor as well as cinema screen replacement, and they are smart enough to build a UI to take advantage of the 3D, eye and hand tracking. That’s again something Meta could never figure out. QuestPro was their take at an VisionPro’ish headset, but despite the $1500 price-tag and a whole lot of tracking cameras, it ended up as little more than a Quest2-with-better-lenses, as none of the additional features found much use in any software. The resolution of the device was also low enough to render it unusable as monitor replacement.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Cheap VR is super important and $300 is a great price for a headset. But you aren’t going to get gamers to give up their PS5 or gaming PCs with the lackluster games offering you find on Quest2. Even in the best of cases, Quest2 feels like stepping 20 years backwards in time. Simply put, Meta managed to make VR look boring and out of date.
You can use the Quest as a PC HMD, both wired and wireless. So no, it's not a problem of performance.
The reason the Quest can't secure content is the content doesn't sell. Which is the same reason Sony struggles to secure content. They both basically have to finance the entire library. Sony and Valve sidestep this by having VR be a feature in flatscreen games, but even then people arent' queuing up to get them.
And nobody wants to use VR as a monitor, either. Maybe in a plane if you're a weirdo or to watch movies in private if you live in cramped quarters, but nobody is going to get to their desk and slap on a face-screen to type a text document, no matter how fancy and expensive it is.
The reason the Quest can’t secure content is the content doesn’t sell.
Meta spends enough money on VR to make a new GTAV or Cyberpunk-level AAA game happen once a week. If it sells or not is irrelevant when the company making VR is already not only willing, but actively burning, that amount of money. The issue is that Meta is neither interested in games nor are they interested in PC support. So little to nothing of that money flows in either direction and the games look mediocre as a result.
Making profit from selling games is something you can worry about once VR is popular, but to get VR popular you have to have great games first. And of course they wouldn’t even need to spend that much, porting existing games into VR can be done for cheap as numerous mods demonstrate, but that’s an avenue that they barely touch too (RE4 and that GTA:SA port we haven’t heard from in two years).
And nobody wants to use VR as a monitor, either.
Nobody wants to do that because all VR headsets currently on the marked are garbage for that use case. BigScreenBeyond gets closest, but still falls short. On top of that the whole “desktop-in-VR” software is garbage too. Everybody just puts 2D windows into 3D space and gave up. There are no GUI toolkits that take advantage of the fact that VR is 3D, there is no way to have multiple-3D apps run side by side, pass-through mode still sucks, etc.
Apple actually spend effort on making 2D apps in VR work. Nobody else in the industry did that, so of course nobody wants to do that right now. That will change once VisionPro is out if people that tried it are to be believed.
We could talk a lot about how much Meta has been getting out of their investment, but ultimately they've not been spending that money on funding huge triple-A releases, and you can't buy your way into a platform's worth of content.
And yes, of couse profiting from the games matters. ESPECIALLY if you're selling the hardware at a huge loss, which is really where a bunch of those Meta billions ended up going. The idea was to get money from the games and the data funnel, but without software and hardware that people use daily both of those things dry up.
As for VR headsets being garbage for the VR monitor use case... that's not a design issue. The issue is that when I'm using a monitor I want to be able to also look at other stuff. If I want to check my phone, or read a piece of paper I don't want to be looking at things through a camera and a screen, let alone take a whole set of glasses off.
VR as a monitor is a bad idea not because the tech is bad, but because it's a bad solution to a problem that doesn't exist. You want to look at an image in space? We solved that problem in the 1940s, and that solution didn't require you to strap an opaque thing to your face.
and you can’t buy your way into a platform’s worth of content.
That’s exactly how Xbox started. Microsoft lost something like four billion on Xbox, bought Bungie, Rare, etc. to get high quality games on their console and sold the console at a loss. Once the next generation came around, Xbox360 was a big hit.
Meta spend double the time and more than 5x that money and VR still can’t get any real traction.
you’re selling the hardware at a huge loss,
It’s not a huge loss, it’s around $50 that they lost on Quest2 hardware on release.
The idea was to get money from the games and the data funnel,
In the future. VR isn’t established enough to milk it for profits.
The issue is that when I’m using a monitor I want to be able to also look at other stuff.
That’s not an issue, that has been solved for years with pass-through.
If I want to check my phone
Pass-through aside, you can stream your phone into VR with Microsoft Phone Link.
I don’t want to be looking at things through a camera
Good pass-through is essentially indistinguishable from reality.
Simply put, the “problems” you list there are problems because the current VR space is an unfinished mess when it comes to regular 2D apps. Companies still use $1 tracking cameras for passthrough instead of stereo RGB cameras, they still lack depth sensors to allow proper composition of virtual and real objects, and the software side lacks smooth integration and lots of fundamental features.
Guess who doesn’t have any of those problems because they actually cared and finished the product instead of giving up half the way through? Apple Vision Pro.
Good passthrough is very much not indistinguishable from reality. That's why on my face there is currently a set of lightweight lenses instead of screen with a camera attached to it.
In fairness, you're not alone in being wrong about the issues with the VR business being about incremental hardware upgrades. That's a very costly mistake that a lot of very smart people have made.
But they're wrong.
It's not about the quality of the hardware or missing improvements to the features. The mode of usage, the application itself, is simply not a go-to, first-use thing. You're NEVER going to use a headset instead of a monitor. The quality of the headset doesn't matter. It's just not a leading application or a leading solution to the problem of having a display.
So no, Apple Vision Pro will not fix this problem. If I had to guess, they are aware enough of this to charge a ridiculous amount for it and see what happens before betting the farm on it like Meta did. And my guess is the takeaway will be that their branding goes a long way but people who do buy it still won't use it as their daily driver for eight hours a day of work.
That sunk cost fallacy right there is how Meta bled money on this until it was untenable to keep it up. Those goalposts have been moving for a decade now. First it was when the shipping version of the Rift got out, then when the lag got better, then when inside-out tracking was solved, then when resolution got better, then when the price was right, then when passthrough improved...
...it's none of those. It's the fact that you're in VR.
Being in VR is the dealbreaker for VR as mobile phone-like quantum leap in consumer electronics, which is what Meta thought they had.
It's not. It's a cool bit of tech with a gimmick that you crack out at parties sometimes. Or, you know, for weird porn if you live alone. I'm not judging.
That's a fine thing to be, but you need to spec your product to that target.
Good passthrough is very much not indistinguishable from reality.
You tried a VisionPro or Varjo XR3? Since that’s the only ones that have good passthrough. All I have here is a Lenovo Mirage Solo, which while still lowres and black&white does have proper distortion free 3D and really good automatic contrast adjust. Even on that old thing I constantly forget that I am in passthrough. Having proper 3D vision and being able to see your hands and legs goes a very long way into fooling your brain that what you are looking at is real. It’s orders of magnitude better than any actual VR game or the nausea inducing pseudo-3D passthrough you get on Pico4.
You’re NEVER going to use a headset instead of a monitor.
I already replaced 95% of my TV usage with VR and spend a ton of computer time in WMR Portal. I’d happily go monitor-less and replace it all with VR if I could get something a little more high resolution, more comfort, with better connectivity (e.g. HDMI input support) and software.
It’s not about the quality of the hardware or missing improvements to the features.
You can’t comfortably read text on current headsets. Hardware has to get a lot better before this use case is even possible.
If I had to guess, they are aware enough of this to charge a ridiculous amount for it
The price is dictated by high resolution MicroOLEDs having terrible yields which drive the price high, along with bleeding edge CPU/GPU. Though even with that, it’s not really expensive compared to the competition, Varjo XR3 cost $6500 and Hololens2 costs $3500 too. It’s obviously not aimed at the mass market just yet, it’s focused on setting the bar for what a comfortable and versatile VR device has to look like.
That sunk cost fallacy right there is how Meta bled money on this until it was untenable to keep it up.
Meta sucks at building products. They are rich, but incompetent. Every time they accidentally stumble into something good (Quest2 $300 launch price), they ruin it with something else (Facebook account requirement, Metaverse focus, and a $350 price increase), only to than back paddle and end up right were they started. They have been wasting years doing that, killing all the hype and good will they could have had. And even now with the hardware cheap again, the games offering still suck due to wasting so much time on the Metaverse. And lets not even talk about the failure that was QuestPro (“high end” AR/VR headset without a depth sensor and stuck at the same low resolution as a Quest2).
Simply put, Meta has not released a single good or finished VR product so far, neither has anybody else for that matter. Modern VR is basically a slightly easier to use version of what people build 10 years ago by taping Razer Hydras to their DK1s, there has been a serious lack of actual progress in the space, outside of very slow incremental spec increases. VisionPro is the first thing that feels like a true step forward, though some problems remain (battery life, still heavy).
You may have to acknowledge that you're an outlier. Way off the mainstream, in fact.
The reason me and the rest of the mainstream will never ever use any type of passthrough in the way you describe is that you still have a headset strapped to your face. I don't know if you've ever tried to have a conversation with a person using passthrough, but no amount of creepy video of your eyes is going to solve that fact. It doesn't look normal, it's never going to look normal and you don't have to put up with being that weirdo because it turns out monitors are just fine and keep getting better.
So no, the endlessly moving goalposts of HMDs will never get to the bottom of the rainbow where they are a superior alternative to phones and displays. There is simply no feature tradeoff to justify -and I will keep repeating this- strapping a display to your face.
The few VR evangelist stragglers out there keep telling people to wait. You'll see, it'll get good enough any second.
But it already got good enough. The people that bounced off of the Quest did not bounce off because of quality. That's been my point here all along. The Quest 2 is, in fact, good enough for most people. They've certainly put up with bigger limitations on handheld devices or flatscreen gaming. Everybody who tries one for the first time has their minds blown. It's amazingly cool tech.
And exactly none of those people ever consider using it instead of their current screens.
It's an additive thing, at best, and it fits best for dedicated sessions where you won't be interrupted by kids or dogs or text messages or have to deal with a sweaty brow or scratching your nose or adjusting your glasses.
you’ve ever tried to have a conversation with a person using passthrough,
You are stuck thinking about yesterdays problems in the world of tomorrow. Yes, talking via passthrough will be a little weird. That’s why you don’t do that and use your VR to call them. That’s why you are wearing that thing in the first place, it brings the power of the Internet straight into your eyeballs.
Look at local multiplayer in gaming, it’s basically dead, because everybody plays over the network instead of walking over to their friends house like we did in the 80s and 90s. People of the future will watch movies together with their friends that are living hundred of miles away, thanks to virtual cinemas.
And those few that want to do things the old school way, they can still just remove there headset in a second. It’s not like you are forced to use VR 100% of the time.
endlessly moving goalposts
It’s only moving because Meta never finished any of their VR devices. Had they actually delivered on their ~$300 PCVR, as promised back in 2014 back when the hype was at its peak, things might look quite a bit different today. But they sold it two years late, for double the price, reduced the feature set to a forward-facing-only experience, added god rays and an Xbox controller and than wondered why nobody was buying it.
Simply put: Nobody has a build a good VR system yet. It’s not surprising why the whole market is a mess.
There is simply no feature tradeoff to justify
Call me old school, but I consider smartphones a gigantic trade-off due to there tiny screen barely usable screens.
The Quest 2 is, in fact, good enough for most people.
It’s good enough for kids that really like the initial wow-factor that comes with 3D and VR (many of which aren’t allowed to use the device due to Meta’s age13 account requirement). Quest2 is very definitely not “good enough” for any experienced gamer, the resolution is pathetic, the games are trash and even the good stuff you can mod and patch together is years old at this point. Once you are past the initial wow-factor, there is no worthwhile content, neither released nor announced.
won’t be interrupted by kids or dogs or text messages or have to deal with a sweaty brow or scratching your nose or adjusting your glasses.
Again, old-timey problems. VisionPro or BigScreen don’t even allow glasses in the headset, you get prescription lens insert and take your glasses off. Your dog will automatically get blended into VR when it get close. And your text message will show up right in the headset, WMR figured that out years ago, there is no reason to think that Apple won’t have that too. Many modern headsets also come with a fan to deal with heat issues.
All that said, this will all take many years. VisionPro will at best be the device that finally demonstrates that VR is viable, it won’t be the device that the masses buy, that will still take a few more hardware generations. Meanwhile Google and Microsoft have just finished killing their old VR attempts, so it will take quite a while for them to reboot and catch up to Apple. Meta might be a little quicker once they can point at Apple and just clone what they see instead of coming up with something themselves.
No, they're not old timey. That's the issue you get from, pardon my language, techbros sometimes. It's what deceived people into thinking say, crypto was a linear evolutionary process that would eventually replace other aplications doing the same thing. That's not how it works.
Your smartphone comment is a great explanation of why not, actually. Yes, we've all moved to tiny screens and low battery. Why?
Because the device solved problems that we wanted solved and provided features we wanted to have. It wasn't the tech. People were as crazy about the first iPhone as they are about the 15th iPhone. The tech improvement provides a replacement upgrade path, not a removal of the roadblock to success.
What people wanted from smartphones was a camera in their pocket, the internet available when they want it and a pocketable media player with good enough quality. That was achieved very quickly, now we're just iterating.
Nobody wants a replacement workstation from VR. That's not a problem to be solved. Nobody wants a replacement game console either, as it turns out (see the attach rate of the PSVR for evidence of that). Those aren't problems to solve with better tech.
When the smartphones started exploding the techbros applied that logic to talk about device convergence. "We won't have PCs anymore man, that's the past. Everybody is going to be just using their phones".
But nope, that did not happen. We wanted convergence with cameras, so cameras did get replaced. But PC workstations weren't. Because that wasn't a problem that needed a solution. The handsets can do it, look at Samsung Dex. But nobody wants it, so that's not an application that drives the hardware.
Instead, we got that factor scaled up to tablets, and then people figured a physical keyboard is neat, so we got keyboard covers and now the smartphone tech scales smoothly from a pocket device to a hybrid device to a laptop to a desktop. But the phone? The phone is still for what it was when it was first introduced, despite its limitations, because cameras and portable media were valid use cases.
So yeah, that's the fundamental misunderstanding. VR is good for sporadic "wow" moments, social gimmickry and a niche industry of gaming and... eh... 3D porn.
It is NOT and it never will be a replacement for workstations, TV gaming or smartphones. Because those are not applications with demand for a new solution. We already know that, the tech is mature enough to know.
It’s what deceived people into thinking say, crypto was a linear evolutionary process that would eventually replace other aplications doing the same thing.
Both US and Europe are doing an official digital crypto currency:
It’s inevitable in the long run. Cash is already seeing declining use and the alternative to crypto is the Visa/Mastercard duopoly, which sooner or later will run into anti-trust issues.
That early attempts at future technology often fail doesn’t mean that the future won’t have something extremely similar. See Apple Newton, that was a flop too, yet the modern iPhone is basically the same thing in a little smaller and with better wireless connection.
Nobody wants a replacement workstation from VR.
People still have multi-monitor setups, ultrawides, projectors or even crazy monitors like the Odyssey Ark, which cost similar amounts to a VisionPro. VR can do the same thing, everywhere you go with zero setup. Or cinemas, they are still popular, now you can have one in your f’n pocket everywhere you go. Big screens still matter and VR can make screens as big or small as you need them to be, no physical display can replace that.
(see the attach rate of the PSVR for evidence of that).
PSVR2 doesn’t have enough games and can’t even access PSVR1 games. Getting VR off the ground takes more effort than the minimum effort that Sony is willing to put in, their focus is obviously still on plain PS5 content.
If I haven’t been clear enough: Modern VR SUCKS, big time. It keeps failing because it’s crap. Nobody has build one good enough for Desktop use, they haven’t even build one good enough for gaming.
The handsets can do it, look at Samsung Dex
That’s the right idea and a crappy implementation. Being able to connect your phone to a bigger screen is a great idea. Only being able to do that when you can find a DeX docking station (aka nowhere) ain’t it. And you won’t even get a real Windows desktop out of that, but just whatever Samsung hacked together out of Android bits. If I could take a Windows desktop, pack it into my phone, carry it somewhere else and run it, that would be great. But there are obviously some technical hurdles that need to be overcome and that can take a very very long time in a fractured ecosystem with numerous competing companies.
Guess who doesn’t have to deal with a fractured ecosystem? Apple Vision Pro. Apple controls the whole stack, hardware, OS, software, they even app stores and TV channels. They can take it all and bring it into VR and optimize the experience to their hearts content.
We already know that, the tech is mature enough to know.
So you think we’ll be using smartphones and workstations until the end of time with no new innovation happening ever again? Look at the Xreal Air. Something like 60% of people already wear glasses on their face, if those had the choice between regular glasses and smartglasses, you don’t think they’d pick the smart ones once the tech is ready (which it obviously isn’t today)?
Hah. I did not call you a techbro and I was not projecting cryptobro vibes on you specifically...
...but hey, I'm gonna say this makes sense.
Look, I've been warning people off wasting money in some of this stuff for fun and profit for a while and I've made my point.
Oh, wait, one more thing. You can absolutely use Dex with a normal USB dock, you don't need any additional hardware and you can absolutely carry any peripherals you need on a small bag and set up a desktop workstation on any screen, both wired and wirelessly.
That's neither here nor there, but Dex is pretty cool and the one thing I miss from leaving the Samsung ecosystem. I feel I owe them recognizing their good software after all the crap I gave Bixby. Still won't replace my workstation, though.
The OG Vive is a really horrible experience compared to modern VR headsets already. There are incredible technological advancements being made and to say all VR is doing is waiting for some Star Trek technology is incredibly ignorant. And frankly an insult to those super talented engineers that are breaking new ground on a yearly basis.
Sorry if I sounded disrespectful to the brilliant people working on this tech. I don't mean to say they aren't making insane progress in the field. However, I stand by the main point of my original comment: until VR makes a lightyear jump in tech and frees itself of the headset and the wands/hand pieces (or minimizes them to the point of negligible discomfort), I won't be sold on VR as a consumer.
I get that but I feel like we’re much closer than you think. Hand tracking has been a thing in budget headsets for years now and it’s really solid. There are quite a few really fun experiences that don’t require controllers at all.
Apple is about to ditch controllers completely, combining hand tracking with eye tracking. The displays are almost as sharp as real life and headsets today are fully wireless, standalone computers while being 50% slimmer than your Vive. Oh yeah, they also map the environment automatically and have high definition 3D passthrough with AR capabilities.
A lot of that stuff was considered science fiction when the Vive was released. What you want from VR is happening within the next decade, no lightyear jump needed.
I’m a game developer who had a chance to create a VR game. I have to admit, VR was not my cup of tea at first. It gave me a terrible headache and nausea for hours after playing for a short time. But I was determined to overcome it and I kept practicing. Now I can enjoy VR for hours without any issues. I think kids will be fascinated by VR as well, even if they have some initial discomfort. They will be amazed by the simple games that make them feel like they’re in a different reality. VR is not about making games that look like real life, like Call of Duty. It’s about making games that let you explore new worlds and possibilities. Imagine playing games that involve sports or exercise in VR, or games that let you interact with 3D characters that have realistic personalities thanks to LLM AI. You could make friends and connections with them instead of fighting them. That would be awesome, right?
I think that kids making fake friendships after school instead of fake murdering AIs might have some positives. I hope it can help kids develop social and communication skills.
If the AI is thaught to have good communication skills then even if the kid would benefit from it, the kid would end up expecting good communication from others and that would make him feel like everyone around him sucks ass in comparison to his AI friend
No motion sickness, but most VR games make me disorientated after a while and I just don’t enjoy them very much. They’re fun for a couple of hours once in a great while, but I never see myself doing it as a daily hobby.
I'm in the other camp. The first time I squeezed my 155m spaceship through the tiny mouth of a rotating space station in VR, I wept like a baby. (An Anaconda in Elite: Dangerous)
Yeah getting a new headset for the Oculus with a battery in the back is a comfort game changer. It’s not the weight of the headset that’s a problem, it’s that it’s all front loaded.
People get very stuck on this part, and I genuinely don't think it's the issue.
Look, l have very decent "VR legs" at this point, but I'm still not a likely spender and I don't play long games in VR or crack out my headsets very often at all.
The issue is not motion sickness or space or tracking stations. The issue is having to put something on my face and not being comfortably on my couch, free to go pee or get a snack without removing a thing from my face.
And yeah, it's uncomfortable. That's part of it. A version of it that looks and feels like glasses would be less of a problem. But the thing is, those aren't a thing that exists, they are not even an incremental step that we can get to at any point, and also TVs and monitors look just fine.
VR is a neat trick, and I gladly keep my headsets around for any time when something actually interesting pops up. But it was never going to be the next big thing.
VR continues to make more sense as an arcade-like attraction than as a consumer product.
Except for the part where I would have to wear a headset that 5000 other people have also worn. (And except for the VR sickness that, it turns out, I'm very sensitive to).
I had a full compliment of Rock Band instruments, including the keyboard that came out with Rock Band 3. Also the PS2 and 360 versions of the Guitar and even the modular one they made for the remake on PS4.
So what you're saying is VR is exactly like Rock Band.
Having gone to a VR gaming business (the kind where you book a time slot, not an open arcade) I wasn’t impressed. The hardware isn’t really rugged enough for that kind of commercial use, so it was clear they were struggling to keep the gear in decent condition.
But besides that, the limited time nature of the setup meant that the game options needed to be significantly dumbed down so that anyone could pick it up in a few minutes. And there isn’t enough of a demand to create any interesting experiences, most of what was on offer was neutered VR games I’d already tried on my personal VR setup.
I played a six player zombie shooter at one where you had actual gun controllers, it was fun enough, and a good laugh for the half hour sesh, but it was the most basic game I’ve ever played in itself.
COVID killed The Void, that was the one company that was building high end VR-arcades. Everything else so far looks quite lackluster, just using just regular consumer VR headsets and uninteresting mini-games. VR arcades are also expensive and with $300 headsets around, you might as well just buy one yourself instead of wasting money at the arcade.
I’m in a similar boat. The use case where I really would use it regularly, simming, is hamstrung by two things. One, it’s so damn fiddly and laborious doing settings non stop to make it playable, and two, even if I get the settings right—I start noticing weird crap with my eyes after a couple sessions. Like you end up basically crossing your eyes all the time inside the visor, and I’ll notice fatigue/trouble focusing after using it a lot, what I would imagine it feels like to have a bad prescription or something (don’t personally have glasses).
And as you say, it’s bloody uncomfortable. Something like big screen beyond with good AR/passthrough would go a long way to fixing that I guess.
Bigscreen Beyond is a new vr headset that is a little bigger than pool goggles. It’s manufactured based off of a lidar scan of your face, and is supposed to be very comfortable.
Additionally full color passthrough is becoming more of a common feature so you can see the real world in good definition while wearing the headset. Also some models hinge the display upwards off of your face.
We are getting there. Personally I play for hours a day. Sometimes multiple 4 hour sessions if it’s a free weekend for me. I agree we need more experiences. But it will come.
See? No, this is what I mean. It's not this. It's not even Apples insane thing.
It's not an incremental progression that will take us there. I will not pop out a headset of any kind and put it on my face as my default mode of engagement. Won't happen. Not a thing.
It could be shaped like pool goggles, it could have color passthrough, it could have perfect resolution and field of view, it could solve the nausea problem, it won't matter. Because the reality is that anything that straps to my face and substitutes my normal free field of view is by definition and by design a secondary device.
It's cool that you like what they offer, and hey, unlike the weird people out there mourning Stadia you can still use all of these things.
But a replacement for PCs, TVs or consoles they are not.
Oh. It’s just that you listed these reasons as detractors. I don’t really know what you mean by default engagement. I’m not understanding your use case. Do you expect to be wearing VR goggles while you walk down the street to the convenience store? They are for play right now… not so much work.
Let me put it this way: I reach out for my PC handheld or my Switch to play small indie games all the time. Specifically to avoid even turning on my TV or going over to the living room.
Wearing a headset is an extra step of complication, discomfort and annoyance over turning on my TV, and my TV is losing out to more convenient devices even right now.
VR, no matter how advanced, is currently the third in a list of convenience when I want to play some Tetris Effect.
To be mainstream, VR needs to be at least as convenient as a TV, or ideally a handheld device. And the reason it can't be that is not the tech, it's that by definition VR requires a screen strapped to your face and a couple of dangly motion controllers.
That’s solvable with good pass through, I am speaking from experience. It’s kind of surprising how little focus that aspect got, even most modern headsets still lack proper stereo-correct passthrough and instead just fudge something together via tracking cameras (e.g. Pico4 looks like a butchered photogrammetry scan due to having only a single RGB camera).
With Apple VisionPro that will hopefully change and motivate the rest of the industry to catch up.
A version of it that looks and feels like glasses would be less of a problem.
BigScreenBeyond gets pretty close (but no passthrough at all). Some AR headsets like Xreal Air get even closer, though those come with tiny FOV.
To be fair, with good enough passthrough you can get your pee wherever it needs to be.
I genuinely can't believe how quickly you glossed past the mental image of yourself peeing with a headset on. I feel I can rest my case right at that point, honestly.
Summed up my feelings 100%. I love VR and almost every experience I’ve had with it have been great, but I’ve touched my Index probably 5 times in the past two years (and probably 3 of them were to watch VR porn). There’s just a big setup and time commitment required to VR game that a lot of people don’t have time for.
I never felt sick from just VR, but the continuous movement (rather than teleporting) made my brain confused like I wanted to fall over, but after a few hours of it I got used to it for good and now have no problems with VR, other than fatigue of moving around so much aha.
I think most people could break it in, but are reluctant to keep playing or play again once they feel sick doing it. While its easy to get immersed, you have to disconnect yourself from it a bit and remember you are in the real world, when friends and family try it I have to make sure they dont walk into walls, but on my own I have full awareness of my surroundings even when I am blind to it. It just takes time to get used to it.
It's a really fun experience, I hope it keeps getting developed regardless of sickness issues. Higher framerates are definitely important, the 120Hz mode on the Index is definitely recommended, any lower and its much more likely to be sickness inducing.
I think most people could break it in, but are reluctant to keep playing or play again once they feel sick doing it.
The article author reports trying twice: first a rollercoaster, and then a racing game. Then cites a study about people getting sick in their first 15 minutes of use.
I think you’re right, but some people just aren’t going to give it another try. I think this tech is likely to be one of those big generational dividers that old people just won’t tolerate (like computers or cell phones, or the thousands of prior things).
Yeah for most people getting the desire to throw up is going to prevent any future use of VR. Even if it’s known to get better after it’s still a case of “Oh it gets better, you just haven’t suffered enough yet” which is a deal people understandably don’t want to take
I easily get motion sick with first person games, so I can’t imagine what VR must be like. My only recourse, however, is imagination because I have a nerve disorder in my face, which makes it extremely sensitive and I can’t wear VR gear because of it. I’m far from alone when it comes to people with health issues and VR.
First person games also make me motion sick, for lack of a better word, because I’ve got permanently screwed proprioception (so less “sick,” more “horribly dizzy”), so I’ve never even dared try VR. I feel like the market is a lot more limited than companies might think it is.
I actually wonder if proprioception has a lot to do with it. We pretty much use all of our senses with proprioception, and they are more limited by VR. No matter how good the eye tracking is, there will still be big blind spots and no matter how good the 3D sound is, it still won’t quite replicate how real sound moves between your ears. And then, of course, you have the illusion of walking without moving your leg muscles. This won’t change for a while. Not without major technological advances in VR gear.
I also cannot play 1st person games for this same reason. But oddly enough, VR games actually make me feel less motion sick than flat 1st person games do.
I’m pretty sure that Meta is the only company that thought there’s a big market for VR, and even they seem to be giving up on it. Apple’s device seems more oriented to giving you a private workspace than a real virtual world - like a big array of virtual monitors to replace actual hardware - and that avoids the worst motion sickness triggers. Of course, their device is also priced far out of mass market.
The most popular applications for VR are all games, and even the gaming companies are doing very little development in that space. Fewer people think VR will be a big thing than thought 3D TV would be a big thing.
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