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Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

Can you say what you think is really cool about it?

It's fine if it's hard to explain. There are lots of things I can't explain the appeal of to me, and lots of things I didn't get until I tried.

But I'll admit I don't get the appeal of VR, so if you've got a good take on it I'd love to hear it. It would be great to be excited about something new. (It's been a while.)

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I have had lots of great experiences in VR.

I used to be a 3d modeler, so I've found sculpting and painting in VR to be excellent. Tilt Brush, SculptVR, Gravity Sketch, Medium. To scale up what you're working on, sculpt out a building while truly feeling like you're inside it. It's great.

Then there's gaming experiences. The first game I tried was Vader Immortal. It was a surreal experience, by far the most immersive gaming experience I've had. It sounds insane, but the first time you encounter Darth Vader, it actually made me realize for the first time that this is a terrifying person in front of me. It was the first time I didn't think of him as a cartoonish villain, but an actual hulking presence.

Then I tried SkyrimVR. At first I was unimpressed, as I was playing a melee character. Swinging weapons that are meant to be heavy and attack with respect to their weight felt extremely silly when I could just wiggle them around as fast as I wanted. But then I tried bow and arrow, and the game did a complete 180. I became fully immersed and played all the way through. It was indescribable the degree to which I inhabited this world for about a month, in no way comparable to my previous playthrough a decade ago in PC.

Then there's Beatsaber. Best cardio I've gotten in years. It doesn't feel like exercise because it's genuinely fun and extremely hard, and you come out drenched in sweat.

The horror experiences, like with Resident Evil 7, absolutely terrifying. There is no genre more enhanced than horror.

And finally, the gimmicks. I brought VR to a few family events where kids and adults alike were trying the gimmick games. We cast the screen to the TV so everyone could watch, and they proceeded to try Richie's Plank Experience. Again, it's gimmicky, it's not meant to be lasting fun, but it was a great introduction for everyone, and they loved it. Watching adult men crawling on the floor out on a virtual plank.

This all clicks with my experience with VR, but don't you think this is pretty small fry and additive? You've got some fun hobby-grade content production stuff, you've got a handful of good but small scale experiences, you've got a handful of things that already exist but that there are arguably benefits to doing in VR (in exchange for drawbacks), you've got an exercise video game that more or less compares to existing exercise video games, and everyone agrees it's a sort of fun novelty that fills the same kind of niche the Wii did 15 years ago. I agree all of this stuff is cool. I had a great time with some of the VR games I played on Steam including Beat Saber. But how is this totally underappreciated? I think most in the gaming community would exactly echo this level of appreciation. It just isn't and won't be a bigger deal than this.

I love my Oculus, at least for my use case, exercise, and I highly recommend it. I think exercise is the killer feature of VR, personally.

For context: I'm not much of a gamer. But I was looking for some way to do cardio exercise in my small-ish apartment. I heard from a few people about exercising in VR. so I got the Oculus.

And it's been great! There are lots of games that are purely exercise-focused, which I liked a bit. Then there are lots of games which are just games, but that you also can get a workout doing, which I absolutely love. There are enough of them that I think I can keep playing for a while before ever getting bored.

I love table tennis, but don't regularly go play anymore cause kids/family/etc, lack of time. But I can put on the headset and be playing an almost completely realistic game of ping pong with an AI or a random important anytime I want, for a quick 5 minute break or for something more.

Then there are the other games - games that are actual games. I'm most surprised by this - since I'm not a gamer, I wouldn't have thought I would be drawn to these. But apparently games in VR are just much more fun, or at least much more novel to me - and I've actually found myself using VR to play games without an exercise focus more and more.

So to summarize - if you want a way to do some cardio at home, in a relatively small space, without feeling like you're working out - a VR is a great way to do that. And let's face it, most people need to do more cardio.

(I'm also very excited for using VR as a workspace, but way more skeptical of this really being a thing.)

Edit: Oh, and this is way more out there - but if there is ever a good, affordable omni-directional treadmill thing ala Ready Player One - it will instantly make VR 100x more valuable for exercise, and I think it will be completely transformative.

Thank you. Doing cardio in VR doesn't cause motion sickness issues?

I've got a really strong stomach, and played something on an Oculus for far longer than the device's owner could, but it was still only a half hour and I was getting queasy.

I'd like to think it works. I am a runner and I hate treadmills, even with a TV. Something to make it bearable would be a big win on bad weather days.

I'm maybe not the best to ask, as I've rarely had any motion sickness issues. But the few times I have, it's been very specific games, and mostly ones in which you're "flying around" or some such.

Luckily, that means you can choose games that don't have this issue, and most fitness games are included. E.g. a lot of "fitness" games are like beat saber - you're effectively "standing still" and things are coming to you. Other games allow you to move around a little, but you're still basically "on the ground" and moving around, not flying.

So in my experience, it's fairly easy to do 30 minutes of something like Beat Saber, Pistol Whip, or similar games. And way funner to do that than do 30 minutes of just running, at least to me. (Sorry, I'm not much of a runner.)

That said, there's a reason for my belief that when a good omnidirectional treadmill hits the market, it will make VR 1000x better. It will make all fitness games instantly much better, and more realistic, and it turn many games that aren't currently fitness games into fitness games by having you walking or running around a lot. An FPS that allows you to actually walk around will instantly be the best game ever, in my mind, but right now there's no way I'm doing that for exercise.

Certain gaming experiences are really good in it. First person shooters are great. Horror games are so effective they are basically unplayable.

I can imagine VR gaming becomes the new racing wheel. Something that never dies and never becomes ubiquitous. Just another way to enjoy entertainment.

FPS are immersive, fun for an hour or so, but I'd rather play with keyboard/mouse/monitor anyway - I'm often tired after work and just want to chill for a bit. Actively moving in VR gear is more of an excersize.

Otherwise you can go play paintball/softball etc and it would be 100% better than any current VR tech.

I can play VR shooters at home. I don't even know how I would play paintball as they are far out in rural areas without public transport access. That's an anecdote but its not unique. VR brings accessibility to a lot of people.

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