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Comment by legohead | Hacker News Reader

It's not going to take off until someone solves the movement issue. The only games VR is currently suitable for are if you are stationary somehow -- pilot, tank gunner, etc. Which limits it pretty severely.

Something like the Ghostbusters Experience[1] is what people want in their own homes.

Also, maybe it's because I've been gaming my whole life, but the resolution in VR is still not good enough to "blow" me away, like I keep reading about. How people are so amazed at current gen VR confuses me.

[1] https://ghostbusters.madametussauds.com/

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The ghostbusters experience was done by The Void[1], who in my opinion are on the forefront of where VR could really take off. People are thinking narrowly about VR in terms of personal use, but there's so many obstacles there for mass consumer adoption that it's a way off(and honestly I think mixed reality will be the real killer app, VR has other limitations for personal/consumer use at home).

Instead I could see a lot of VR arcades popping up once the technology is more polished. You go to a large warehouse space, don a VR suit of sorts and with your group of friends can battle pirates/aliens/whatever in a large enough environment that it doesn't matter that it's still physically confined. There's obviously an appetite for this sort of thing,(see the explosion of "escape rooms" or higher end laser tag/paintball places).

https://thevoid.com/

Movement with the Vive and room scale works (walk around small area and teleport to new small areas). I think it solves the problem and feels pretty intuitive.

To add to this point - I personally only buy/play Room-Scale games for this reason. And with HTC expected to sell additional LightBox sensors, it's quite possible I'll be able to expand my play space from the current HTC Vive max of roughly 12x13 to pretty much fill my entire basement. Of course you are limited by the cabling right now but HTC has a wireless module already announced for release during the first half of this year.

Exciting times for VR after decades of false starts.

> with HTC expected to sell additional LightBox sensors

You can buy additional base stations right now[1], mostly for replacement purposes, but the biggest limitation to using more than 2 has been in the software simply not supporting them.

[1] https://www.vive.com/us/accessory/

I thought adding more sensors (laser projectors?) to a Lighthouse system decreases the refresh. It halves for each one?

It does since they wait for each other to finish before doing a sweep with the laser.

I've wondered if scaled movement was possible or if it would really mess with our brains. For example, 1m realspace = 3m in VR. Would your body adjust to smaller/slower movements, or would there be a disorientation?

Not scaled movement, but there was research done in the 90s about having the computer subtly "distort" (I can't remember how it was really done) things being displayed to in effect make you walk in a curve to keep you away from walls (I think it was similar to how you can attempt to walk a straight line in a forest - and without a compass, actually find yourself walking in an orthogonal direction compared to where you started - simply due to ground level differences, motion cues, etc). I'm not sure how well it worked, but it was a workable system.

There's also the more expensive idea of an "infinite 2D treadmill" - which was first implemented by a guy named Rudy Darken; iirc, he did it for the "dismounted soldier" VR/AR training project for DARPA:

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1246853

'redirected walking'. This has been used in practice by some of the big VR applications and in research since them. As I understand it, the problem is that it doesn't solve the 'small living room' effect because you can only distort by a few degrees and this produces a circle of like 15 meters - so works in a sort of warehouse setting but not in normal buildings.

That works for some people but not all - but for those it does work for, it works very well.

I've added exactly that - scaled movement - as an option into my VR game, Left-Hand Path, and so far most of my users are very positive about it. I love it personally - it feels very much like it doubles my available play area.

One of my playtesters hated it and found it made him nauseous, though, so like many VR locomotion options it's a YMMV situation.

I'd love to read/hear more about your experiences, as a fellow gamedev and looking at VR but not ready to take that plunge yet (couple projects first).

I Tweet a fair bit currently, and I've written about my VR work a fair bit over at strangecompany.org over the years.

I'm actually about to start doing more writing or videos on the topic of VR development and my experiences in it, so keep an eye on my Twitter, blog or YouTube if you like - they'll be up there starting in the next few weeks.

Any movement of the player in VR that is not 1:1 tends to cause motion sickness.

This will be solved by untethering the experience and adding Inside-Out tracking. Then, you could go to a local park and go on a Skyrim adventure with redirected walking [1], for example. A 100yd football field could potentially simulate 2km of movement, if I remember correctly.

[1] http://www.roadtovr.com/new-unlimited-corridor-video-shows-m...

Oh wow this is amazing! I wonder if it would also work if there was an outer-rim wall to create the illusion of being surrounded

Yeah, I think the current iteration of VR will be comparable to how the Ninentdo Wii and Kinect were received--initial enthusiasm giving way to the realization that movement is physically taxing and requires a bunch of dedicated space.

Right now, I also think the costs are still too prohibitive for most people whose Kinect sensor or Wii-motes have been long idle.

I think Microsoft's strategy of marketing VR/AR as a productivity tool is interesting.

The movement problem is already pretty much solved. Teleportation works amazingly well in games where that's not inconsistent with the in-game universe, and when fluid motion is necessary games like Onward have managed to make it work quite well. Keep in mind that Onward is a competitive military sim, so there's not a lot of room in the game for players to be fiddling with locomotion. The fact that the game has been such a success is pretty strong evidence that locomotion is not the contentious issue in VR that it was a year ago.

Recroom's Paintball is is one of the most popular and constantly active multipler VR games and that is all about movement.

http://vrlfg.net/ also shows Onward as being very popular - also very movement based.

(one thing worth noting in that page is how low current play counts are relative to other games. Currently there's not enough people in VR to support more than a handful of multiplayer games)

Roomscale VR is a complete DOA gimmick in the home. The Wii and the Kinect proved that physical UI's are not fun and don't have durable appeal.

Wii and Kinect sucked because they tried translating predefined motions to button-presses, with no added benefit over pressing that button on a controller. And they weren't particularly good at it. You don't see how VR is different, have you even tried the Vive?

For the record I was hugely bearish on the Wii, Kinect, 3D tv and movies, and rightly so. But there is no question in my mind that VR will be huge.

I've been thinking about this and it's bad for active entertainment, but maybe it would be fine for futuristic productivity uses where you have factory workers remotely controlling heavy machinery that still can't be fully automated through a VR interface.

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