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jader201

It's still VR. It's still niche.

There are still many issues that VR hasn't solved (and may never solve).

- You still have to wear a device on your head

- You still (can) get motion sickness and/or headaches

- There is still not a lot of great content around VR

- Many people still prefer the flat screen medium and content

The openness/closeness is only one of the many issues this solves, and it doesn't matter when all of the other above issues exist.

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Every single time I use VR, it is a brilliant experience and then a day later I completely forget about it. The object permanence and product stickiness just isn't there yet. It is like the Apple Vision, I only remember it is a thing when it is brought up by someone else.

The VR world still has not produced a killer app.

I had imagined that remote work would induce a VR desktop work environment (as the killer app), but that hadnt taken off at all (mostly, i think, because it's difficult to type and do keyboard work in VR).

Gaming has not and will not be the killer app for VR imho. It needs to be business/money/work-related for it to actually gain a level of traction like how personal computing gained traction from mainframes.

You forgot to add to the list: If you wear glasses you have to buy special lens inserts.

I did for my Valve Index, which I've used twice and are now sitting in a box. So, if I ever wanted to wear Facebook glasses, I couldn't because they don't sell them in my prescription; not that I ever will.

VR only works when your eyes are not skewed.

> - There is still not a lot of great content around VR

I'm sorry but, will there ever be? I've always been on the fence about VR, it looks great for flying/racing/space games, but there has been a lot of time since it seems to have peaked and the only killer app it has is Alyx which came out 6 years ago

VR might be worth it if there's a modern Descent VR and a modern X-wing vs TIE Fighter VR. Hawken was a fun game and I was looking forward to trying it in VR, but the servers are offline. There's a VR mod for Mechwarrior 5, and mech games do seem to be ripe for the VR picking.

What I would really like to see next, though, isn't so much on the content side. Instead of putting everything in the headset and seeing how light it can get, I really want to see a system on a belt, vest, or backpack involved. The HMD can just have hardware for the display, audio, and head & eye tracking. Put a coiled connector down to my shoulders. Put the compute, storage, and batteries on my torso somehow. That's where most of the weight is, and your core will notice it a lot less than your neck.

Overload[0] is the modern version of Descent, made by the creators of Descent. It has standard VR support, but doesn’t work with motion controllers. Flight sticks, keyboard and mouse and other input devices work fine.

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/448850/Overload/

Try Underdogs for some fun mech action, “You control giant metal arms using your real-life hand movements to punch, bash, and tear enemies apart. Movement: You move around the arena by grabbing the floor with your hands.”

That’s on Steam and also on the Meta store to run directly on the Quest.

Also, find the Hawken discord where we meet for networked games on a community build of the old Hawken.

Wow. Thanks for the helpful and detailed reply. Once I have my rig set back up I'll look into these.

The motion sickness in particular is something that's been mostly solved by using non-stick locomotion, like Gorilla Tag (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1533390/Gorilla_Tag/). Both the 'big name' developers and the various flat-to-VR mod makers still insist on stick locomotion, though, even though that actively makes the experience worse.

That's not a solution, that's a workaroud. Gorilla Tag is still a niche game where you're simulating gorillas.

Most games are human-centric, so until we're able to move around using our legs & feet, stick locomotion is still the preferred way to get around in a human-centric simulated environment.

Funnily, I always found all the anti motion sickness "hacks" (especially teleporting for movement) to be the only things that actually caused motion sickness for me when I started out using VR. "Normal" controller movement was never a problem for me, so it was kind of unexpected that the safe mode was actually harder for me.

I often wonder how common this is. As in, how many people consider motion sickness in VR a problem specifically because they only ever experienced it with these workarounds applied, and then never even found out that actual normal movement (which their brains might be completely used to from years of video games) would have been completely problem free for them.

Same here. It was so weird to see all these VR developers claiming you can't have smooth locomotion when that works so much better for me than disorienting teleports where my brain has to rebuilt my frame of reference from scratch every time.

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