Comment by kyledrake | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kyledrake | Hacker News Reader

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> I've got a GearVR with Galaxy S6 and the display is adequate. Not one of the 6 or so people I've let try it have wanted to vomit.

Try using it for an hour or more. Keep a toilet handy.

> No one is stopping you from running with your own WebVR platform, my guess is that it's not an easy thing to make money off of (which is what Google does).

It's fun to pretend this is a passive thing that doesn't hurt the rest of the industry, but they've cannibalized talented people for this project that were previously working on WebVR. So I'm sorry if I'm not all that jazzed about torturing developers for the next 10 years with several shitty proprietary SDKs for doing VR development that won't work with eachother, when we could have a standard we can all come together and agree on and that runs on every device and platform with the same code. Have we seriously learned nothing from mobile phone competing SDKs and proprietary app stores nightmare?

> Try using it for an hour or more. Keep a toilet handy.

I don't think that's quite fair. Some people might get nausea from using VR while others won't. Just like carsickness doesn't affect everyone, "VRsickness" doesn't either.

It's not about an individual's tolerance, it's because the phones are not capable of having a refresh rate that's fast enough for your brain's ability to process it. That's why all the serious VR headsets right now require a physical cable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBtXMtUNpdE

It's going to be a very long time before mobile phones are capable of refresh rates sufficient to prevent this issue. The fastest consumer graphics cards are barely capable of keeping up with this rate as-is. Aside from being yet-another proprietary SDK for VR development, Google VR is DoA regardless because it depends on a hardware platform that simply won't work well for what it's trying to do.

Please let's focus on WebVR. Please?

>refresh rate that's fast enough for your brain's ability to process it

Lol can we keep junk science out of threads like these. Nobody knows enough about the tech yet to say things like this, especially with such vehemence. Let's start with the fact that the visual system definitely doesn't have some sort of unitary processing rate. It's incredibly context dependent, just like VR.

From personal experience I have never had VR sickness, and I use my Note 4 Gear VR every week on flights to watch multiple ~2hr movies and play timepass games with no ill effects. On the contrary it's pretty fun once you get off HN and actually try it...

I think what we've learned from the past several years in game development is "Let Unity paper over the SDK differences, and if you need to rip apart the engine, hire a subcontracting game dev studio to port your stuff to other architectures."

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