Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrm4 | Hacker News Reader

Got a 2 on accident, an aunt was dazzled by ideas of exercising and meditating and was wildly underwhelmed by the actual experience, and gifted it to my family.

Kind of fun to have around very occasionally, but I'm still seeing nothing to indicate anything more than "overpriced, non-essential toy." Would never pay good money for one.

(and this is from a household where the Steam Deck is absolutely an essential toy.)*

*edit, come to think of it -- said aunt has logged more hours on my Steam Deck even though we don't live together, thanks to the Jackbox series. I feel like there's a lot of good anecdata here :)

View on HN

> but I'm still seeing nothing to indicate anything more than "overpriced, non-essential toy."

I saw a reviewer mention that VR is like "having your favorite amusement park ride at home": it's awesome, but at the same time you're not going to ride a roller coaster for 3 hours everyday.

VR can be loads of fun, but I still find it exhausting, and very focus demanding. It will, for me, always remain a nice plus, but never as essential as something I can easily pause and put down.

Absolutely.

I LOVE "Pistol Whip," but I'm in my 40s. I literally can only do about 2 or 3 rounds of that in one day :)

For whatever reason Pistol Whip gives me crazy anxiety.

Definitely. A bug and a feature for sure. Superhot lets you slow everything to matrix/bullet time which is super cool, but Pistol Whip is like LETS SEE HOW YOU FARE IN REAL TIME. :)

This resonates for me as well. It's just too exhausting and uncomfortable, and I hate the feeling of isolation from the real world.

I think it may be the case that the general public will find putting on VR goggles and losing their visual connection to the physical world around them to be weird and alienating in a way that fundamentally cannot be overcome by technical improvements.

Maybe VR goggles are OK for small doses and the novelty, but perhaps this is just too jarring and strange to ever become the primary way people interact with games (never mind the much touted non-gaming applications).

For hardware, visual connection to real is what Apple and Meta are solving with their latest products. For software, non-VR software in the room is still lacking but Apple and third parties will solve it. Many VR software are better with remain isolated.

Starting with the Quest Pro, I think this problem has been solved. When I started using it, aside from the lightness, I noticed that I didn’t care about adding in the light shields. I liked being able to have a decent view of both my left and right at the cost of immersion. I’m sure the vision pro will take this a step further

> having your favorite amusement park ride at home

I dunno, I'm still waiting for a good recreation of Haunted Mansion in VR.

I think Half-Life Alyx would qualify

I regularly play competitive VR shooters for hours at a time - against servers populated with people who do the same.

The novelty wears off after a bit and then it’s mostly just a less convenient version of a game console (the limited software really hurts any other use)

Good point -- I do wonder if it's inherent or if we really are missing some "much better software?"

A thing that makes me think the latter might be the is how there's no real Google Earth for the Quest, which strikes me as madness?

(also, Aircar and having to jump through hoops to find Tiltbrush/Openbrush?)

The PC Oculus software was much better so there’s definitely more they can do; the Quest software is full of artificial limitations, like having window placement and sizing be unnecessarily limited. They’re also somewhat hostile to sideloading (not blocking it but making it more difficult than it needs to be) which probably hurts niche use cases

Yup, I do the sideloading.

It's kind of interesting how garbage most the sideloaded apps are? I'm not expecting amazing, but, like even your average popular Roblox game has more polish.

Even without VR, I think Google StreetView (or equivalent competitors) are heavily underrated contents. Improving UI like FPS game would make significant difference even in desktop. Maybe it's too costly for operator due to bigger data and bad cache hit rate, and difficult to monetize.

>but I'm still seeing nothing to indicate anything more than "overpriced, non-essential toy."

This seems like a semi common sentiment. To those who used both a Valve Index and a Quest 1 or 2, is this also true for the Index?

So I do have access to Indexes and the HTC ones, and they do seem to have some more stuff, but I'm also curious what other people think. I definitely could see it if they had more things like Google Earth, which is weirdly absent from the Quest.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com