It needs to either become a generic commodity like a TV, or it will die.
We can’t have this fragmented system. Imagine if you needed a Sony TV for PS, one for Xbox, one for PC, a standalone one that could run it’s own exclusive content…
It’s good tech, and the immersion is unparalleled, but greedy company are going to burn it to the ground it so they can rule the ashes.
It’s fucking madness that you can’t even use it to watch 3D movies on Netflix etc. There needs to be a generic box that accepts USB or HDMI input from all devices so you can at least use it for things other than gaming, even if it just puts it all in a big virtual screen.
Yep. The Corporate demand for siloed ecosystems is self-defeating. There are other examples of the same paradigm with VHS v Beta, DVD Audio vs SACD, Dvd vs LaserDisc etc.
Frankly, I don’t really care if the tech dies- the companies that “support” it are too flimsy to be counted on as going-concerns, they’re just fighting their own downward spirals.
Half Life Alyx is like if we got Super Mario 64, and then four years later the games influenced by it just didn’t come.
I blame Meta. My Oculus Rift CV1 was working great until some random software update and now for some reason it won’t read my sensors as being connected via USB3.0 cable despite them being so, instantly rendering my expensive VR device a giant paper weight.
I’m still salty about Oculus starting out crowdfunded then selling to Facebook. What a fucking betrayal.
I loved my original oculus. I thought it was very well built. I loved it right up until having a Facebook account became mandatory… now I love my value index.
I imagine the insane price to entry is a big thing.
I had some disposable cash so I went with the index, I love it don’t get me wrong but, 1k is super fucking steep for an enjoyable system, and that’s ontop of the requirement they do it right when they make a game, many of them take vr as a minority and you can tell when a game puts it on the side burner
I have an Index also, one thing I find frustrating is that because the Quest has such a dominant marketshare and packages games differently, some smaller VR games and experiences I see seem to be only available as an apk file for Quest sideloading and there is no straightforward way for me to play them.
The main reason I don’t use it more though is I never got past the physical discomfort, I still feel nausea playing most games for more than a few minutes, and headaches from the pressure on my scalp/face if going longer than that, ie. trying to watch a movie with the headset. So that basically means I’m not going to just spend a lot of time passively chilling out in VR, it has to be some specific thing I want to do that feels worth it to push through the discomfort involved and can be gotten through relatively quickly. Mostly that ends up being just Beat Saber.
Also a lot of people are lazy. VR requires you to move more than playing flat games. Also it requires a decent PC which is an added cost. As you said - when it works (Payday 2, Alyx) there is nothing better. When it doesn’t, you can end up with physical symptoms.
I’ve enjoyed my VR but rarely. When I game, I’m usually doing it to relax. Getting everything up and running, clearing space, etc so I can wear a device that makes my face sweat while I thrash about isn’t relaxing.
VR is the gaming equivalent of going to a fancy restaurant with a formal dress code. It’s nice once in a while, but most of the time I’d rather just make a sandwich and stay in.
Yup, $1k for a decent headset, $1k for a decent GPU, and you also need space to play. It’s a pretty big barrier to entry before you even get into the limited selection of games.
Even though Facebook is a terrible inhumane corporation, they have the best product because it is lightweight, can be used without any base station and can be used without a pc-link.
The fact that a VR set requires at minimum a 5x5 feets space with a computer within the vicinity is definitely hurting the VR market.
So I just hope that we get something akin to the Quest but without the evil corporation bit.
When I played Elite Dangerous with a VR headset, man was it magical. But I won’t dedicate a small room and a PC just for that experience.
You don’t need anything like that much for a Quest 2/3. Quest 2 is obviously a bit outdated, but I still have fun with mine.
I couldn’t use the quest, it seemed to be on par with the psvr in terms of frames which gave me massive motion sickness
Fair enough. Personally I find the motion sickness mostly down to the game rather than headset, I didn’t know that the frame rate had an effect!
Sony gave up on the VR2 before it was even released. No promotion, hard to even find the games in the store, no free VR games in PS+, barely any investment in developers and exclusives. I don’t understand why anyone would expect a better outcome.
PSVR2 died because it’s not backwards compatible with PSVR1.
That’s another reason, yes
Sony gave up on VR when the PS5 launched without it.
I think it would take off if Facebook wasn’t involved
I’m not going to lie: I would own a Quest 3 already if it didn’t have Meta all over it.
Saaame and I have an index and a WMR kit hahaha. But in my house, no Facebook hardware or code on any machines.
…I miss beat saber. I’ve been too lazy lately but I have all the parts I need for a quarantined beat saber computer.
That’s how I feel about it. I don’t know if I would buy one but independence from Facebook is a prerequisite. Can these even be used without logging in?
Yes, I have no facebook account. It hasn’t been a problem. Other than the logo on the headset, I haven’t seen any other downside to it being a meta ptoduct. The money they have put in to make sure they are and remain ahead of everyone else for tech means that until there is an actual downside, I pretty much have to use their headsets. But I will have no trouble jumping ship if there ever is a downside, or if anyone else even comes close to catching up.
They’ve sunk ungodly amounts of cash to create unrealistic expectations for the VR market. Nobody can compete for the low end, and there’s no way meta is profiting, so what’s their end game?
Presumably, they want to get everyone used to their environment so that when their hardware lead doesn’t mean as much in the future, there will be hesitation to leave. We know they aren’t currently doing anything untoward as there is plenty of overlap between paranoid tech experts and people interested in pioneering new tech. Can’t hide from them. The software and network traffic has been thouroughly vetted and everything is so far doing exactly what it would need to or purports to do.
As long as you go into it knowing you will be changing platforms at some point in the future and hedge all software purchases against that in your mind, the only remaining downside is whether you can stomache giving them your money.
And if that ever changes, it won’t go hidden.
There is also something to be said for the fact that everyone in the Meta community see VR as thriving and growing, and everyone that is outside of it sees VR as stagnating or shrinking. So their money is doing that too presumably.
Their ultimate main goal is also, of course, marrying the tech from VR headsets to the tech from AR glasses. Which will be a true ubiquitous product. Being the first one there will be a huge pay day.
Same. I want to use it as a huge desktop display at work for those days when I need like 40 things visible at once
It’s only that way because developers don’t seem to be, you know… Developing shit for it.
Like, I love a lot of what’s available and the tech itself is great; but there is no killer app. There is next to nothing but novelty bullshit being made. Even if Meta wasn’t the one with the cheapest headset, people wouldn’t necessarily be buying into VR because there’s not really much to do with it yet.
One Half-Life game, a chatroom, and a bitching rythym game isn’t enough.
It’s killer app to me is sim racing but it requires too much additional investment
What, like a wheel and some pedals? Or would you go full-on actual car stuff? I met a guy once who turned the entire back half of his trailer into a plane cockpit for his flight sims. Had actual instruments and switches and stuff. I’m sure with what it had to cost, he could have just bought a real plane. lol
The cheapest plane I’d feel comfortable flying my family around in goes for about $100k, and you’d better be able to pay ~$5k a year on average for upkeep.
Meanwhile an instrument six pack is cheap buying it off someone that’s upgrading their cockpit.
Well really that’s where I’d say it’s up to you, the quasi real cockpit would not be worth it but most “entry level” sit down rigs and a wheel cost about $4-500 all in
I think that the biggest problem is the lack of investment and willingness to take on risk. Every company just seems to want a quick cash grab “killer app” but doesn’t want to sink in the years of development of practical things that aren’t as flashy but solve real-world problems. Because that’s hard and isn’t likely to make the line go up every quarter.
It’s mostly the price. If you have 500 or even 1000 to invest to play games, first that puts you squarely in the top 1% worldwide but more importantly a VR headset is the worst choice in terms of breadth of games you can play. So the first choice will always be a PC or a console which leave the VR headset for the people who actually have 2k+ to spend for gaming and actually want one. A tiny tiny minority.
If you add on top of it that you still have a 50/50 chance of getting nausea each time you play and that it’s a pain in the ass (or an additional expense) if you wear glasses, and the space requirement. It’s not a surprise if the market is stalled.
As for useful implementation, my cousin is an orthopedic surgeon and they use VR headset and 3D x-ray scanner, 3d printers and a whole bunch of sci-fi stuff to prep for operation, but they are not using a meta quest2, we’re talking 50k headset and million dollar equipment. None of that does anything to the gaming market.
My though is that the tech need to get a couple of order of magnitude better and be usable as a day to day computer for work. When I can code in one 10 hours a day without fucking up my eyes, vomiting myself, sweating like a pig and getting neck strain it will have the possibility to take over the computer market, until then, it’s a gimmick.
Even your hypothetical perfect headset would be useless in so many situations where you can game today, can’t use it in public, can’t use it while watching children, can’t use it while talking to other adults in your household,…
Also, I think the idea that you even need that first person perspective for immersion is deeply flawed, lots of games make you feel immersed without that. Not to mention that it severely limits possible UI elements if you don’t want to break the immersion again.
Oh I agree. Once you already have a PC or a console the added experience of a VR headset isn’t a great value proposition for the price.
As for useful implementation, my cousin is an orthopedic surgeon and they use VR headset and 3D x-ray scanner, 3d printers and a whole bunch of sci-fi stuff to prep for operation, but they are not using a meta quest2, we’re talking 50k headset and million dollar equipment. None of that does anything to the gaming market.
That’s really awesome and I love seeing that the tech is actually seeing good uses.
Yeah. A lot of what you’re saying parallels my thoughts. The PC and console gaming market didn’t exist until there were more practical, non-specialty uses for computing and, importantly, affordability. To me, it seems that the manufacturers are trying to skip that and just try to get to the lucrative software part, while also skipping the part where you pay people fair wages to develop (the games industry is super exploitative of devs) or, like The Company Formerly-known as Facebook, use VR devices as another tool to harvest personal information for profit (head tracking data can be used to identify people, similar to gait analysis), rather than having interest in actually developing VR long-term.
Much as I’m not a fan of Apple or the departed sociopath that headed it, a similar company to its early years is probably what’s needed; people willing to actually take on some risk for the long-haul to develop the hardware and base software to make a practical “personal computer” of VR.
When I can code in one 10 hours a day without fucking up my eyes, vomiting myself, sweating like a pig and getting neck strain it will have the possibility to take over the computer market, until then, it’s a gimmick.
Absolutely agreed. Though, I’d note that there is tech available for this use case. I’ve been using Xreal Airs for several years now as a full monitor replacement (Viture is more FOSS friendly at this time). Bird bath optics are superior for productivity uses, compared to waveguides and lensed optics used in VR. In order to have readable text that doesn’t strain the eyes, higher pixels-per-degree are needed, not higher FOV.
The isolation of VR is also a negative in many cases as interacting and being aware of the real world is frequently necessary in productivity uses (both for interacting with people and mitigating eye strain). Apple was ALMOST there with their Vision Pro but tried to be clever, rather than practical. They should not have bothered with the camera and just let the real world in, unfiltered.
I imagine when you treat VIRTUAL REALITY BEING REAL NOW as a fad, develop like two or three games for it, then never do anything with it again… yeah I imagine the market would decline…
people choose consoles over pcs for comfort
people choose pc for its capabilities (and for some, a different kind of comfort)
people choose vr for the experience only - and it can get old quite quickly because the market is too small - not enough ‘content’
There’s just too many edge cases in VR for it to be a real platform. Movement is hard, there needs to be a lot of space around a person, form factors aren’t great for the hardware, there’s more graphical requirements, etc.
It’d legitimately be easier to fit an arcade cabinet in my house than space for proper VR play.
I personally don’t feel like spending 700 or how many euros to play beat saber on my ps5.
Other games that might be awesome in this is ones were you don’t need to move around but benefit from being able to look around, so flight sims, driving sims, but there the chair setups are better imo.
Can’t really think of much else, that’s why VR is on the decline, really limited number of fun games to be had, or it would require some paradigm shift, like a strategy game but you are playing on the inside of a globe, but then that game would have to survive on being a VR exclusive.
A VR mech game could be so baller. Also a remake of Black and White would work well. But generally yeah it’s just not a great medium for most games and while we have a lot of promising hardware we’re struggling to find ways to use it intuitively
I think after the bubble breaks it does down a bit well see some groups take their time to build really functional stuff. We don’t have good standards on how to interact in VR and it shows. We don’t have enough data on how to make people less motion sick. Basically the hardware is there but the software isn’t and that’ll take more time than we’ve been giving it, imo
Realistically though I think the fundamental limits on how you can interact in VR means while there may be a strong niche market, I don’t expect it to be a mainstream thing. Even if the prices drop a lot and the headsets get smaller there’s still a lot working against them
UNDERDOGS is amazing. And I’m not saying that just because I’m in the credits as one of the testers =D
A remake of Black and White would just be amazing, period
The whole hand thing already felt like a gimmick in the regular version of Black & White. How would a god game benefit in any way from VR?
Armored Core could have been a baller VR game
More games and a Matrix-esque visual file manager where you could walk through various libraries of documents, files, videos or pictures in 3D space, or proportional size like WinDirStat would be cool.
The lack of good games has really made VR hard to enjoy. I have five good evergreen titles and not much else.
I would use that for sorting my porn folder (C:\Games\JazzJackrabbit)
Because we would all love it if a large folder meant we had to run for a few hundred meters to get to the next one instead of just hitting a single key on a keyboard or moving the mouse by a few pixels…
That’s just making a community reference with extra steps https://youtu.be/NMTQxCzStuw?si=3HIeDCTcgaFmBKGj
Anybody that says vr is a gimmick haven’t tried a vr racing rig. Not only the fun factor but I’m definitely a better driver now for it.
Flight in VR is truly something else. Not even a simpit can provide that level of immersion. You think jumping into a white dwarf system is spooky in Elite Dangerous? Try doing it with a headset on. When your cockpit is smoking, alarms are blaring, and the panic sets in, you will finally understand.
Yeah but I’d have to play elite dangerous
Fair lol. There are other games with good support but it’s the one I played the most in VR
Wearing a headset isn’t appealing to me. I’d rather get a curved screen or more screens to be more immersed.
I mean the hype has died down but I think it’s rather that VR is too expensive right now. I want VR but I don’t want it $500 much to get a novelty item.
I think using it as a big ass screen would be nice and I really want to Serious Sam and Subnautica on VR. The immersion is really good for VR and I’ve liked it a lot every time I’ve played it.
Still, you need a decent space in the living room. A good graphics card for the frame rate and the expensive headset and motion trackers to get the full experience. That’s a lot to ask for with the current economy.
You probably couldn’t pay me to use VR. The whole way of shutting yourself away from the world just to be stuck with a shitty UI that resembles RL interactions instead of the multitude of UI options abstraction can give you feels entirely unappealing.
You should try it when you get the chance, it’s absolutely bonkers. I had my reservations about it before I tried it and it was much better than I expected.
I mean I am absolutely open to try it at some demo event or something like that, just can’t see myself using it regularly because it is such a hassle to put on, take off, do anything else while you use it, limits so much what you can do while gaming both in an out of the game,… and I already very rarely use first person perspective in existing games that do have the option not to. I also like automation and streamlined UIs so the idea of doing every little shitty thing manually is utterly unappealing.
