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Comment by wisnoskij | Hacker News Reader

I think this fundamentally misses the point of VR and buys into to the advertisements too much.

Yes, titles need to be better at seated play, because it is a reasonable way to play, given almost no one has enough room to actually walk around.

But the entire point of VR is the controllers, not the headset. The headset is a huge pain in the ass, annoying, blurry, and tiring to use. No one would put on a headset if it were possible to transfer hand movements to a game world any other way. The monitor has to be glued to your face, but that is a downside, not the benefit.

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I can't tell if this is a tongue-in-cheek jab at the article's "missing the point of VR" or if you think the Wii is the next step in the evolution of VR. The whole point of VR is the immersion created by being able to look around with the parts of your body made for looking around and seeing a virtual reality substituted for the real one, i.e. the headset. Heck, I can be pretty satisfied with a VR headset and a bog-standard Xbox controller, so long as I have free-look based around twisting my neck.

Agreed. Flying around in Elite Dangerous with a xbox controller is nuts when you have a VR headset on. Shame they didn't follow up on the VR experience with their expansions.

There is even a horror game where all you can do is look around, as you're canonically bound to a wheelchair with chains. You can direct an AI companion with a laser pointer, and that's about it. No controller required (or allowed for that matter).

A great use of VR without full-body controls was "Sir, You're Being Hunted". They changed nothing about the game when they added VR support, except that instead of being able to press ALT or whatever to free-look your head around, you could just... look around. All other controls and whatnot remained the same.

Funny aside about that game, the initial development had promised multiplayer, and then the dev team went incommunicado for like 2 years, during which time everyone assumed the game had died. Then 'Surprise!' multiplayer release. Another year of radio silence and boom, VR support. Mind you, VR headsets were not yet widely available, as in maybe you could see one at some sort of tech fair, but there was no chance you could just go into a store and buy one.

I worked at a startup once and we had early access to the Vive before release. We did a whole VR horror that was set in one hotel room. Imagine something between The Ring and PT. It was unfortunately never released but we never found someone who could make it all the way through without needing to take the headset off.

As someone who plays flight sim: the controllers hold zero value for me, because they're useless. However, the headset is the thing that turns a flight sim into a truly immersive experience, because it allows for the kind of situational awareness that cannot be replicated without a full monitor dome. A triple-wrap-around monitor setup doesn't even come close.

As it turns out, VR means different things to different people. The best VR implementations allow all those people to enjoy VR.

You think the entire point of VR isn't the actual virtual reality?

Without the headset you're back to looking at a 2D projection of the world. There are plenty of fantastic VR experiences that are fully playable in a seated position, flight sims in particular are vastly more immersive when you can physically look around the cockpit and the glass canopy.

No, I think 1 screen vs 2 minutely different screens is the same order of magnitude of virtual reality. Their is almost no benefit, and far more downsides. The complete failure of 3D movies and tvs demonstrates that easily, as they had way fewer downsides and still failed.

Also the neck control is nice, but the only significant benefit of vr is the use of hand-eye coordination for the controller. The use of our feet for locomotion would also be huge, but no one can afford a warehouse to play VR in, so that is possibly never going to happen.

Tried VR gaming via a warehouse-based company. https://zerolatencyvr.com/

Even with a warehouse, it was obvious that a lot of levels started with you having to turn around as you'd hit the end of usable space.

So even warehouses are not going to cut it.

But I disagree with your "2 minutely different screens" point. I see VR as being like Surround Sound. Yeah, you can play music and watch movies with mono or stereo audio - but the immersivity does add significantly to the experience.

> But the entire point of VR is the controllers, not the headset

Not to be rude, but have you used modern VR systems much? The above sounds exactly the opposite of what it's all about.

I have used a quest 2.

You can very easily use a large TV (or multiple monitors) if they cover a good amount of your vision plus any standard webcam and do "VR" without a headset. It just basically tracks your head movement and moves the view the monitor produces. Which is the entire point of VR.......

Also the headset does not transfer hand movements at all? Are you talking about the handsets like the two controllers that come with the Vive?

I am not sure how that would work? You want a bunch of monitors mounted around your head somehow?

All modern VR does either full body tracking with the base stations or quest style hand tracking. It would be pretty hard to arrange the monitors in such away that you has full hand movement I dont see how they would not get in the way unless they were tiny and strapped to your face.

I think parent commenter is talking about something like TrackIR, that uses a scaling factor to turn small head movements into large in-sim movements. It has been around since 2001 and has some advantages over VR for seated applications, particularly in terms of cost and comfort.

A 180-degree sphere of monitors would cost a whole lot more than even the fanciest VR headset.

Usually people are not doing full VR with these - more like a large TV in front of you and you can look around but not behind you.

Is there a SteamVR driver for TrackIR-like setup? It feels there ought to be.

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