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Comment by MrJagil | Hacker News Reader

I think they missed the mark with that trailer.

They promote it like it’s a skateboard: cool tricks, fast paced, hip and happy. I don’t think that’s why you want a VR headset at all, it’s actually the opposite: immersion, sinking into a another world, it’s concious dreaming.

The D&D pitch could be perfect. I’d love to play a VR/AR d&d game. But in the video, the first thing he does is take off the headset and smile? It makes no sense. He should be totally enraptured, not happy to take it off.

It’s like they don’t get their own product.

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I think it's very interesting to just compare it to a wii ad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTsF_v66HhI

I think it comes off as a lot more immersive. Look at the woman bowling. The ad really makes it feel like she is bowling and throwing the ball that is 1:1 with the screen (more than the actual game tbh). Compare it to the images of the guy jerking his arms around the one minute mark. The bit of the japanese dudes just stepping back and helping themselves to lemonade in t he background is funny and smart as hell.

We don't see what the VR guy is doing. He is alone while doing it. The content they do show is clearly fake, like the dnd.

High fidelity motion tracking has a lot of disadvantages tbh. Like wii bowling. You can't waggle the ball in front of you. It more or less just detects your swing. It does feel your toss is... "real" because if you don't do it the intended way it just doesn't work and if you do it right, it works great. See the number of VR games that try to implement awful "throwing" mechanics where it's just you releasing an attachment to the ball and letting the physics do the rest. Hard problem.

> We don't see what the VR guy is doing. He is alone while doing it. The content they do show is clearly fake, like the dnd.

I think this is lazy marketing indeed. Fb didn’t need to sales these and you can still feel it.

I still remember that Wii ad from when it first aired, which shows how good it was.

I disagree with you. That trailer makes it a lot more appealing to a broader audience.

It gave me strong vibes of Nintendo's ads for the Switch and Wii.

Even if they can sell VR as a fully immersive experience, I doubt that would be something that drives more sales than a bunch of people smiling after they've experience what the headset offers.

If Meta wants this thing to be big, they can't just capture people that want fully immersive experiences.

Considering the dozens of billions of USD already spent, instead of playing half-way, Facebook could have considered to have a fully immersive experience by choosing the same path as Neuralink; connecting directly within the brain, or in some areas nearby (like one company that Neuralink allegedly tried to purchase).

If it is possible to read your mind, then it will be possible to inject game and ads at some point.

Facebook could open a gigantic business model: "we are directly in the brain of our users, our users are happy and are connected to the Matrix (Meta), you will not find better ad placement than here".

You aren’t thinking deeply enough if you think ads is what they'd do. Electrically connected chips can just zap the pleasure center, conditioning you to a level beyond the word brainwashing.

I think people talk too much about AI apocalypse and too little about neuralink. Neuralink will be the death of humanity in principle, eviscerating whatever hopes of freewill we hoped we had.

Imagine your employer programming the chip to give you pleasure when you work. Imagine autocratic nations implanting it into every newborn, and algorithmically controlling the nation’s thoughts —- leaving propaganda as a laughable, feeble relic of the past.

The Warrior's bland acronym, MMI, obscures the true horror of this monstrosity. Its inventors promise a new era of genius, but meanwhile unscrupulous power brokers use its forcible installation to violate the sanctity of unwilling human minds. They are creating their own private army of demons.

> Neuralink will be the death of humanity in principle, eviscerating whatever hopes of freewill we hoped we had.

Neuralink is a thing that will never achieve any sort of mass-market appeal, though, so I'm not nervous.

>Neuralink is a thing that will never achieve any sort of mass-market appeal, though, so I'm not nervous.

The only way I see it happening is if not having it becomes a significant competitive disadvantage in the workplace. If it could also stimulate parts of the pleasure center, perhaps that too.

If we reach a point where having brain surgery in order to avoid a competitive disadvantage in the workplace is a common thing, then I really do need to stop and get off of this planet. Things are already dystopic enough as it is.

On an infinite time scale, I think this comment will not age well, personally. Who knows if it will be Neuralink, but some kind of widely used brain interface seems inevitable to me now.

Who is to say subsequent versions will require anything like the invasive procedures we see today - pacemakers can be installed with keyhole surgery now and so forth, compared to the giant things we put in people in the 50s. People regularly get wireless subcutaneous glucose meters that pair with their phones or insulin pumps installed for diabetes too, the threshold of installing tech in bodies has already been crossed really.

If that was the intent, I think they failed miserably. Nothing in that trailer looked even a fraction as fun or high quality as a Nintendo experience. In fact it just reaffirmed why I'd much rather play Mario or Zelda on Switch for a fraction of the price.

> In fact it just reaffirmed why I'd much rather play Mario or Zelda on Switch for a fraction of the price

No debate from me the Nintendo games are vastly better and I'd take a Switch before a Quest almost any day of the year, but I think it's important to point out pricing is closer than your comment indicates - an OLED switch is 349, a quest 2 is 399 in the US and still competitive as a headset if you are looking for one. Obviously there is also the non-OLED switch, but I think point remains they aren't miles apart in pricing.

That's cool, but don't conflate the fact this doesn't appeal to you with it not appealing to the general population.

> It gave me strong vibes of Nintendo's ads for the Switch and Wii.

Nintendo doesn't make fully immersive games. They make fun games with often cartoon graphics and logic.

Which happens to be how people play "immersive" games anyway. The number of glitched GTA5 videos I've seen proves that its not really about immersion as much as it is about seeing if the physics engine of GTA5 can handle a car hopping across the skyscrapers or not.

Nintendo's entire pitch is: "Here's something we found fun", and it works. Because its not very clear that anyone else is focusing on ya know, fun things.

You are using a very narrow definition of "immersive" here - personally I don't think graphical realism is necessary to provide immersive experiences. Sure it can help, but its a very shallow way to think about gaming broadly.

People spend literally weeks of game time deeply immersed in both of the Zelda titles, as the obvious example.

I'm not talking about graphical realism.

I'm talking about shoving fire breathing blocks together with fans in the most recent Zelda game (so that you can build your own flying tank or platform). Its designed for fun and play, not immersion.

If anything, VR's issue is that instead of trying to be fun, they're trying to be immersive. No. You know why Beat Saber is one of the best games on VR? Because its fun.

I don't think the Beat Saber blocks realistically represent anything. The scoring system is pretty arbitrary (wider swings for more points as opposed to timing), etc. etc. But it works and is fun. That's the important bit.

I think it is just a challenge to market the experience. Immersion doesn’t look like immersion from the outside — all you know is you can’t see most of the actor’s face.

You also can’t accurately show what the user is experiencing because your advertising surface is typically not a VR device.

If someone can’t crack it then I guess the method will just involve grinding away at getting more users each generation so you can map their ad onto your own experience.

I think you're making an assumption that what you want from VR is what everyone wants. For me the last thing I need is total escapism or "conscious dreaming". The coolest thing I have done on VR is Superhot, an action game. And my main use case would be sim racing.

> He should be totally enraptured, not happy to take it off.

Most gamers don't want to make gaming their whole life. I want to have fun for 45-90 minutes and walk away.

They also don't do a good job marketing their metaverse.

Also: switch it up?

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