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Comment by frisco | Hacker News Reader

I am so over goal-less MMOs with simplistic pastel graphics. We've done this so many times before. How is Horizon any different from Second Life? It's really unclear. Both are ugly.

I am a huge fan of the idea of the Matrix, and I don't even think it needs to be gamified to be fun, but the graphics are such a big part of the appeal of VR for me. I would pay a lot of money just for a photorealistic VR house with a beautiful view out the windows and in-world access to my computer - a better place to hack than my usual Starbucks. Why can't we have something like the Unreal tech demos? It's clear that beautiful worlds are possible now: https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/20/18273832/epic-unreal-engi...

If a VR world that looked like the first video in that article existed, it would be huge. But the intro video for Facebook Horizon? I am completely unsold.

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They're possible now, but you also need expensive hardware to run them. This is meant to run on the oculus quest. Give it a few more years (and probably a few more) and portable ultrarealism will get here eventually.

You don't need expensive hardware to do better than glossy pastels, at least for desktop gaming. I don't know what the requirements are for VR, but even turning modern games down to low/medium settings can still look pretty stunning if you haven't gamed in a while.

This reminds me of higher-res Mii's from the Wii, which was dated tech even at the time.

That said, the most important thing people should be asking is: is it fun? Because if you aren't gonna go super realistic then you had better nail the gameplay (Nintendo or Blizzard style).

The Nintendo Switch is by no means powerful hardware. But Breath of the Wild looks beautiful on it because of the art style.

I really don't think VR needs to wait half a decade for hardware to catch up. Existing systems can create beautiful experiences with the right artistic decisions

I 100% agree. I'd say Breath of the Wild looks incomparably better than this artstyle though. Something about this artstyle feels so... sterile? Maybe I'm just out of touch with what kids are playing these days, although as another commentator said, VR is counter-indicated for children.

What if it's targeted at kids/teens/young people and is lightweight "casual" playing experience? Wouldn't this look be preferred?

Sometimes ultra-realism takes the fun nature out of things.

Simpsons and South Park could easily use high tech graphics but the simple nature of it all is what makes it appealing . Same with Minecraft or even Zelda.

It's also easy to build expansive worlds with breakable objects that don't require tons of physics and special effects to make something like a box exploding look realistic.

Then we're going to have a problem, as VR is clearly counter-indicated for children because it messes up with eye development...

A technology like Google Stadia will probably solve this. Nobody will need a expensive hardware to run it. The graphics will be generated in cloud computing and streamed to the VR. Keep creating hardwares to run better graphics is a dead end.

The speed of light says no. “The cloud” will always have too much latency to do acceptable vr. To meet your deadline for a 120hz video frame, your signal can travel at most 1500 miles in a vacuum, closer to 1000 miles in copper/fiber.

> “The cloud” will always have too much latency to do acceptable vr.

Perhaps but you haven't established that.

> To meet your deadline for a 120hz video frame, your signal can travel at most 1500 miles in a vacuum, closer to 1000 miles in copper/fiber.

Edge computing is a feature of some modern clouds, and certainly is intended to have much lower round trip distance than that to at least major markets, specifically to reduce latency.

Admittedly, public cloud offerings don't tend currently to have compute resource suitable for hosting VR in their edge offerings, but it's certainly something a major cloud player supporting their own gaming/VR offering could do, and for that matter a feature that it is easy enough for public cloud vendors to offer if there was sufficient demand.

Edge computing is a thing, but it really doesn’t help that much: That 1000 miles has to include the signal path inside your gpu to generate the frame and assumes no data loss in transit.

If it takes 4ms to generate a frame you’re down to < 500 miles from the data center. If you need to pad for packet loss you’re down even further.

> If it takes 4ms to generate a frame you’re down to < 500 miles from the data center. If you need to pad for packet loss you’re down even further.

As I understand, edge computing locations tend to be in most major cities in the regions covered, providing tens-of-miles distance to most people in major markets.

I live in the bay area, and yet my ping to google is still ~12ms.

We've done this so many times before.

Global birth rate is around 150,000 people per day. At Facebook scale that’s not one sucker born every minute but tens of thousands; millions of new Facebook users born every month.

They never played second life or minecraft.

“We” have done this, most humans haven’t.

> Global birth rate is around 150,000 people per day. At Facebook scale that’s not one sucker born every minute but tens of thousands; millions of new Facebook users born every month.

Yes, but how many of them are going to waste time playing pointless games like Horizon online? How many people that would play such a game haven't already? To say that there are a lot of Facebook users and that that naturally means a lot of players is strange given that VR headsets are still a luxury item and that Facebook Horizon doesn't essentially offer anything novel outside that.

> They never played second life or minecraft.

> "We" have done this, most humans haven't.

Similarly, most humans haven't played Horizon, and there is as far as I'm concerned no compelling reason to believe that a lot of people will. Who would waste their time in that disgusting looking world and present themselves using a bland Wii-like avatar?

> How is Horizon any different from SecondLife?

Probably less cybering, from the looks of it.

You think?

Well, if nothing else, they'll probably be a bit less... flexible in the avatars they let you use.

This probably won't actually stop people.

Cybering always finds a way

A comparison to Rec Room or VRChat would make much more sense and be way more fitting to support your argument.

That Facebook Horizon video is exactly how Linden Lab marketed Second Life.

Going to be interesting how Facebook will handle the (legal) fringe and subvert creativity when it doesn't fit their business model.

Any such VR world should be openly developed and not be provided by a corporation who can selectively put anything in there and inhibit anything going against company policies.

This is Black Mirror waiting to happen.

I really enjoyed SL for a few years. At one point in some role play world that involved hunting or being hunted with bow and arrow or melee weapons. I had played plenty of other purpose build FPS but enjoyed that SL game more despite the crap graphics, laggy scripts, weapons, hacks etc. It felt more visceral.

I never spent a cent inside of an FPS but probably spent a few thousand dollars in SL.

Sure but the parent post was talking about the graphics. Second Life looked good when it launched but is so old that it looks outdated. It tried to look realistic while both Horizon and Rec Room goes with the Mii look. My point is that Rec Room is a better comparison since it uses the same graphics style, is way more popular/up-to-date and is also VR.

Or why not compare it to SecondLife's foray into VR "Sansar"? I haven't tried in about 9 months but it's definitely an improvement from SL, albeit full of bugs.

Agree. Instantly felt like "seen it before and it wasn't fun then, so it won't be fun now".

But Dirt Rally on the other hand... That is a different story. VR is great when realism is the goal. Games in zero g environments are cool too.

We don’t even have powerful enough hardware for that, let alone software. Give it another 10 years.

I don't think this is actually true; being close to some deep learning research groups, it's really surprising how powerful GPUs have gotten. Improvements over the last few years have been very nonlinear; it's kind of astonishing. And, internet latency has also gotten very good. I bet it's totally possible to make something like this now, though most people don't realize it yet!

Well, it certainly is technically possible.

> it's really surprising how powerful GPUs have gotten. Improvements over the last few years have been very nonlinear

These improvements did not come at fixed cost, though. Prices for top-of-the-line GPUs have been increasing (as well as die sizes, power consumption, and manufacturer margin). Together with Moore's law, that already brings nonlinear improvements, the available computation power has increased a lot.

However, those GPUs are very expensive. Most people just can't afford them. And if few people can afford them, it's hard to justify paying a whole army of developers (like AAA game studios) to bring that kind of experiences.

Do you see a lot of games that run well in 4k@120hz? VR is much more demanding. Maybe if you spend $20k on a box with 8 GPUs it will be able to run it. But it’s not just GPUs, you also need much better headsets (much higher refresh rates, 8k+ resolution, wide FOV, very good eye tracking for the foveated rendering, much higher dynamic range). Most importantly, creating all that photorealistic content is a huge effort, and you need a lot of it for VR. How much are you willing to pay for it?

Gameplay >> Graphics

Tell that to the people who get nauseous from VR. There are some people that will get nauseous from VR no matter what, and then there are people of varying sensitivity. The higher refresh rate, lower latency, improved FOV, and improved optics will all help more people be able to experience VR at all. And it will allow everybody to experience it for longer periods of time more comfortably.

I would have put that under "gameplay" (see "teleportation" vs "regular FPS" movement types), but I guess it's a bit of both...

Your parent post is true. This isn't about PC GPUs where the cooling hardware alone weighs almost as much as the entire standalone headset. These headsets are based on mobile phone hardware and need to deliver stereo rendering at 75 to 90Hz to make the user comfortable. Also, heat dissipation is a lot harder for a box strapped to a face that can't reach 50 to 60 degrees. You need to make lots of compromises for that.

Run the game in the cloud, stream to the VR. The more you pay for cloud computing, the better your graphics. Why no company is doing that already?

Google is, with Stadia

Latency

I had that exact coffee break argument some years ago and have a slack reminder "play some VR" at 9:00 Sunday, December 7th, 2025. I might have to revise that.

6 years from now? Maybe. It depends on Apple - if they release a VR headset by then, it might become an iPhone moment for VR. However it seems like they are focusing on AR, rather than VR, so who knows.

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