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Comment by greggman3 | Hacker News Reader

I have the exact opposite opinion. The Quest is massively underpowered for the games I want to play. I want GTA VR (which is amazing except for the fact that it's not designed for VR). I want beautiful worlds to visit. I want more Half Life Alyx like experiences. I won't get those on a Quest with a mobile GPU anytime soon.

This is the major problem will all the mobile tech based VR. The content is not and will never be compelling to the audience that actually wants this tech.

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My brother is the use case you describe.

If you have a chance, try playing one of the three parts to the Vader Immortal trilogy. It is like being inside a Star Wars movie. At first Darth Vader is not too bad but the more you work with him to try to bring Padme back to life, the scarier he gets. Really unlike a regular game because of the motion of your body. When you are fighting with a light saber in one hand and levitating rocks to hurl at opponents with your other hand, the whole experience is very compelling.

About 25 years ago I did VR projects for SAIC and Disney, and I have written little games for fun since the 1970s, and being where I am now in my life, I am thrilled at the Oculus Quest experience and I can’t wait to see Apple’s system and what 3rd parties write for it.

> The content is not and will never be compelling to the audience that actually wants this tech.

You are not the arbiter of that.

One of the Google cardboard demos has you flying along with a bunch of seagulls. The first time I saw that I was extremely annoyed they didn’t just make it an endless loop of flying. It felt magical, if I could have put on some psybient music with it it would have been 10/10 relaxing. I also showed the demo to my 60yr+ mom and she felt similar.

That is where the big money for VR would be, once polished, in the same way that mobile games went absolutely stratospheric and are worth more than 50% (in value) of the gaming market. You want to tap the mainstream.

I don't agree. I believe most people will look at that 3 times and then never touch it again.

Phones enabled casual gaming but don't believe VR is for casual users (except maybe VR porn). Sealing yourself off from the world in a 3x3 meter space (or even on the sofa) is just not a "casual user" use case so chasing the casual VR users with low-powered VR devices is doomed to fail IMO.

For higher end stuff, you can play Alyx through Virtual Desktop on Quest. I haven't tried it myself yet, but I've watched the videos and apparently it is quite good assuming you get everything setup correctly.

I did this exact thing for the first time the other day after a friend's recommendation. It worked FLAWLESSLY. I was as amazed by it working so well as I was the first time I used the inside-out tracking of the Quest.

Alternatively you can now use a (properly spec'ed) USB-C cable to turn your Quest into a native desktop-powered headset (search for Oculus Link). I've used it recently to play Alyx and I realized I had clearly forgotten how awesome a proper graphics card can be (paired with high quality content), it's really quite incredible.

Actually actually, now you can use any old USB cable, even the charging cable that comes with the Quest works for Link. The quality is a bit reduced on USB2.0 but honestly still totally fine.

The thing that most amazes me about how well this works is that I can actually get a great experience rendering remotely on a cloud pc (Shadow, 350 miles away) using VirtualDesktop or one of the other streaming solutions.

So there's a bit to be said for both approaches. But as far as the hardware goes, a decently powerful standalone device is still necessary for a lot of local operations such as view reprojection or frame interpolation that is necessary to make the remote experience usable.

I think both of you have valid points. While I have a Vive Pro, I'm rooting for Quest and PSVR to gain for traction. While nothing beats PC VR in performance, quality, and tracking; the price of entry alone is bad enough for PC VR. Then you have to add the complexity of base station setup. With procrastination, it took me weeks before I had the right PC VR setup vs instant plug and play with the Quest. That said, you can't beat the refresh rate, resolution, and tracking on the PC (especially when you count emerging full body tracking support).

I'll probably jump into Quest if wireless to PC gets an official solution and if they fix the low refresh rate. VR sickness is not fun.

Check out Shadow http://shadow.tech/

It's not perfect, but I got HL Alyx running via the cloud with no local hardware.

This is classic Apple, they try to widen the audience that wants a tech by simplifying as much as possible, then finding a key value.

Prime example is the Apple Watch... who "wears" it now? Sports people...

> Prime example is the Apple Watch... who "wears" it now? Sports people...

Two years ago I was on vacation in Hawaii and took a whale watching / snorkel tour. I was the only person on the boat not wearing an Apple Watch. They are pretty much ubiquitous, like the iPhone, among an upper middle class demographic.

People on a snorkel tour are sports people.

You are being snarky and not adding to the conversation. From the time the Apple Watch appeared, it's been denigrated, but I see them everywhere. I see regular complainers here on HN about the iPhone too, but it misses the total saturation in certain demographics. Apple is successful. Yes, we should continue to hold them to a high standard of ethics, but the haters need to realize that consumers like their gear.

Apple Watch sales are increasing year over year.

"Apple now sells more watches than the entire Swiss watch industry"[0]

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/5/21125565/apple-watch-sales...

The glass frame business is ~25B, eyewear market is ~125B.

What is the minimum key value to take a chunk from Luxotica?

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