When will virtual reality take off? The $100 bet

But for all you jaded folks out there, let me tell you that this is an absolutely unstoppable evolution of computing. All entertainment since sung epic poetry has aimed to briefly take us into another world. Plays, novels, movies, theme parks, and video games have always offered immersive fantasy. This is the ultimate fufilment of that very human impulse, to consciously enter another world. If we lose sight of that, then it will be up to the next generation of technologists to create it.

I went with code-only approach (no binary assets) and built a primitive development environment that works in VR. Now I have a neat little virtual shed with different experiments and demo projects. Geometrical landscapes, driving & flying, teleporting, various gizmos...

Currently I'm tweaking physics engine to work with hand tracking skeleton. Masses connected with springs turn out to be amazingly palpable even without any haptic feedback and with simple cartoonish visuals.

VR is already fun and we're in for a wild ride once AR hits the market.

Flashback to 1995. I'm a 17 year old PFY invited to beta test a VR headset from a local company. My Uncle was an investor and I was technically savvy and the target market.

I had a copy of Descent that supported VR, and while it was a bit of a hassle to get setup, I got it working. The experience was incredible. After the first use I said to myself "this is the future". I had permission to test the headset for two weeks, and I wanted my friends to see it as well.

So I invited them over that weekend. And that's where the problem set in. When one person was using the headset, they were gone. You couldn't interact with them in any way. They might as well have been in a different room. Then I said to myself "this is not the future", and haven't touched VR since.

There is no amount of technology that can get over this problem. It's not about FOV or resolution or immersion. It's a social problem. If you live alone at home, and want to plugin then great. But if you live with someone, its distant, weird, and kinda creepy, to have the other person in a headset and unreachable.

BUT, the VR ecosystem is a shitshow. So many manufactures are making crappy headsets and wondering why they don't sell. The HTC Cosmos Elite, for example, ships with old base stations and clunky-as-hell Vive wands, and costs almost as much as an Index. Windows Mixed Reality is, for one, not "mixed reality" at all, and the tracking is so fucking broken I'm honestly surprised we haven't seen class action lawsuits. Most VR games are just normal 2d games with VR tacked on, or if they are made for VR they're tiny.

Valve made a good headset and it's been sold out since launch. They made a good game and it's won awards and sold to pretty much every single person who can play it. Facebook (as much as I hate they're a major player here) made a good headset with the Quest (not with the Rift), and it's been sold out since it launched as well.

Just make good products and we'll buy them FFS. It's not that complicated.

I wish I had more time to play it! I'll put it on and start playing, and two hours later I'm still going, I'm exhausted from the workout, and I don't want to stop.

And my six year old loves it too! She loves to draw in 3D. She loves the YouTube VR roller coasters, especially because she isn't big enough for the biggest coasters just yet.

And every other person whose tried it loves it too (sadly with lockdowns I don't get a chance to share very often because I don't see a lot of people and have to quarantine the unit for two days every time I loan it out).

My sister in law is an artist so I dropped her into the 3D paint program. In 10 minutes she had made a beautiful 3D sculpture from nothing. My brother refused to give it up for days because he couldn't stop playing.

And I just got a second unit from Amazon to participate in a virtual world experience for re:invent, and it was the most awesome way to have a remote meeting! The sound is directional, so you have an idea of who is talking, and the avatars have hands, so you can see people's hand movements as well as their head and body movements. It adds so much to the conversation to see body language.

Let's just say I'm a bigger fan than I thought I'd ever be. Especially since the last time I tried it it got really motion sick, but that was years ago. The tech has come a long way.

Productivity is quite strongly correlated with screen size, so I'm expecting quite a leap in this regard when the right software is matched with the right hardware.

When Facebook bought Oculus for $$$$, the collaborative community which had been pushing the envelope, exploring for possibilities, rapidly died. People took it as a hint to switch modes. And eye-tracking rent seekers, already in low-volume high-cost exploitation mode, weren't then incentivized to support exploration.

Gaming had dollars, and so became a dominating focus. But it also had challenging constraints, which further pruned exploration. Do you want higher resolution, to allow text and programming in VR? Well, a panel existed, but gaming standards of immersion and such were too GPU intensive for the market at that resolution, so ... feel free to diy it yourself. In an environment where diy was no longer a supported thing. Programmers - a niche market.

Facebook et al, even Chinese OEMs, aren't interested in niche, or in making "commodity" hardware. Consumer platforms, and lock-in, and unicorn dreams. Even while that further cripples exploration.

Nreal light AR glasses are a laptop-comparable 1080p 3D screen at 2 meters. As with their dev kit, consumer availability is now first in China, SK, and Japan, then later in Europe, and eventually in the US. So asia now, and maybe US late next year. And the glasses are developed on linux, but you can't have that - no unicorns there.

Here's this amazing tech, and instead of an exploratory ferment, we wait for a few large companies to navigate patent thickets, to eventually meet the severe constraints of creating mass-market consumer devices. And then we'll dig in to exploring.

The problem isn't the cost. It's that moving around while wearing VR headgear is only safe in either customized environments, like the Star Wars location based entertainment system, or when movement is in a small area, like Beat Saber. Which is why Beat Saber is the #1 VR game.

Read the setup and cautions for full-body tracking in VRChat.[1] It can be done, but it's not popular. Partly because it requires the agility of a dancer to use properly.

Wearing VR headgear while sitting down isn't worth the trouble. Plus about 10% of the population gets nauseated when visual and actual motion differ.

On the other hand, make an AR headset that sells for $79.95 and runs Pokemon Go, and you have a hit.

[1] https://docs.vrchat.com/docs/full-body-tracking

When I tell someone to buy a Nintendo I know they're not going to call me to complain about how annoying it is to use.

Also, I do think the "Killer app" for VR has already been found: education. The US Military, Airforce, and NASA has been using VR for decades for training for example, and will continue to use them. There are several startups working on adapting VR education to other high-end use cases like surgery and enterprise training as well. I think those will still be niche, but will probably make for a couple companies with longevity in the end.

There are some unexplored but interesting pieces to the VR puzzle that also haven't been either invented or put together yet: better hand tracking, better haptics, better eye tracking, better displays, and lighter headsets for example. Potentially some combination of these will result in a 'must have' application for VR. Who can say when this will happen though.

For XR to take off, I think something akin to the metaverse needs to exist first, so applications can develop within its framework.

1) ROI for the platform's premium was not worth it, due to... 2) lack of must-have apps, due to... 3) poor ratio of difficulty designing a great user experience vs low number of outfits trying to build that software, due to ... 4) fragmentation in technology (AR & VR) which results in different user experience in each platform, and low rates of adoption especially given dispersion over different platforms, consequently there was far less financial motivation for a company to invest long term resources.

With VR/AR, the obvious killer app is 3D model generation, because you could turn efficient workflows into money, but the amount of effort that has been thrown into desktop publishing is so much that the bar for a VR/AR app to get over is very, very high. If your audience is professional 3d modelers. The mouse is such an excellent precision instrument, it's going to be a long time before we have a 6 degree-of-freedom input device that can match it for precision and ease of long term use. The existing CAD companies with funds sit on large portfolios of software, and a fantastic VR/AR experience would devalue them, so they don't have a lot of motivation.

Long story short, it's going to take longer than the PC revolution, because the adoption-conformity numbers are not as good. I'd guess another ten years?

If you look at where we are now vs. 100 years ago, our technology would be utterly unrecognizable to them. When people of that age predicted the future, they didn't do great. I'd like to think we have better foresight, but the reality is we'd probably be just as bad at predicting what things will be like in 100 years.

The thing that amazes me is the exponential nature of human progress. Even if we made linear progress - that is, some "equal" amount of advancement in the next hundred years as we did in the last, that would be incredible. But of course our progress builds on itself, and so if we assign a value of 100 to the amount of progress in the last hundred years, we're likely to have a 200, 300 or 400 over the next hundred years.

Personally, I'm betting on pretty much all computer interfaces being directly connected to the brain and people living off of earth permanently.

If my headset broke today, I would order a new one same day.

I had motion sickness when I tried the early first-person shooters, but got over it when I learned to keep the (non-moving) screen bounds in mind. That' just impossible in VR, and when the motion in my eyes doesn't match my vestibular system, wow, it's bad.

Sigh... some of the games were amazing.

I had wondered if larger companies would do VR technical interviews to remove biases in their quest to "hire the best". You can have a whiteboard, and the usual schtick, but you can disguise the voice, height, gender, ethnicity, etc of a candidate, so the interviewer can focus on the communication and the solution.

And then the interpersonal part of the interview can be done in person and unmasked. After that, both parts of the interview can be conjoined during the committee evaluation.

I never went down this avenue, because I thought sourcing candidates was a bigger problem than evaluation accuracy, and all but the biggest companies don't worry so much about their interview methods.

I was tremendously excited about it, to include messing around with VR development in my spare time, until the Facebook account debacle dropped my enthusiasm to zero. I’ve used my Quest maybe twice since my account got caught up in all that. I have no plans to develop any software for such a closed platform with arbitrary gatekeeping.

Sure, I would love to buy VR headset but there are things that are stopping me, and until they are fixed, I will wait before buying, it is not a crucial piece of technology after all (like robotic vacuum cleaners are :D )

- I will not vendor lockin myself into some store "Hey, buy xy monitor and you can only use software for it from xy store".

- I will not pay for the VR substantially more than good monitor (of normal size)

- I will not pay extra for games that I have already bought as non VR

- I will not upgrade my whole hardware just to be able to use VR (I do understand why hardware requirements are as they are but I will just not do it)

- I will absolutely not buy anything subscription based.

- I will never buy it from facebook (,google,...), I dont consider them a trustworthy company and I am not buying anything that is positioned in home from those.

- While watching tv, playing playstation whole family can have fun, for the same price, not just one

And once I go trough all the points I dont think that here is any VR headset that fits. And to me all those points are showstoppers. Maybe buying new computer hardware can be left out as a showstopper, it is just a huge annoyance.

Bottom line the VR technology is not even a problem at all.

Everything around is.

The reason VR is struggling is the same reason that most exercise games eventually struggle. Humans are lazy and prefer sitting on their asses and click buttons with near zero muscle activity.

It really doesn't help that you're basically stuck buying the facebook-locked Oculus (either the Quest with a more limited game selection or the Rift S which requires a good PC), spend a bit more and get a Vive Cosmos, or you can spend boatloads of money and buy the Index (or buy an old Vive and piecemeal the Index parts you want since the lighthouses are compatible).

Any VR that is not roomscale will feel limited, and any VR that doesn't use some sort of tracking for the headset/controllers (IR based, usually) will feel clunky and will lose track of the controllers constantly. I tried (and loved, despite its limitations) Google Cardboard and Daydream, but those definitely never took off. Playstation VR isn't roomscale so you can't move around in the environment, so it's inherently limited.

The Windows Mixed Reality inside-out tracking works for 95% of what you need to do -- overhand throws don't work reliably since your controller leaves the tracking area, so you have to throw things by doing awkward pushing motions most of the time.

So again -- I'm faced with: - Upgrade to a more expensive headset to get better tracking but still have low/medium quality ($300-1000). - Upgrade my GPU to max out the quality on my current headset ($300-1000). - Do both ($600-2000).

In all honesty, for the limited amount of time I spend in VR (1-2 hours once or twice a week, mostly for exercise with Beat Saber or BoxVR) -- None of those options appeal to me. I'll just keep using my headset until it dies, and then we will see where we are at. There's not enough new features coming out (or enough new VR hardware in general coming out) to justify an upgrade every year or two, especially when it relies on my PC having sufficient specs to power it.

I love listening to music in surround, but it requires time to fill a room with speakers placed just right.

A few years ago I tried my friend's VR setup. He had to set up a room just right, and the space had to be completely empty or you'd smack into things. I even smacked into a wall where some sensor wasn't calibrated right.

Even the economics of dedicating a large, empty space for VR means it's mostly for "rich" people. You could be middle class in the 'burbs and pull the car out of the garage to do VR... But what if you live in a tiny SF or NYC apartment? What about even denser living conditions outside of the US?

Specifically:

1. It looks real 2. It's affordable 3. AI characters become believable

If anyone's played with Replika.ai lately, you'll know #3 is starting to get really close. #1 and #2 are inevitable.

So at some point it becomes wildly rewarding to spend hours hanging out with your AI friends in virtual space.

Simply being in a 3D space isn't enough. Most people seem to experience this as a neat trick, but not something they feel the need to make a part of their daily lives.

But building emotional bonds with characters who are only accessible in VR? Or perhaps can be texted (like Replika) and then met "in person" in VR? I see that being worth many billions.

Now I have an index a quest 2, and spend far, far too much time in VR. Nothing comes close to PCVR gaming in VR, and quest 2 titles are starting to become really good. Population 1 is probably one of the most enjoyable games I’ve ever played in my entire life, and I don’t even like battle royals.

Yes there are some things we need to get better at, but I just can’t imagine something this transformative, that is consistently sold out, doesn’t take off at one point, even if it is 5 years away.

His sales estimates are a little low, unless he's only including PC VR. PSVR alone has sold ~5M units by most estimates. In the most recent Steam hardware survey, about 2% of users that completed the survey have VR devices, which is roughly another 2M users. That doesn't include Quest and Quest 2 sales (many people never use the link cable), or the few Rifts out there that aren't on Steam. So while it's highly unlikely that 6DOF VR devices have sold 10M units, its likely cleared 8M units and could easily surpass 10M in 2021.

The biggest issue right now is lack of software. There isn't much to play at all in VR, and there are very few great VR titles and only a handful of good ones. For HN commenters that want the infinite screen experience, I unfortunately believe that will be relatively niche (you sell to a bunch of programmers) and none of the current players are really focused on enterprise as games have been the stickiest thing so far. Quest 2 is pretty high resolution and eventually a tracked keyboard and infinite office will ship, so it might still be the best option for a while for people looking for VR productivity.

Gilmore and Pine “Experience Economy” suggests that we are now in the transformation economy. Maybe VR needs to be transformative?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fKpJ-hKbiE

I haven't tried Supernatural but FitXR was a great improvement from Beat Saber (granted, BS is more fun but the workout is nothing compared to FitXR or Thrill of the Fight).

I'm very excited for the future of fitness in VR. Oculus Move shows that it's a rising star.

Every game I’ve played uses some hack to make up for the fact that I can’t just walk anywhere I want in the world they are presenting.

I don’t think this is a solvable problem, but I could be wrong. Occasionally a game will do a very good job disguising this problem, but I’ve never seen anything that hints at a solution.

We're getting the bottoms of our toes wet and calling it immersion.

iPhones were replacing something that people already had with something that did it so much better than before that it seemed like magic. I can't see VR doing that unless the tech becomes so wonderful that it can be added to spectacles/contact lenses or the experience injected right into the brain cheaply and someone creates a killer app that people will want to use repeatedly.

There will always be technical and industrial uses - training, visualization etc that can justify expensive headsets and expensive content creation but those are niche markets.

VRChat.

More and more of my furry online circles are constantly posting VRChat videos and photos. Give it a year or two of the gear needed dropping in price and I think it may finally explode in usage.

The ‘rona helps here; all the furry cons have been cancelled but furries still want to be cartoon animals at each other. There have been virtual cons via VRCHat already. I don’t have the spare cash to get a vr setup myself so I can’t talk about how well they went off, but I bet the virtual-first cons founded this year are not gonna go away just because physical gatherings are safe again...

Oculus Quest (just looking at the hardware) may as well by the first VR headset because it’s the first that is both feature complete with full head and hand presence and doesn’t have to be tethered to another bulky system and doesn’t cost $1000+ to get started.

First time I demoed quest to a friend he had ordered one off Amazon 2 minutes seconds after taking it off and him demoing it to his family and friends sold 4 more.

warning: discussion about guns

> Half Life Alyx seems to me to suffer from the same problem, a fun game with some compelling content, so great to try, but not a must-have. Exercise programs like Supernatural or Beat Saber fall in the same category, fun, cool to try, but not something without okay substitutes or alternatives.

I think HL:Alyx is a game changer. Elite: Dangerous sold me on it initially. I regularly use Beat Saber to stay fit during the pandemic -- the recent addition of multiplayer is amazing. VR Chat is really awesome. I find it's not nearly as exhausting to hang out with friends in VR Chat than a Zoom meeting.

HL:Alyx -- the fidelity, performance, and detail given to the content is amazing. But what was unique about it for me was that it made exchanges with guns actually harrowing and... more cinematic and believable. A lot of FPS' have to band-aid around the fact that the player character can soak bullets/zaps/whatever because the lack of spatial awareness of a projection onto a 2D surface means most casual players are going to be running into the middle of a fire fight and expect to have a reasonable chance to win.

In one of the opening scenes a soldier catches you off guard and points a gun right at you. In VR, without even thinking, my hands went up. In any other FPS, unless that interaction was scripted, I would have just shot back or ran.

Yet even because Alyx isn't a super hero or wearing some high-tech recharging shield, it still feels cinematic. I'm physically ducking behind walls, tossing items and using bits of junk as a temporary shield.

And it does advance the story of the HL universe so there's that... I wouldn't say it didn't change anything. It raised the bar for VR content that was lacking original content from AAA studios.

Elite: Dangerous. VR changed how I play completely. I was instantly better at flying. The added benefit of depth perception improved my reaction speed and spacial awareness. I play on a flat monitor now and again but it's too boring and awkward.

Although you can't argue with the numbers -- it's not mainstream in the way that a Nintendo Switch or other game system is.

But I wonder if that's not so much a content issue but if there were other factors involved like, say, how FB has managed Oculus or how it wasn't deeply discounted at first to gain adoption like most new hardware platforms are.

Because VR manufacturers were unprepared for the surge in demand, things like the Quest were out of stock constantly for months. The Quest 2 is still extremely hard to find outside of crazy scalper prices or a 1-month wait if you buy direct.

Besides which, 10,000,000 seems very large for an early adopter group a anyway. I'd argue that anything selling 1million+ units has pretty much made the mainstream.

Still, that wasn't the bet, but it may very well be that demand for 10,000,000 existed, it just outstripped supply, at which point I'd say the spirit of the bet was fulfilled.

Managed to put together a small skunkworks team to develop an application to view data - goal was to gain insights through manipulation and viewing data in an immersive space. We had a novel approach to do this.

Problem is COVID-19 hit so getting other people to try it became impossible and most target users do not have their own headset. We used video's to showcase but its obviously not the same.

Project on ice (for now) but we felt there was definitely something there. What we developed was not the final killer product but it got people talking a lot.

Its (VR/AR) time will come, that's for sure, but we need more 6DFs, lighter, capable standalone headsets.

Current VR just seems not quite immersive enough to feel real or worth using for most things but slightly too immersive so that it ends up being unnerving after a while.

The lack of tactile stimulation doesn't help either. I think if they could come up with some kind of gloves that could simulate pressure and touch, that worked reliably as controllers, VR would become more popular.

Here are some experiences I wish I could have: 1. Virtual presence at a concert or sporting event 2. More apps or games where I sit down and can move around but still experience VR. Controls seem awkward still for this type of thing. Maybe it contributes to motion sickness.

Mobility is a huge problem that needs to be solved. Until then, VR will be a peripheral like the Kinect, great for one-off interactive experiences involving your full body... but never able to deliver truly transformational gameplay.

Considering the massive success of group games like Jackbox.tv and Among Us, I think the killer app for VR has to have a group competition or co-op element. Single player VR stuff was cool but felt pretty isolating.

So it seems like we are about 1 generation away from having something mainstream for work, so probably 2 years away.

We are a remote team and I decided against Quest 2 but was borderline due to text legibility. I would probably buy everyone a Quest 3 though as a way to interact on some things.

"VR System Guide Summer 2020! Updated with Reverb G2, and all recent info. By Evanlyboy"

https://imgur.com/a/QVbyeA1

https://old.reddit.com/r/SteamVR/comments/hzkl36/vr_system_g...

For VR to succeed at that level it needs: better UX (Quest is close but needs to be 2x resolution and content richness / latency) and ease of use needs to be 100.

I.e., it needs to replace people’s glasses and/or be as easy as turning on the tv. I.e., very lightweight. Again Quest is the closest but still I’d say 25% of the way there.

Another bottleneck was that standard graphics pipeline in GPU had too much latency to keep up with user movements.

The PSVR and camera doesn't even have an upgrade for PS5 yet. So that's too bad.

Something more advanced like the Oculus Quest 2 or HTC or Valve, but for powerful enough hardware people and brands people already have would be the right move.

Also an ability to ditch the external camera requirement.

and also ditch the cords, but we can revisit that stretchgoal later.

What? Going from essentially zero consumer sales to 5m/year is 'nothing'? It's not smartphone or even console numbers yet, but it's not some tiny insignificant niche anymore (now it's a significant niche).

VR is the flying car of software: so amazing to imagine, so impractical in real life.

Forget about photorealism - cartoony, Nintendo Wii style graphics are much more forgivable on VR hardware. Currently, VR is bad considering the cost.

But AR - that's different - and I think it will happen the second we can get a full day of use out of it in a normal glasses form factor. (With enterprise scenarios driving earlier larger form factors)

or

When VR doesn't merely solve for an "immersive" experience, but rather provides for a better way to interface with 3D "space" than does a 2D monitor.

I'm unfortunately not convinced it will ever "take off". At least not in its current incarnation of HMDs and controllers. There are just too any limitations.

1) You usually need a 10x10sqft open space to use it. Sure there are examples of experiences or tools that you can sit in chair but they are very limiting.

2) You're isolated. Watching TV or playing a video game you can be in the same room as others but standing in the same room as other playing VR is kind of off putting (maybe that's just me)

3) People get sick from motion so more limits on what you can actually do. I generally don't get sick and have played a few games 5-8hrs a day though I have experiences serious debilitating sick for 3 hours nausea in 2 "VR hacked into a not designed for VR" games

Other issues are chicken and egg.

* You can't show people what it's like to be in VR without them being in VR. If you stand out of VR and look at the screen it looks just like a standard video game. The feeling of presence is not something you can show in video so the user who doesn't have VR equipment will never get excited about it from videos of what the experience is like

* The audience is too small so there isn't enough content. There's a ton of tiny indie games but there are very few well made AAA VR games. Some AAA games have a VR mode but the game wasn't designed for VR and so is usually poor. I'm sure this will be controversial if you're a fan but for example Eve Valkyrie fails for me because none of the controls are in VR. You need to sit at a keyboard where as I just want to reach out and touch the controls that I see on the control panels of the ship I'm in. No Man's Sky did some of this better with it's VR control stick and thrust stick and the exit handle but failed everywhere else where all the inventory screens are designed for joypads, not VR.

* This is more of the same but many interfaces are bad or to put it another way they are kind of like "by gamers for gamers" I almost wish valve/oculus had shipped controllers with no buttons or at most one button per controller to force the devs to put the controls in VR. In VR they are usually intuitive where as most games it's press one of the 18 buttons on both controllers (Oculus has A,B,X,Y,Left Trigger, Left Grab, Right Trigger, Right Grab, Left stick Up, Left Stick down, Left stick left, Left stick up, Left stick press, right stuck up, right stick down, right stick left, right stick right, right stick press and there's actually to more, left menu button and right menu button.

I realize that 1 button per controller would be limiting, I just wish more games/tools/software embraced VR more

* Inside out tracking of controllers and Quest level smartphone hardware are very limited. I know many owners of Quest are enthralled with it but for me it's a step back. The fact that it can't track your hands in all directions at all times breaks many experiences. Designing around that limitation basically means giving up on many experiences. Similarly a smartphone GPU is just not up to providing the top level experiences. It's like Switch vs PS4. Sure there are wonderful experiences on a Switch but there are also 100s of PS4 experiences that are just not possible on a Switch. Same with Quest. It's underpowered so Beat Saber, great! HL2: Alyx, not going to happen. (even with the link which you can go read reviews of blurriness and latency. People make due but it's not compelling the same way high powered VR is)

It probably will eventually be a successful thing, probably slowly and incrementally, but I think that the rush to be first to market caused all parties involved to make some mistakes that prevented the wild success they were envisioning.

- They should have been even more experimental. Bootstrapping a market is difficult. The way it goes is that the audience is zero at the start, so no sensible publisher or developer would risk their money over the years it takes to build a game, so the platform creator has to fund them 100%. But that also means that the platform creator gets to control the games and how they're made. I got the sense that the VR platform owners were overly controlling. I was involved with several different headset makers and they were pretty specific about how the input devices had to be used, limitations on the permissible content, and what kinds of games they were looking for. That makes sense for a mature platform where you know what a killer app looks like, but I think they needed much more experimentation for VR. When we first started building for VR, our team strongly believed that it would be the most fun to make games that focused on small-scale, close-up experiences, basically fitting everything on a tabletop. But we were steered away from such ideas, in part due to platform pressure. I guess they felt that big, splashy, open experiences were going to dominate (or would at least make good screenshots for marketing), but they were wrong. Long distance scenes aren't actually that cool in VR because the stereoscopic difference goes to zero; it becomes no different from looking at a monitor. Maybe small-scale stuff wouldn't have worked out -- the lack of vergence cues may cause additional eyestrain -- but it still seems like a big unexplored area of potential.

- Fragmentation is a huge problem. Even within one single headset model, developers cannot assume that players have more than a seated chair's worth of space. If you make a game that accepts that limit, it feels like you're "not really doing VR" and that pisses off funders. So you try and awkwardly have some sort of "progressive enhancement" that makes the game more fun when moving around the room, but still playable when stationary. You really have to build the entire game around such a compromise, so most such games felt very demo-y (e.g. Robo Recall, Job Simulator). Plus all the options for the inputs -- remember how the Rift shipped with an xbox controller? Building a game that can use either xbox or 3DOF or 6DOF controller is madness; the paradigms are totally different. So you're pretty much limited to building a lowest-common-denominator system, which sucks. I think Oculus is trying to address this now, by focusing on standalone headsets, but that saddles them with additional technical challenges so it'll be a few years before that can succeed.

- Inputs are everything for VR, and I don't think people realize how late in the game they actually were. When Oculus and Vive announced, the problem of having accurate-enough handheld controllers was not known to be solvable. Valve's "room demo" had inside-out head tracking that looked at barcodes plastered on the walls, clearly a temporary hack. Good game development takes years; not having a reliable input paradigm to count on _severely_ impacted developer productivity. That said, vehicular games like Elite which can treat the VR headset as a more immersive display were and continue to be some of the high points of the VR experience. I think that they thought that more genres of games would behave like that, but, no.

- I think it was a mistake on Oculus's part to have different levels of buy-in for their platform. It would have worked better if there was one package that everyone bought, even if it was expensive. Maybe the thought that they could have a cheap version for the masses, and people who wanted a better experience could spend more. But it isn't the case that getting the fancier VR package improves the visuals without affecting the gameplay; the different controller types and increased precision substantially changed the types of games you were able to play, exacerbating the fragmentation problem.

- The technical road to having high resolution displays and low-latency rendering was too long. It may be there now, after 5 years of concerted effort, but it wasn't in 2016. If the renderer can't keep up, it's super noticeable in VR. The analogy is capacitive touchscreens. Until they were _absolutely nailed_, they were worse than no touchscreen at all.

Game platforms fail to take off all the time, this was just one of the more well-funded and public ones. Remember the Ouya? Google's various game platforms preceding Stadia? Stadia itself? Failure is the norm; what might eventually turn this around is the very strong dedication some people have to the idea.

When people talk about how VR hasn't taken off like they expect, I really wonder about their understanding of technology. As a high end technology, I think VR is doing great. There are some pieces of work that people like, but the state of the technology reminds me of smart phones circa 2008[1]. Technology is getting better, but there's substantial disagreement about what a "good" experience needs. Do we need higher resolution? Easier access? Better integration? Obviously all of them are good but the point is that the field is still very much in flux and even people who have spent thousands of dollars on a nice setup are looking forward to the next generation.

I also think about LCD televisions. I don't really know what their sales numbers are over the years, but Wikipedia tells me they started selling more than CRT TVs in 2007[2]. They came on the market in the 1980s[3]. That's a ~27 year journey from being in a consumer good and becoming the dominant technology. Smartphones improved uniquely fast, and since VR is (right now) more firmly centered on luxury and leisure, I wonder if the arc of LCD televisions isn't more indicative.

I think VR will "arrive" when you can spend under $100 (maybe $200?) and get all "the good parts" of the VR experience, like my friend did with his cheap phones. It will also help if the high end is better established than it is now. It can't be used or home-made or just a part - one price for a low-frills version of what you came for. I think successful technology needs a "bottom-end" as well as a top-end and I don't think VR is very close right now. The first Oculus shipped to consumers in 2016, which puts us 4 years into my proposed ~27 year arc. That feels about right to me.

Edit: for all my skepticism about VR, writing this post has me researching the price of headsets again :p

[1] As a point of comparison, the first iPhone sold 6m units. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(1st_generation)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_set

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid-crystal_display

If you don't get that, then you won't understand the What, How, When of VR. (Hint, it's a long way off)

- Fresnel lenses!

- No haptic feedback?

- Closed hardware/software.

Unfortunately in the future electricity prices will mostly limit VR to non-realistic graphics, f.ex. Cyberpunk 2077 can't render (full blast) at 60 FPS on a 350W 3090, so to get 90FPS on both eyes you would need (if it was possible, it's not) more than 3x 3090 at a whopping 1000W!

And this is at peak everything: memory speed and litography; with cheap- energy, hardware, (food, rent too) etc.

The final medium is not VR, it is regular 3D MMO action potentially with server-side neural-network brained mobs/npcs! How is that progressing Mr Carmack?

The graphics sucked, the lag sucked, it gave some people nausea and others an unwanted sense of vertigo. Prices for high-end equipment were (and still are) ridiculous and unattainable for the mass market. Even if you could afford it, do you also own a space big enough to set it up? And if you did, was it convenient to have to be in that space to use it?

The premise of VR as a foundational technology is totally flawed. VR is for experiences that take you out of reality, but most people aren't looking for that on a daily basis. Entering VR is comparable to going to the movies: it's something to do once you've exhausted better options.

To those who say the technology can never get there, I disagree. The market will explode once the first real AR/MR device arrives. People won't care what it looks like or that it has a pervy camera if it's the most amazing piece of technology they've ever used. It will be like the first iPhone - an "Aha!" moment in amongst a sea of products that just don't get it. It won't require lighthouses or setup or spatial mapping or wires or the social isolation of being at home, it will just implicitly understand the world wherever you are and will be available to you when you need to use it. Like a phone in your pocket.

And I'm sure with the equivalent of a sleeping mask such a device would be VR capable as well.

It's coming, but it won't be a product from a startup (anyone remember Magic Leap?) and not for maybe 5-10 years.