5 Years After the Oculus Rift, Where Do VR and AR Go Next? | Hacker News Reader

5 Years After the Oculus Rift, Where Do VR and AR Go Next?

wired.com

14 pointspmastela4 comments

I like that this article recognises the key use case of exercise as a "killer app" while other applications develop. After the novelty wear's off, most games lose their interest. While there are a few novel game mechanics, there aren't as many as you would think and the impracticality of putting on a headset and isolating nature of it mean that it fails to break through as an activity that keeps you using it with a high level of regularity.

But exercise is not like that. It has real advantages especially for people not well situated to access other exercise options. Because the headset is intrinsically motion tracking you it knows a lot about your motions and can really feed that back and closely integrate motions into scoring mechanisms etc that gamify exercise in a way that isn't possible through any other means. But best of all, it's an intrinsically regular activity - it's a reason to use your headset every day for an hour or more - something that easily tips it over the value proposition needed to justify buying it.

Fitness is very popular in VR and one of its retaining values. I've even developed some WebVR games that thousands of people used daily for exercise (and preferred over big studio games like BeatSaber / BoxVR) and had people pay money for like squat mode and such.

Whether it's something that serves a small select audience, and whether it's a novelty remains to be seen. There are advantages to VR fitness but also disadvantages including the impracticality of putting on a headset and isolating nature of it as you said.

And also sweat, humidity fogging up the lens, shaking the headset around, having enough space to not smash a controller into a TV or ceiling fan. I recognize thousands of people get over that though.

Gamified fitness is a thing, but I question whether the ultimate form of that is a VR headset. There are alternatives to consider as well: Peloton, social running and exercise apps (Strava, Charge Running here recently), Ring Fit.

For me personally, that has gone from DK1 to DK2 to Vive to Rift to Rift S to Quest to now a Quest 2 owner that has barely used it, I'll take a basketball or tennis court any day.

I stopped using my VR headset more or less 6 months ago (HTC Vive). I put quite a bit of energy into making very simple prototypes of a VR table-top strategy game I had in my mind. I photogrammetrically scanned my room and superimposed it into a VR environment to get an AR feeling. And then a whole bunch of other half-baked projects and experiments. The Unity VR headset developer packages are really quite powerful, and you can build anything you like.

To me, the limitations are very simple - these things should be smaller, the processors running them have to be more powerful, and the interface should rely on precise live hand tracking for UI. The neural interfaces arę awesome R&D-wise but I can’t imagine them stealing the show.

I imagine these companies have forecasts on when this tech will be ready at desirable price points. At the moment I’m liking the rumors on the Apple headset - it would seem they’re shooting for a much more expensive device and to me this makes much more sense, especially considering their existing high-quality wearables etc.

Probably NFTs will make these useful...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com