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Comment by the_rosentotter | Hacker News Reader

I am sceptical about this. People like to sit down for their entertainment, that is unlikely to change. Turning, swerving, swiveling, sure, but I bet most would quickly get fed up with having to get on their feet and move around in order to play their games.

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So far, you're wrong. I have a Vive and four kids. The Vive sees at least two hours of play time a day, with kids often sneaking time at weird hours. They were even getting up before 6 am, dressing and doing chores in order to play before school until my wife halted the practice.

When friends come over, it's the most offered activity; it's a very compelling experience. Not a ton of long form content yet, but seriously, it's compelling.

Does it fit a child properly? I have been planning on getting one for the kids, but I read several complaints that it takes some work to to get a good fit on an adult, let alone a child, plus the fact that it seems very front-heavy.

I don't doubt that it will get a lot of play from the novelty factor alone, but I remain sceptical that it will make sedentary gamers change their habits in the long term.

It does fit my kids. The experience gets less sharp if your interpupillary distance is too far out of spec, but down to about 7, kids function with it fine. Even little kids immediately 'get it' when they are using it; it is the least mediated computer experience I've seen.

You can put on a headset with a 75 year old man and hold out the controllers to him, he will reach out and take them.

Inre: weight, the kids don't like to play more than 30 minutes at a time or so, but that's partly because they want to talk about what they're seeing with someone there.

Probably the most frustrating part right now is that you want to engage with other people, ("oh wow!!" "can you believe that just happened?") and it can be hard to do so when you're isolated visually and auditorily. I think it's got a ton of potential as a party game technology though, with a little bit of work at the integration back and forth with friends sitting on the couch.

Inre: sedentary gamers, probably not, but it does encourage movement. In the first few minutes I tried out hover junkers I was literally crouching on the floor, popping up out to shoot at an opponent and then back down as quickly as I could. One of my daughters at her first try was down on the ground crawling around to look at something in under a minute or so.

So, it's at least a lot more movement than we currently have. :)

I remember people having nearly-identical debates about the motion controlled "party games" of the Wii.

My kids still like to play those with their friends as well! But they've mostly moved on to the vive.

I'm gonna have to back vessenes on this. It's really a very compelling experience. I'm sure there will be many games/experiences that you play seated, we do still sit in cars/planes/giant robots in real life after all.

However I very much doubt that such experiences will be the overwhelming majority. Dodging bullets and moving around to see things from different perspectives is WAY too fun.

Sitting down is great for passive entertainment, of which Vive has a lot of. But also, VR is for immersive interaction... and for that, standing up with tracked controllers is not only compelling, it's essential.

I thought that about the Wii, but me and my lads still stand to play that. The games are a bit crap, so we only play for an hour or so, but standing to play isn't an issue for us (much to my surprise)

The Wii may actually be a case in point, since it never really got that much consumer uptake, and no other platform has picked up the mantle with physically active games.

As with the Vive, it seemed like the future at the time, the concept games were a lot of fun, and it scared competing platforms to rush out imitating products (Xbox Kinect, PS Move). But neither have ultimately had much adoption.

The Wii was Nintendo's most successful console, selling over 100 million units.

Like you said, Microsoft and Sony both introduced motion controllers for their consoles. The Kinect was the fastest selling consumer electronics device.

Source: http://nintendoenthusiast.com/article/the-false-success-of-t...

The kinect was crap. It was almost good, but it just wasn't there, it would miss things, get confused, it wouldn't pick up one of my lads (he was too small?) and the games were really boring.

I feel like the happiest Kinect customers were research groups and some artists, because it was the first really cheap depth camera system you could buy readymade.

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