When will virtual reality take off? The $100 bet

Fitness. It is much easier to grind in a VR game for an hour than it is to grind on a treadmill for the same amount of time.

I have a Quest, the games suck, but the fitness experience is paradigm changing. Beat Saber was and still is the Quest's killer app, but there are lot of similar games that keep the experience somewhat fresh (not to mention new beat saber music packs, I also use FitXR more than Beat Saber).

I bought my Quest back in May 2019, it died around June 2020, but I was already using it a couple of hours a day by then so had to get a new one from a scalper (during the Pandemic, Quest units were hard to get). I really don't want to go back to life without it.

I have a pretty high tolerance for motion sickness in VR. However, if I play something like No Man's Sky for one hour, in the normal locomotion mode, my mouth will start to water, which for me is a prelude to nausea, so I have to stop. That's goes for other games too, even if the blank the peripheral vision(although that helps).

I can play for 10 hours straight (and I have) if I use the teleportation mechanism.

I'll get nauseous in Subnautica.

A few people have tried Beat Saber, they all seem to have been ok.

Planes, cars, spaceships don't bother me. My wife threw the headset away in Elite Dangerous when the ship banked. But I feel perfectly fine. Shouldn't that make me nauseous too? After all, things are moving and the vestibular system is not registering anything.

Maybe that's because we are used to cars? And could it be that the nausea can be "trained" away?

Forget about photorealism - cartoony, Nintendo Wii style graphics are much more forgivable on VR hardware. Currently, VR is bad considering the cost.

warning: discussion about guns

> Half Life Alyx seems to me to suffer from the same problem, a fun game with some compelling content, so great to try, but not a must-have. Exercise programs like Supernatural or Beat Saber fall in the same category, fun, cool to try, but not something without okay substitutes or alternatives.

I think HL:Alyx is a game changer. Elite: Dangerous sold me on it initially. I regularly use Beat Saber to stay fit during the pandemic -- the recent addition of multiplayer is amazing. VR Chat is really awesome. I find it's not nearly as exhausting to hang out with friends in VR Chat than a Zoom meeting.

HL:Alyx -- the fidelity, performance, and detail given to the content is amazing. But what was unique about it for me was that it made exchanges with guns actually harrowing and... more cinematic and believable. A lot of FPS' have to band-aid around the fact that the player character can soak bullets/zaps/whatever because the lack of spatial awareness of a projection onto a 2D surface means most casual players are going to be running into the middle of a fire fight and expect to have a reasonable chance to win.

In one of the opening scenes a soldier catches you off guard and points a gun right at you. In VR, without even thinking, my hands went up. In any other FPS, unless that interaction was scripted, I would have just shot back or ran.

Yet even because Alyx isn't a super hero or wearing some high-tech recharging shield, it still feels cinematic. I'm physically ducking behind walls, tossing items and using bits of junk as a temporary shield.

And it does advance the story of the HL universe so there's that... I wouldn't say it didn't change anything. It raised the bar for VR content that was lacking original content from AAA studios.

Elite: Dangerous. VR changed how I play completely. I was instantly better at flying. The added benefit of depth perception improved my reaction speed and spacial awareness. I play on a flat monitor now and again but it's too boring and awkward.

Although you can't argue with the numbers -- it's not mainstream in the way that a Nintendo Switch or other game system is.

But I wonder if that's not so much a content issue but if there were other factors involved like, say, how FB has managed Oculus or how it wasn't deeply discounted at first to gain adoption like most new hardware platforms are.

The problem isn't the cost. It's that moving around while wearing VR headgear is only safe in either customized environments, like the Star Wars location based entertainment system, or when movement is in a small area, like Beat Saber. Which is why Beat Saber is the #1 VR game.

Read the setup and cautions for full-body tracking in VRChat.[1] It can be done, but it's not popular. Partly because it requires the agility of a dancer to use properly.

Wearing VR headgear while sitting down isn't worth the trouble. Plus about 10% of the population gets nauseated when visual and actual motion differ.

On the other hand, make an AR headset that sells for $79.95 and runs Pokemon Go, and you have a hit.

[1] https://docs.vrchat.com/docs/full-body-tracking