VR Is Not Dead
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That's not to say VR can never be successful, but I think it needs to offer something more compelling than just "immersion." Exercise or AR might be viable routes.
Meta glasses somewhat justify themselves just for recording hikes/cycles/weddings etc.
They're different experiences. I don't need Tetris or PacMan in VR. Conversely, Half-Life 1/2 etc are not remotely intense as Half-Life Alyx. In the first 2 you're watching a movie. In the later you're in the world of Half-Life
Examples:
- Before going on a trip, pre-visiting the destination in Google Earth with VR is very spatially informative & makes directional intuition memorable upon arrival at the real world destination.
- Virtual role-play with environmental cues that cause make-believe to be ever more real.
But most people don't need this very often. Picking up a book or throwing on some earbuds to listen to a book are far more frequent and compatible with simultaneous other activities. VR feels the same--a high-demand focused experience that is infrequently worth the effort.
I think that the relatively low living space area for most of the world is a huge strain on VR adoption.
The reason movies exist isn't simply "immersion", it's a different experience than reading a book.
I know some people complain of motion sickness, but that doesn't bother me. I just want controls like Mario or Zelda on a regular joystick. Why can't this be done?
It doesn't even have to be first person. I'd play a third person game like Mario or Zelda with a VR camera tracking them. I just want that kind of movement.
Pushing a button to teleport in short hops is annoying as hell. I hate everything about it.
I gave up trying in frustration.
The game Moss did this well for a platformers. But it could also be really fun for realtime strategy/simulation games (StarCraft, sim city) or sports games like Madden.
I think even being the Lakitu camera in Mario 64 would work.
And you're right, it would kick ass for strategy, sim, and sports games.
I wonder if folks have tried building the movement and camera before the main gameplay loop. Just to see what feels right.
What held it back from mainstream imo is an inherent space issue (you need room) and a lack of multiplayer participation (need even more room). Compared to sitting on a couch in a small studio with a few friends, it doesnt stand a chance.
The other problem is most peoples first experience is with some shitty mall vr room where the “game” consists of free unity assets slapped together in a way that makes marky marks horizons look polished. Few people start off with something like the half life one.
You're probably the last generation who would think so.
If there are fewer headsets in a room than there are people, it’s going to be awkward for at least one person. Trying to help someone debug something in their headset without me being able to see what they see is a problem (granted, this could be solved by software).
Having to share headsets sucks. You have to faff with head straps, adjust IPD, focus. I’ve had exactly one evening where everyone had a headset and things worked well for everyone involved. I’ve had dozens if not hundreds of events filled with awkward moments, setup issues, problems, where everyone is continuously taking the headset off and need to figure something out. And this was while working for a VR company where everyone was quite computer and VR literate.
Reflecting on it, it felt kind of like 90s and 2000s LAN parties, before the days of DHCP. Randomly copying values around, IP conflicts and not understanding subnet values. Good times.
I think the biggest impediment is just how bulky they are. If we can make them so it’s just like picking up and putting on a pair of lightweight glasses, the same way you pick up a controller, I think that there would be a lot more uptake, especially in the gaming space.
For example, think of the opposite of Apple's People Awareness feature. Instead of an immersive experience fading away when a person comes near, the AR user's experience fades in as you approach.
I think it would be pretty magical, honestly. One of the wow moments the public never got to (because of adoption rates) is a shared AR experience. Really compelling stuff.
I can think of a lot of impediments to VR (the weight of the headset and vertigo being the biggest) but needing everyone in a room to share a single headset at the same time seems like an extremely fringe case. The real problem there is just the cost of buying enough headsets.
When I’m playing on my couch with my wife, when something happens on screen we still look at each other and laugh—regardless of whether it’s a single player game or not. There’s eye contact.
If I’m engrossed in a game of RL in my office, I can still look down at my dog when she comes and boops me. There’s eye contact.
Virtual reality, for all its qualities and ability to let you be digitally present with people online or also in VR, is physically isolating users from the people who are physically nearby.
So from where I'm sitting in my middle class suburbs, it's certainly not dead, but it's basically the modern equivalent of those actuated flight sim entertainment experiences from the 80s/90s.
VR seems to be much bigger among the perpetually online. For us normies VR is hardly a blip on the radar.
I still don't even really understand what Horizon Worlds or the Metaverse even was, or if there's a distinction between the two. I've heard of VRChat, but from the little I've seen, it seems extremely unappealing.
I still think that most people don't want to strap a computer screen to their face, for any reason. I've done it, it's not very pleasant.
There is no way this ever can be close to safe for your health than, say, not using it.
When I was playing standalone VR (Quest 2/3), I was pretty much always sore from moving around while playing. I moved to PCVR a few years ago, and I still move significantly more just from twisting around to look behind me (combat flight sims).
I can’t see any way that it’s not at least better than a monitor.
(2) I think the Horizon Worlds problem is not so much that the whole idea is cringe but rather than the authoring tools weren't good enough for users or brands to create interesting worlds. I wanted it to work but I couldn't find worlds I wanted to visit and was strongly alienated by the platform's inability to incorporate JPG images or GLB models. No way I'm going to waste my time learning an awkward interface to make worlds based on dumbed-down computational solid geometry where I can't apply those skills to other platforms.
(3) Part of that problem is that the MQ3 has enough RAM that you can use video game programming techniques to make interesting worlds but very little headroom for user-generated content in systems like Horizon Worlds and VRChat. The 16GB Apple Vision Pro is better but I find it completely comfortable to author for PC VR with a 64GB workstation as much as I love the standalone MQ3 experience.
How would editing work?
Do you think these will win over video world models like Genie?
Have you played with DiamondWM and other open source video world models?
It's the only app I use. I think my issue is that VR is very much a solo experience.
It's hard for me to have the free time and room to play with my kids and family. I would rather play 2d games with the kids.
Disagree. It‘s quite mature and usable.
I worked on a software that offered VR as a feature. The user‘s started enthusiastically with eg. dedicated VR rooms. But it became clear that the immersive delta to a screen is surprisingly low. We‘re all trained to immerse into 2D screens on a daily basis. If you then observe how people are ridiculed while wearing a VR headset by their colleagues or how people with complicated hair style hesitate wearing a headset: then you understand why it‘s just not a good fit for B2B.
But then on top of that you add the expensive cost of the headset, the battery issue, the limited mobility, not being able to go to c0rn sites without Meta being all up in my b'ness, etc. etc. etc.
There is like, zero upside to this thing. None. Zilch.
At least the smartphone was easy to adopt en masse cause it combined a music player, mini browser, portability, GPS, game machine and all in a nice portable package that, at worst, just takes up more space in your pants pocket.
But if they can ever invent hardware that doesn't sit on one's head or rest on top of your ears (which also chafes on a hot day), then this thing could really start to get some traction cause much of the friction (figuratively speaking) would be removed. Meta glasses are a step in the right direction but they're not very immersive.
VR is the perfect metaphor IMO for how "the tech industry" at large has lost its way. It's no longer about using technology to solve long standing human problems, it's about how tech firms can find ways to insert themselves in the fabric of human existence so they can suck their rent indefinitely.
I actually think VR is very cool, and I thoroughly enjoy playing VR games like Beat Saber. But building a really fun (short term) gaming platform, or finding some dedicated VR use cases in specific environments like construction, was never going to be enough for big tech. They wouldn't be satisfied unless all of us had goggles strapped to our faces for 8+ hours a day. Everything Meta talked about made this clear - they only invested a ton of money because they saw it as the new "platform" after desktop and mobile that they could own and control. And it's obviously why AI is commanding so much investment now, as companies are scrambling to own the means of production in human society for years to come.
I agree that VR is not "dead", whatever that means, but I do find some joy that tech companies haven't found yet one more way to own the basics in societal existence.
Consumers need to be wary, and take steps to prevent such an outcome. Unfortunately, most consumers just simply dont know they're in a chess game with corporations they deal with, so don't see any setup moves as being threatening.
Or one could, you know, go for a walk outside. There is a reason phrases like "go touch grass" have become popular, or that the prescient Nickelodeon ad from the 90s about putting down VR so you can experience the wonders of "actual reality" has gone viral again.
For the past 30 or so years we've seen an explosion of tech that was supposedly going to make humanity more connected, yet somehow in many ways I've seen the exact opposite happen.
Until I see folks "max out" on the amazing experiences available in our natural world, I'm extremely skeptical that VR is the solution to our natural limitations.
It's just not it's time yet for mass adoption, however it might be.
VR/AR continues to have an increasing footprint of usage and adoption as the technologies evolve.
This has been the same cycle for over 20 years.
Once we get past 4K displays to 8K at a reasonable cost level, it again will introduce a new audience to VR/AR, and a larger and larger existing audience will sit here nodding along.
VR has gotten much better and it's fine for whomever it works for, it doesn't have to work for everyone, even if a big company took a bet on the timing of it being now.
Huh? Is this AI slop?
The basic problems with VR are well known. First, the headgear is too bulky. Carmack, who headed Oculus for a while, says that it won't get traction until the headgear is down to swim-goggles size, and won't go mainstream until it's down to eyeglass size.[1] "AR glasses", with just an overlay, achieve that, but it's not a full virtual environment.
Second, a sizable fraction of the population experiences some nausea, and a smaller fraction will barf.[2] That's worse than roller coasters. When visual and vestibular data disagree, the brain doesn't like it. The most successful VR games, such as Beat Saber, keep them locked together, but then you're stuck in one spot. There's a really good discussion of this by Phia, a VR influencer who started using VR as a teenager and spends a lot of time in VR.[3] She has practical advice on tuning VR systems to minimize nausea (interocular distance matters!) and how to introduce new people to VR (it takes repeated exposures of increasing length.)
VR Chat continues to grow, driven by young people who worked through the problems. VR Chat used to prevent free movement - you had to teleport from one seat to another. But experienced users wanted more freedom, and VR chat now allows it if you opt in. Really good users can do gymnastics with full body tracking while in VR.
It's not just put on the goggles and have fun. You have to acclimate. Learn the gestures that drive the system. Practice. If you go for full body and face tracking, your avatar has to be calibrated to match your joint lengths and you have to strap on sensors. (Which are now good, small, and wireless.) You need a safe open space where you can move, where there are no dangerous objects nearby, and the VR system knows the real world safe boundaries. VR is a sport, and takes the preparation of a sport.
So it works, but is not mass-market.
[1] https://next.reality.news/news/oculus-cto-john-carmack-outli...
[2] https://www.pcgamer.com/vr-still-makes-40-70-of-players-want...
You have guys right now spending $300 a month on Grok Imagine because it puts out extremely realistic soft porn. Imagine what that would be like in a virtual world, that is three-dimensional, looks exactly like real life, the VR headset is in your contact lenses and AI can generate compelling narratives on the fly.
3D film offers an added level of immersion, but the technology has had peaks of popularity interspersed with longer periods where it was very niche. Anaglyph 3D boomed in the 50's, but couldn't handle colour. Polarized 3D boomed in the 80's and could handle colour, but often at the expense of reduced brightness and resolution as well as increased prices. IMAX 3D soldiered on, but 3D was all but absent from mainstream movies until the 2010's, when active shutter 3D become popular alongside polarized 3D. Today, only the occasional movie is offered in 3D, and that's declining. Few cinema's are investing in new hardware for 3D projection.
The pattern repeated because 3D always added drawbacks and expense. Films were either made with it in mind (e.g. By deliberately shoving things into the viewer's face) or they just let it passively enhance things. The former made films gimmicky and limited their audience. The latter left it to audiences to choose whether 3D was worth the drawbacks. Audiences decided it wasn't time and again. A 2D window into another world was immersive enough. Studios keep coming back, roughly every three decades, because it seems like that's how long it takes audiences to start getting excited for the same gimmicks again.
VR is currently expensive, uncomfortable, isolating, and (for some) nausea inducing. Any one of these is worse than the sum total of modern 3D's drawbacks: You have to wear glasses, pay $5 extra, and hope the theatre's projector is bright enough. My bold prediction is that VR and 3D will both eventually succeed and stick (perhaps in the same package!), but only when the technologies are without significant drawbacks or extra expense. VR technology has made exciting progress since the 90's but, like 3D, it's not ready to stick yet.
The harsh reality is that, even if somebody were to make a quantum leap forward in VR technology tomorrow that solves all its major drawbacks, it would probably still be years or decades before audiences are willing to reconsider the opinion of VR they've formed over the last several years. People need to forget before they're willing to reevaluate.