Comment by phh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phh | Hacker News Reader

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I like it quite a lot for gaming as it's much more immersive than PC gaming (I don't have any other gaming console). I play both wire-free on Oculus Quest 2 itself, or (still wire-free) from a Windows VM with a RTX3070 pcie passthrough (so I can dynamically switch between ML and gaming usage).

Immersive-ness doesn't only come from just the screen, but also from the fact that you can't multi-task (one could say this is a sad state of my attention).

I play various kind of games. My main usage is "sport", with synthriders and beat saber. I love story telling/puzzle games, though they are quite costly (like 30€ for 4 hours of game play) so that doesn't account for a lot of play time. But I also like a small Cities Skyline (Cities: VR by the people from Cities Skyline), Deisim where you play a god, and Derail Valley, where you drive a train in a miniature world.

As a software engineer I have tried using it for other stuff than gaming, but even though it feels cool, I never found it actually useful. I can keep the headset 4 hours (and probably the whole day) without any issue (assuming no frame drop, which do happen when running from Windows, not in the Quest environment), so that's not the issue. Maybe with a better display resolution it could be better, but honestly I doubt it.

Just a word on the metaverse: I do think it can be pretty cool for socializing (Ready Player One is IMO not that far-fetched), though Meta's universe development still looks extremely primitive compared to everything else that exists. At this point, I think that a Meta Quest 3 with face emotion detection (and improved SoC and display compared to Quest 2), and let competing companies provide a good environment based on that hardware+OS (for instance Rec Room) would be pretty good, but I doubt that could follow Meta's bottom line.

I find it pretty crazy to see the current state of VR and conclude Ready Player One is not far off.

We are nowhere close.

Alright, there are a lot of stuff in Ready Player One, so I'll formulate more in depth what I meant:

Having one VR universe from which you can join various worlds where a world is pretty much its own game, and you can join friends in that, and it needs to be "alive enough" to feel like actual social interaction. Pretty much a very big MMORPG.

Several games actually have most of that (including Meta Horizon), except that the games inside are very crude, that the transition from one world to another is clunky, and it's obviously completely lacking emotion (which Meta is trying to solve, I don't know whether they will).

There are indeed other stuff in Ready Player One: - walkpads: That's definitely cool, but they already do exist. They are costly, but same in Ready Player One: Only few people have it. But yes movement in VR is a bit of an issue. I sadly don't expect any progress on that matter (give me a trackball under the hand!), until we can connect to our brain (which I think could be possible 5-10 years from now for simple move forward/backward commands?) - stunts: There are a lot of stunts made in game. I don't think there is any reasonable way to implement that realistically. That being said, stuff like EchoVR are already very immersive imo. - haptic gloves: Okay everyone has it in Ready Player One, and even though we have some stuff, it's nowhere near mass-market. So yes I'll agree this is missing compared to Ready Player One.

No, we are not close. Walk pads and haptic gloves will not solve it.

VR is not immersive. The people in the movie (or book) are IN THE WORLD. They teeter over ledges, and jump over things. They touch things. They move around. They fiddle with small objects.

Our VR isn’t anything like that. If your foot is half off a ledge you are not off balance. You don’t jump, not really. When you do it tends to feel gross. You don’t touch things. Objects feel very fake up close. Most stuff is basically immutable. And it has to be because the game engines aren’t capable of more. It’s all clearly fake.

I think that screen resolution is the only significant hardware limitation left to use a headset for work, etc. Small details are too uncomfortable. I would love to try one of those headsets that have an extra high-density small display behind the center of each primary display.

Right, I didn't want to expand too much on that matter as I usually make unreadable comments. Most of the reasons I can think of that would prevent me from using headset for work are largely personal (though I think many people might identify themselves in it):

I need to play with stuff with my hands (and I mean random stuff, not just always the same toy. Like right now I'm busying my hands with mounting/dismounting some lego that requires putting a bit of force in it, not really something you can do with a controller). I need to look at my smartphone. I might do interruptible stuff which would require corner vision (say I'm playing on TV, waiting for my build to finish that I can see in the corner of my eye). I'm chewing through gums (k I could probably do that with headset on)

Possibly all of those stuff could be fixed with better hw and sw. But. BUT. One of the feature I really like about current day VR, is that I am disconnected from everything. Which would pretty much contradict fixing every issue I have mentioned.

The more interesting ways that a headset could be incorporated into a workflow don't exist yet. Before that can happen, we need a baseline of hardware utility. I think my index is very close, but text needs to be comfortable.

An addition after seeing a sibling comment:

It's more annoying to setup, but I also like playing Euro Truck Simulator 2 in VR with a 1080 wheel. As someone who doesn't have a driving license, that makes me see why some people like to drive to clear their mind.

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