Developers speaking to the Game Developers Collective seem to think the VR games market has hit a roadblock, even with this year's launch of the Apple Vision Pro.
VR always seemed like a gimmick to me. I ended up with a wii instead of a PS3 or 360 as a teenager and it made me bitter and resolved to avoid anything like motion controls or gimmicks in future purchases.
Not that the wii was a bad console but I ended up playing the virtual console and gamecube backwards compatibility more than anything else.
I use it for sim racing sometimes and it’s amazing to feel like I’m in an F1 car or something. Until I get nauseous after 15 minutes or something. It’s also a bit of a hassle to set up. That being said, maybe it would be cooler if I got into beat saber or something.
Was it over hyped? Maybe. But it’s still a cool technology and I’d be sad to see it fall into nothingness. I don’t see a future where everyone is wearing VR glasses, but it’s still a very neat thing to enjoy every now and then.
I personally don’t feel like spending 700 or how many euros to play beat saber on my ps5.
Other games that might be awesome in this is ones were you don’t need to move around but benefit from being able to look around, so flight sims, driving sims, but there the chair setups are better imo.
Can’t really think of much else, that’s why VR is on the decline, really limited number of fun games to be had, or it would require some paradigm shift, like a strategy game but you are playing on the inside of a globe, but then that game would have to survive on being a VR exclusive.
A VR mech game could be so baller. Also a remake of Black and White would work well. But generally yeah it’s just not a great medium for most games and while we have a lot of promising hardware we’re struggling to find ways to use it intuitively
I think after the bubble breaks it does down a bit well see some groups take their time to build really functional stuff. We don’t have good standards on how to interact in VR and it shows. We don’t have enough data on how to make people less motion sick. Basically the hardware is there but the software isn’t and that’ll take more time than we’ve been giving it, imo
Realistically though I think the fundamental limits on how you can interact in VR means while there may be a strong niche market, I don’t expect it to be a mainstream thing. Even if the prices drop a lot and the headsets get smaller there’s still a lot working against them
More games and a Matrix-esque visual file manager where you could walk through various libraries of documents, files, videos or pictures in 3D space, or proportional size like WinDirStat would be cool.
The lack of good games has really made VR hard to enjoy. I have five good evergreen titles and not much else.
Because we would all love it if a large folder meant we had to run for a few hundred meters to get to the next one instead of just hitting a single key on a keyboard or moving the mouse by a few pixels…
There’s just too many edge cases in VR for it to be a real platform. Movement is hard, there needs to be a lot of space around a person, form factors aren’t great for the hardware, there’s more graphical requirements, etc.
That’s how I feel about it. I don’t know if I would buy one but independence from Facebook is a prerequisite. Can these even be used without logging in?
Yes, I have no facebook account. It hasn’t been a problem. Other than the logo on the headset, I haven’t seen any other downside to it being a meta ptoduct. The money they have put in to make sure they are and remain ahead of everyone else for tech means that until there is an actual downside, I pretty much have to use their headsets. But I will have no trouble jumping ship if there ever is a downside, or if anyone else even comes close to catching up.
They’ve sunk ungodly amounts of cash to create unrealistic expectations for the VR market. Nobody can compete for the low end, and there’s no way meta is profiting, so what’s their end game?
Presumably, they want to get everyone used to their environment so that when their hardware lead doesn’t mean as much in the future, there will be hesitation to leave. We know they aren’t currently doing anything untoward as there is plenty of overlap between paranoid tech experts and people interested in pioneering new tech. Can’t hide from them. The software and network traffic has been thouroughly vetted and everything is so far doing exactly what it would need to or purports to do.
As long as you go into it knowing you will be changing platforms at some point in the future and hedge all software purchases against that in your mind, the only remaining downside is whether you can stomache giving them your money.
And if that ever changes, it won’t go hidden.
There is also something to be said for the fact that everyone in the Meta community see VR as thriving and growing, and everyone that is outside of it sees VR as stagnating or shrinking. So their money is doing that too presumably.
Their ultimate main goal is also, of course, marrying the tech from VR headsets to the tech from AR glasses. Which will be a true ubiquitous product. Being the first one there will be a huge pay day.
I think that the biggest problem is the lack of investment and willingness to take on risk. Every company just seems to want a quick cash grab “killer app” but doesn’t want to sink in the years of development of practical things that aren’t as flashy but solve real-world problems. Because that’s hard and isn’t likely to make the line go up every quarter.
It’s mostly the price. If you have 500 or even 1000 to invest to play games, first that puts you squarely in the top 1% worldwide but more importantly a VR headset is the worst choice in terms of breadth of games you can play. So the first choice will always be a PC or a console which leave the VR headset for the people who actually have 2k+ to spend for gaming and actually want one. A tiny tiny minority.
If you add on top of it that you still have a 50/50 chance of getting nausea each time you play and that it’s a pain in the ass (or an additional expense) if you wear glasses, and the space requirement. It’s not a surprise if the market is stalled.
As for useful implementation, my cousin is an orthopedic surgeon and they use VR headset and 3D x-ray scanner, 3d printers and a whole bunch of sci-fi stuff to prep for operation, but they are not using a meta quest2, we’re talking 50k headset and million dollar equipment. None of that does anything to the gaming market.
My though is that the tech need to get a couple of order of magnitude better and be usable as a day to day computer for work. When I can code in one 10 hours a day without fucking up my eyes, vomiting myself, sweating like a pig and getting neck strain it will have the possibility to take over the computer market, until then, it’s a gimmick.
Even your hypothetical perfect headset would be useless in so many situations where you can game today, can’t use it in public, can’t use it while watching children, can’t use it while talking to other adults in your household,…
Also, I think the idea that you even need that first person perspective for immersion is deeply flawed, lots of games make you feel immersed without that. Not to mention that it severely limits possible UI elements if you don’t want to break the immersion again.
As for useful implementation, my cousin is an orthopedic surgeon and they use VR headset and 3D x-ray scanner, 3d printers and a whole bunch of sci-fi stuff to prep for operation, but they are not using a meta quest2, we’re talking 50k headset and million dollar equipment. None of that does anything to the gaming market.
That’s really awesome and I love seeing that the tech is actually seeing good uses.
Yeah. A lot of what you’re saying parallels my thoughts. The PC and console gaming market didn’t exist until there were more practical, non-specialty uses for computing and, importantly, affordability. To me, it seems that the manufacturers are trying to skip that and just try to get to the lucrative software part, while also skipping the part where you pay people fair wages to develop (the games industry is super exploitative of devs) or, like The Company Formerly-known as Facebook, use VR devices as another tool to harvest personal information for profit (head tracking data can be used to identify people, similar to gait analysis), rather than having interest in actually developing VR long-term.
Much as I’m not a fan of Apple or the departed sociopath that headed it, a similar company to its early years is probably what’s needed; people willing to actually take on some risk for the long-haul to develop the hardware and base software to make a practical “personal computer” of VR.
When I can code in one 10 hours a day without fucking up my eyes, vomiting myself, sweating like a pig and getting neck strain it will have the possibility to take over the computer market, until then, it’s a gimmick.
Absolutely agreed. Though, I’d note that there is tech available for this use case. I’ve been using Xreal Airs for several years now as a full monitor replacement (Viture is more FOSS friendly at this time). Bird bath optics are superior for productivity uses, compared to waveguides and lensed optics used in VR. In order to have readable text that doesn’t strain the eyes, higher pixels-per-degree are needed, not higher FOV.
The isolation of VR is also a negative in many cases as interacting and being aware of the real world is frequently necessary in productivity uses (both for interacting with people and mitigating eye strain). Apple was ALMOST there with their Vision Pro but tried to be clever, rather than practical. They should not have bothered with the camera and just let the real world in, unfiltered.
The force fields that allow you to walk in one direction without actually moving and hitting the wall also seem to still be missing in our RL tech tree.
The work these folks are doing is pretty cool. They utilize polarized light to allow for multiple viewing angles of holograms.
https://axiomholographics.com/
There is potential here, maybe, in the future. But nothing really happening now. Outside of Beat Sabre and a couple of other fun kinda cool but then boring ones, my VR experience got stale quickly.
The actual gameplay feels very different, and locomotion on that scale was more uncomfortable for me than other games (on an original vive). It might be that the performance isn’t stable, as their engine has always had some level of that.
But holy shit, even the whole introductory sequence hits different, and just getting to whiterun feels like an epic adventure. Because of physical space requirements I never got super deep into it, but I could easily see getting lost in it if I’d had more time and got past the slight discomfort other VR games didn’t give me.
So what you are really saying is that playing Skyrim in VR is painful and difficult and makes you uncomfortable. And people wonder why that technology never took off with the masses…
Got an og Vive (699.99 cdn at the time came with headset, controllers, and base stations), playing the hell out of that headset just over a year in steam VR playtime at 2 - 4 hrs a day. I have played Half-Life:VR mod (due to the age of the actual game it is my worst port experience) Half-Life 2: VR mod, Half-Life 2 ep 1 and 2 in VR (absolutely amazing) Raft:VR mod (a few bugs and a few abilities missing from flat, but overall flawless) The Forest:VR mod(excellent), and let’s not forget Valheim:VR mod.
Quest garden can be limiting but you can plug your quest (air link, ?whatever? desktop, link cable) and pretty much play anything on steam, personally have 90+ titles under my VR library (no beat saber). You can check yt for people playing these flat2vr games
There are some cool ones coming out for Meta Quest exclusively, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to buy one of those. Meta’s going to exclusive the market to death.
Yeah I don’t think doing a VR console war will work. They need to all play the same games, and compete in hardware. Which puts more pressure on devs to make sure the control options are there.
Wildly overpriced, except for the options owned by the devil. For fuck’s sake, “even with this Apple’s hilariously expensive flop” underlines how hard companies refuse to get it. To reach a wider audience - charge less. Reduce cost. Simplify and add lightness. the only company even trying is god-damned Facebook, and they’re still fumbling it.
You need low-latency 6DOF. Everything else is negotiable. Everything.
And for god’s sake, have an intermediate format. Ship a VR gizmo that only renders ten million floating dots… and guarantees it can show them at 200 Hz, with up-to-the-millisecond tracking. Disconnect that performance from computing power. And latency. Let an absolute potato, on the other side of the world, be capable of producing the magical dreamscape you’re standing in, without making you throw up.
I still cannot fathom how anyone justifies paying so much for phones. My most recent one was a Pixel 4A, £100. I’ve not seen anything exciting in a smartphone in a decade or more.
Mainly camera, nice screen, and longevity. I went from an iPhone XS Max that’s over six years old to a like 1600USD iPhone 16 Pro Max that I’ll probably have for six years. I’m in my phone all the time so I want something fast, 120hz screen is amazing, and super high quality low light pictures of my cats are amazing.
Yeah true, not having to switch phones every couple years is a plus. I don’t do contract, just buy the phone I want and pick the network I want to use it with. Then use that phone for as long as I can stand to. Eventually the upgrade is positive enough to outweigh having to get used to the physicalities of a new phone. New muscle memory, especially for typing on a screen based keyboard is so annoying.
Completely agree! I don’t fault anyone for buying less expensive phones—1600 is an insane amount of money for a pocket rectangle. But I justify it as, I use it more than six hours every day, and it has replaced my DSLR. And I’ll have to for five or six years! It’s nice to have a fancy!
Hehe yeah, nice added benefits to everything, but ourside of gaming it would be hard to justify the price of a high-end phone. Heck even with gaming it can still be hard, lol.
Whether it is closed source or not is irrelevant to this discussion. The fact of the matter is that VR offers a different gaming experience, one that has the opportunity to provide real exercise for the player.
What game would you finally consider good? Do you even know what people play in VR? There are literally thousands of games. I personally own 250 from over the 10 years, and that’s me holding back. There are so many more that I wanted to play if I had more time to do so.
And even outside of bespoke VR games, a VR headset is an awesome monitor replacement now for your regular computer games too. My Virtual monitor is 4k 120hz, that I can use while sitting in a recliner.
Yeah I used to have an old Windows MR headset until it stopped working (and I switched to linux)
It was a lot of fun, and I do miss beat saber.
But I’m not going to spend a thousand dollars on an outdated index, or put facebook spyware on my face. If Valve or some other company comes out with something modern without proprietary bs, I’d buy it in a heartbeat.
I love the shit out of mine. Got the VrCover face pieces which keep sweat from being a problem. I mainly play heavily modded Skyrim VR and a few different exercise games. My son plays a ton of different games with his friends. I don’t think they are for everyone, but not a gimmick IMO.
Still seems fairly narrow, the field where you train for literal RL tasks but can’t train on actual RL objects because those are living beings is fairly narrow in itself. Not to mention that there is a fairly limited number of them where you actually have to use your hands on the patient directly considering the prevalence of keyhole type surgeries in recent years where the actual patient contact is not the surgeon’s hands anymore.
its a standalone device that functionally is like buying a phone with a Snapdragon 865(for older quest 2 models). relative to what you’re paying for. It’s actually not that expensive in the grand scheme of other gaming devices, as its on par/cheaper than basiaclly all other mainstream gaming devices, and on the low end in terms of smartphone pricing.
which is the condition on whether a user wants to make it cheap, else you have to go theough the trouble of sideloading the requied stuff to turn the device into a mixedvr/piracy headset by cutting off the meta related services.
else the “cheap” option would be to go use older windows mixed VR headsets, or cheaper chinese options(e.g Pico Vr headsets), both having their own cost of using it, very similar to what you sign into for users who buy a phone, or a console.
Let’s be honest, any manufacturers/developers willing to embrace porn will successful. Everyone else is just picking gnat shit out of pepper, hoping it’ll turn to gold.
Hardware and content is still the big issue. The good porn games still suck in VR, and there’s not a lot of them. The equipment is just too inconvenient.
Your hands are occupied, your positions are restricted, your tethered to the PC, and I don’t want to get a thousand dollars of delicate hardware nutted on. It’s just not there yet.
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Wearing a headset isn’t appealing to me. I’d rather get a curved screen or more screens to be more immersed.
VR always seemed like a gimmick to me. I ended up with a wii instead of a PS3 or 360 as a teenager and it made me bitter and resolved to avoid anything like motion controls or gimmicks in future purchases.
Not that the wii was a bad console but I ended up playing the virtual console and gamecube backwards compatibility more than anything else.
I enjoyed my Wii well enough, but my PS3 got the most play out of the three.
VR is absolutely incredible though. It’s hella expensive for a nice kit, but my mind is blown every time I strap into my Index.
My flight sim would say otherwise if it had a mouth. Also if it had a mouth… Uhhhhh… It might be another kind of sim…
I use it for sim racing sometimes and it’s amazing to feel like I’m in an F1 car or something. Until I get nauseous after 15 minutes or something. It’s also a bit of a hassle to set up. That being said, maybe it would be cooler if I got into beat saber or something.
Was it over hyped? Maybe. But it’s still a cool technology and I’d be sad to see it fall into nothingness. I don’t see a future where everyone is wearing VR glasses, but it’s still a very neat thing to enjoy every now and then.
I personally don’t feel like spending 700 or how many euros to play beat saber on my ps5.
Other games that might be awesome in this is ones were you don’t need to move around but benefit from being able to look around, so flight sims, driving sims, but there the chair setups are better imo.
Can’t really think of much else, that’s why VR is on the decline, really limited number of fun games to be had, or it would require some paradigm shift, like a strategy game but you are playing on the inside of a globe, but then that game would have to survive on being a VR exclusive.
A VR mech game could be so baller. Also a remake of Black and White would work well. But generally yeah it’s just not a great medium for most games and while we have a lot of promising hardware we’re struggling to find ways to use it intuitively
I think after the bubble breaks it does down a bit well see some groups take their time to build really functional stuff. We don’t have good standards on how to interact in VR and it shows. We don’t have enough data on how to make people less motion sick. Basically the hardware is there but the software isn’t and that’ll take more time than we’ve been giving it, imo
Realistically though I think the fundamental limits on how you can interact in VR means while there may be a strong niche market, I don’t expect it to be a mainstream thing. Even if the prices drop a lot and the headsets get smaller there’s still a lot working against them
Armored Core could have been a baller VR game
:)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2441700/UNDERDOGS/
UNDERDOGS is amazing. And I’m not saying that just because I’m in the credits as one of the testers =D
The whole hand thing already felt like a gimmick in the regular version of Black & White. How would a god game benefit in any way from VR?
A remake of Black and White would just be amazing, period
More games and a Matrix-esque visual file manager where you could walk through various libraries of documents, files, videos or pictures in 3D space, or proportional size like WinDirStat would be cool.
The lack of good games has really made VR hard to enjoy. I have five good evergreen titles and not much else.
That’s just making a community reference with extra steps https://youtu.be/NMTQxCzStuw?si=3HIeDCTcgaFmBKGj
I would use that for sorting my porn folder (C:\Games\JazzJackrabbit)
Because we would all love it if a large folder meant we had to run for a few hundred meters to get to the next one instead of just hitting a single key on a keyboard or moving the mouse by a few pixels…
There’s just too many edge cases in VR for it to be a real platform. Movement is hard, there needs to be a lot of space around a person, form factors aren’t great for the hardware, there’s more graphical requirements, etc.
It’d legitimately be easier to fit an arcade cabinet in my house than space for proper VR play.
I think it would take off if Facebook wasn’t involved
I’m not going to lie: I would own a Quest 3 already if it didn’t have Meta all over it.
That’s how I feel about it. I don’t know if I would buy one but independence from Facebook is a prerequisite. Can these even be used without logging in?
Yes, I have no facebook account. It hasn’t been a problem. Other than the logo on the headset, I haven’t seen any other downside to it being a meta ptoduct. The money they have put in to make sure they are and remain ahead of everyone else for tech means that until there is an actual downside, I pretty much have to use their headsets. But I will have no trouble jumping ship if there ever is a downside, or if anyone else even comes close to catching up.
They’ve sunk ungodly amounts of cash to create unrealistic expectations for the VR market. Nobody can compete for the low end, and there’s no way meta is profiting, so what’s their end game?
Presumably, they want to get everyone used to their environment so that when their hardware lead doesn’t mean as much in the future, there will be hesitation to leave. We know they aren’t currently doing anything untoward as there is plenty of overlap between paranoid tech experts and people interested in pioneering new tech. Can’t hide from them. The software and network traffic has been thouroughly vetted and everything is so far doing exactly what it would need to or purports to do.
As long as you go into it knowing you will be changing platforms at some point in the future and hedge all software purchases against that in your mind, the only remaining downside is whether you can stomache giving them your money.
And if that ever changes, it won’t go hidden.
There is also something to be said for the fact that everyone in the Meta community see VR as thriving and growing, and everyone that is outside of it sees VR as stagnating or shrinking. So their money is doing that too presumably.
Their ultimate main goal is also, of course, marrying the tech from VR headsets to the tech from AR glasses. Which will be a true ubiquitous product. Being the first one there will be a huge pay day.
Same. I want to use it as a huge desktop display at work for those days when I need like 40 things visible at once
Saaame and I have an index and a WMR kit hahaha. But in my house, no Facebook hardware or code on any machines.
…I miss beat saber. I’ve been too lazy lately but I have all the parts I need for a quarantined beat saber computer.
I think that the biggest problem is the lack of investment and willingness to take on risk. Every company just seems to want a quick cash grab “killer app” but doesn’t want to sink in the years of development of practical things that aren’t as flashy but solve real-world problems. Because that’s hard and isn’t likely to make the line go up every quarter.
It’s mostly the price. If you have 500 or even 1000 to invest to play games, first that puts you squarely in the top 1% worldwide but more importantly a VR headset is the worst choice in terms of breadth of games you can play. So the first choice will always be a PC or a console which leave the VR headset for the people who actually have 2k+ to spend for gaming and actually want one. A tiny tiny minority.
If you add on top of it that you still have a 50/50 chance of getting nausea each time you play and that it’s a pain in the ass (or an additional expense) if you wear glasses, and the space requirement. It’s not a surprise if the market is stalled.
As for useful implementation, my cousin is an orthopedic surgeon and they use VR headset and 3D x-ray scanner, 3d printers and a whole bunch of sci-fi stuff to prep for operation, but they are not using a meta quest2, we’re talking 50k headset and million dollar equipment. None of that does anything to the gaming market.
My though is that the tech need to get a couple of order of magnitude better and be usable as a day to day computer for work. When I can code in one 10 hours a day without fucking up my eyes, vomiting myself, sweating like a pig and getting neck strain it will have the possibility to take over the computer market, until then, it’s a gimmick.
Even your hypothetical perfect headset would be useless in so many situations where you can game today, can’t use it in public, can’t use it while watching children, can’t use it while talking to other adults in your household,…
Also, I think the idea that you even need that first person perspective for immersion is deeply flawed, lots of games make you feel immersed without that. Not to mention that it severely limits possible UI elements if you don’t want to break the immersion again.
Oh I agree. Once you already have a PC or a console the added experience of a VR headset isn’t a great value proposition for the price.
That’s really awesome and I love seeing that the tech is actually seeing good uses.
Yeah. A lot of what you’re saying parallels my thoughts. The PC and console gaming market didn’t exist until there were more practical, non-specialty uses for computing and, importantly, affordability. To me, it seems that the manufacturers are trying to skip that and just try to get to the lucrative software part, while also skipping the part where you pay people fair wages to develop (the games industry is super exploitative of devs) or, like The Company Formerly-known as Facebook, use VR devices as another tool to harvest personal information for profit (head tracking data can be used to identify people, similar to gait analysis), rather than having interest in actually developing VR long-term.
Much as I’m not a fan of Apple or the departed sociopath that headed it, a similar company to its early years is probably what’s needed; people willing to actually take on some risk for the long-haul to develop the hardware and base software to make a practical “personal computer” of VR.
Absolutely agreed. Though, I’d note that there is tech available for this use case. I’ve been using Xreal Airs for several years now as a full monitor replacement (Viture is more FOSS friendly at this time). Bird bath optics are superior for productivity uses, compared to waveguides and lensed optics used in VR. In order to have readable text that doesn’t strain the eyes, higher pixels-per-degree are needed, not higher FOV.
The isolation of VR is also a negative in many cases as interacting and being aware of the real world is frequently necessary in productivity uses (both for interacting with people and mitigating eye strain). Apple was ALMOST there with their Vision Pro but tried to be clever, rather than practical. They should not have bothered with the camera and just let the real world in, unfiltered.
Half Life Alyx is like if we got Super Mario 64, and then four years later the games influenced by it just didn’t come.
where are the vr holographs? i want a star trek holodeck in my house
It’s been difficult so far to make beams of light decide to stop middair, but maybe you have some ideas?
The force fields that allow you to walk in one direction without actually moving and hitting the wall also seem to still be missing in our RL tech tree.
The work these folks are doing is pretty cool. They utilize polarized light to allow for multiple viewing angles of holograms. https://axiomholographics.com/
holograph - A document written wholly in the handwriting of the person whose signature it bears.
I think you meant hologram. In which case, check it out: https://axiomholographics.com/devices/hologram-room/
people choose consoles over pcs for comfort
people choose pc for its capabilities (and for some, a different kind of comfort)
people choose vr for the experience only - and it can get old quite quickly because the market is too small - not enough ‘content’
There is potential here, maybe, in the future. But nothing really happening now. Outside of Beat Sabre and a couple of other fun kinda cool but then boring ones, my VR experience got stale quickly.
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Does it just need more games maybe? How are flat games that have a VR mode, are those good?
Skyrim is mind blowing.
The actual gameplay feels very different, and locomotion on that scale was more uncomfortable for me than other games (on an original vive). It might be that the performance isn’t stable, as their engine has always had some level of that.
But holy shit, even the whole introductory sequence hits different, and just getting to whiterun feels like an epic adventure. Because of physical space requirements I never got super deep into it, but I could easily see getting lost in it if I’d had more time and got past the slight discomfort other VR games didn’t give me.
So what you are really saying is that playing Skyrim in VR is painful and difficult and makes you uncomfortable. And people wonder why that technology never took off with the masses…
Got an og Vive (699.99 cdn at the time came with headset, controllers, and base stations), playing the hell out of that headset just over a year in steam VR playtime at 2 - 4 hrs a day. I have played Half-Life:VR mod (due to the age of the actual game it is my worst port experience) Half-Life 2: VR mod, Half-Life 2 ep 1 and 2 in VR (absolutely amazing) Raft:VR mod (a few bugs and a few abilities missing from flat, but overall flawless) The Forest:VR mod(excellent), and let’s not forget Valheim:VR mod.
Quest garden can be limiting but you can plug your quest (air link, ?whatever? desktop, link cable) and pretty much play anything on steam, personally have 90+ titles under my VR library (no beat saber). You can check yt for people playing these flat2vr games
Nice. Valheim:VR must be interesting. I can’t blame you for HL1, I have a hard time even with Black Mesa. The mechanics are just out of date.
90 games is pretty decent for a niche system. Someday I’ll play, it’s on my bucket list.
There are some cool ones coming out for Meta Quest exclusively, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to buy one of those. Meta’s going to exclusive the market to death.
Yeah I don’t think doing a VR console war will work. They need to all play the same games, and compete in hardware. Which puts more pressure on devs to make sure the control options are there.
Booooo Facebook exclusives
Wildly overpriced, except for the options owned by the devil. For fuck’s sake, “even with this Apple’s hilariously expensive flop” underlines how hard companies refuse to get it. To reach a wider audience - charge less. Reduce cost. Simplify and add lightness. the only company even trying is god-damned Facebook, and they’re still fumbling it.
You need low-latency 6DOF. Everything else is negotiable. Everything.
And for god’s sake, have an intermediate format. Ship a VR gizmo that only renders ten million floating dots… and guarantees it can show them at 200 Hz, with up-to-the-millisecond tracking. Disconnect that performance from computing power. And latency. Let an absolute potato, on the other side of the world, be capable of producing the magical dreamscape you’re standing in, without making you throw up.
It’s an expensive gimmick.
Like 3D TVs.
Unlike 3d tvs it actually has something to offer. I wouldn’t call it a gimmick, but it definitely has a price barrier that is hard to swallow.
They’re like $300 now. Cheaper than a console, 1/3 the cost of an iPhone, 1/6 the cost of a gaming laptop…
I still cannot fathom how anyone justifies paying so much for phones. My most recent one was a Pixel 4A, £100. I’ve not seen anything exciting in a smartphone in a decade or more.
Mainly camera, nice screen, and longevity. I went from an iPhone XS Max that’s over six years old to a like 1600USD iPhone 16 Pro Max that I’ll probably have for six years. I’m in my phone all the time so I want something fast, 120hz screen is amazing, and super high quality low light pictures of my cats are amazing.
Yeah true, not having to switch phones every couple years is a plus. I don’t do contract, just buy the phone I want and pick the network I want to use it with. Then use that phone for as long as I can stand to. Eventually the upgrade is positive enough to outweigh having to get used to the physicalities of a new phone. New muscle memory, especially for typing on a screen based keyboard is so annoying.
Completely agree! I don’t fault anyone for buying less expensive phones—1600 is an insane amount of money for a pocket rectangle. But I justify it as, I use it more than six hours every day, and it has replaced my DSLR. And I’ll have to for five or six years! It’s nice to have a fancy!
Generally for gaming. It’s like PCs, you can totally get by with a 100 dollar second hand computer… unless you want to play a game made this year.
Typing this on a 120hz 4k gaming phone.
I don’t even play games on my phone but 120hz is INCREDIBLE. I’m so happy my phone is finally a high refresh rate display.
Hehe yeah, nice added benefits to everything, but ourside of gaming it would be hard to justify the price of a high-end phone. Heck even with gaming it can still be hard, lol.
What kind of games can you even control with a touch screen where refresh rate matters that much?
Same! Typing this on a cheap as dirt android 😁
It’s all closed source trash. No one wants to get stuck with a $500 paperweight if meta decides to alter the deal further.
Whether it is closed source or not is irrelevant to this discussion. The fact of the matter is that VR offers a different gaming experience, one that has the opportunity to provide real exercise for the player.
If it did someone would have come out with an actual good game for it in the decade or so it has been around by now.
What game would you finally consider good? Do you even know what people play in VR? There are literally thousands of games. I personally own 250 from over the 10 years, and that’s me holding back. There are so many more that I wanted to play if I had more time to do so.
And even outside of bespoke VR games, a VR headset is an awesome monitor replacement now for your regular computer games too. My Virtual monitor is 4k 120hz, that I can use while sitting in a recliner.
Yeah I used to have an old Windows MR headset until it stopped working (and I switched to linux)
It was a lot of fun, and I do miss beat saber.
But I’m not going to spend a thousand dollars on an outdated index, or put facebook spyware on my face. If Valve or some other company comes out with something modern without proprietary bs, I’d buy it in a heartbeat.
Yup and hopefully untethered. The thought of being attached by a cord to my most expensive appliance would never let me be fully immersed
A slightly more useful gimmick.
Thought this too until I was gifted a headset, and found out I was dead wrong.
Btw they genuinely aren’t even that expensive anymore. Cheaper than a console, a phone is 3x the cost, and a gaming laptop 6x the cost.
I love the shit out of mine. Got the VrCover face pieces which keep sweat from being a problem. I mainly play heavily modded Skyrim VR and a few different exercise games. My son plays a ton of different games with his friends. I don’t think they are for everyone, but not a gimmick IMO.
Medical training in VR isn’t a gimmick. Your view of the uses is just too narrow.
Still seems fairly narrow, the field where you train for literal RL tasks but can’t train on actual RL objects because those are living beings is fairly narrow in itself. Not to mention that there is a fairly limited number of them where you actually have to use your hands on the patient directly considering the prevalence of keyhole type surgeries in recent years where the actual patient contact is not the surgeon’s hands anymore.
I feel like you haven’t tried it. 3D TVs were fine and kinda cool. VR is still mind-blowing every time I play it.
its a standalone device that functionally is like buying a phone with a Snapdragon 865(for older quest 2 models). relative to what you’re paying for. It’s actually not that expensive in the grand scheme of other gaming devices, as its on par/cheaper than basiaclly all other mainstream gaming devices, and on the low end in terms of smartphone pricing.
Only if you’re willing to do business with Facebook.
Paying you per hour to use Facebook hardware would be overpriced.
which is the condition on whether a user wants to make it cheap, else you have to go theough the trouble of sideloading the requied stuff to turn the device into a mixedvr/piracy headset by cutting off the meta related services.
else the “cheap” option would be to go use older windows mixed VR headsets, or cheaper chinese options(e.g Pico Vr headsets), both having their own cost of using it, very similar to what you sign into for users who buy a phone, or a console.
Let’s be honest, any manufacturers/developers willing to embrace porn will successful. Everyone else is just picking gnat shit out of pepper, hoping it’ll turn to gold.
Hardware and content is still the big issue. The good porn games still suck in VR, and there’s not a lot of them. The equipment is just too inconvenient.
Your hands are occupied, your positions are restricted, your tethered to the PC, and I don’t want to get a thousand dollars of delicate hardware nutted on. It’s just not there yet.
I think the fundamental flaw in VR proponent thinking is that they think you need a first person perspective to be immersed.
Thank you for this wonderful phrase that I will be using from now on.