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Comment by eddythompson80 | Hacker News Reader

VR in general is dying a slow death. “AI” has taken its place as the next hot thing for the 2020s. VR never demonstrated enough value for the general public. Sure there are some highly specialized niches where it excels, but it’s never gonna be the next iPhone that everyone must have to function in the world.

VR was the darling of the 2010s but it crashed and burned due to both physical limitation and lackluster technology. Microsoft throw their hat in the ring, and are now walking away as they see abysmal usage.

I don’t even know if Apple could save it. Of course there is the age old conundrum of “are people not using it because the implementation sucks, or because the concept sucks”. PDAs being the poster child of this.

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Sounds like the typical cycle of new technology, that even LLMs will go through at one point.

- Thing is invented and people think it's cool

- Suddenly everyone wants this cool thing to be everywhere and do everything

- People start to realize the limitations and cool thing gets used in niches where it actually makes sense.

For VR, some people thought it'd replace gaming as a whole. Instead, it just made simulator games a lot better, but the rest is kind of gimmicky (said as someone who does enjoy VR a lot).

Similar thing will happen with LLMs and also the next cool thing.

LLMs are a little different.

The consumer buy in for language based interfaces is way less. ChatGPT is literally the fastest growing product of all time. It already generates a ton of value (more than VR ever did)

LLMs are more likely to become technology that everyone uses every single day (like phones.) even after it loses its hype.

VR will never get there.

Maybe mixed reality will, but I just don’t think most people will want screens on their eyes.

> LLMs are more likely to become technology that everyone uses every single day (like phones.) even after it loses its hype.

Smartphones/tablets is another good example where the industry first were amazed by it, then industry started to shove it down everywhere even when it didn't make sense ("you can perform all your daily work tasks on smartphones/tables now!", "Now you can code on your iPad!") and eventually it went back to its optimized use cases, instead of being used for everything.

Ah, and also, every proponent for these technologies when they are at the max of the hype, have a period of "Ah, but X is different than Y" while if you hang on for some years, you'll see the exact same cycle, even for X.

I’m not seeing this cycle for phones.

For example.The most popular web browser, by far, is chrome from android. (according to caniuse) This was not the case before the iPhone. Accessing the internet on the go is a game changing feature.

People use their phones every single day for a variety of tasks.

Phones had their hype phase (the whole there’s an app for that phase), but obviously they’re here to stay.

I think LLMs will be similar.

Unlike VR, which never hit that critical mass.

> For example.The most popular web browser, by far, is chrome from android. (according to caniuse) This was not the case before the iPhone. Accessing the internet on the go is a game changing feature.

I was talking about entire categories of products, or industries/sectors/niches, rather than competitors within one industry.

> Phones had their hype phase (the whole there’s an app for that phase), but obviously they’re here to stay.

Yes, but at one point everything was trying to be an app on the smartphone, while now it's been dialed back instead.

And they're here to stay, just like VR is here to stay, just within the niches it has found. Which may or may not expand in the future depending on capabilities/availability of experiences.

There’s some miscommunication here, sorry.

I’m saying that smart phones are pervasive in the daily life of at least a billion people.

I think that LLMs will eventually reach those numbers even after the hype phase ends. I think this based on the accessibility, utility, and ease of use of them. I think the growth of LLM products is a kind of indicator for this.

I don’t think VR will ever get to that scale. I don’t think Vr will disappear, but it’ll never see the same scale of usage.

I think this because of the physical and economic barriers to using VR and the fact that people generally don’t like having things strapped in front of their eyes.

I’m not really sure what you’re trying to say.

LLMs are a fad like cellphones are a fad.

Cool that I didn't say that either are fads then, so we agree :)

Ok, my lazy use of words. Substitute the word "fad" with "niche".

VR found a couple of very specific niches where it brought value. LLMs are already starting to pervade society in both good and bad ways and will likely continue on that trajectory. The obvious uses are many, and non-obvious ones are emerging.

If that's what you're saying (it does not appear you are), then we agree.

Sorry but VR will never die, its future potential is too enormous. It just has cycles of popularity and we might see a new surge with the Q3 being a very popular holiday gift this year.

> "Future potential .. enormous"

With foreseeable technology VR is always going to need something that covers large parts of your head, covering at least your eyes and ears. This is fine in specific cases like gaming, but it seems very unlikely to be something everyone uses all the time.

No matter how you spin it it's still a gimmick and will probably stay a gimmick for a very long time. I was present at the HTC vive release in LA, none of the promises realized since then. It's the same hype cycle since the 70s or so

Everyone I know who tried VR has 30 minutes of excitement and literally never mention it ever again.

> Everyone I know who tried VR has 30 minutes of excitement and literally never mention it ever again.

Well, except of they like simulation games like flight simulators. Then they surely have already migrated to a VR setup and won't ever go back. Yes, I'm one of those.

How long do you typically spend under the goggles? Back when I played Elite Dangerous in VR, 4..5hr sessions were completely exhausting. I since switched back to traditional head tracking for flight simming (although I have to admit that at least for helicopter landings the spatial awareness and depth perception in VR is extremely useful - but it's just too damn exhausting).

Not the OP, but I spend in FS2020 up to 5 hour flying with HP Reverb G2 (2048x2048 per eye) without any issues. Frankly, it feels like being in a real airplane and one can visually recognize all their real favorite spots without any issues. Losing this would be a major blow for me to run any simulators as it's just so much better and outclasses any 3D projections on the screen.

> How long do you typically spend under the goggles?

Max around 3 hours I think, that's the longest amount of (consecutive) free time I have available.

I remember in the beginning (First version of Oculus I think?) I could play for something like 20 minutes before being tired from it. Not sure if it's because of the HP Reverb G2 I have now, or because I got used to it.

What flight simulator game would consider existing VR resolutions good enough? Reading tiny dials on a virtual cockpit? Not really. Visual IFF in a combat sim? Not a snowball's chance. That leaves us with arcadey games that put everything you need conveniently in some not-sim-at-all HUD overlay, and perhaps some paragliding sim where the only instrument is the variometer and that is mostly read through audio cues. Now racing sims, that's a different beast: two large dials and huge demand for spacial awareness. I'd be surprised if screens where still around in that scene five years down the line.

I'm using a Pico 4 with Il-2, no assists. Dials are 100% a non-issue (headset resolution has been good enough to read them easily for years). Spotting and recognition are fine.

Is the Index that far behind? I basically bought it with IL2 as my main excuse (mostly hoping for some magic hack to repurpose lighthouse for desktop head tracking, but I never got around to adding a Vive tracker) and for me it was a clear not even close to acceptable. Tolerable for some quick "blow up some AI targets" but super far using a screen with my old webcam wannabe-trackir.

I've never used the Index so can't personally compare them. vr-compare.com shows it as having about 30% less pixel density, which is substantial; the pancake lenses of the Pico 4 also offer a large sweet spot. (The Reverb G2 is perhaps the most popular headset for Il-2, and sacrifices a little FoV for a little more pixel density than the Pico 4). The only annoyance with the Pico is that it's not really intended for PCVR, so you'll need to pay $10 for Virtual Desktop. But once set up I've found it to work well.

Trading FoV for density would certainly be the correct choice for flight sim, not much value in peripheral vision while scanning horizon or instruments.

Do you spend much time zoomed in, losing the angular 1:1 mapping of the viewport? I did that a lot with a headtracker (makes you really strive for precision, I had a custom build of freetrack with generous per-pixel hystheresis), but under the headset zooming felt more wrong than expected.

FoV is still very valuable for general situational awareness, IMO.

I spend very little time zoomed in. Mostly when trying to pick up a ground target. I agree it feels very wrong in VR.

I use a HP Reverb G2, with X-plane and Microsoft Flight Simulator. I can read the dials (yes, even the tiny ones) just fine with the built-in controls. But most of the stuff I do is programmed with keyboard shortcuts/my HOTAS flight controller.

I would not be able to go back to standard 2D-view-of-3D experience again after getting used to VR. Can't even effectively look around your shoulder, and a bunch of other things.

I still remember the time when airspeed and altimeter reading on the HUD on a Rift DK1 were literally just ":::" and "::::", they just were. But that's a long time ago.

You have to admit that the promise of true pass-through capabilities have been achieved with the Quest 3 (e.g., watch YouTube videos in a screen overlaying your vision while doing laundry), and that Apple's solution promises to finally make VR something that can work for general purpose computing.

Not that I don't agree with you, as someone who sold my Valve Index. I consider it to be a technology that takes a wild amount of development money and technology to basically take solved problems and put them in an interesting perspective in front of your face.

Also, I've seen reviews of spatial videos (Apple's marketing term for stereoscopic surround-y video capture) that describe them as eerily real, like you're living inside a memory. I think that may be an interesting use case (plus, unlike Apple's silly tech demo showing a dad capturing a video with a big VR headset strapped to his face while he watched his kids play, you can capture spatial video with a phone).

By that token we had viable PDAs (Palm Pilot) since the late 90s and it took 2 decades to get smartphones. The first consumer level VR headset (the Rift CV1 ?) launched in 2016, so we're still less than a decade into it.

Comparing the windows CE devices we had in the early 2000s and the Quest 3 for instance, I think the stages are not that dissimilar: they require enough effort and compromises that the general public would not care, but there's actual real world use cases and enough companies willing to invest in the field and bringing incremental and not so incremental evolutions.

You appear to be in violent agreement with the parent commenter. What everyone in this thread is saying is: VR might be big someday, but that won't be this year, or next year, or possibly even this decade or next decade.

To continue to use the PDA analogy, if you went back to the mid-90s and told people "these will be everywhere in 20 years!", people would still shrug their shoulders and go about their daily lives same as ever, because 20 years from now ain't today. And when it comes to VR, we're all shrugging our shoulders.

I agree with your general take on the time line, but people mid-90s were definitely seeing where it was going. The move from phones in cars, to pagers, to cell phones, feature phones, and win CE phones happened in about a decade and some. That's enough evolution speed to understand that the next turn will happen within a few years.

The same way I think everyone sees smart glasses coming. We just have no idea which company will crack the nut, what will be the twist, and on what timeframe.

It'd be kind nice to replace my set of 4k screens with something physically smaller.

But that would need AR rather than VR (excessive isolation from the real world is bad), and way better resolution than headsets currently have.

> It just has cycles of popularity

Agreed, but those cycles are measured in decades, not months. VR had its last hype cycle in the 90's, and AI in the 80's and thus will the wheel of reincarnation continue to spin with VR and AI switching places until the sun dies ;)

The goal of VR is not VR:

- Ads that you cannot look away from

- Ads everywhere you look

- Tracking face muscle as you see ads, to build a model of your reactions and target you more aggressively

- Having more digital interactions that can be spied on

- Having more metadata about those interactions

- Seeing how you react to objects in digital environments and then serving you ads of those objects

As usual, the goals are spying and advertising.

I’ve got a Meta Quest 3 and it is great. I am playing the pack-in game Asgard’s Wrath 2 and it is the first AAA game I’ve seen in VR and succeeds in every way as a single player game.

It’s the most interesting thing this year in the game business in the sense that there is nothing special about Xbox or Playstation right now, the Nintendo Switch is ancient, they don’t plan to upgrade the Steam Deck anytime soon, etc.

Outside of that, I am interested in experiences that are more like a theme park, say 3-d models of boulders on Mars inside a natural history museum and it is not hard to make that kind of thing with A-frame.

Seems foolish to make such predictions this close to the release of the Apple Vision Pro. Maybe you are right, but also maybe we will get that paradigm shift people have been waiting for.

Apple themselves haven't said a word about Vision Pro since the demo event. If $300 VR headsets can't make a dent in the public consciousness, a $3500 bauble from Apple won't do it either.

I remember all the talk about iPad Pro's AR-capable cameras. Do you know a anybody who actually uses an iPad for that?

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