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Comment by dcw303 | Hacker News Reader

Since I sense this is the perfect time to offer a half-baked eulogy, let me offer my half-baked theory:

I think it was McLuhan who said that each new medium begins by imitating the old. e.g - The first television programs were basically radio broadcasts with an image of a talking head. It took a while for tv to break out and capitalize on the features of the new medium.

VR was always going to be measured by gaming. But its well-documented problem was that a very large subsection of games (1st person) have a considerable barf factor for a considerable section of the customer base.

So VR may have had great future potential for new avenues in gaming, but it was hamstrung by its weakenesses for existing games.

People got too caught up with possibilites to objectively look at how sucky it was right now.

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It would be like if the first TV programs were barely audible but they had images.

VR thus far has been a bit of a step back. Devs have for a long time been under the impression that tech > gameplay (which is dumb when you think about it), and now a lot of devs are under the impression that doing something in VR excuses games not getting the basics right. The fun part is the studios who are used throwing 100 artists at a job pumping out the highest detail models, but that doesn't work so well, so they're either gonna go back to the basics or keep floundering.

The best games I've played in VR have been ports, and they're just as enjoyable without VR and you aren't hot and sweaty after 5 minutes.

Really have to complain about 'Out of Ammo' on that one. It had a really great gimmick. It's a tower defense where you can become your towers + units and shoot the enemy with superhero speed and accuracy. That part was really fun.

It was also one of the worst tower defense games I've ever played. Enemies coming from all sides, rngs that made certain levels unbeatable if you got unlucky with the tower drops, and wide open areas that meant you couldn't really create bottlenecks.

For all the potential it had, they really needed someone better at game design.

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My biggest issue though is that we haven't seen any long form VR games. Everything decent is more or less like an arcade. One room where you do everything, and you run out of unique stuff to do pretty quickly.

Definitely. Waiting for those experiences that you can _only_ create in VR, not something that tries to replicate the previous things just in VR.

This will take some time, but once we get there, I will feel we will find some exciting things .. working on one such experience myself :)

VR will have its breakthrough as soon as it makes porn available in a way that makes you feel like being "there" or involved. Simple as that. Technology is driven by war and porn.

I've been trying to keep up with that - I'm not really a big consumer in that area, but I agree with you that it will drive the market for VR.

So far, I've found that there is a lot of content being created and it seems like a lot of newer stuff is being shot in a way that is either natively VR or can be converted (I assume using a fisheye lens of some kind). Some of the big players in the industry have obviously put some effort behind it, but I'm not really sure what the adoption rate has actually been like.

I wonder if PornHub has released any metrics on viewership of their VR category. It seems like a bad idea to check at work, but I'll go check their blog tonight if I think about it.

Porn is 90% about visual input - hence acceptance hinges on the graphical resolution which is currently lacking.

Today, porn is 90% visual input. There will soon be devices capable of tactile input (for lack of a better term), but I don't think that will be the real breakover point for VR because there won't be a non-porn/non-sexual use them.

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