Comment by mattlutze | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattlutze | Hacker News Reader

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I think there's something in mapping the mental model of interacting with your environment to the new controls for that environment, which isn't quite finished yet.

Humans are good at making tools invisible or subconscious extensions of our physical selves, and there's this moat that VR gets stuck in I think on the way to true integrated physical extensions. i.e., a hammer becomes consciously indistinguishable from the carpenter's hand.

TV-based gaming consoles have had 4 decades of continually improving the screen and the input device. How invisible do the newest Playstation/Xbox/Switch (pro) controllers feel in your hands now?

VR can be immersive, but in the real world outside the goggles you're not yet transparently / invisibly integrated into the physical things you're near. So you kinda don't yet trust it, and some of the cables pull you out of the experience, and things are heavy etc.

When VR can live-integrate the world around you transparently into your virtual world, and the problems with things that pull you out of that subconscious human-tool melding are fixed, then I think there's going to be some really epochal things happening.

Until then AR seems to approach that integration moat from the other side and already looks to be making its way into everyday use.

It's called proprioception. It's your body's sense of its position relative to itself and to an extent the sense of position in your environment. It involves your inner ear, eyes, sounds, and even sensation of air moving over body parts

VR headsets gives your eyes visual cues that don't necessarily match that of your inner ear and body positioning. Lag between your inner ear's sensation and what your eyes see also causes problems.

Additionally your eyes aren't just a pair of fixed cameras mounts in your skull. They constantly scan (saccades) a scene and change their focus and that's that's then constructed by your visual cortex. The world doesn't have a depth of field effect applied to it, your eyes do that for you. Forcing both eyes to focus on a particular focal plane causes a lot of strain in because your eyes are not identical.

Besides human sensory input the lag and lack of precision of the game's sense of your body really fucks with your proprioception. Using a traditional controller uses small muscles with fast reaction times and little of your large motive and balance muscles. You can split your focus easily on the events and visuals of the game and work the controls.

With VR you have to make a lot larger movements and use more of your muscles for balance. Most people are not highly trained athletes their game avatars are and do not have that level of coordination or muscle endurance.

VR basically short circuits a ton of your body's senses or gives them conflicting input. Some people can adapt, many can't adapt for long, and some can't adapt at all.

Your comment makes me wonder how much variation people experience when trying VR. Possibly quite a bit. I get what you are saying about different cues that are missing, but for me it caused very mild nausea, some odd dreams and a bit of mild disassociation that passed after a few sessions. I wonder if there is some neuroplasticity factor that allows some people to more easily rewire to the new sensations and still feel natural.

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