When will virtual reality take off? The $100 bet

I saw an analysis about 7 years ago (Boulder startup week) that adequate spatial resolution, fps refresh and tracker response would require about 100 teraops of local processing power in the display device. At that time it was just one percent of that power. Apples family of top end ARM devices are closing that.

Another bottleneck was that standard graphics pipeline in GPU had too much latency to keep up with user movements.

^ This a thousand times over. Everyone forgets VR has been 5-10 years away since the 1960s![0]

You can't obstruct people's eyes - glasses get a pass because they're a handicap, and folks with sunglasses communicate by wearing them.

We will need to live many more rounds of evolution to give up the idea that covering your eyes to 'go somewhere else' won't be a survivally threatening move...

and what's more, we're just starting to fully appreciate how smells and air (quality, pressure, etc) play a role in 'us being there' - don't even begin to think about the small gravitational pull between all of our bodies at a concert.

Long story short, it will take a long time and a lot of generations to die off before we appreciate VR as much as a physical experience.

[0]https://virtualspeech.com/blog/history-of-vr

There's a business near me that seems to be pretty much what you describe. I keep meaning to stop in and check it out. https://www.portalvr.us/

I was tangentially involved with VR as a game developer, in the 2015-2016 timeframe. Both Oculus and Valve really strongly believed that there was a "there" there, but didn't know what the actual killer app would be. They spent a lot of money trying to find it, and I benefited by getting some free headsets! I don't feel like they have actually found it yet, though they seem to be closer.

It probably will eventually be a successful thing, probably slowly and incrementally, but I think that the rush to be first to market caused all parties involved to make some mistakes that prevented the wild success they were envisioning.

- They should have been even more experimental. Bootstrapping a market is difficult. The way it goes is that the audience is zero at the start, so no sensible publisher or developer would risk their money over the years it takes to build a game, so the platform creator has to fund them 100%. But that also means that the platform creator gets to control the games and how they're made. I got the sense that the VR platform owners were overly controlling. I was involved with several different headset makers and they were pretty specific about how the input devices had to be used, limitations on the permissible content, and what kinds of games they were looking for. That makes sense for a mature platform where you know what a killer app looks like, but I think they needed much more experimentation for VR. When we first started building for VR, our team strongly believed that it would be the most fun to make games that focused on small-scale, close-up experiences, basically fitting everything on a tabletop. But we were steered away from such ideas, in part due to platform pressure. I guess they felt that big, splashy, open experiences were going to dominate (or would at least make good screenshots for marketing), but they were wrong. Long distance scenes aren't actually that cool in VR because the stereoscopic difference goes to zero; it becomes no different from looking at a monitor. Maybe small-scale stuff wouldn't have worked out -- the lack of vergence cues may cause additional eyestrain -- but it still seems like a big unexplored area of potential.

- Fragmentation is a huge problem. Even within one single headset model, developers cannot assume that players have more than a seated chair's worth of space. If you make a game that accepts that limit, it feels like you're "not really doing VR" and that pisses off funders. So you try and awkwardly have some sort of "progressive enhancement" that makes the game more fun when moving around the room, but still playable when stationary. You really have to build the entire game around such a compromise, so most such games felt very demo-y (e.g. Robo Recall, Job Simulator). Plus all the options for the inputs -- remember how the Rift shipped with an xbox controller? Building a game that can use either xbox or 3DOF or 6DOF controller is madness; the paradigms are totally different. So you're pretty much limited to building a lowest-common-denominator system, which sucks. I think Oculus is trying to address this now, by focusing on standalone headsets, but that saddles them with additional technical challenges so it'll be a few years before that can succeed.

- Inputs are everything for VR, and I don't think people realize how late in the game they actually were. When Oculus and Vive announced, the problem of having accurate-enough handheld controllers was not known to be solvable. Valve's "room demo" had inside-out head tracking that looked at barcodes plastered on the walls, clearly a temporary hack. Good game development takes years; not having a reliable input paradigm to count on _severely_ impacted developer productivity. That said, vehicular games like Elite which can treat the VR headset as a more immersive display were and continue to be some of the high points of the VR experience. I think that they thought that more genres of games would behave like that, but, no.

- I think it was a mistake on Oculus's part to have different levels of buy-in for their platform. It would have worked better if there was one package that everyone bought, even if it was expensive. Maybe the thought that they could have a cheap version for the masses, and people who wanted a better experience could spend more. But it isn't the case that getting the fancier VR package improves the visuals without affecting the gameplay; the different controller types and increased precision substantially changed the types of games you were able to play, exacerbating the fragmentation problem.

- The technical road to having high resolution displays and low-latency rendering was too long. It may be there now, after 5 years of concerted effort, but it wasn't in 2016. If the renderer can't keep up, it's super noticeable in VR. The analogy is capacitive touchscreens. Until they were _absolutely nailed_, they were worse than no touchscreen at all.

Game platforms fail to take off all the time, this was just one of the more well-funded and public ones. Remember the Ouya? Google's various game platforms preceding Stadia? Stadia itself? Failure is the norm; what might eventually turn this around is the very strong dedication some people have to the idea.

I also recently got a Quest 2 and it's changed everything for me. I'm usually that jaded person but today's VR tech really has me gushing. This is the first time I've been truly excited about video games since I was a teenager 15 years ago (despite playing a lot of games in that time).

The feeling of vertigo and momentum in games like Jet Island that makes you weak in the knees, looking out your cockpit and being awestruck by planets and stations in Star Wars Squadrons or Elite Dangerous, dodging bullets in Pistol Whip and Superhot. The dream of the 90's is alive - the technology is here! It's so good and I can't wait until quarantine is over to share this with more people.

Previously I'd used a friend's Oculus DK1 (not good) and then later a friend's HTC Vive (getting there). The Quest 2 is a major improvement and I look forward to the next generation of headsets.