Hacker News Reader

Comment by kranke155 | Hacker News Reader

VR will never become mainstream. I’ve been working in VR since 2015 and I don’t use it daily. I don’t know a single person who uses it daily.

Maybe if you’re mildly autistic or remarkably introspective it works for you. For most people it’s a fundamentally alienating experience, like taking LSD but with none of the joy.

VR is fundamentally an industrial technology, good for training and other purposes. For entertainment or home use it’s purposeless. Ask anyone (non techy) who has one. They don’t use it.

The focus on VR is how I know Zuckerberg has no idea what he’s doing. VR is never going to work, not in its current incarnation. It just demonstrated that he has no idea how normal people work, and that he’s decided (for some reason) to completely ignore whatever data they have, which would show him that people just don’t use it.

View on HN

> I don’t know a single person who uses it daily.

I know a bunch of people who use it daily. They are all using Immersed[0] for work (disclosure, I'm an investor, but I invested because of the love their early customers had for the platform). Basically, you get a bunch of virtual monitors in VR.

It's way cheaper and much more portable than dragging five massive screens around, and the isolation is the point -- you can focus better when you have the headset on and headphones in.

But you're right, that is a niche, and not the social product Meta is hoping for.

[0] https://immersed.com

to someone who is prone to headaches with poor eyesight and long eyelashes (smudges the lenses), the idea of working in VR all day is at best delusional and at worst discriminatory

I'd say claiming that the concept of working in VR is discriminatory is at at the very least extreme hyperbole.

How do you get any work done with a big heavy uncomfortable weight on your head?

Looks like this could be interesting for me if hardware quality/pricing improves over the next decade.

This can’t be good for your eyes. Making people blind long term doesn’t seem like a good product strategy.

I once took our team from work to a VR center, as none had tried VR before. Circumstances were top notch: Valve, super high-end PC, large rooms, wide selection of games, all possible accessories.

We all had fun and that's it. Nobody ever talked about it again nor did anybody purchase a VR device themselves. It was more like a one-time ride in a theme park. Mind you, these are tech people with a good income. If here the hit rate was zero, that's quite telling.

I think VR will at one point have a true mass appeal, and when it does, it will change everything. Personally, I hope that moment is far away. This "let's add even more options to never leave the house" trend is backfiring.

> This "let's add even more options to never leave the house" trend is backfiring.

People who don't want to leave the house already have plenty of options.

People that love the outdoors or being sociable probably aren't going to swayed either.

I don't think VR will change much in either direction for most people. Personally I like a mix of things. I value staying indoors and experiencing media that is rewarding. I like getting out in nature when the climate permits. And I'm not a total hermit. I don't think VR change things for me or others. Digital crack already exists.

I was pretty skeptical but for a few months I use VR every day for a quick midday workout to wake me up (thrill of the fight and pistol whip). Can't believe how much it can get your heart rate up with just head and hands monitored. I definitely think if they start monitoring your feet it'll be used for a lot of exercise

I have one and use it probably a few times a week. It's become a necessity for flight sims for me, I no longer play them outside VR.

Flight sims aren't terribly mainstream, sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's enough of a crowd between flight and racing sims who are willing to spend small fortunes on peripherals to keep VR going at some scale.

For gaming generally, there's a lot of friction that'll have to be removed before mainstream success is a possibility, I think--reducing the weight of headsets, reducing the cost, solving motion sickness, improving the game selection, improving situational awareness with the real world, reducing the setup effort, etc.

A lot of current games aren't worth the effort of dealing with all that, at least not once the novelty of VR wears off.

How many people do you know who do the same thing as you?

When Nintendo sold the SNES it wasn’t one person here and another one there playing it. It sold millions and a good percentage of your friends had it.

People seem really stuck on "VR is either the next iPhone or it's nothing".

Isn't there a middle ground?

Of course there is. My point is Meta’s investment is currently being justified by home usage, and I will make a decent sized bet there will never be mass adoption of VR for home use in its current form.

Having worked in VR since 2015, I don’t know of a single person who uses it for their entertainment, period. Some folks here in the comments saying they use it for flight or racing sims, in which case Meta is sinking billions into an expensive peripheral for sim players, similar to a flight joystick.

See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32241770

I think you're overstating things but I agree to some extent. It's a niche product but there's more niches than just "industrial". There's still a lot of interest from the arts and creative sectors for example.

I agree. The only true sustained usage I’ve seen it is industrial training which is why I mentioned it. But yes there are other uses for it.

It’s mind boggling to me why or how Zuckerberg decided to invest so much on it. I wonder if it’s just a screen for the stock price not to collapse as he loses DAUs, and certainly young people, to TikTok and other apps. Because otherwise it doesn’t make a lick of sense to me.

I'm torn between "thanks for investing billions in a medium I love" vs "I hope the whole field doesn't get dragged when disillusionment sets in among Meta stock holders"

The secret is - there is no field.

Meta wouldn’t have to spend billions jump starting something if it was a commercial success. No commercial success in history needed tens of billions for commercial success. It either sells or it doesn’t.

> there is no field.

You obviously mean "there's no field fulfilling criteria X that I haven't spelled out".

VR predates Meta's acquisition and took far less than "tens of billions" to get to commercial readiness. Several small-ish companies have got products to market. Heck, even Google's half-hearted attempts resulted in a fairly decent 6DOF headset.

I’ll clarify - there is no mass consumer field for VR that will enable adoption or a market in the size of home consoles, laptops or televisions.

VR in its currently incarnation will not make a system that will sell 100 million units, which is the regular size market of the leading home console in a generation (both switch and PS4 sold this much).

I’m surprised they sold as much as they did tbh.

Supposedly the fitness hook is rather successful.

If it's like most other fitness products, it sells well but gets abandoned in the closet before very long.

people almost certainly said this exact thing about computers and the internet. that does not necessarily mean that VR will go the way they did, but it does show that just because it seems this way now does not mean it will be this way forever.

facebook and Zuckerberg may be unethical monopolistic robber barons, but unlike some of the other big players in the industry, they're not incompetent, and they never have been

I would guess that they believe the VR industry is awaiting a critical mass of adoption where, like computers, then the internet, then social media, it will suddenly go from being a techy niche to a viable alternative platform for society. presumably they're gambling that the negative anecdata you're reporting will reduce as the UX improves, and I personally think they're probably right

They’re probably wrong.

> VR will never become mainstream.

But XR will. It's clearly the future of general purpose display tech.

VR is extremely purposeful in my simracing rig

I do table tennis in VR almost every day. There's also a very good Golf simulation.

Thanks for the seemingly well informed opinion. I, too, would like to see VR labeled more as a “tool” rather than “the future(!) of {education|recreation|work|etc}”

I've been big on VR since the Oculus kickstarter days, and I have to admit that I don't play it every day.. but that's just because there aren't any polished high-end multiplayer games for it yet*. All my friends are on WoW, Fortnite, and League of Legends, and old pancake games with friends are more fun than VR indie games with randos

You should check out Half Life: Alyx to get a glimpse of what VR could be someday. It's a super-polished, super-fun game, and even just standing around in it doing nothing is mindblowing compared to any non-VR game

* There are some good multiplayer action games, but so far as I know they all require you to "get your VR legs" which is a non-starter for me

I appreciate the suggestion, had never heard of Alyx before seeing this thread. I’m admittedly quite reticent to use VR in my personal time but mostly because I don’t play many video games (and have never “happened upon” any VR exposure thus far) - small amounts of time gaming is often something on the N64. The technology is immensely impressive, though, and hope the games gain polish over time!

AR will absolutely become mainstream

Reply on news.ycombinator.com