Valve’s Gabe Newell: VR could “turn out to be a complete failure”

This is what I'm waiting for. Easy bar to set for any new gaming tech.

I thought maybe some existing games like War Thunder would be best for taking advantage of VR: a plane simulation where being able to easily look around you would be exhilarating and useful. Here's one guy's experience with a Vive:

https://forum.warthunder.com/index.php?/topic/336758-a-user-...

So, beautiful but flawed. I've played and burned out on War Thunder already, so it's not a selling point, but I was hoping there would be more by now. Doesn't seem like there is, and it sounds like the resolution and refined experience isn't quite there yet.

You don't play Onward? Everyone should play Onward.

I don't get sick from movement because the ground textures are plain. Running in place while moving is also wonderful for acclimation to artificial movement.

If Onward was the only VR game in existence, I would pay roughly half of the Vive's sticker price for just that. I am very excited for later iterations of that game, as well as higher budget knockoffs that may come in the future. But I could play the current version for years if necessary.

With you on most of your points though. I wish the built in camera wasn't attached to the virtual controller - it makes it hard to use and thus very antisocial.

I considered getting a VR headset just to stay current with technology but decided not to largely for this reason. With a wife and kid it's hard enough to occasionally play games but at least if I do I can still have a casual conversation while I play.

> Rift+Touch tracking is bad and more or less completely broken for many users

Interesting. Admittedly I've only had the opportunity to try the Rift/Vive for around an hour or so total, but I've never really experienced either of these issues, at least in the games I tried (Fantastic Contraption and The Unspoken). The tracking was flawless (except during the one or two times I got outside the range of cameras/lighthouses, but that only happened because the demos were using a 2-sensor configuration, so my body could block the line-of-sight if I turned the wrong way), and image quality was good enough to not be noticeable. Did you only start noticing these problems after using the headsets for a long time, or was it an issue for you right out of the gate?

> The locomotion problem is not being solved.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the big issue with that that it's easy to get motion sick if you move around at all in VR? Don't most games solve the problem by letting you teleport instead? How do you feel about the titles which don't require you to move around at all in-game?

> It's very anti-social.

This has been true in my experience, but only to the extent that any other type of video game is. Are there no good local multiplayer experiences in VR yet?

Personally I'm still thinking of getting myself a Vive or Rift, but probably not for a year or so. My plan is to wait and see what the second-generation devices look like.

Two incredible things to look at with respect to the promise of VR:

1. Multiplayer Climbey - multiple people in VR jumping and trying to grab each others hands, not fall off the building, etc. hilarious and very social. Should also mention, that's a user created building.

https://youtu.be/extNh3Z-ikk?t=294

2. Google Earth VR - this video is from the Giant Bomb crew who are typically a little cynical and have been fairly underwhelmed with VR in general for games. But they all LOVED this: "...it might not work for the folks at home, but this shit is profound and crazy."

https://youtu.be/X_zEHzZern8?t=253

VR right now is the worst it's every going to be, a year from now it'll be better and cheaper and in 5 to 10 unrecognizably better.

As you point out, it can be tough to clear out entire rooms for room-scale, so recognition of real world obstacles seems paramount to proper enjoyment (regardless of how much you think that is immersion breaking).

Socially sharing the same spaces together with friends/family I think is more important than a lot of people at first realize. It's especially important for business applications and things that aren't games, but even in games, cooperative sharing of spaces may be the defining difference between good games and great games.

Even projects like "Spectator Mode" allowing cameras to share in the spaces seems like important baby steps to breaking VR/AR/MR out of its shell and more to something that enriches the spaces around us rather than locks us in and closes us out.

I for one think that's the direction all of this needs to go in order to be more than just a toy, more than just the flavor of the month ViewMaster for adults with big enough budgets.

The enormous social benefit is remote. You can have a social interaction with any of the BILLIONS of people throughout the world that are connected via the internet. You can connect with friends and relatives that live thousands of miles away.

I'm not going to be in VR 24 hours a day, but if I can hang out with a friend twice a week that lives in England, how is that anything but "social"?

Have you tried VR before? I've played paintball and gone on quests with people all over the world with my Vive. VR is the complete opposite of anti-social.

Not only that, we had "VR" (with shutter goggles) 20 years ago that you could have said exactly the same thing about, and exactly the same thing happened. The hype train failed to stop at reality station, jumped the tracks, rolled down an embankment, and burst into flames. VR lived on in niche applications. Just like it's going to this time.

It doesn't need to be that fancy. Current resolution with perfect positional tracking on a mobile device with 2hr battery life, finger tracking, and photogrammetric passthrough could tell 90% of the "compelling story" your 8k device is for. And you could definitely make experiences in it worth a $400 price point.

We could be as little as 2-3 years from a device like that? At at a premium price point at least.

Remember that people had no problem staring at 320x240 screens, as long as you didn't make them jump around in a pukey way.

Headlines are always "clickbaity" whether they're online or in a dead tree newspaper. They exist to grab your attention and make you read. If I were writing a headline based on this topic, I'd choose something along the same lines. It's not nuanced but it's not misleading either.

Here's the quote for people who read comments first:

"We're optimistic. We think VR is going great. It's going in a way that's consistent with our expectations," says Newell. That said, "we're also pretty comfortable with the idea that it will turn out to be a complete failure.

"Some people have got attention by going out and saying there'll be millions of [VR unit sales] and we're like, wow, I don't think so," Newell continued.

But I agree with other posters about low resolution being an issue.

Also: the Facebook factor. Oculus has been a couple orders of magnitude less interesting since it was acquired by Facebook. I don't give a crap about avatars and VR chat, and I don't think anyone I know does, either.

This would be pretty cool, and you'd probably be able to lower the videocard requirements as well.

the headset would need to capture your expressions somehow and translate into your avatar doing the same. if not, you'll get Second Life level crap.

it will take a while.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d59O6cfaM0

Ki-Adi-Mundi working from home here.

ADDED: It's also not especially newsworthy that the CEO of a company developing VR says VR is doing great. It is far more newsworthy for him to acknowledge that VR might not succeed.

I'm not sure 3D work done while sittings really a particularly niche application, unless you interpret "work" narrowly (in which case, I just think it's wrong.)

And, in any case, advanced AR is many years behind VR and mostly builds on top of it (it requires solving a super of the problems required for successful VR) so VR could be quite successful even if that was true in the long term.

It's just that they see it as an ongoing experiment so they're okay with this iteration of it failing probably because they haven't bet the farm on it.

- It's too bulky or uncomfortable - It's too expensive - There isn't enough good content - There aren't any killer apps - Resolution is too low (and relative optics, screen quality and FOV issues) - Its not wireless

All of these problems are actively being worked on. I'd argue that there is core tech missing from the current round of VR headsets that will come later and enable exciting applications.

My future concerns with the VR market are consumer perception, which might cause people to reject VR or AR even if a killer device with a killer app comes to market, and the larger existential issue of people will never want to interact with software in 3D space, and something about 2D (or text, or speech\audio) is inherently more convenient or easier to grasp. The former issue can be solved by good marketing, word of mouth, but the later can't.

On HN the most commonly mentioned "killer app" for VR is infinite 2D screens, which is one of the most boring and unimaginative thing you can do with VR. AR "killer apps" tend to be equally boring, floating notifications and maps. Occasionally people mention telepresence, but its largely still straightforward applications like live event streaming or teleconferencing.

A high quality AR\VR device with the proper infrastructure could essentially give people limited super powers, think time travel, teleportation, conjuring\illusion, being in multiply places at the same time, reality remix, etc.

The only caveat is that the implementation doesn't give me any motion sickness.

Locomotion methods are also a big problem, but Eve is a cockpit game which usually doesn't trigger people.

It may turn out to be a novelty, but it may be an important one.

I do agree that AR is a huge gimmick that probably won't be solved until VR is firmly established

I dunno, I think that consumer sit-and-consume is more viable than most "expensive simulator" applications: VR isn't useful for things where either more-than-audiovisual interaction is important, and it's arguably lower quality than a high-rise little physical mock-up with a flat 2D display for most vehicle, etc., simulators.

Now, if we were talking AR, I'd agree that the military and other expensive simulator market is where AR's big initial market is, because AR can layer on top of and enhance the best-available conventional training systems.

People do know what to do with an iPad.

I think the iPad's current problem is that the trend towards using larger phones made them less useful as a device between a phone and a laptop.

The iPad can only be claimed as a failure compared to investors' expectations, or compared to the iPhone. In the most recent quarter (Q1 2017), Apple sold 13.1 MILLION of them. Over 6 billion dollars of product sold in one quarter sounds pretty great to me.