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When will virtual reality take off? The $100 bet

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Re: When will virtual reality take off? The $100 bet

#151

Post by bigyikes »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #141
gonehome wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The headsets are pretty cool - I’ve played with all of them except for the Valve Index. Though there’s something unpleasant about them that keeps me from going back when the novelty wears off. I think it might be because I don’t want to be standing and moving around when playing a game and if you’re not doing that, the motion is kind of unpleasant. I’m not sure this is something it can really overcome. I think an AR…

> I think there are probably some narrow applications where it’s clearly better than not having it, but I’m skeptical of VR as a platform. 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 si…

Be sure to mod and side load custom Beat Saber tracks if you haven’t already. Dancing (sabering?) to songs you actually know makes the whole thing way more fun.

Re: When will virtual reality take off? The $100 bet

#152

Post by jonny_eh »

outworlder wrote: post #111
jnwatson wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook's Quest 2 is an impressive piece of tech. One of the biggest reasons to be skeptical of VR taking off is that Facebook is one of the major players. Between the login shenanigans and their anti-competitive dealings with developers, they have an opportunity to single-handedly tank the industry.

It's the ONLY player on the "stand-alone" headset space. There's some competition on PC headsets, Rift headsets are not even the best, feature-wise. But just like the quest, they score very high on the cost-benefit analysis (I guess we pay with a combination of cash and data).

PSVR is somewhere in the middle but Sony has all but abandoned it at this point.

Re: When will virtual reality take off? The $100 bet

#154

Post by Impossible »

arduinomancer wrote: post #132
Impossible wrote: post #116

Estimates of total hardware sales vary depending on what is considered VR hardware, but most estimates I've seen have worldwide unit sales at around 5-6M in 2020. His sales estimates are a little low, unless he's only including PC VR. PSVR alone has sold ~5M units by most estimates. In the most recent Steam hardware survey, about 2% of users that completed the survey have VR devices, which is roughly another 2M users…

Maybe he's referring to yearly sales of 5-6M

Ah yeah, you're probably right. I read it as total sold units. He's probably right about total units sold in 2020, or maybe a little bit on the high end. Because we don't know Quest and Quest 2 sales and they're harder to estimate it's hard to know

Re: When will virtual reality take off? The $100 bet

#155

Post by [deleted] »

edmundsauto wrote: post #106
lwansbrough wrote: post #102

It was pretty clear to me back in 2015-2016 that VR was going absolutely no where. All you had to do was try on any headset and evaluate it honestly. The graphics sucked, the lag sucked, it gave some people nausea and others an unwanted sense of vertigo. Prices for high-end equipment were (and still are) ridiculous and unattainable for the mass market. Even if you could afford it, do you also own a space big enough t…

The Quest line has been a major step up. You should consider updating your 5 year old opinion in a product category that is nascent. Also, I believe a lot of hype around VR is that it is a necessary first step before VR. Finally, while I agree that AR is the “mobile phone” type of revolutionary product, I still think VR is going to be wildly successful. To me, the limiting factor is the builders tools - it’s so expen…

[deleted]

Re: When will virtual reality take off? The $100 bet

#156

Post by Geee »

outworlder wrote: post #136
Geee wrote: post #8

I think VR will become mainstream when it's good enough to replace large screens in productive work. It should leave large screens in dust, if done right. Productivity is quite strongly correlated with screen size, so I'm expecting quite a leap in this regard when the right software is matched with the right hardware.

I actually considered this when I was buying a new monitor. "This thing will be obsolete pretty soon". Headsets are still a little bulky (and not enough resolution) for that to happen. Once that's fixed (and more importantly, with many people shifting to work from home, so they don't have to care about people staring), I expect it to become a pretty popular thing. If the virtual monitor is overlaying a camera feed of…

Exactly. And you can fill your whole room with interactive information. You could have hundreds or more files open at the same time and see how they interact. Human brain is pretty good at complex visual/spatial things and I don't think we are aware of the limits yet.

Re: When will virtual reality take off? The $100 bet

#157

Post by outworlder »

jonny_eh wrote: post #152
outworlder wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the ONLY player on the "stand-alone" headset space. There's some competition on PC headsets, Rift headsets are not even the best, feature-wise. But just like the quest, they score very high on the cost-benefit analysis (I guess we pay with a combination of cash and data).

PSVR is somewhere in the middle but Sony has all but abandoned it at this point.

Pretty underwhelming hardware too.

Re: When will virtual reality take off? The $100 bet

#158

Post by Kiro »

dudeinhawaii wrote: post #119

I don't think it's been mentioned enough that VR doesn't fundamentally bring anything new to the -gameplay- table. There are some 'experiences' that are better, like piloting games since they play to the "sit here and look around" model, but that places VR in the same category as a really awesome flight stick, steering wheel, or the Kinect. Mobility is a huge problem that needs to be solved. Until then, VR will be a…

Sounds like you haven't tried Superhot. Even Beat Saber is a mechanic unlike anything else. Right now I'm having a great time in Blaston and that's also gameplay that would not be possible in another medium.

Mobility was solved with untethered devices. Just put it on and start playing immediately. No dedicated area required.

Re: When will virtual reality take off? The $100 bet

#159

Post by an_opabinia »

Impossible wrote: post #122
an_opabinia wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing is, I also recognize that while it is already an incredible achievement, it's still probably 5-20 years from hitting its iPhone moment. Ironically, by getting acquired by a giant company, Quest development was set back by that many years. The real problem isn't technology or even adoption, it's that people who work at giant companies suck at making games.

Microsoft has a good track record with making games, but yes all of FAANG is terrible at this. I have a little more hope for Facebook now that they've started acquiring studios and letting them run independently, instead of the previous combination of publishing\funding and having few internal game teams (which generally doesn't work in big tech anyway). This could lead to a model that looks more like Microsoft Game…

> I have a little more hope for Facebook now that they've started acquiring studios and letting them run independently

The reality is, the acquisition of best VR game of any objective measure, Beat Saber, set back VR for all game developers because it will rob other VR platforms of a doorbuster title (i.e. Beat Saber 2).

Also, it enables Beat Games to keep using unlicensed music by fiat of Facebook's legal might, a completely unassailable competitive advantage that is strictly better than actually licensing the music and making a game with it.

It is illustrative of how the things giant companies are good at, which is using their huge cash piles to achieve totally anti-competitive advantages, changes nothing for the status quo of the consumer - they don't pay for the music no matter who the game's owner is - but just winds up harming other game developers.

Consider also Facebook Horizon is seeking to replace VR Chat, I believe the #1 free VR title by installs. How is that benefitting game developers and gaming culture? Just compare a screenshot of VR Chat here (1) to Facebook Horizon here (2), it tells you everything you need to know about why the kind of people who work at giant companies are awful at making games. It's so fucking sterile dude, and it's sterile on purpose.

People have said this for eons about Disney, but it's not comparable. By the way, Disney also totally blundered Disney Interactive, shutting down under the CEO Bob Iger who was known as the "tech" CEO of Disney.

(1) https://miro.medium.com/max/3840/1*I5c-QMDHVPeyC35pM1V4Ng.pn...

(2) https://cnet1.cbsistatic.com/img/9kGJANvUNFtxp5mGEgMIDI95DnA...

Re: When will virtual reality take off? The $100 bet

#160

Post by rchaud »

I picked up a GearVR headset w/ my Galaxy S7 phone in 2016, and was really impressed with the graphics and immersion in the games I tried. There really wasn't any kind of killer app, like say Pokemon Go was in the summer of that year. After a few weeks of use, the novelty wore off and I haven't used it since.

Considering the massive success of group games like Jackbox.tv and Among Us, I think the killer app for VR has to have a group competition or co-op element. Single player VR stuff was cool but felt pretty isolating.

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