Hacker News Reader

Comment by Loque | Hacker News Reader

VR is not yet 'here' and is not currently delivering, but it is promising a lot.

The form factor alone has challenges which the public will not be willing to sacrifice for the experience, which could turn out to be mostly a gimmick. Some things people don't think about;

-) looking at your keyboard/input device whilst wearing a VR headset

-) being the same room as other people for prolonged periods of time with a headset

-) sharing experiences with other people close to you

-) what are you going to experience on VR, that needs VR so bad? Who is going to pay/develop and what is this content going to be... can it actually deliver, making good immersive software is incredibly hard.

-) and then cost...

View on HN

"what are you going to experience on VR, that needs VR so bad? Who is going to pay/develop and what is this content going to be... can it actually deliver, making good immersive software is incredibly hard."

The real problem with this question is that it's like asking someone in 1990 what the point of 3d graphics are. Beyond what's been announced, there's no definite timeline for anything - who besides John Carmack would even imagine the genre (FPS) that would popularize 3d graphics cards? Who could predict that Castlevania would suck in 3d but Mario would find an amazing niche?

I trust that most people reading this thread are alive and well, so clearly we don't "need" VR, but I can imagine some incredibly engaging experiences that will make today's best entertainment options look second best at best. Imagine playing a competitive game of ping pong with a friend that lives a few states away. Imagine watching a sporting event from the best seats in the stadium. Imagine being able to golf at a luxurious seaside resort... after work in the middle of winter, in your apartment. Imagine watching movies on a movie screen sized virtual screen. All of these are necessarily limited by being based on existing analogues, some or all of which could be completely off the mark, but I for one believe we'll see some breakthrough experiences rather quickly.

The "unique" experiences of something like having the best seats in the stadium or more immersive experience with a golf simulator would be awesome. But for movies, it takes a commonly social experience and makes it strictly solo. You cannot use a shared VR headset. You may experience the same thing at the same time (or similar since you'd be looking in different directions, most likely), but it wouldn't be common. Would you really want a date night where you sit on your couch and each put on headsets blocking the other out? A family night in, everyone trapped in their own VR headset. What do you do for guests?

Let's not even address cleanliness (honestly, one reason I have no interest in most of the 3D TV tech that came out, even if it offered cheap, passive glasses).

It's useful, and cool, but really only applicable when you're physically alone or wiling to be deliberately isolated from others in your physical proximity.

"For movies, it takes a commonly social experience and makes it strictly solo."

Well, not if Netflix can make a "watch together" mode and you find yourself sitting with 3 college buddies' avatars who could be anywhere in the country. Facebook, for one, will have a strong interest in shoving "social" into everything - they certainly have the social graph, VOIP technology, infrastructure, etc. to make this easy to imagine.

I don't want to feel like there is a brick strapped to my head.

VR won't be a mass market product until the brick becomes less brick-like.

The VR market is likely to be limited to gamers and a few devs for at least the next few years. That's not a tiny market, but it's much smaller than the market for phones and tablets.

It's also unlikely to take off until VR becomes social, with couples and families all playing in the same virtual space on the same hardware.

Costs and hardware requirements make that impossibly expensive for now.

Not impossibly expensive, I've already been talking to my wife about this. Building two machines so we can each have our own Vive headset. But in regards to 'impossibly expensive', I'd also consider buying two PS4s with PSVR headsets for the same purpose. We're talking $1,600 total for the next best thing to a holodeck.

If someone delivers the software and it gets rave reviews as a cooperative experience, I will buy those PS4s or build new computers for it. That's how trends start, but the PS4 option for VR brings the cost and complication down considerably for everyone on day one.

What are you going to experience on VR, that needs VR so bad?

Elite: Dangerous. DiRT Rally. Minecraft. Movies, and interestingly, documentaries. These are all currently available.

Further down the line, VR will replace multi-screen setups. As a developer I'm very excited to code in a VR IDE.

It'll be great for video games. it'll be useful for movies and documentaries if they weren't "flat". And really only useful for solo experience with them. TVs are large enough and cheap enough that with the lights dimmed you get a similar experience to a VR headset, but shared with others in the same room.

I'm not totally sold on the virtual desktop concept, but I'd be willing to try it. But I, personally, benefit greatly from actual tactile feedback with paper and handwriting. A multi-sensory experience (touch, sight, smell, sound) is far better than a 1-2 sense experience (sight w/ maybe sound) for memory retention and recollection.

To that we can add the biggest problem: nausea.

Nausea probably won't be a problem with the young generation, who will eventually grow up with VR, if it succeeds.

We have a DK2 at the office and no-one has experienced any nausea. Anecdotal but still, I think that was a much bigger problem with the DK1.

What percentage of your office is women, and how old is the oldest person to try it? I've heard some suggestion that the anti-nausea stuff is optimized for men. And obviously older people will have more issues.

I recently picked up a first person game for the first time in quite a few years, and I was surprised to discover I got a little motion sickness after a few hours. It was fairly mild, but it's not an experience I'm keen to repeat for the sake of entertainment.

You get inured to it. I used to get sick but I perservered - three teenaged boys, it was something I could do to engage with them. Soon I had zero problems, and never had them again. Like riding a bike?

It's low and we're young. It's interesting though because I spoke to a female acquaintance this weekend who said she tried an Oculus Rift and was nauseous, after which I told her it was probably the old version. I had no idea there's a suggested difference between the genders so now I'm not so sure anymore.

Just to give a counter anecdote: I get terrible simulator sickness from using Oculus, I've tried DK1 and DK2.

It's a huge, unsolved issue that affects a not insignificant portion of people.

What rig? What games?

I got some truly awful nausea that lasted nearly 48 hours! I felt like I broke my brain. But I was running a DK2 on a wayyy underpowered rMBP on early firmware.

I quickly learned: (1) if a game has judder or is otherwise not running smoothly, do not play it; and (2) do not move unnaturally (i.e. no fast strafing or running like in a FPS).

When I followed those two rules, the nausea disappeared and when I felt presence it was mind blowing.

I don't doubt that some people may have unavoidable motion sickness, but I wonder how many reports are due to people like me running early dev kit software on underpowered hardware, and playing games with mechanics not meant for VR. There may be some subset that just can't play without some nausea, but the same is true for riding in cars or on boats.

It certainly wasn't an underpowered rig. It has a Titan X GPU and top of the line Broadwell or Haswell CPU. I tried some of the Oculus demos as well as War Thunder flight sim. DK2 was miles better than DK1, but the nausea was still there.

You're right about FPS strafing and some other unnatural movement, that seems to make things worse for some people.

Additionally, I think the situation might improve if you really take the time to adjust the lenses and the headset to match your head and eyes. This makes the Oculus headset a "personal" device in that you can't really borrow or share one, though.

However, I got terrible nausea that lasted for the rest of the day and rendered me incapable of doing any work (fucked up my eyes so I couldn't focus on text) after just 30 minutes of play. I'll need a pretty good reason to try it again.

what VR dev kits have you tried?

the HTC Vive and Oculus don't come out until next month.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com