Well, I can save FB/Meta a lot of money right now.
Goggles and VR/AR won't take off in any meaningful way for the next decade.
Goggles and VR/AR won't take off in any meaningful way for the next decade.
Apart from presence, spatial awareness, 360 degree stereoscopy with 6DOF motion etc etc.
Gravity Sketch, Tilt Brush, Beat Saber can't exist on a flat monitor. Most VR games would be radically different on a flat monitor (if they worked at all)
> as shown by the basically dead VR software market.
Either your info is slightly out of date or you've using a rather strict definition of "dead": https://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-quest-store-revenue-stats-da...
There is only one company seriously invested in this ecosystem in 2022. This is not a healthy platform. It's on life support.
For the record I don't think VR is ever going to see sales like the smartphone market and I don't think it needs to. And I think the "metaverse" is a silly hype bubble. But I do think it's found a healthy niche. Most trends are upwards and income for devs is healthier than it's ever been.
Sticking the knife in like you're trying to do just seems to be a little unneccesary - and isn't born out by the numbers I've seen.
I was responding to a comment hyping VR and saying, "companies ignoring Metaverse now will regret it later on." I find much less to disagree with in your statement, here.
I think a lot of people in this thread, and a certain very high-up sociopath at Facebook, see a much larger future for VR than this little niche. I think VR's rather large fall from its 2016-2019 height is good evidence against that.
Please avoid hyperbole. There's no need to overstate a sound argument.
VR doesn't really enable new experiences that people actually want in significant amounts. Tilt Brush has a couple dozen daily users[1] (remarkably consistent; demo stations, I wonder?). Beat Saber seems to be the one VR exclusive game that truly has been a lasting success, holding steady around 1000 to 2000 daily users on Steam and surely more on PlayStation. Maybe that's a clue that there's something there (I think it indicates more the popularity of rhythm games a la Guitar Hero, and a paucity of other VR titles worth playing). But I think if there really was something compelling about VR, we would have seen more than one successful game in the five years since VR has been on the market. Big names like Valve and Sony would have increased their VR resources, not mostly abandoned it. There just isn't good evidence that those couple things VR is genuinely capable of are something people actually want, and it's not like the big names didn't make an effort.
My point about the VR software market being dead is that there hasn't been a VR application worth talking about since 2020, with Half-Life Alyx. Everything they're putting out now[2] just looks like more of the bland flat-screen-with-Wii-controls experiences we've been seeing for five years. The gaming sites I follow don't really even bother doing VR reviews anymore. There just isn't significant work going on in this ecosystem, outside of Facebook.
[1] https://steamcharts.com/app/327140#All
[2] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/04/ghostbusters-vr-bonew...
I've got access to the developer console for Open Brush which is merely the open source fork of Tilt Brush. I'm looking at the stats and your estimates are nonsense.
Now - we can get silly and quibble about "significant amounts" but I get the feeling you're not arguing in good faith. VR is a mixture of wonder and disappointment, it's both overhyped and at the same time a genuinely a new medium. I'm not especially interested in it's commercial success. It can limp along for another decade as long as there's enough interest to keep it alive - even on life support. I've seen enough genuinely innovative work created to justify my interest so far. It's the most interesting medium to arise in my lifetime (and I'm not especially young).
It may never take over the world and that's fine. It just needs to pay it's way and keep it's head above water.
"I think Quest 2’s price was an important factor in the success, and there is lots of data showing non-linear sales increases below certain price points for many types of devices. However, we need to acknowledge that even if today’s hardware were completely free, billions of people wouldn’t be using it. There are tons of lapsed users today that have a VR headset sitting in a closet, not being used. In contrast, there are near zero “lapsed mobile phone users"." [0]
[0]: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ruv739914jzquue/connect2021.txt?dl...
If selling it to people requires they experience first then it's dead because that automatically limits the size of the market to people who are willing and able to spend $300+ to try it.
For VR to become mainstream people need to want it before they've bought it.
You want HTC Vive Pro at a minimum (it's high enough resolution to see much less pixelation) with Virtual Desktop or Bigscreen, both of which you can get on Steam.
Support for Linux is sometimes spotty though. I sometimes have trouble with Steam VR on Linux. It does work but can require effort to get working, depending on your setup.
[0]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/382110/Virtual_Desktop/
[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/457550/Bigscreen_Beta
Also, demos of the VD seem shaky. When I move my head, my monitor only seems to move 1 inch instead of the whole viewport shaking. This is because I'm also readjusting my eye-target.
Without eyetracking/gazetracking and proper SDKs these things will still feel like a mouse (aim with your head)
A valid opinion but I do think you should try it. I have an HTC Vive (not Pro). While the pixelation is pretty strong, I did get used to it for games. I couldn't get used to it for a high fidelity desktop screen or movies. This would be something that everyone can have a different opinion on for the same reason that everyone's eyes are different.
> Also, demos of the VD seem shaky. When I move my head, my monitor only seems to move 1 inch instead of the whole viewport shaking. This is because I'm also readjusting my eye-target.
Imagine this scenario: you move your eyes to the left or right and your computer screen is now blocking your view outside or to the person standing next to you. Or: you move your eyes to look at something on the left of the screen and instead the screen moves with your eyes so now you're looking at the center again.
Your eyes already do the tracking. Having the 3d scene move with your head and tracking would effectively double everything that moves. So I would counter-argue: it only looks shaky because you're viewing it on a screen recording instead of viewing it in 3D.
Here is an example from 2018:
https://www.seeker.com/gadgets/new-technique-generates-free-...
Wearing goggles is not very hi-tech or comfortable. Am just not seeing this become mainstream anytime soon.