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Comment by Morphling | Hacker News Reader

At first Oculus seemed like a cool idea, but you can really only play "simulator" games with it, games where you sit in a vehicle otherwise it ruins the VR feel and you might as well just play on a monitor.

Only other thing I've seen was some sort of sculpting thing, but I'd imagine the novelty would wear out there pretty fast.

More I think about whole VR thing the less I think it will actually be a thing. I'm sure when Oculus Rift comes out for reals a lot of people are going to buy them, but I don't really see a lot of value for developers supporting them in most games, but someone comes up with killer app/game for it.

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> At first Oculus seemed like a cool idea, but you can really only play "simulator" games with it, games where you sit in a vehicle otherwise it ruins the VR feel and you might as well just play on a monitor.

Check out castAR which you might consider an "inside out" VR experience that projects the virtual world into the real world. Thus you can walk around and look at 3D objects from all sides, see other players, your coffee, or whatever is in the real world, instead of the VR approach of sitting in one place looking around. So it's a way of working you can't do with a monitor.

(CastAR can run regular VR apps too with a small adaptor, but that feels less compelling than the mixed/augmented reality)

http://www.technicalillusions.com/

(note: We're hiring in Mountain View!)

I agree, that's why I'm keeping my eye on Magic Leap in 2015. If they can really compactly do what their patents show, they will change everything and be a great platform for not only games, but get us away from all these screens in general.

http://www.twitch.tv/gyratory/b/601749359

That's an early VR demo of TxK, being ported from PS Vita, which is a Tempest remake (fast paced twitch shooter). I haven't played it myself, but those who have say great things about it. An example of a non-simulator game. What's remarkable is Jeff (one of the dev's) doesn't have the ability to see stereoscopic vision.

Most of TxK is played facing towards a web without lots of head turning. Certain games like this will benefit simply by being in 3D, along with VR's total-immersion effect.

VR is a new medium so content creators are figuring out what works. Simulator games were low hanging fruit since even with less-than-perfect hardware/software they prevent sim sickness. The product for the company I work for is a VR experience with a first-person perspective and we are having no trouble preventing sim sickness by designing things properly.

That's why, in my view, the most important thing for VR to be successful isn't just getting the headset perfect. The most important thing is a better input technology. If that is hand tracking, body tracking, or something else, I don't know but I do know this is one of the most important things to make VR achieve it's potential.

This is no longer true. The Gen 3 (latest) helmet lets you walk around just fine.

For instance, my favorite demo is in some kind of nuclear sub control room. You can walk around, up to panels, even kneel down and look up under a shelf.

I actually recently wrote a blog post on VR game design www.renderingwithstyle.com/post/106510862343/now-youre-thinking-in-vr

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