Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why we've never fallen in love with virtual reality

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 285 posts

Re: Why we've never fallen in love with virtual reality

#41

Post by tomclive »

I had a GearVR and it was pretty fun for a while but the battery life, overheating and lack of great apps made me lose interest.

I then got a mixed reality headset and Beat Saber was a game-changer for me. The controls are so simple and are perfectly suited to VR. No motion sickness etc. It's a great game. I've picked up loads of the best selling VR games on Steam and although some have been fun, none quite match up to Beat Saber.

Google Earth with room-scale VR is stunning. Being able to walk around your hometown as if you were a couple of hundred feet tall is an incredible experience.

I'm looking forward to MS Flight Simulator 2020 and it looks like the devs are making VR a priority. This could be a winner for me.

Re: Why we've never fallen in love with virtual reality

#42

Post by meesterdude »

bartread wrote: post #33

I have the PSVR and in many ways it's great. For example, it's tough to beat Wipeout VR as a future racing experience. The fact that you can look around/through the corners the way you do in the real world when you're driving a vehicle really changes the way the game plays and makes it much more immersive. OTOH some games do seem to cause quite severe motion sickness (I forget the name of the one I'm particularly thi…

> but then, of course, you open the system up to more latency issues.

Nope. Maybe "of course", if they just lazily hack something together. But the tech is there, today, for low latency.

Re: Why we've never fallen in love with virtual reality

#43

Post by Nursie »

rkho wrote: post #28

Truly immersive VR experiences are great. The park I went to in Tokyo recently had some fun licensed ones: + A Shin Godzilla themed helicopter raid which required a customized "cockpit" to ride in with rumble capabilities, + A Dragon Quest free-roaming VR adventure which required a LOT of space to enable + A Mario Kart race which, again, required a customized "kart" to ride in which simulated the physics of every sha…

While the graphics and sensor capabilities have undoubtedly come a very long way ...

I'm pretty sure I played a VR racing game in a similar sort of setup in the 80s! There were only ever a handful of games, and they were only found in a very few places, but foir my birthday one year when I was a kid I was taken to the Trocadero centre in London where they had a few of these machines. They weren't massively responsive but they were good fun and for the time they were amazing.

But given just how long VR tech has been around, I do wonder if it will ever be mainstream in any way.

Re: Why we've never fallen in love with virtual reality

#44

Post by mlang23 »

I am concered about the upcoming accessibility disaster. Granted, most games are likely not really essential for say, blind people, to play. But the future will bring UIs to VR. And I doubt that companies will think about accessibility from the start. It is already hard to maintain screen readers for typical GUIs. But it will be almost impossible to have meaningful assistive technologies in VR as long as they are designed as add-ons.

Re: Why we've never fallen in love with virtual reality

#45

Post by aepiepaey »

kstenerud wrote: post #30

Another issue is motion sickness. For a significant portion of us this is a huge problem.

Most people can reportedly get used to the discrepancy between the vision and balance senses and be rid of the motion sickness (with some training: keep playing until you start feeling uncomfortable, wait until the next day, go again).

Ginger can also help delay onset.

It can also be noted that motion sickness really only is a problem where the game character moves while you stand still physically (e.g. using a joystick to move around). Other forms of locomotion (like teleportation) are usually fine.

Re: Why we've never fallen in love with virtual reality

#46

Post by gmueckl »

FractalParadigm wrote: post #3

> A major issue is that the price of headsets has remained very expensive. They mention it in passing in a later paragraph, but the cost of the headset is peanuts compared to the cost of a system that can provide a consistent, high-framerate, high-quality image. While cheaper options exist (Daydream/Gear VR, Oculus Quest, PSVR) they just don't have the quality or framerate to really send home the "future of gaming" V…

Good VR isn't just about graphics quality. Mobile phone GPUs can deliver a high enough frame rate to deliver an immersive experience. The Oculus Quest is proof of that.

The only downside is that the graphical content has to be stylized. But in games, stylized looks can be a boon instead of a hindrance. A typical good gaming experience is extremely stylized and over the top, anyway (especially in these "realistic" militaristic FPS games).

Re: Why we've never fallen in love with virtual reality

#47

Post by nottorp »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #37
newzombie wrote: post #17

The very main reason VR isn't taking off is because it has no killer app , that is, an app that other platforms can't have, and that people love. End-of-story. What's to understand here is that it's not said that this killer app "exists". If VR is only a cooler screen, then it will sell like cooler screens. Now maybe it's a killer screen, that is a screen that everybody wants. I guess there is a competitive advantage…

Beat Saber has been a killer app for a lot of people. VR still has a lot of room to improve tech-wise before it's a mature platform, though. Resolution remains not that great, ditto for FoV, physical feedback is meh, most headsets are pretty bulky, etc. I have a Rift CV1 and a Quest, they're fun platforms for enthusiasts, but it doesn't feel ready to go fully mainstream yet.

Hmm I looked it up on youtube and it looks like a nice gimmick, but nothing to justify the price of a VR headset.

Re: Why we've never fallen in love with virtual reality

#48

Post by nottorp »

kstenerud wrote: post #30

Another issue is motion sickness. For a significant portion of us this is a huge problem.

Yup. Borrowed a PSVR, no one in my family could play for more than 15-30 min. We had a stack of different games to try so it's not just one particular title.

Re: Why we've never fallen in love with virtual reality

#49

Post by nottorp »

Kiro wrote: post #13

I'm a firm believer that Oculus Quest is the new beginning of VR. I used to be a real skeptic but now I've turned. I think it's futile to analyse the market pre-Quest and I'm excited of what's to come.

It sends everything you do to Facebook right? Occulus products are the one thing I'll never consider buying.

Re: Why we've never fallen in love with virtual reality

#50

Post by jobigoud »

newzombie wrote: post #17

The very main reason VR isn't taking off is because it has no killer app , that is, an app that other platforms can't have, and that people love. End-of-story. What's to understand here is that it's not said that this killer app "exists". If VR is only a cooler screen, then it will sell like cooler screens. Now maybe it's a killer screen, that is a screen that everybody wants. I guess there is a competitive advantage…

> [killer app] an app that other platforms can't have, and that people love.

Thinking about art. VR has spatial painting and animation, things completely impossible on non-VR platforms. And, this is where many people fail to grasp what VR killer app really means, they are not a VR way of doing something we used to do on flat screens. Painting in VR is as much a different art form as painting is from sculpting in the real world.

Thus it may not interest ALL existing artists, because it has a learning curve. Just like painters aren't necessarily drawn to try sculpture, not all artists want to invest time discovering what painting in space can unlock.

What will happen in my opinion is that a number of young people that haven't picked their preferred art form yet will decide to spend their 10 000 hours of training in VR, and develop their expertise there. This hasn't happened yet simply because it has only been a few years and in constant flux.

The same may be true in other areas. The very first VR-native people are just growing up.

Post reply on HN