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Comment by rgmerk | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps I’m getting old, but back in the day it seemed like that when a consumer product was going to be a hit, “everybody” would want it watts and all because the good parts were so compelling people would put up with the rough edges.

I mean, I remember when Wolf3D was first released. Some aspects of it - the low-resolution bitmapped NPCs, for instance - were clearly stopgaps. But the over experience was so amazing you were prepared to ignore that.

With virtual reality, the argument seems to be “if we just polish it a bit more it’ll be a compelling consumer product”. How many more years of polishing is it going to take?

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I feel the hardware is already here, it’s the lack of users and software at this point. I struggle to think of what massive hardware improvement could be needed.

I still struggle to see a future where VR/AR headsets don’t have 50m users by the end of the decade. I wouldn’t be shocked to see the Quest3 be a sleeper success once the wave of interest generated by Quest2 materializes in the form of new software.

... wolfenstein 3d sold less than a million copies...

With VR I feel like it’s a bit different since fidelity is the product - unless the experience is near real life levels of realistic, there’s not much point. We’re probably a couple of generations away from that, VR will seem a disappointment until one day it’s not.

We play video games that aren't anywhere near real life levels of realistic. IMO the main issue with VR is it makes you feel nauseous

Bad/unoptimized VR makes people feel nauseous. I've never heard of anyone getting nauseous from a polished and performant VR experience like Moss or Beat Saber.

In beat saber you stand in one spot and objects come towards you in a narrow field of vision.

In a lot of VR games you move your character around while you do not and that is what causes a lot of nausea. If games have to be like beat saber for VR/AR to be successful that’s damning.

I think the Quest2 with its cellphone graphics utterly crushing PCvr put that argument out to pasture. 20 years from now standalone VR is still not going to be near real life levels of realistic.

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