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Comment by MegaButts | Hacker News Reader

Let's say they sold 200,000 for the Xmas season - that would put Oculus Quest sales at around 600,000.

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.

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People expecting a half life gaming experience have been disappointed while the rest of us are too busy playing Beat Saber. It is going down just like mobile gaming did, in a different direction from hardcore gaming. AngryBirds wasn’t half-life either.

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.

One of the hardest problems in VR has been locomotion -- how do you move from place to place in a way that's seamless and fluid? Even Half-Life Alyx struggles hard with this. You'll notice that whenever anything cool is going on, they have you put your hand on some pillar or controller to keep you from wandering off.

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 basically use it for kickboxing, and the lack of locomotion in my apartment is a feature, not a bug. One reason I haven’t really gotten into thrill of the fight is because it involves actual moving, and I’ve found that isn’t really safe unless you have the space for it. Instead, I have to duck, lean, and weave enough with boxvr, and that is good enough for a lower body workout.

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.

You might like to the top, it's not quite as much exercise as boxvr or beat saber but still a decent bit, and fairly minimal space requirements.

I remember trying a VR game in a shopping centre in Malta of all places in the 90s. They strapped you in a harness and you walked on an omnidirectional treadmill within a "ring".

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.

Sounds like Dactyl Nightmare!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Xj7qPEUEq0

Oh this is cool, it wasn't this one from what I recall (which isn't a lot).

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.

This rig like from "Community": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQEiXST_qms

Yes it was like that, but standalone, the computer, I presume was in the base, which was like a platform; about a foot-high puck shape you stood on within the ring which had the treadmill built in.

Edit: I seem to recall it costing 2 lira for a turn.

I thought half life alyx wasn't released yet?

It's not which is why their comments are confusing to me too and also highly anecdotal. I know just as many half life fans who are super excited for it.

Half Life Alyx was amazing when I play tested it. The only thi g lacking was that they hadn't turned hard mode yet so I have to play through on normal, which was still challenging and exciting.

> People expecting a half life gaming experience have been disappointed

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2020/02/25/its-the-simple-a...

>I think Half Life Alyx will be an interesting juncture and maybe even a make-or-break point for VR

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.

”PC VR is a dead end for anything outside of creative tools, very few adults want tower PCs in their homes anymore.”

Call it a tv and manage to get something to market before those have effectively gone extinct, and you have a market.

Independent headsets are getting good enough that all the computational power can fit on your head. Getting rid of the PC is just the natural progression of hardware like this.

CSGO just broke their record # of players at one time, at around 900,000[1].

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....

[2]https://store.steampowered.com/stats/

> "Can I use it with my MacBook?

Who cares that won't be needed for long

Ditto for the Quest. I have a Vive Pro and a traditional gaming rig, and I'm very happy with it, but I can't deny that my friend's Quest is by far the more convenient setup. Even discounting the lack of power, the ability to just pick it up, put it on, confirm the play space and go makes the thing infinitely more attractive. Even the low battery life isn't a major concern, since I rarely want to spend that long in VR anyway.

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.

> 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.

Get out of your bubble. Among non-casual gamers, tower PCs are very common.

There was a lot of frustration with the quality of games for the Kinect. Some nice, playable titles for adults, more for kids (who are more tolerant of "pointless fun" like balloon-popping and chasing things around). But there were many terrible titles, and I wonder how many companies were unable to recoup their investment in development.

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).

It's a lot compared to the 6000 or so units Magic Leap has sold though, that's for sure.

Kinect was also bundled with the Xbox One at launch though, and it was mandatory

A lot also got bought up by roboticists and hackers, though in the grand scheme of things, those users were probably still just a drop in the bucket.

The Kinect was actually relaunched recently. It was a failure as a consumer product, but has a loyal following in some niches like experiential installations.

Same with Google Glass. Failed as a consumer product, but companies used it and Google has now relaunched it as a product aimed at business users: https://www.google.com/glass/start/

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