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Comment by dtagames | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty much an accepted reality that VR has not been a big success for anyone. Disney failed early with DisneyQuest. Second Life hasn't become popular even though VR hardware has existed for a long time. There's the complete joke called Magic Leap. MS decided to pivot to military applications because theirs didn't sell. Google gave up on Daydream. And Facebook just laid of 10,000 people, many of them in the metaverse department.

The most likely reason is physics. These devices aren't fun to use. They're disorienting and make people sick. In practice, they add nothing to the experience -- certainly not the experience of a business meeting! It seems quite ridiculous to think that would ever have been a use case.

So, the article really isn't a hit piece but perhaps a rather late and rather obvious commentary on something that even Zuck has to admit isn't a thing.

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I agree with almost all of what you said. There's basically nobody who's made money selling VR hardware, 99% of VR games are extraordinarily primitive, motion sickness is a major barrier to making more diverse kinds of games, the barrier to entry is high (you need a high end PC and you have to set the damn thing up, both initially and every time you want to play it).

But there's one small thing - it can be fun! and LOTS of it!

Job Simulator is my go-to so-you-wanna-try-VR game. It's fun. It knows what its limits are and create fun within them. It's silly. Anyone can play it! It's like the fun of the point-and-click games of old but in VR.

Every single person who I've shown - from my mom to my wife to friends - has been absolutely blown away by how readily your brain accepts the VR world as "real". Your brain's ability to "adopt" the VR hands is just a magical thing to experience, and so fun!

The same goes for the Valve VR demo thing whose name I forget, where you're in an Aperture lab or something and can go through portals to do different minigames as well as mess around in the lab itself.

It reminds me of Wii Sports for the Wii and the motion-sensing wiimotes. Some cute demos (and nearly some full games in their own right) that show off the hardware, and the spark is truly there and your grandparents play 200 hours of wii bowling, but then nobody can figure out where to go next. People didn't like it in Skyward Sword. So eventually it's kind of ditched for the Wii U and then kind of brought back for the Switch Joycons but only to be trotted out every once in a great while for a quirk.

We seem to kind of be somewhere in there for VR except that some companies scented THE NEXT BIG THING and tried to be the google/facebook/amazon/etc of this new paradigm but they all got collectively wiimote'd. So the comedown is a lot more dramatic than just the WiiU not having a remote.

I hope someone figures out google glass and AR stuff though. And not just the garbage AR that pokemon go et al call "AR" where it's just "look we put your phone's camera as the background of the scene" and they use GPS + PoI's. Real AR like I'm the pilot of a damn evangelion and it's giving me readouts. (JARVIS/Iron Man might be a more recent reference that I would also accept as well).

> motion sickness is a major barrier

I recall a story from a colleague who knew some folks who had worked on the game System Shock (this was in the early nineties). System shock was one of the first games that had an engine that implemented real 3D physics; so when you threw a grenade, it would describe a real parabola. And you can lean around a corner and sneak a peak without exposing your entire body to enemy fire, and when you did that, the 1st person shooter rendering would realistically reflect that. They had an experimental version of the game that was hooked to a virtual reality headset at the time, and gave up on it because, as one of them joked, it was "virtual reality, real nausea".

This was 30 years ago, and things haven't improved since then.

"Descent" goes back 28 years and I remember getting pretty disoriented and a little nausea, worse than I ever experienced flying a small airplane.

"Descent" was the game where you blast robots in a very 3-d mine.

One oddity of "VR" is it initially attracts people with excellent visuospatial analysis skills; the problem is the majority of the population is not good at it. It would be like implementing a user interface based on bench pressing 275 pounds of real world weights; it would be an incredibly popular fad among people already qualified to participate, then the general public would LOL and that's it. So that's the problem selling VR to the general public; most folks aren't very good at solving maze puzzles and drawing 3D CAD drawings in their heads so a UI based on that will be a hard sell.

When I started out in web design and development in 1995, a lot of companies were showing early "VR" and 3D interfaces, touting them as the next great thing. Somehow, people got the idea that reaching around in 3D space for everything was better than just picking from a menu, a list, or an index -- like we have done for 1,000 years.

I feel like all the 3D hype is just that. While it could be fun in games in a holodeck-type environment (but probably not outside of that, 'cause physics), I don't think the majority of everyday human interactions with information are better off in 3D. Why would anyone think so? We don't read in 3D. We don't write in 3D. We don't make pictures in 3D. Why would a 3D interface be better?

Microsoft recently laid off nearly the entire HoloLens team. Even groups working on AI/ML for things like computer vision and scene detection / 3D understanding weren't spared. All they care about is a Chatbot these days.

That’s not accurate

Sound business decisions.

I’d say PSVR did quite well. Your examples above - from FB or Google - failed for the same reason everything else they try ends in failure - it’s a problem with those corporations and their “engineering culture”, not with VR.

A lot of the tech will eventually see widespread use. AR will be a huge deal when they get it right, just because having HUDs will be a game changer for a lot of jobs.

I think the most promising VR technology might be something like Starline [1]. No headset to wear. No disorientation. You just sit down and you're there with somebody else. It's a more limited use case, but one with many business applications as well.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q13CishCKXY

It’s not accurate that many were from the metaverse org.

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