I Spent Hundreds of Hours Working in VR

I bought an Oculus a couple of years ago out of curiosity and because I wanted to support the technology. My disappointment is that it essentially a gaming platform. I've never been attracted to games, not IRL, not in early PC's and now not in VR. There are 360 degree videos on YouTube, but accessing them is awkward and they aren't that good. The screen door effect and view not extending to the periphery detracts from the experience. But once in awhile, when "immersion" hits you like a drug, it's amazing. I think it's still too early unless you are a gamer. ymmv of course.

Valve Index allows you to set the distance of the lenses towards your face so there is room for glasses.

A lot of glass wearers did tell me that they can see perfectly well without glasses, probably far-sighted.

I think the pushback to that is basically the philosophy of The Big Lebowski, which ends up being some flavor of Stoicism (John Goodman's character has a strong opinion on both the Eagles and nihilists). Attributing evil to man for thriving and expanding is a bit strong; of course it's more fun to be the first one in a new territory, but we're not bad for striving to do it.

> Creating content for these empty rooms is actually a problem as there are no open standards, the tools are complicated, there are lots of hurdles, and a lot of gate keepers with dollar signs in their eyes

I have to disagree, most 3D models can be used in VR. There are millions of assets out there that have been produced for the games industry. Both Unity and Unreal Engine have huge communities with lots of tutorials both official and independent on VR development. OpenXR is an open standard supported by many of the big players.

> The only people that bother with going through the trouble for this so far are game studios.

This is wrong, there are plenty of indie studios and individuals building VR experiences. It's actually the other way around, the big studios want to make games that essentially just have VR bolted on whereas the independents are the ones experimenting with the medium.

> 3D movies

I don't see how 3D movies would be compelling in VR. They are still fixed POV so you'd have to watch them on a screen like any other movie. You wouldn't want to have it replace the feed going to your headset since you'd have to keep your head still or risk disorientation and motion sickness. Netflix and Prime are on Oculus btw.

> IMHO, any content that works in VR should be trivially accessible using a normal 2D screen as well.

I'm sorry but that's not feasible unless you use VR controllers with the display set to your monitor. Even then having to control the look direction with a joystick would be terrible compared to just moving naturally and you'd be lacking the ability to dodge, duck, aim, etc. Sure you could make those actions trigger from button presses but then you've just got a bog standard FPS which is not a good VR experience. VR is a new medium, saying that all VR content should be accessible via 2D is like saying all movies should just be filmed stage productions. It doesn't work. Great VR games make use of the full 6DOF, they have you physically push buttons, throw switches, dodge bullets and swords, punch your enemies, walk across narrow ledges. Having these be real physical movements is a radical difference from tapping buttons on a keyboard or controller. It'll only get better as things like full body tracking and haptics improve and come down in price to the point that they are part of the purchase of a headset.

> there's nothing stopping us from building a metaverse right now

Also disagree, I've played Second Life and other 3D chat programs and they can't hold a candle to VR Chat (and VR Chat is put together with bailing twine and bubblegum so I'm not a big fan of it). Presence is a real thing in VR. Our brains really are that dumb (or that adaptive) where chunky polygons presented stereoscopically with a few other tricks really does make you feel like you're in a room with other people. It's weird but also fun. The VR goggles are necessary for any version of the metaverse to get off the ground.

I don't think that our current media will go away any time soon but I do think that VR is here to stay. 10 years down the road I think most households will have more than 1 VR headset. I think it will probably compliment our current UIs, you can put 2D UIs in VR after all and probably make better use of them by having them laid out in virtual space the same way you arrange things in a physical office. Speaking of offices, I'm pretty sure VR will be the default for work from home folks, at the very least for meetings if not for the whole work day. VR is just better than video calls for talking to people and as time goes on we will have a lot more social VR experiences and there will be a lot of people that exclusively socialize in VR.

So they think people will put on a headset in order to shop.

Versus me picking up my phone and ordering something within a minute. Or texting someone a simple message.

What VR and metaverse miss is that they haven’t solved the asynchronous problem.