I Tried VR and It Was Just OK

I want to write about this more at length -- maybe I'll put something on my blog or on Medium or something -- but I also tried VR, and the most interesting aspect of the experience was just how clueless all of the gamer types at the gaming company office I went to were about what other people out there in the world would want from the experience. Here is what I mean.

The most impressive and important part of the otherwise crappy VR demo I sat through was a crudely rendered virtual media room with a big screen TV, where I was placed on a virtual couch to watch some movie clips. Why did this rock my world?

It rocked my world because I happen to know that it would cost me $40K at least to add a media room on to my house, and if I could buy $5K worth of VR gear for my wife and I and get pretty much the same effect, then that would be a major win for us (and a loss for Austin's contractors and architects).

In other words, gaming is the /least/ interesting thing about VR. VR has the potential to disrupt the architecture and building trades. In the real world, people like to have access to spaces that they can do various non-gaming things in, and they have historically been willing to pay quite a bit of money to have those spaces built. VR will drive the cost of adding those spaces to one's home/office/trailer/pad/etc. down towards zero.

I tried explaining this to the crowd of young white male gamer nerds gathered around the pizza station after the demo, and they sort of chuckled at this boring old guy rambling about building contractors (I'm pretty sure none of them owned a house) and went back to wracking their brains about what, to them, is the single most important thing in the world: how are we going to make a frigging GAME with this?

I know these guys, because prior to my wife + 3 kids + house I was one of them: a young white male gamer nerd. But at this point I've been around the block enough to recognize that the number of people interested in blasting virtual aliens or orcs is a few orders of magnitude lower than the number of people who want to just hang out on the deck of a mega-yacht at sundown, or have coffee once again in an exact replica of a Parisian cafe that they used to frequent in the 60's, or retreat from their kids and life into a virtual media room and watch Game of Thrones on a virtual big-screen TV.

Note that I'm not slamming Jeff Atwood, who for all I know owns a house and who thinks about many things other than leveling up and collecting loot. I'm just saying that he has thoroughly missed the point of VR, and in a super common and troubling way.

I'm not an SJW by any stretch, but VR needs women, and black people, and old people, and in fact it will get them because the market will demand it. That's because VR isn't the next Atari 2600 or Kinect -- it's the next TV, and the next Internet. Are today's Internet addicts hooked on MUDs or MOOs? No, they aren't. And tomorrow's VR junkies won't give a rip about games.

That's the problem.

There are tricks, yes, but big pixels are a fundamental problem until you reach a "good enough" size. Sort of like when the iPhone 4 and retina was released. We are very, very far from retina resolution in VR.