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I Spent Hundreds of Hours Working in VR

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Re: I Spent Hundreds of Hours Working in VR

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've not played the right games, then. I mean, take Robo Recall, which is one of the first things that came out. Sure, you can do a shooting game without VR, but then you don't get the experience of tearing a robot apart with your own hands and punching another's head off with a torn off arm. Or Elite Dangerous is quite the experience in VR too. Less so than Robo Recall, but it works out extremely well if you have…

The tech works extremely well at making me feel sick. I enjoyed subnautica sans VR. ED is less interesting than Euro truck simulator. :-) I get the physical games like table tenis and beat saber, but how is this not a fad? The wii was cool at the time too. Nintendo didn’t retain the ideas in later hardware. VR chat is about as interesting as second life, and any metaverse that follows will follow the same path.

> but how is this not a fad? The wii was cool at the time too. Nintendo didn’t retain the ideas in later hardware.

Hand tracking (via controllers or cameras) isn’t comparable at all to the Nintendo waggle/point/swing tech.

Re: I Spent Hundreds of Hours Working in VR

#192

I wanted to love VR. I dreamed of having a headset when I was younger and kickedstarted the oculus rift. I imagined a million worlds that would be within virtual reach. It would be the coolest! VR has been nothing but a complete disappointment to me. Motion Sickness, headaches, sweaty headsets and detachment. Never played a VR game that wasn’t better without it, somewhat like 3D movies. I have my doubts this will eve…

I've played a few VR games that were better or could only really work in VR that I thought justified it, but I keep my Rift around pretty much just for Beat Saber. Generally speaking I'd agree that VR is pretty disappointing. The best experiences are room scale and need, you know, basically a whole room dedicated to them. Movement is a problem because of motion sickness, tracking tech is still a bit dodgy, and unless you are ok with patronizing Facebook the tech is expensive and requires you to deal with cables.

In a few generations I'd say it might be worthwhile, but for now it's a pretty expensive gimmick.

Re: I Spent Hundreds of Hours Working in VR

#194
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zuck rebranded because Facebook has a bad rep. Microsoft bought AB for their IP and lib, I don’t believe they do any VR stuff. They do online gaming well and will be very successful with Xbox. I don’t think we will be seeing competitive esports in VR, as we don’t see competitive Wii Bowling as an esport.

> Microsoft bought AB for their IP and lib, I don’t believe they do any VR stuff. https://store.steampowered.com/app/967490/Microsoft_Maquette... https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/mixed-reality/altsp... https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/mesh

It would make more sense that "they" refers to Activision Blizzard. They do very little VR stuff compared to Microsoft.

Re: I Spent Hundreds of Hours Working in VR

#195

I wanted to love VR. I dreamed of having a headset when I was younger and kickedstarted the oculus rift. I imagined a million worlds that would be within virtual reach. It would be the coolest! VR has been nothing but a complete disappointment to me. Motion Sickness, headaches, sweaty headsets and detachment. Never played a VR game that wasn’t better without it, somewhat like 3D movies. I have my doubts this will eve…

My son pushed through his VR sickness, and now doesn't really suffer from it. He plays at least a couple of hours of VR each day. Boneworks, H3VR, Onward, Pavlov, RecRoom, Blade & Sorcery, Half-life Alyx, and other games he just loved. I can go maybe 15 minutes in it, and VR isn't really something I'm that into (despite it being a fantasy of having it since I was a kid). Although VR shooters have kind of ruined 2D shooters for me now :( Thing is, when I play a game, I don't want to move around - as an adult, I've been busy all day, now I just want to sit on a couch and chill.

VR was key to my son making it through the pandemic with his sanity intact. But he does seem to be a rarity - he has a couple of friends that have VR and they just play Beat Saber, if that.

If there was an updated Garry's Mod for VR - we'd never get him out of there!

Re: I Spent Hundreds of Hours Working in VR

#196

I wanted to love VR. I dreamed of having a headset when I was younger and kickedstarted the oculus rift. I imagined a million worlds that would be within virtual reach. It would be the coolest! VR has been nothing but a complete disappointment to me. Motion Sickness, headaches, sweaty headsets and detachment. Never played a VR game that wasn’t better without it, somewhat like 3D movies. I have my doubts this will eve…

If there is any hope for this space it's in VR, the technology necessary for a quality AR experience is so far away from what is currently possible that it's basically DOA as a product.

Re: I Spent Hundreds of Hours Working in VR

#197

Whenever I read dismissive comments about new tech I think that this same people would have dismissed the internet in the early days.. who needs all this complicated stuff when you can just go to the library ???

I'm kind of a perpetual skeptic and I probably would have been one of those that dismissed the internet as a toy in its early days had I been old enough to have an opinion. That being said, by being a skeptic, I think I'm right more than I'm wrong. For every "internet" that I've called wrong, there's a "3D TV" or "Segway" that's I've correctly predicted would fail to live up to the hype. These revolutionary technolog…

> the downsides of a false negative and less than the downsides of a false positive

As a consumer, yes. As a founder, there is an opportunity cost to not founding the next Googlebook.

Re: I Spent Hundreds of Hours Working in VR

#198
post #10

> A VR headset is just like a stereoscope from the 1800s, except the image is on screens fixed just past your nose, and you're in space. Your eyes are free to change angle as the images on the screen move, but your lenses are accommodating screens that are at a fixed distance. Never thought about that. You can throw processing at VR to dial up the frame rate, throw in more expensive displays to increase the resolutio…

This is actually tractable, if difficult. There's a handful of different approaches, for example having varifocal lenses and you adjust the focus depending on where you gaze.

That's clever. We can already track the eyes.

Re: I Spent Hundreds of Hours Working in VR

#199
post #50

> A VR headset is just like a stereoscope from the 1800s, except the image is on screens fixed just past your nose, and you're in space. Your eyes are free to change angle as the images on the screen move, but your lenses are accommodating screens that are at a fixed distance. Never thought about that. You can throw processing at VR to dial up the frame rate, throw in more expensive displays to increase the resolutio…

Maybe its just me but I don't find it nearly as immersion breaking as the other things listed. You're not experiencing it when you focus on an object, after all.

Not immersion breaking, maybe mentally fatiguing? The point seems to be that your brain is expecting to have to change focus, and is "surprised" when it does not.

Re: I Spent Hundreds of Hours Working in VR

#200
post #182

People don't seem to understand that VR was always an element of dystopian fiction. It's one of the things we do when we are confined to Earth. The others are gambling (with apes?), drugs, mindless hedonism (there's an app for that), following cults and crazy ideologies (Qanon? flat Earth?), pointless political intrigue, and war both physical and cultural. There will be a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. Sta…

The best argument I know against expanding into yet another frontier is expressed in the Eagles song "The Last Resort". The basic message of that song, as I understand it, is that we ruin every new frontier we conquer. Or as the closing words of the song put it, "you call some place paradise, kiss it goodbye." So maybe the universe is better off if our damage is limited to our own little planet.

Then again, that song also said, "there is no more new frontier," seemingly ignoring space, so maybe Don Henley was just being overly pessimistic.

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