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Comment by danielbln | Hacker News Reader

Early adopter here, initial 2012 Oculus Rift Kickstarter backer, I own all the headsets. My excitement has all but died down in regards to the current generation of VR. Mostly, I find the hardware cumbersome and clunky and the games to be too same-y (teleportation galore) or unpolished. The absolute best experience I had in VR was playing Half-Life 2 back in 2013, with terrible resolution and tracking, but it was so immersive I could barely contain myself. Now though, that I'm no longer wowed just by "being there", the act of strapping into VR is so cumbersome, the software is buggy at times, the cable is annoying, the headset is heavy, hot, doesn't work well with glasses etc.

However, I'm still as excited for VR as I was in the beginning in regards to the technology. Give me a lighter headset, 100% wireless and great handtracking and finally some long, immersive games (can be ports, that's fine for me) and I'm ready to shell out money again.

As it stands today though, my VR hype is on hibernation until the next gen rolls around.

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Valve are the ones who have dropped the ball. They had all the cards lined up. Killer IP that would make people buy hardware if used correctly (HL3, Portal 3). Probably the best tech currently available (Vive). The biggest PC gaming storefront (Steam). Their own OS. Each and every one of these components, with the exception of Steam, was neglected. They had the future of PC gaming right there ready to grab... and did essentially nothing with it. It may not be too late but I think Valve needs an organisational restructuring if they want to pick up their pieces. If they don't it's very likely that they loose most of their revenue in the next 10 years, because even Steam needs killer exclusive content, i.e. content that cannot be licensed on another online platform, which soon will only be Valve games.

It's beginning to appear clear that FPS is VR's pipe dream. The locomotion part seems non-trivial to solve and dissonance between the virtual and real world renders VR FPS completely unplayable for a large amount of gamers (it can make you feel incredibly uncomfortable, can also cause motion sickness.)

HL3 and Portal 3 would be incredibly difficult to implement well in the VR space, and I feel this is something that Valve understands much better than many others.

What would excite me about VR is a game like Morrowind. While it is first person, it's not exactly a shooter. The only teleportation is fast travel, but that could even use a World of Warcraft style where instead of teleporting you just ride the animal to get there.

Put me in a foreign world with several varied environments. Let me explore it without artificial restrictions. The combat could be minimized with most potential enemies being non-aggressive by default (a change to Morrowind's mud crabs or cliff racers). For this style of game I would even expect to still have to use a controller both for combat but also for inventory management, etc.

> can also cause motion sickness

This is a real issue, and was my exact experience with VR. I know VR devs are aware, and have addressed it in some ways. But, idk. I was ready to plop down the cash for a Vive, but decided against it after a test run.

You know it goes away right? For all the hate in this thread, I am still in love with my vive. The motion sickness is a problem at first, but your body eventually adapts- took about 2 weeks for me, now I never get motion sick what-so-ever.

IMO these franchises have one big advantage: They are in a science fantasy setting that has already introduced the concept of teleportation. So there is already precedent for teleporting around the map, making locomotion unnecessary.

Teleportation is a garnish, not the main dish. Traversal mechanics are a core part of most action related games.

I don't play an FPS to teleport around. I play to run, jump, dodge, etc.

Don't call it FPS then. Have you played Portal?

Portals main mechanic is movement, portals are created to enable new venues of movement. If portals were simply point at somewhere and click to teleport there the game would hardly be portal anymore and probably not fun at all.

Yes, I have played Portal and think that there is still enough movement involved to be problematic for VR as it's done now.

Sure, you could invent a teleportation-specific genre, but I think it'd be quite the niche.

Have Valve/etc gone after the hardcore F1/racing market? I have various friends who follow F1 closely and generally have money to spend. Surely VR works well for seated-racing games.

- Cheap omnidirectional treadmills

- Haptic touch feedback through gloves

These are the final two pieces, in my opinion. Well those and making the hardware smaller.

Can't the locomotion problem be solved by putting the player character in a wheelchair or some sort of mobility assistive device?

Wheelchair Deathmatch. Sounds fun, I would totally play that in VR.

I visited the Valve offices about two years ago, and almost 2/3rds of the company was working on VR. I think right now they're aware that the current iteration of hardware isn't good enough for the common consumer, and in addition there's no real AAA content out for it. VR really needs it's own Breath of the Wild kinda game to go along with the hardware if they want it to sell. I suspect what we'll see is a new version of the Vive released alongside a major AAA title by Valve at some point, but being Valve they want to ensure that they release it when it's done, not when the timing is right.

VR is at iPhone 3GS. I'm waiting for 4S.

You say that like it's easy. Like they didn't try or are not trying.

The truth is, you don't know what they tried, and failed. You don't know what resources they got at their disposal. Especially considering all the stuff they are doing right now and how hard the competition is.

And worst, given the exceptional track record of Valve, you choose to believe in a theory ignoring it.

Your comment read like you are just disappointed to not have your pony yet and want to blame one of the best pony breeder for your frustration.

I suspect the loose management style of Valve has this effect. Great ideas, no one to drive them home. Something that works great for keeping your employees happy, but works only as long as you have a dominating market position.

There might be another way of looking at this in that perhaps with a distributed management style the costs become more apparent. With a centralised style you can take a "five year plan" style approach and swallow all the upfront costs but where you have a bunch of separate cost centres each with their own P&L it's harder to find one single personality to drive things forward.

It might seem that I'm saying that if they had a more centralised style they might have made more progress but I don't think that's the case since when we look around at other more driven companies we aren't seeing too many breakthroughs either.

There are two fields where I know for a fact VR has made significant inroads in the last few years they being Gaming and Design Visualisation. The latter being where a VR rig is a worthwhile business expense. The former being my PS 4 where there seems to be plenty of content available, but the €600 price-tag is just a little out of my reach...

I'm a well-paid (some would say over-paid) professional and I'm quibbling about the cost of the rig and I just wonder are we at a point where the economics stack up for widespread adoption of the technology? Not just in terms of the gear but the R&D costs for game developers, such as Valve, with a questionable rate of return ..

> Valve needs an organisational restructuring

There's nothing to restructure.

Who says that the future of gaming is VR? For me the future of computing including gaming is AR. VR is just an halfway technology that can't do any of the things that AR can. And I don't think that an halfway tech can ever be the future.

Self driving car are the future of automobile. Self driving is not even halfway to GAI, yet it is the future.

People taking this VR/AR stance don't understand at all what goes into such tech. Like somebody spitting on the explosion engine because "that's only a halfway technology" and refusing to drive anything but flying cars.

AR, or more appropriately Mixed Reality, is rumoured to see the light in 2019, so it's less than 2 years. VR is simply pointless as of now and the sale figures reflect this dire reality. Your comparison with the ICE is completely wrong. A more accurate one would be to go on a ship vomiting everything in your stomach when currently you can go by car across a bridge taking more time and in less than 2 years there will be a ship that doesn't make you vomit.

It makes little sense to say that AR will render VR pointless. They have fundamentally different purposes - AR (as stated in the name) adds your existing reality, while VR replaces it entirely. If you're playing a game, AR would put a monster in your living room, while VR would put you in a completely virtual environment.

Also, what do you mean AR is rumoured to see the light? AR already exists; see Hololens, META, and others. Magic Leap has developed interesting prototypes but has failed to develop any unique practical consumer implementation.

Hololens, Meta and the others are only Dev kits with general consensus for a consumer version in 2019. I would like to see any reliable source for your Magic Leap statement. As far as I know the rumours currently put a Magic Leap dev kit announcement by the end of this year. And there is already a product equivalent that has been successfully demoed to the board on February. And as for your first point you can do VR with an AR device, you can't do the opposite. And the AR part is the most important experience that will permit you to bring your device everywhere. With VR you will be confined to a room without any movement possibilities in an uncontrolled environment.

http://www.kguttag.com/2016/11/20/magic-leap-separating-magi...

Magic Leap is certainly capable of releasing a dev kit, but it will not feature most of the technologies present in their prototypes.

Yes, AR and VR can be combined into a single device, and that will most likely be the way to mainstream commercial success in the future, but at present, current headsets offer an incomparable experience in terms of immersion and pure enjoyment. Have you tried the Vive or Oculus with touch controllers? Being tethered to a gaming PC allows for much higher graphical performance than a mobile device.

I see no reason for such animosity towards VR. Saying that current VR devices are pointless because VR will be later combined with AR devices is like saying the Palm Pilot was pointless because its functionality would be later included with smartphones.

(I would argue that the end-goal of VR is actually quite divergent from AR; the future of VR would be the Matrix, where your mind itself is in a completely simulated environment. In the mean time, we make do with the Vive.)

Similar experience here. I was an early adopter, 2012 rift backer and a major proponent of the technology. I jumped on the VR band wagon hard, and now, am shocked by my own disinterest in the space. Simply put - no game has really kept my interest. Most feel unpolished, and very limited. What you gain in VR immersion, you lose in gameplay. Either the immersion needs to be PERFECT, or the gameplay needs to be much, much better.

As I see it, there are some technical (even physiological?) hurdles, that they need to overcome.

1) "Teleport to move" is horrible, and sucks the feeling of immersion right out of the VR experience. Sadly, true "walking" with horizontal movement without accompanying angular momentum causes nausea in most people - hence teleporting as a solution. This as I understand it is a physiological system that is at odds with the VR world and while not everyone experiences it most do.

2) The resolution. It's hard to feel immersed in the world when it's so blurry. This is especially true for VR. VRs selling point IS immersion which IMO is an all-or-nothing experience. A blurry view detracts from feeling immersed in the world.

> Sadly, true "walking" with horizontal movement without accompanying angular momentum causes nausea in most people - hence teleporting as a solution. This as I understand it is a physiological system that is at odds with the VR world and while not everyone experiences it most do.

While true, it is also true that of these most people who will (at first!) experience simulator sickness, the vast majority can adapt fairly quickly and "get their VR legs".

Sadly this is never mentioned in articles.

Is this anecdotal or does research saying this exist? I know this is conventional wisdom but I've wondered about how true it actually is after seeing a few counterexamples.

As far as I know it is literally the same thing as sea-sickness.

You get over it eventually.

This is a common misconception.

No, it is NOT the same thing as sea-sickness. I do not get sea sick, never have. I also don't get car sick if I'm a passenger reading a book or something. Never have. But turning, specifically TURNING, in VR, induces nausea.

When Oculus was first released (dev) games allowed for "free walking" FPS games which invoke a specific kind of nausea that is different from roller coaster style movement. It's the reason why almost all games are teleportation based now... Because this problem as I understand it affects the majority of people, even those who don't experience the other VR nausea which IS similar to sea sickness. This turning / angular momentum nausea does not attenuate with time. It's a huge problem with VR, and one which there is no solution for currently other than the poor "teleportion" movement mechanism.

Not entirely sure about how trustworthy it was but I think I've seen some kind of a study that claimed it affects something like 30% of people. Doesn't really matter if it's majority or just 30% though, still too much to ignore and not all games are able to offer multiple locomotion options.

Also depends on where you draw the line. I've never gotten sick from VR personally but the movement can still sometimes feel weird to me.

Teleport to move" is horrible, and sucks the feeling of immersion right out of the VR experience

But consider the old 8-bit game Sentinel. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sentinel_(video_game)

Brilliant game, but that was part of the mechanics of the game. Sentinel was a very singular game. I don't think I've ever heard of anything quite like it ...

I have a Vive, and have surprised myself with how little I play it.

The game Fantastic Contraption was illuminating for me. I had played many tens of hours of the original. In VR I was amazed at how it looked and felt. Solving the first couple challenges was a lot of fun - just watching the machines run was great.

I started to realize a flaw though. A machine I could build in seconds by stretching my fingers a few inches across a keyboard and mouse took ten or twenty times as long in VR, and involved squatting, walking, grabbing, holding, etc.

There's a Perry Bible Fellowship comic of a child in a VR suit, clutching his simulated wounds while saying "Cool!" That comic is similar to my experience. Do we really want to experience things like this? (Tedium or pain)

I think the devs of Fantastic Contraption acknowledged this partially, and several months after releasing the game they added the ability to rescale and move the world, so you could play even while sitting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AQg2I7VIh8

> There's a Perry Bible Fellowship comic of a child in a VR suit, clutching his simulated wounds while saying "Cool!"

You made me find this website (thanks for the implicit recommendation) and go through every single comic (they're not that many), and there is no such comic on this site as of now.

http://pbfcomics.com/comics/game-system/

Thanks! Also, I'm confused. Why did this one not show up when I read the entire comic back-to-back (by starting at the most recent one and going back)?

Comic for comic Perry Bible Fellowship is my favorite.

I also tried to find the comic to link to it, but I couldn't do it. I have a strong memory that it was that comic though, and no better guesses.

Same for me, though a huge factor in my "re-entry" threshold is resolution.

I really do enjoy VR when I get around to playing it, but all I have is presence, but in a world that not particularly beautiful.

My favorite VR title is Elite: Dangerous, but while it's absolutely beautiful outside of VR, in VR it's rather....blurry. When in-VR had the detail of out-of-VR, the presence may be more meaningful. (But that'll be a while).

> in VR it's rather....blurry

I wonder where the issue lies; is 1080×1200 per eye just not high enough (considering the wide FOV)? Or is it the optics? I used to play E:D on somewhat of a potato machine, and it was pretty sharp on a standard monitor, with relatively low resolution.

It's a lot closer to your face. Your conical vision is seeing like an order of magnitude fewer pixels as when it's looking at the same resolution screen but 18" away.

Also, if you're a serious gamer, that screen 18" away is likely to have a lot more pixels than 1080x1200.

Yes, 1080x1200 per eye is nowhere close to high enough. I mean, sit back, look in the direction of your monitor, and estimate how large(small) part of your total view area is taken by it (for me it seems less than 1/9 for a quite large screen and 1/25 for a laptop). You'd need 1080x1200 for that central area alone.

is 1080×1200 per eye just not high enough (considering the wide FOV)?

But that's more pixels than your retina has photoreceptors when you consider full colour (6M but it takes several of them working together to form a "pixel" equivalent)

The difference is that your eyes have much higher "resolution" in the centre of your view compared to the peripheral vision. But your eyes move all the time, so unless you can move the screen as fast as your eyes moves, a VR headset needs to have that highest resolution across your entire field of view.

As one of the issues with VR has been (still is to an extent) the "screen door effect" which means being able to see the gaps between the individual pixels of the displays I think it's safe to say it's the low resolution.

E:D Has always had VR issues. I think one of the tricks I've used is to downsample the game itself while upsampling the final render in SteamVR. I don't remember if it was like that or the opposite.

My favorite games have been Climbey, Lone Echo and Vivecraft.

I can't speak from ever using a proper current headset like Vive or Oculus, but I have done some (very short-term) experimenting with Google Cardboard sets and Oculus/Vive emulation software that pipes the display over the local network to the phone-headset.

With some of that porting/emulation software I was able to play some SteamVR and other games. As a control I just used an Xbox 360 USB controller and the results surprised me.

Now working with a G Cardboard set isn't fun for very long, but the way that a few games translated was surprisingly good, as long as you're happy to not have the full experience. I found the headset was a lot of fun as a change of perspective.

The games I recall in particular being pretty good were GTA V and Skyrim (though I think Skyrim had a little bit of a perspective offset issue, but I didn't really tweak it). For native VR apps I tried ADR1FT (http://store.steampowered.com/app/300060/ADR1FT/) which was pretty good as well.

I imagine trying this with a proper headset work work far better and be more comfortable than my experience, but like I said I haven't worked with one.

A conclusion I made though was that I really didn't mind using the controller as I would on a console.

I wonder what we'll see when the newer Microsoft sponsored vR headsets start to hit the shelves. I think Acer will be one of the first ones.

They're not as advanced as a Oculus/Vive, but they can function without needing to setup an entire room.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/d/hp-windows-mixed-rea...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/d/acer-windows-mixed-r...

Those are not VR headset, they are AR headset with a front camera as the "mixed reality" in the product name implies. MS would never invest in VR given all the heavy investments in AR. And I think that it is indeed the correct choice.

As someone who owns both of these devices you are incorrect. They are fundamentally VR goggles with cameras in the goggles allowing them to be self tracking. Microsoft's MR branding is confusing but it is a mistake to think of these goggles as AR.

I guess that you are not using them correctly then: "Where mixed reality wants to make a point of differentiation is in offering a system of front-mounted cameras that can give you either real world objects in your virtual world, or virtual objects in the real world."

http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/141215-windows-mixed-reality...

There is at present no way to get imagery or spatial data about the room from the low cost MR headsets. The HoloLens can do it but not the low cost headsets. The video in the article you linked does support these points, as all it discusses making available about the room in VR is a "subtle boundary grid" which is not room scan or visual photo of the room, it's the boundary region traced out manually by moving the headset when initially turning on the headset in a new physical room.

I do understand that's a surprising answer and not the answer you want or think should be correct, but these are best thought of as VR headsets with MR branding.

The real thing holding back the Vive though is not any of that. It's the small room. Every game has to operate from a very tiny room, and most game creators have not been able to do that effectively.

If we can figure out how to make game worlds bigger, perhaps even with AR, then we will probably have a lot more interesting things to do.

The next generation of SteamVR Tracking 2.0 (it seems that 'Lighthouse' is no longer the preferred name) is bringing the long-promised support for tracking setups using more than two base stations, making large-area tracking a reality. (The first headset we see using it may be an LG HMD, around the end of this year.) https://uploadvr.com/steamvr-tracking-2/ https://steamcommunity.com/games/steamvrtracking/announcemen... The problem is that it seems most users aren't able (and willing) to find even enough free space for even the maximum tracked volume of the current Lighthouse system for their VR setups. (And the new base stations aren't compatible with the existing HTC Vives ...) So large-area VR seems set to arrive soon, but to only a minority of even PC VR setups for the immediately foreseeable.

I wonder if you could set up a large VR room in someone's yard. My yard is much bigger than any room in my house, and I have friends who have more than an acre to spare. That could really open up a lot of possibilities in terms of game design.

Granted, people who live in cities won't have that option, so the market is still somewhat limited.

Unfortunately Lighthouse doesn't work at outdoor daytime light levels, it seems. There are also other practical considerations like safety and so on. That said, an outdoor setup would presumably work at night or twilight, and could indeed be great under the right circumstances. There would be another problem with using outdoor space to create large play areas, though: finding very stable mounting points for all the sensors, especially ones that would have to be directly overhead of the play area rather than just off to one side or corner.

You can't use VR headsets outdoors. The lenses focus light onto the headset's display panels, so sunlight is likely to cause damage.

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