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Comment by ben174 | Hacker News Reader

I do believe one of the reasons VR has been slow to gain traction is because of the bulkiness/awkwardness of the headsets. This definitely takes care of the weight, but it still looks ridiculous. I don't foresee people sitting on the train wearing these.

The right headset is around the corner, but this isn't it.

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Sure you're not gonna wear one on your commute.

But on a long-distance train or a long plane flight? I could totally see people reclining and wearing this to watch TV and movies.

(Honestly, the gigantic IMAX-sized cinema screen in VR is kind of the killer app nobody is talking about. Not to mention it's the highest quality 3D movie experience you can get, if you want to watch something like Avatar.)

Obviously nobody's going to be playing games on a VR headset on public transportation, at least not ones that require moving controllers in space.

I actually asked for experiences of people with VR headsets for movie watching. No one said they would recommend it. I was kind of surprised. Do you think they are good for that use case?

They're amazing. You really need to have the right software though.

I've got a Quest 2, and the app to use is Skybox, and I watch stuff over SMB on my local NAS. The key things are being able to adjust the size of the screen and the angle of the screen. I can literally lie on my back on bed and watch TV on the ceiling. And the visual quality tends to be somewhere between 720p and 1080p -- you can make the screen big enough to resolve all 1080p detail, but it's kind of too large at that point. I think I mostly watch around an "850p" level of detail.

I also watch it with my AirPods Pro paired up, and the app lets me manually adjust the audio sync by 100 ms to compensate for the Bluetooth delay.

Watching TV through various specific apps can be more hit or miss, as they won't allow you to adjust the angle of the screen for example, so you can watch comfortably while reclining, or the Bluetooth audio delay. I assume they'll all figure this stuff out eventually.

So the tech is absolutely all there, but the UX can be very app-dependent.

Anecdotally, it's great in VR. It's actually become a regular habit for me; there's nothing quite as cool as watching a 3D movie with a friend who's a country away on a giant screen. This wasn't the case when FOVs were worse, though.

I use it often. It’s great for a few scenarios:

- all the TVs in the house are taken

- you want privacy. This is more for dorm rooms

- you want to watch something with your family or friends who live far away. This is way better than zoom or facetime

- you want something that’s the size of a 500 in screen or larger

- you want to watch something in 3D. 3D movies never worked for me until VR and the Big Screen app

I agree. By the time you're watching something on a virtual big screen, it's pretty low resolution.

I've done it. It's a gimmick, like many things in VR. It feels neat once or twice to sit in a virtual movie theater, and then you realize that's stupid. If you are spending $1000 on a screen to watch movies, you are much better off with a big, high quality TV.

Well, it's definitely not a gimmick for me -- it's the main way I watch TV now, IF I'm watching it by myself.

It cost $300 not $1000 (at least when I bought it), and there's no big-screen TV that comes even close to the size of the screen in my headset. And there's certainly no room in my bedroom to put a big-screen TV anyways, which is where I'm watching something if somebody's watching something else in the living room.

I prefer my 50” 300$ 4k TV over the Quest for watching things. This is very much a too each his own thing, but I hated watching things in VR as I found it incredibly inconvenient, awkward, and it frankly didn’t look as good to me.

I take my NReal Airs on planes. I use it for movies etc as well as private computer usage. I would recommend.

Anecdotal but I was on a flight recently and the fellow seated behind me brought his Quest2 for the flight. He said it was much better for watching movies than the poor quality of the in-flight screens. Makes sense since you can also download movies via Netflix or Amazon Prime

unless i lived in a very low crime rate area like japan, i would never wear a vr headset on the train

I wonder why VR headsets have not been designed from modified headphones instead of ski goggles.

Those can be trendy and nice looking, and people are still wearing them outside, even the bulkier models.

Headphones do not handle off axis weight well. The headband would just fall off, unless they have so much clamp force they make your jaw hurt instead

Weight could be better balanced, I think. Batteries and computing could be at least partially located in the earcups.

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