Maybe that was your experience but it certainly hasn’t been mine (approaching 2 years of use). To me it’s just another gaming device to play exclusives on. I’ve probably had more time with it than I have my PS4 - but I still love my PS4 and am glad I bought it. :)
Dammit, my own thoughts are wrong yet again.
We’ll just see what the market says here. I predict … an extended, lukewarm near-death experience.
Is your argument that VR won’t be successful commercially, or that we can’t like it?
I ask because I agree that it will be a couple more revisions before it becomes a commercial success. Need to remove wires, update the resolution and developers need to continue refining experiences. I personally think that there is too much potential, and the market is slowly growing, that Facebook and others will continue to refine the experience.
I disagree with you with regards to the experience. It is awesome technology. Playing LA Noire VR has been almost transcendental. I have been playing more often in my headset, and now with my new HOTAS (thanks @Editer) I will be spending more time in the cockpit VR as well. Doing VR Tourism is a killer app, especially once the can move from 2d pictures painted and actually let you walk through castles and buildings. Make it multiplayer as well and I can see it being used a lot to see new places and relive or plan vacations.
I think a lot of people confuse the Pepsi Challenge with a sustainable business. That’s what I think. I mean, people used to love the Wii and Kinect, too, right?
3D TV might be an easy comparison to make, but it is a rather flawed one. No matter how great 3D TV technology could have gotten it was still limited by the size of the screen. It could never be something like even an IMAX 3D experience because the experience remained locked in a rectangle in front of you. 3D TV lacked any sense of immersion. The very thing that made 3D TV “meh” was the same thing that makes VR awesome.
No matter how display technology increased, no matter how fast refresh rates got, no matter how high pixel density got, 3D TV was still just a window into a world. VR is being inside a world. It will benefit by the progress of display technology more than 3D TV could have, outside of wall sized TVs becoming the norm.
VR also has a better chance of not dying off like 3D TV since there is an existing market where the technology is in demand and the price point is on target with what people spend. For people who play sims and spend money on multiple monitors and a track IR, a rift or vive will likely save them money.
Europa Universalis 4 VR is gonna be so lit.
I dont think we are confused. I mean most people in this thread think VR is awesome (I do) but also think its not going to be mainstream or commercially successfull for a long time. Shrug.
You do know that Pepsi is really popular and successful, right?
Pepsi being popular, to me, is like Trump getting elected. Just wrong.
Eh, there are a number of systems which already can achieve something akin to this.
There are systems that project directly into your eye, albeit I think they are all prohibitively expensive.
I worked with a company called IMMY that had a solution that essentially used reflected DLP to create a nice, large screen either projected over reality or onto a blank screen, without needing to have a large LCD or LED display. It worked pretty well, and was cost effective, and the system was pretty light weight. I think they company may have run into financial troubles though.
My big disappointment with VR is motion sickness and my inability to get over it. There was always lots of talk about getting your VR legs but at this point I think it’s bullshit, or it requires some very extended periods of misery that I do not want to go through.
I mean as long as they don’t move the camera, I can play VR for hours without a hint of nausea. As soon as the view point moves without me though I range from ug to hurk. Cockpits and certain techniques do help a lot, surprisingly so, but not enough to completely eliminate the feeling.
So all of that eliminates a large swath of games and development possibilities.
No, not really. It was kinda cool, and I was excited to try each, with high hopes, but neither survived first contact. VR absolutely did. I haven’t pushed it much because it’s a big pain to setup and the cables do suck, but I can’t imagine this going away. It’s way too cool to be abandoned, though it could go away for a decade or more like it already did, waiting for tech to advance again. This time I am hoping it just gets enough angel investing, big company, and startup interest to keep it alive until we get something slick enough to go mainstream.
That’s a testament to how VR will affect each person so differently. The first time my viewpoint moved steadily in a VR experience I had the strangest inner ear buzzing effect. It felt like a literal vibration just inside and below each ear. However, that went away with time. For me, it very much felt like I got my VR legs. I was never nauseated, and I have always loved roller coasters Etc. I don’t think I would have been able to handle something like Quake right off the bat, but who knows.
I agree that there is something very different about this when compared to technology like the Wii or 3D TV. It sounds very new wavey, and when pressed to describe it I can break it down into each of its component parts but the whole effect really does seem greater than the sum of its parts.
Pretty much, yeah.
I feel the same. I know I am one side of a spectrum for VR appreciation and it helps that I don’t get VR sick at all. However even skeptics have cackled with delight when I’ve had them try out certain games on my Oculus Rift. Several that had no interest in the current gen are now talking about picking up a Rift and the newly lower price point is helping a lot.
For my money there is plenty of content right now to offer 10s or even 100s of hours of immersive fun :-)
I barely have room to get 7.1 speakers mounted around the living room. And when I’m PC gaming, I am a laptop gamer. How are you supposed to get a great experience like that?
That restriction is going to go away as soon as inside-out tracking becomes the norm.
Will do!
-Roger (now at Magic Leap)
My wife and I went to see Coco at the movie theater a couple weeks. Her religious beliefs include an afterlife and she told me she could only hope that her mom was enjoying an afterlife in a place as beautiful as the world depicted in Coco.
So when we got home, I booted up the Coco VR experience in my Oculus Rift and called out to her that I had a surprise. She slid the headset on and lost herself in another world for about half an hour.
“What in the heck!!?!”
“Ohhh my gosh!!!”
“I’m going to cry, it’s so beautiful!!”
“Hold me so I don’t fall while I look off the edge of this bridge!” (as she peered in real life into the trash bin outside the kitchen).
I think that many of us are gamers and see VR from the gaming angle. But it’s also a visualization tool for helping us share experiences we can only imagine. That’s the aspect that holds the most interest to me and that I try to curate when I have people try VR for the first time. ymmv of course.
What is inside out tracking? That must be different from coco tracking.
If you need any testers for your Magic Leap doohickeys, I’ll volunteer.
Inside out tracking is what HoloLens and the Windows Mixed Reality headsets currently use - basically all the sensors are in the headset itself so that you don’t need things like the Vive lighthouses spread across your room. I assume Magic Leap uses something similar too.
I have a few friends at Microsoft who specifically worked on the custom-designed “Holographic Processing Unit”. It’s a separate chip inside the HoloLens which is exclusively used to process data from the many sensors on the device to enable precise tracking as the user of the headset moves around. It’s based on tech that was originally used for the Kinect to a much lesser degree.