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Comment by RC_ITR | Hacker News Reader

Here's the real problem with VR (taking your idea and saying it another way).

We trained our brains to know that we are going to 'trick' them with sight/sound all the time. TV, music in headphones, etc.

What VR doesn't do (apart from some of the weird Facebook prototypes you'll sometimes see) is affect any of the senses that actually make us feel immersed in a space.

So great, I'm looking at a beach and when I turn my head, it's still there. But it's 68 degrees in my apartment, I still feel the carpet on my feet, I still smell my partner cooking, etc.

It's honestly why a VR metaverse just seems so far away. My current problem with media is not that I can't see it anymore when I turn my head.

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What do you mean? It's 90 degrees and humid inside the headset.

Could be mistaken, but this comment sounds like it’s coming from someone who’s either not used VR often or who’s closest 6DOF VR experience was Google Cardboard.

The most important things for immersion are the visuals, then sound, and then your ability to interact with the environment (more on this later). Being able to affect your smell and temperature is just novel at best. If you were very familiar with VR, your picks for missing features would instead be the following:

- being able to physically feel virtual objects like a soda can. (You can kind of feel things that tap or strike you now with speaker vests.)

- being able to physically walk an infinite distance in any direction inside of a room

Even without those features, modern VR is immersive enough just like the internet was useful enough in the last 90s and early 2000s

We're getting close to 1: Feeling objects.

If you're sufficiently handy with a soldering iron and have access to a 3d printer, there's a guy doing Open Source force-feedback gloves out there.

> The most important things for immersion are the visuals, then sound, and then your ability to interact with the environment (more on this later)

I mean agree to strongly disagree I guess.

Thats an interesting point. The beach is a particularly high sensory input environment though. I have been thinking about something like the Yakuza games in VR, which is essentially just a accurate simulation of walking around a Tokyo neighborhood at nighttime. In a nighttime urban environment it seems to me sound is the defining sense, you wouldn’t necessarily care what the temp or smell was.

Tokyo at night is not Tokyo at night without the still, musky humid air with a whiff of yakitori sauce and charcoal.

For me grilled yakiniku and garlic frying in oil at ramen places come to mind. Tokyo at night is definitely full of delicious scents, but now that I’m thinking about it even if they replicated it in VR I’m not sure I would want to smell something delicious I had no chance of eating.

Whether or not you realize it, your mind will definitely care that it knows you're inside but the visuals are outside.

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