Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonplackett | Hacker News Reader

This is it people! VR for the mainstream. As a developer this makes me excited. Been waiting for this since I got the first Rift and was half amazed and half totally deflated. $399 should finally mean a wider audience.

View on HN

I think you could be on to something- I kinda agree this could be the "iPad" of VR. The Oculus Go is already pretty awesome, but it is hampered by a still somewhat limited library and the lack of 6DOF is definitely frustrating- Since this new headset will probably have the full Rift AND Go game catalog at launch, as well as a normie-friendly setup (without base stations or PC) this device could see some mainstream adoption and could be a milestone in VR.

What I think will be an iPhone moment for VR is literally when we can drop our phones in a VR goggle that is socially acceptable.

I mean we convinced people that listening to music by sticking a speaker in their ear canals is healthy and safe. Why can't we do this for our eyes? The "Samsung Galaxy" moment will be when they start shipping disposable contact lenses with AR functionalities....but this requires a cross industry expertise and highly proprietary nanotech which Pentagon needs to fully test out before approving it for consumer usage, as with many of our major technological innovations owing to the military-defense complex.

You're assuming that people will make zero compromises to use VR- I think this is wrong, given the utility of a VR system. I could have just as easily have said when the original iPhone came out "It will look too nerdy to be staring at a smartphone- Regular people won't adopt smartphones until they can build them into a contact lens."

It's still weird to carry around an iPad, my point being the bar will be much higher for VR if it wants to become mainstream and while it will win over gamers or other dedicated users, becoming a widespread VR everyday consumer electronic is a much further away

I don't think VR is ever going to reach that point, just because our eyes are too important. Very few people would be comfortable putting a VR headset on while commuting on a subway or bus - because you lose all awareness of your surroundings. With sound you are losing one sense, with VR you are losing two.

AR is the only one with a hope of becoming socially acceptable in public, but it will have its own hurdles (Namely the fact that you will always be pointing a camera at someone just by looking around.)

Buses and trains absolutely, missing your stop because you're too engaged in something is a real possibility.

That same ability to transport you to some other world was an absolute godsend on a recent 12+ hour flight from SFO to Beijing. My Oculus Go has been added to my list of long haul flight must haves in addition to my QC IIs.

FWIW you cant see the haters staring when you've got it on LOL.

dayum, i think I want one now. the ability to use it on a flight...full privacy, nobody can see what you are watching....

Phone-based VR has major issues:

- difficult to adjust the inter-pupillary distance

- display not optimized for VR (phones don’t need OLED, low persistence, or high refresh rates)

- you can’t prop up your headset and fire off a quick text

Sadly the Quest is not powerful enough to run regular Rift titles without heavy optimizations. They even mentioned that for "Superhot" it took multiple weeks for porting it to the Quest.

This isn't necessarily awful. Having a known baseline hardware (even if not quite state of the art) can really help optimization efforts. I'm thinking of the gaming consoles, which are all behind a modern PC in terms of performance, but have really quite good graphics and performance as it's so tuned.

A big part of that is the different architecture of consoles though - the graphics and CPU are highly integrated and share RAM so you don't have to do everything over PCI.

This is almost certainly based on an Android phone so I expect it to have the same performance limitations as those.

You're assuming we need photo realistic games to make VR worthwhile. This isn't true of games in general so why would it be true of VR?

Look at consoles like the Wii/Switch/Gameboy and how well they did. Gameplay is what makes a great game and VR gives you a whole new set of gameplay tools.

The first iPhone and iPad had very different types of games to mainstream consoles but those games were tailored to that type of experience - Angry Birds would have been a pretty dull console game but the touch input made it fun. Pokemon go couldn't even have worked as a console game.

VR is about a new way to experience and interact with a game (it's also awesome how they have standardised the touch controller so that can be properly explored).

Now it's up to developers to experiment and make games people love with this new set of tools.

No I'm not...

Remember how crap the original iPad was (looking back on it). It had awful resolution and was super chunky, but it was enough to get consumers buying and developers making stuff. It set everything in motion by getting content on there, making the next version of the iPad even better. Made more investment worthwhile both in hardware and software and consumer $$$.

I feel like this could be the thing that gets that back and forth ball rolling.

Multiple weeks is a very short timeframe to port something to a new platform.

I think you are right. This price point is huge. I’m amazed they’ve already done it.

Kudos oculus.

It’s a real bummer Palmer has shit politics or I might have been a customer.

Palmer left Facebook/Oculus last March.

If you live your life by that principle then you can't leave your house. Heck, there's probably an asshole in the management of the company that built your house.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com