Agreed. I think the Metaverse will be a niche, but it will soon become a much higher quality niche.
One big reason for this is some strange social stigma surrounding VR. Yes, there are many other issues like cost (minimum $2000 investment for a VR ready PC and headset) and complexity if you’re not using Oculus / Meta. Then there’s also Facebook’s toxic brand, which drives away many early tech adopters; but what if we were able to take them out of the equation?
Anyways, I did an experiment last Christmas. I got several family members Oculus Meta Quest 2 headsets. At the same time Meta was offering a $60 referral credit where both you and the new Quest user would get $60 in store credit.
To summarize, I removed the barrier of monetary cost, and Meta removed the barrier of complexity from VR (ie no wires, or PC setup). None of these people had a bad opinion of Facebook either. What was the result?
They tried the free demos once and stopped using it. It wasn’t until I constantly pestered them, that they actually tried apps with free credits and games and started to understand VR and use it more regularly, namely the fitness and social apps. I even recently talked to Meta contractor who mentioned that she wasn’t interested in a free Quest 2 headset even though she held the company in high regard. I feel for VR marketing teams. Until Apple helps make this mainstream, XR will have a very big hill to climb.
There’s nothing particularly interesting in VR, at least not yet. Most games suck. The ones that don’t are largely stationary with little rotation if at all. There’s a fundamental problem that humans, even when not constrained by space, aren’t very agile, and much less so wearing a vr headset. It still sucks.
I have an index.
VR is a huge paradigm shift. It’s just still in its infancy. Similar to the internet in the mid 1990s.
- Alyx
- Boneworks
- Blades & Sorcery / GORN
- Skyrim / Fallout 4 VR
- Onward, Zero Caliber, Population One, Contractors
- Racket NX
- Minecraft
- Lone Echo
- holopoint
There's really too many games to name, and I can name more. A huge pain point for me prior to getting the Quest 2 was tangled wires from too much turning.
The only games where there's no turning involved are fitness apps like Fit XR and ping pong. Even Beatsaber and SuperNatural have 360 degree levels. Your comment makes me wonder if you've ever used your Index, or if you even own a VR headset because it sounds bizarre.
It’s a thin layer of game design tricks to make you think you’re in something intricate but it’s actually dumb as rocks. The lightning dogs are the peak of this. Even on the hardest difficulty they telegraph their attacks for like… 10 seconds. It’s not clear if it’s possible to dodge it by physically walking 5m. The game wants you to teleport pretty much anywhere to “dodge” it. I don’t blame valve for this. What they almost certainly realized is that humans are incompetent in vr so the enemies need to be dumb as rocks. Not that the AI is bad or anything, but the principles behind their behavior are built for the fact that humans are slow, have low situational awareness, and and especially in vr don’t have a good intuition for where their body is exposed. The electric dogs are still decently challenging. But the limitations on it were incredibly immersion breaking to me, much more than having a helmet benefited.
Superhot solves this the other way by having very short high failure levels and just letting you lose due to human incompetence at your own pace. It works pretty well but it’s not a generalizable strategy for other games. I’m looking to do boneworks next. I’ve never felt wires were a real problem. Mostly because the games I play don’t involve moving around much. I have tried wireless.
I have also done one of those vr domes with a huge open warehouses and multiplayer vr shooters with mild graphics but big gun peripherals. This is the biggest freedom you could possibly have. In my experience playing and watching others, people just slowly walk from place to place, rotate in place, and stand still shooting while monsters get too close and “hit” them because melee attacks feel unintuitive still. They move like they’re an old resident evil tank control character lol.
It was never sold as an open world game so I’m not sure why you’re referencing that.
If you could go to a real virtual gym and lift virtual weights that was no different than lifting real weights, that would be amazing. That would be revolutionary because so many problems would have to be solved.
Instead, the headset has literally solved nothing in the last 30 years. There is a video of Jaron Lanier on youtube showing a vr headset and vr glove in 1990. It could literally be a VR advertisement next year and you wouldn't know the difference.
The fitness apps and communities are real ... there are subscription services with virtual coaches etc. I myself workout at least 45 mins a day. It's the best workout I've ever had - Synthriders, Crazy Kung Fu, Pistol Whip ... they have you dripping with sweat and surprisingly good strength training (as in, my arms are bulking up more than they ever did with actual weights).
And nothing has been solved in 30 years? Do you understand the Quest is a wireless fully stand alone mobile device? Just that alone is a revolution. It does fully controller free hand tracking. It does 6DoF positional tracking with no base stations or external equipment.
I can't really conclude anything other than that you simply have not even looked in real life at modern VR and have no idea what you are talking about.
The only thing absent would be weight lifting. That probably will be integrated with AR and not VR due to safety issues.
> started to understand VR and use it more regularly, namely the fitness and social apps
This is the interesting thing that I observe : beyond the hype there are some genuinely valuable quite mainstream applications. Fitness, e-sports, and virtual monitors being some of the key ones. I regularly use VR for 1-3 hours a day doing these.
The problem is that the hype actually gets in the way of people experiencing those. They all require some skill acquisition or semi-non-trivial setup. So instead of someone getting introduced to VR in the form of one of these more sustainable ways, they are shown a glitzy experience that dazzles them with 3d effects that is interesting for a few minutes but has no longer term value. It's like a sugar hit that lasts a short time but actually leaves you feeling worse afterwards.
I think Facebook et al need to work out how to bridge people between these experiences to make it get more mainstream uptake.
For example there are table tennis apps so realistic that pros use them to train. I will never ever be able to own a table tennis / ping pong table due to lack of space in my house but I can have it with VR. Not only that I don't need to find a comparably skilled player and line up schedules every time I want to play. And just the price of a real a table alone is more than buying a Quest!
So what's the issue? Well these apps intrinsically take a bit of getting used to. There's a specific technique for serving that relies on some use of the controllers that is not hard but not obvious to someone who started using VR 5 minutes ago. So nearly 100% of people fail at using this app first time they play. Very few people can do this well until they've spent a bit of time in VR, getting used to how you can open and close your grip in the right way to pick things up and put them down etc. We may eventually get there with hand tracking etc where this is not such a problem, but its far from that point now.
So this is what I mean when I say, the "cheap" experiences that are easy for people to experience actually work against - in some ways - VR fulfilling its potential, because typically that is all they get shown and they never get a chance to learn to do the more "high value" activities.
Imo the main friction is still mainly the social perception of VR.
Matthew Ball, the venture capitalist, argued last year that the social stigma ended during the pandemic.
People are walking around looking at phone screens while wearing iDweebs hanging out of their ears without being laughed at. VR is just the next step.
As for “iDweebs”, they look fashionable and have been deemed socially acceptable by fashion house Apple. They’re also not some giant, novel monstrosity that covers your face and head; AirPods are new yet familiar. They’re just a hybrid of earrings and headphones.
From my personal experience, the pushback against VR is both subtle and strong and it’s not limited to cost or tech complexity (setup). I mean how do multiple people with no ties to each other in different geographical areas reject free revolutionary hardware?
In the wild, I’ve also repeatedly seen claims that VR sucks made by people who’ve never tried modern VR, to the point where they start fabricating their experience. It’s a strange phenomena. It would be nice to see a more formal study on this. I’m guess that form factor matters, and that mass adoption won’t happen until the headset transitions into a glasses form factor.