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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

#41

Post by wlesieutre »

wlesieutre wrote: post #16
binarymax wrote: post #7

Technology is not the problem. Flashback to 1995. I'm a 17 year old PFY invited to beta test a VR headset from a local company. My Uncle was an investor and I was technically savvy and the target market. I had a copy of Descent that supported VR, and while it was a bit of a hassle to get setup, I got it working. The experience was incredible. After the first use I said to myself "this is the future". I had permission…

That depends entirely on your living situation. If you live on your own, a VR headset becomes just the opposite - you go from being isolated to being in a room full of people. Those people can be on the opposite side of the world, but you're carrying on a conversation and playing mini-golf with them. Or for local play, there are one-vs-many party games where one player wears a headset and interacts with a group of pe…

And on the other end of the spectrum, sometimes you just accept that isolation for a while because you get to fly an X-Wing. A Quest V1 with Oculus Link is far from an optimal PC VR setup, but even with that Star Wars: Squadrons is an experience I’ve been waiting for since I first saw A New Hope. It’s hard to convey how cool it is to be sitting in a spaceship cockpit, dodging through asteroids and chasing down TIE fighters with the pew pew pew of four KX9 laser cannons on your wingtips. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vE90KIBlWyk

Would I play it in VR mode for hours on end every night and stop talking to real people? No. But not all my activities need to be social either. I can go for a four hour hike in the woods by myself and no one gives me a hard time for being too isolated. Or maybe they do, but I don’t care because sometimes that’s how I want to spend my time. To each their own.

One other feature of the Quest that I should mention - you can double-tap the side of the headset at any time to turn the game world off and immediately switch to "passthrough" mode where you see through the headset's tracking cameras. This obviously works best with single player games that can pause themselves until you tap back in, but in those games it makes it no big deal to drop out of the game for a moment to interact with people and things in the real world. A bit weird to talk to you while you have a big headset on your face, sure. But this was added in a software update well after launch, and it's way better for staying available to the real world than needing to take the headset on and off.

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

#42

Post by blackearl »

ajcp wrote: post #32

When VR starts delivering on the "virtual" part of the "reality" concept whereby my girlfriend, uncle, or neighbor can put on a headset and say "why go back?" or When VR doesn't merely solve for an "immersive" experience, but rather provides for a better way to interface with 3D "space" than does a 2D monitor.

I don't think I'll play a 2d rhythm game after beat saber

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

#43

Post by dljsjr »

binarymax wrote: post #7

Technology is not the problem. Flashback to 1995. I'm a 17 year old PFY invited to beta test a VR headset from a local company. My Uncle was an investor and I was technically savvy and the target market. I had a copy of Descent that supported VR, and while it was a bit of a hassle to get setup, I got it working. The experience was incredible. After the first use I said to myself "this is the future". I had permission…

That's an interesting take. I have some contradictory anecdata, though, in that my friends and I love getting together and taking turns playing VR games. And I'm not talking about nerdy hard core gamer friends. Pre-COVID we used to get together every few months or so for a "VR Night" at my buddy's place because he owned an Oculus w/ a living room TV set-up. And we'd just spend a few hours taking turns cycling through the game library and playing all sorts of stuff, and everybody loved it.

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

#44

Post by nynx »

Honestly, I think a large barrier here is there's no pre-existing platform yet. When developing an application for a computer with a regular screen, you have all sorts of supporting software (e.g. window managers, browsers, ui frameworks, etc). When developing for VR, you have to start over almost completely: you have to deal with controller input, different kinds of headsets, designing a UI.

For XR to take off, I think something akin to the metaverse needs to exist first, so applications can develop within its framework.

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

#45

Post by istorical »

chris_st wrote: post #22

I wonder how many people, like me, tried it on a friend's equipment and found that the motion sickness is just impossible to get past. I had motion sickness when I tried the early first-person shooters, but got over it when I learned to keep the (non-moving) screen bounds in mind. That' just impossible in VR, and when the motion in my eyes doesn't match my vestibular system, wow, it's bad. Sigh... some of the games w…

I have to simultaneously agree with you (and even go further and state that the existence of 3-degree-of-freedom devices like Samsung GearVR which was cheap enough to be passed out and demo'd everywhere) really gave people terrible first experiences, both in terms of giving them low expectations in terms of motion sickness and also resolution.

But the reason it's really bittersweet is you _don't_ have to get motion sick in VR, if you just try experiences that don't take control of your in-game/in-experience "camera" and move it without any input from your physical head. In other words, as long as the camera in-game only corresponds 1 to 1 to your real life head movements, there is no motion sickness for the vast vast majority of users. I've given tons of demos and beat saber won't make new users sick. Superhot won't make new users sick. Echo VR, Skyrim VR, anything that doesn't map head movement -> camera movement 1:1 has a 75% chance of making a new user sick, whether immediately and badly or after a medium duration experience and mildy.

But people who are early adopters and have overcome the hump of nausea and forgotten how it feels continue to expose new users to poorly chosen first experiences with joystick movement or even worse - just straight up camera movement entirely unmapped to user input. That and naive users not realizing they need to limit their first experiences to non-joystick locomotion experiences.

It's a bit like if everyone who tried alcohol for the first time took 10 shots of vodka and then span in circles for 10 minutes straight instead of sipping an alcopop or a beginner wine or beer.

There are also hardware solutions like vibrating motors you place on your wrists (or neck/near-the-ear?) that could help as well.

And vignetting and tunneling approaches to keep a fixed frame of reference in the users field of view for those that are advanced enough to begin with joystick movement.

But anyway, in 2020 the most compelling use-case is still porn. And laughably, many people who may have tried VR porn in 2016 or who only viewed free/old/poorly-made files have also had that well poisoned for themselves as well, while newer, higher quality VR film (and porn) is incredibly more realistic and immersive than early attempts or that which you could find on pornhub.

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

#46

Post by iamwil »

Would you do engineering interviews in VR as a candidate?

I had wondered if larger companies would do VR technical interviews to remove biases in their quest to "hire the best". You can have a whiteboard, and the usual schtick, but you can disguise the voice, height, gender, ethnicity, etc of a candidate, so the interviewer can focus on the communication and the solution.

And then the interpersonal part of the interview can be done in person and unmasked. After that, both parts of the interview can be conjoined during the committee evaluation.

I never went down this avenue, because I thought sourcing candidates was a bigger problem than evaluation accuracy, and all but the biggest companies don't worry so much about their interview methods.

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

#47

Post by standardUser »

entropicdrifter wrote: post #40
standardUser wrote: post #6

It's a hard sell for an older (early 40's) gamer like me. I have far more games I want to play on my expensive PC than I have time for (or likely ever will). To consider investing in a new gaming technology it would have to be more enticing than the abundance of stuff I already have! And a lot of the games I'm eager to play are sequels/remakes of things I already know I enjoy immensely, so to draw me away would take…

As a late 20s gamer, some of my earliest gaming memories were formed during the flight/space flight sim boom of the 90s, so I absolutely adore my Vive for Elite Dangerous, Star Wars Squadrons, and No Man's Sky. Put it this way, for simulation gamers it's a godsend compared to a 3 or 4 monitor setup with head tracking.

Right, the type of games matter a lot. I do like first-person RPGs, but those are only a little appealing to me in VR so far. And most of my gaming (4x, strategy, builder) don't benefit much from VR as far as I can tell.

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

#48

Post by tootie »

binarymax wrote: post #7

Technology is not the problem. Flashback to 1995. I'm a 17 year old PFY invited to beta test a VR headset from a local company. My Uncle was an investor and I was technically savvy and the target market. I had a copy of Descent that supported VR, and while it was a bit of a hassle to get setup, I got it working. The experience was incredible. After the first use I said to myself "this is the future". I had permission…

Ha, the first time I tried VR it was a multi-person experience. Back in the early 90s, I played Dactyl Nightmare at some tourist location. All 4 members of my family were in the same "world" and could see each other. It was, like most VR games today, fun for about 10 minutes. There's still some interesting experiences being developed at portable venues (ie, thevoid.com).

But I'd also say that FOV is really, really important. Right now the experience is just like putting a little TV on your face with an IMU. Immersion requires peripheral vision and spatial audio.

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

#49

Post by rm445 »

binarymax wrote: post #7

Technology is not the problem. Flashback to 1995. I'm a 17 year old PFY invited to beta test a VR headset from a local company. My Uncle was an investor and I was technically savvy and the target market. I had a copy of Descent that supported VR, and while it was a bit of a hassle to get setup, I got it working. The experience was incredible. After the first use I said to myself "this is the future". I had permission…

That's a great story. I remember being blown away by Descent - probably the second 3D-type game I played after Doom. The thought of free spaceship movement through caves with 6-axis control was amazing - though IIRC the level design was carefully done to keep mostly 2D-ish with a clear up-down orientation. Must have been mind-blowing in VR in 1995.

All that said, I think people playing alone is a big enough demographic to support a VR breakout, if the killer app comes along.

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

#50

Post by istorical »

medium_burrito wrote: post #34
lo_fye wrote: post #3

It started to take off in October, with the release of the Oculus Quest 2, which is out of stock all over the place. It has nearly doubled Oculus' userbase on Steam in just 2.5 months despite their various other headsets having been out for years.

I have a Quest2 and motion tracking is great, but the resolution/blurriness bothers my eyes a lot, to the point where it gives me a headache. Now it could be with not wearing glasses, but I tried it with contacts and it still bothered me. My wife meanwhile has no issues. Is this a common issue?

It's likely that the resolution/blurriness are not responsible for your headache, but rather the lenses and lens spacing, and your particular IPD. Quest 2 has low-granularity control over IPD settings, so you may just be a bad fit for the device. Check your IPD online using a webcam and credit card and see if its close to one of the three available settings on Quest 2.
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