The Oculus Quest has pretty much gone mainstream at this point, they even had supply shortages during Xmas that has yet to be recovered from (but mostly thanks to Corona).
https://gamedaily.biz/article/1337/report-oculus-quest-has-s...
And it seems VR sales (EDIT: shipments) are hovering at around 6,000,000 a year (this tends to include the crappy VR headsets that are sometimes given away for free with high end phones).
https://www.androidcentral.com/nearly-half-all-vr-headsets-s...
This sounds like a lot...but it might not be. To put things in perspective, the Kinect sold around 20,000,000 units and was considered a failure by Microsoft which is why they abandoned it. I think the parallels between the Kinect and VR is worth noting, since most are really accessories to something else (or used for very niche purposes).
VR definitely isn't mainstream yet, but it might get there in a few years. I think Half Life Alyx will be an interesting juncture and maybe even a make-or-break point for VR.
I don’t really game on my Quest, but I do use it for a one hour workout everyday. My system is pretty beat up too, if it stopped working tomorrow I would get a replacement immediately.
Beat Saber is probably the best app for VR, because it solves that problem by not having any locomotion. The world locomotes to you.
But that works well for an abstract rhythm game. I don't know how well that works for anything else.
I’ve never used the knobs and triggers on my VR controller for anything beyond game selection. In fact, I think Oculus would do better just to put out additional simplified controllers meant for fitness gaming.
Nothing wrong with rhythm games if they can help you drop 40 pounds.
The space problem is easy to solve with....space. A VR gym setup could easily solve it by putting you in a racket court with an appropriate guardian, and then let the VR system do the rest. Otherwise we will have to wait for Omni directional treadmill tech to get better.
The game was basic, early "3d" (in the gaming sense), low polygon, low resolution, no depth or actual streoscopic, but this was the 90s.
I tried to check it out again on a subsequent visit to Malta but it had of course gone. Real shame, I saw nothing of its kind for decades later.
The main things I remember are; it was an FPS, it was indoors/enclosed, the lighting was bad so it was really hard to tell where walls/corners were and it was very, very red.
The controller was sort of ring/oval shaped, I remember basically nothing about the headset other than that it was tethered.
Edit: I seem to recall it costing 2 lira for a turn.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2020/02/25/its-the-simple-a...
The Kinect experience could have been dramatically improved with a hand-held device (at least some buttons you could use to do grabs and stuff, and some kind of tracking looked possible). Several efforts along these lines were either canned by politics ("YOU ARE THE CONTROLLER" dogma that you thwarted at your peril) or by people dog-piling so many features into an initially simple product that the costs went out of control.
It looks harder to convince customers to use terrible VR gear. (I could be wrong).
PC VR is a dead end for anything outside of creative tools, very few adults want tower PCs in their homes anymore. When I demoed my Rift to friends they were completely blown away and the first question was "Can I use it with my MacBook?" and that was that.
When I demoed my Quest, one person sat down and ordered one straight after taking it off, he demoed it to someone at work and they ordered one, took it to a family barbecue and two of his relatives bought Quests.
Call it a tv and manage to get something to market before those have effectively gone extinct, and you have a market.
Steam alone regularly has over 10,000,000 people logged in at a time [2].
I think saying "Adults dont want a tower PC" is a pretty wide sweeping statement. I agree about Alyx. If they release a full length game that has the same level of quality that Half-life 2 had, with the same level of mod and customization support, that is going to be the tipping point. If VR is still a sub-niche in gaming/PCs, we won't see it takeoff for another 20+ years. But we may see it become the new standard.
[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/808630/csgo-number-playe....
Who cares that won't be needed for long
I don't think tethered PC-based VR is going away, simply because that setup is most flexible for development and experimental purposes, but for the mass market, I think a device like the Quest is the only thing with potential to truly take off. Especially if the weight of the headset can be reduced, as comfort remains one of the most nagging negatives of the whole experience.
Get out of your bubble. Among non-casual gamers, tower PCs are very common.