The VR Winter Continues
ben-evans.com
ben-evans.com
VR companies are trying to make the iPhone of VR without considering that the iPhones success was built on decades of computing fundamentals. Before its possible to make good hardware and XR experiences, we'll need basic research in optics, display panels, tracking, multiview eye tracked foveated rendering, gaze correction, vari-focal, lossless wireless... the list can go on and on. Very few want to invest in solving these problems and simply wants to build a huge ecosystem with a large user base. Even Facebook/Meta, who have invested the most, have failed to tackle any of the major problems even after 10 years of being in the field. Since 2016 when 6-DoF tracked controllers became the norm, there hasn't been any major advancements other than slightly better visuals.
Looking at XR technology that has been successful, its usually because of a very clear focus on a specific application. VR flight and racing simulations with professional headsets like the Varjo appear seem far more developed. With a motion rig, these are good enough for training professionals. VR has solidified its place its this niche market at least. Microsoft's success often gets overlooked, but they have a $20B defense contract to supply IVAS AR headsets to the US military. If more companies focused on solving one of fundamental problems, it should eventually be possible to create a mainstream mass-market device that everyone will want to use.
There was new Wigig standard that may have solved this, but I believe its not being used anywhere.
On-device reprojection/ATW lowers the bar for bandwidth and latency considerably, and many of us spend hours and hours with VR streaming wirelessly.
Separate in-room WAPs would be the only real recommended modification for multiple vr users in the same building.
The problem with VR and AR is that you can't sit around the living room and enjoy the same entertainment. You isolate yourself away from others in the room in a strange way.
Wearing headphones is somewhat like this in that others can't easily talk to you, but at least they can waive their hands to get your attention if needed.
Speaking on this, I wish more games integrated the role of the God-mode / PC player like some do through things like dev consoles.
It creates instant entertainment for the outside players to be able to see and affect the game world. Some games are explicitly designed for PC vs VR while others, like Blade & Sorcery, give you the ability to drop in enemies for the VR player.
Anything that can keep a party lively and entertained while waiting their turn. I think I have more fun watching my friends scream & flail as I drop in more enemies than I do actually playing.
I loved it from the beginning. I spent almost 3 years at a VR startup.
Even when I play VR now with my Valve Index, I tend to play sitting VR like VTOL VR for ease because I don't enjoy walking around essentially blind anymore. At first, it was funny and novel to punch a hole in the wall, break a controller, hurt your hand but after a while, it just becomes annoying.
In my opinion, locomotion and the lack of innovation in it is what is holding VR back. Every game comes up with a new version of locomotion and somehow they always invent new ways to make people sick. The much-lauded Boneworks is nearly unplayable because all it takes is getting stuck in the wall or whipping too fast and you'll wish the trash cans were real.
VR games need to give up on joystick movement and start thinking about how to increase player comfort either by going back to roomscale so your virtual and physical movements are joined or the tried-and-true casting movement. Or alternatively, go even more niche and make the game VR Treadmill only so they can entirely optimize the game around heavy movement to push manufacturers and players to invest in the tech.
---
The other thing I am keeping an eye on is VR Computing. I am dying for Simula One to land it. I would love to spend my money on one but with them being, I think, a year past their self-imposed deadline with early production headsets not having the retro-futuristic look they sold but now looking like a boring Quest clone... not feeling great and thanking myself for not putting down the cash.
And stop listening to existing users who like joystick movement. I mean that entirely seriously: there's a vehement subset who will complain if reviews even mention nausea as a factor because 'it works for me, stop talking about purely personal factors'.
I do wonder though if shorter people feel it less so. It's always felt like I am skyscraper waving in the wind because it almost feels like my feet are in concrete blocks on a conveyor belt so my head feels disconnected as movement happens.
Until VR tech is strong enough that it becomes a must-own product type for the average gamer, any other consumer-focused use case should be considered dead in the water.
Everyone I know who bought an Oculus has it laying on some shelf accumulating dust after 2-3 months.
For an example of what I mean, look at the many, many FPS-style VR games that have the barest of bare-bone adaptations to the medium (stick movement, often button-based menus, etc), and then compare to Gorilla Tag. Even the big-name games like Half-Life Alyx have similar failures of imagination; the Half-Life series made its fame in part due to physics-based nonsense and yet in the VR game you can't even use objects to hit things.
Even weirder is that the games that would benefit from "VR as a screen" without many of the downsides—think, for example, playing Civilization on a big floating globe you can move around, completely sidestepping any nausea issues—just don't exist for the most part.
You've now made me realize what I am missing.
All I can think about is having a palette that I pick buildings from then bow down to arrange them on the map. In multiplayer, you would see the other player's God avatars walking around commanding their little troops.
For something with a similar element but cooperative, there's Demeo (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1484280/Demeo/), which tries to blend the best parts of a board games in person (easy communication and body language, hangout lobbies, etc) with the benefits of VR (like being able to arbitrarily manipulate and zoom the game environment).
As a kind of ex-VR enthusiast and strategy fan, I don't see much value there.
A single strategy game like Civ are 10s of hours of playtime or if a paradox game, 100s. The magical experience of VR presence fades pretty sharpish so it quickly comes down to comfort and practicality. This also applies to MMORPGs like Elite Dangerous - it's a breath taking experience docking your ship the first few times but as soon as you are into the grind, a headset just becomes sweaty nuisance.
These are games that benefit from the external world e.g.
- eat a sandwich, sip coffee, tickle the cat on your lap... as you ponder your next move
- have 30 browser tabs open - the wiki, a strategy guide, a tutorial, the patch notes, a thread about a bug, and that random history rabbit-hole because you are accidentally learning things about the Carolingians or whatever.
- ideal games to play along with some TV/netflix/youtube that only deserves partial attention. These are not games that benefit from 100% undivided focus. Kind of the opposite, a thoughtful game benefits from "gazing out the window" type defocussing.
- if playing something new/tricky, then I also have a todo list and spreadsheet for calculating some things going too
I think motion controllers have untapped potential but even then, they are are going against mouse/keyboard. When the task is wrangling complexity with both precise selections, data navigation/entry and bulk actions, filtering, searches etc. then it's difficult to see an advantage. You can enjoy some Minority Report navigation for a bit but after a few hundred hours... a keyboard shortcut is the real, truly valuable innovation you want.
Instantly jumping from location to location / screen to screen is better than whatever visual journey VR would typically insist on. I generally have zero issues with VR sickness but I actually get kind of nauseous micromanaging multiple wars on different sides of a map in 2D because of having to rapidly flip back and forth every other second. I can't imagine how bad that would be in VR!
It's like inception, and I am 3 layers deep, and every layer has it own controls.
They can’t just load you right into the application. They need to own the real estate so they can control the experience and later show you ads.
Curiously, what games are you playing? I find that games that involve real world motion didn't match virtual world motion (ie, any racing or flying game), I feel sick within seconds, but games where the two worlds always match (ie, Beat Saber, Pokerstars VR, Superhot VR, Space Pirate Trainer), I could play for literally HOURS and feel fine.
I dont get any motion sickness from room scale games (real world motion match virtual world) like ping pong or watching movies.
But, this takes actually designing for VR, rather than designing the same way as a PC game and then slapping on "but in VR" to it.
A fan facing you so you can orient yourself in the room along with starting on a standing pad. Both help you ground back into the world but like you stated, it's largely getting used to it by building up longer sessions.
I am not a neuroscientist or the like but I imagine there are visual tricks that you could employ to improve it. I think things like blacking out vision when turning quickly is one method. I can't speak for sure, but it almost feels like VR games haven't adapted to screens being 2" from your eyeballs.
I'd imagine anything that can help / trick our brains into processing like we are in the world would help. It looks like foveated depth-of-field helps reduce sickness by 66%, I'd imagine because it mimics how our vision works so our eyes are trying to process less at one time.
The screen being 2" from your eyes has nothing to do with it, especially since the lenses focus the image as if it was 4 feet from your face.
At least, not for me, so I guess this is just worthless anecdata, but...
I have literally played Beat Saber for an hour straight, then sitting down for PokerStars VR for another 4 hours. Five total hours in VR, and I felt 100% fine.
But put me in Assetto Corsa (racing game) in VR, and as soon as the car starts moving, I'm feeling dizzy. Half a lap around the Nurburgring, and I'm nauseous. After finishing my lap, I'm having to take the headset off and I'm spending the next 15 minutes fighting the urge to puke and then another hour with a headache.
The greatest cause of motion sickness in VR is simply motion in the real world not matching the virtual world motion.
https://simulators.redbirdflight.com/products/fmx
https://simulators.redbirdflight.com/products/topic/simulato...
I don't know the answer to that question, but I certainly won't care. I am not in any of the demographic groups that can currently get value from it.
VR/AR is a thing that covers several niche use cases very well, but it's hard to see how it would be useful enough generally that it would become a common consumer item.
I could see it becoming popular amongst gamers, and its utility in specific things like industrial use are pretty clear, but most people aren't gamers, and most people don't need to do industrial sorts of things in their daily lives.
I don't see it taking the role of smartphones in most people's lives even if the gear becomes no more onerous than a pair of glasses for a number of reasons, but if the tech does reach that point, I could see a large minority of people swapping to them.
But who knows? What I'm very confident about is that this won't be a mainstream thing for a nontrivial number of years.
Maybe a “better” example would be of the same ilk, a robot in space repairing something with the handler back on earth controlling the thing.
Apps can be any size of your choosing because you're not limited by a physical screen. Google maps can be a wall sized 2D map or a fully 3D model in you hand.
Its not that hard to consider why AR apps would be compelling once the basic interface is sorted out.
When VR becomes something that is effortless to use and I can just slip on some glasses and not even feel them on my head is when it will break out.
Apple has some fundamental aspects of VR right such as controlling the UI with eyes and slight hand movements. Also most apps are geared towards sitting down. The problem is their headset is too heavy.
edit: Also I know there are people the above doesn't apply to, I'm basically going off of revealed preference. There is a reason why there are so many people that prefer watching others play games rather than playing themselves for example. There is also a reason mobile games are so popular over desktop.
Curiously, what games are you playing? I find that games that involve real world motion didn't match virtual world motion (ie, any racing or flying game), I feel sick within seconds, but games where the two worlds always match (ie, Beat Saber, Pokerstars VR, Superhot VR, Space Pirate Trainer), I could play for literally HOURS and feel fine.
VR sickness is the inverse of car sickness.
- VR FPS game: Visually moving while physically static.
- Car passenger in back seat: Physically moving while visually static (car interior).
This is a key idea, and a pattern one sees over and over:
> Something can be amazingly cool and part of the future, but not a big part of the future.
I think that self-driving cars will also prove to be in this category.
Like 3D printing.
It's a game changer for making inexpensive prototypes and models, maybe. But nobody was going to FDM a mass-produced object. It's just too slow.
That said, for some hobbies, 3D printing is a godsend, especially once prices came down to the point where you could get an Ender 3 for $100.
So yeah..."cool and part of the future, but not a big part of the future" is pretty spot-on for 3D printing.
For those who do fix things or build/craft them, a 3D printer is now a pretty standard and mature part of the toolset.
It did revolutionise things especially in the home (in the industry it already had, we just didn't know it because it was hidden behind prototype NDAs and hundreds of thousands of dollar price tags). That's pretty great for a piece of tech. It democratised the ability to custom design, share such designs and manufacture them reliably to the masses. Only a niche of the masses is interested in that because most of them are mindless consumer drones, but still.
People expect too much these days. VR was never going to revolutionise everything. That's just what some circlejerking investors were telling themselves. But it will revolutionise some usecases it's good at. It's opening an amazing new door in terms of storytelling and art for one. It's not shaking up the whole world but it doesn't have to to be a success. I'm a bit sick of these hype men calling everything a flop if it isn't providing their imaginary 2000% return in two years.
The same with AI. It's good at some things and totally sucks at many others. They're trying to shoehorn it into everything again and making it a failure.