It needs to either become a generic commodity like a TV, or it will die.
We can’t have this fragmented system. Imagine if you needed a Sony TV for PS, one for Xbox, one for PC, a standalone one that could run it’s own exclusive content…
It’s good tech, and the immersion is unparalleled, but greedy company are going to burn it to the ground it so they can rule the ashes.
It’s fucking madness that you can’t even use it to watch 3D movies on Netflix etc. There needs to be a generic box that accepts USB or HDMI input from all devices so you can at least use it for things other than gaming, even if it just puts it all in a big virtual screen.
I blame Meta. My Oculus Rift CV1 was working great until some random software update and now for some reason it won’t read my sensors as being connected via USB3.0 cable despite them being so, instantly rendering my expensive VR device a giant paper weight.
I’m still salty about Oculus starting out crowdfunded then selling to Facebook. What a fucking betrayal.
Sony gave up on the VR2 before it was even released. No promotion, hard to even find the games in the store, no free VR games in PS+, barely any investment in developers and exclusives. I don’t understand why anyone would expect a better outcome.
Sony gave up on VR when the PS5 launched without it.
PSVR2 died because it’s not backwards compatible with PSVR1.
That’s another reason, yes
It’s still pretty much gate kept to rich people. The affordable ones will make you sick if you’re not in the small lucky group that is unaffected. I’ve wanted to get into VR for years but never have the excess money to do it. I have noticed an uptick in YouTubers playing VR lately. I think this article and the developers polled are missing a lot of reality.
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.
Everyone complaining about intense sweating… I have to wonder if you guys are on the bigger side. Playing very active games on the Vive never made me sweat like you guys are saying.
Maybe you are just a naturally less sweaty person, that can vary a lot by genetics too, not to mention temperature and humidity around you.
I imagine when you treat VIRTUAL REALITY BEING REAL NOW as a fad, develop like two or three games for it, then never do anything with it again… yeah I imagine the market would decline…
As other have said, it’s extremely expensive to pc/vr and for those that can afford it, there isn’t enough content. For video browsing I find that I have a better monitor than the quest 3. (led vs qoled) so why would I bother? Plus I have a fiancé around me when I’m at home so it makes no sense to close myself off. I enjoy the product and maybe if it had better integration for multiple people, I might use it more often. The fix for the sweating is to use a bobovr s3 pro strap and to remove the headface. It also comes with a fan so it’s honestly very comfortable. But that’s another £100.
I wish it could take off more, but I know it’s still just a gimmick.
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.
Antis have been killing VR for years already, Asgard Wrath 2 came out in December.
What do you mean by this?
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.
Anybody that says vr is a gimmick haven’t tried a vr racing rig. Not only the fun factor but I’m definitely a better driver now for it.
I imagine the insane price to entry is a big thing.
I had some disposable cash so I went with the index, I love it don’t get me wrong but, 1k is super fucking steep for an enjoyable system, and that’s ontop of the requirement they do it right when they make a game, many of them take vr as a minority and you can tell when a game puts it on the side burner
I have an Index also, one thing I find frustrating is that because the Quest has such a dominant marketshare and packages games differently, some smaller VR games and experiences I see seem to be only available as an apk file for Quest sideloading and there is no straightforward way for me to play them.
The main reason I don’t use it more though is I never got past the physical discomfort, I still feel nausea playing most games for more than a few minutes, and headaches from the pressure on my scalp/face if going longer than that, ie. trying to watch a movie with the headset. So that basically means I’m not going to just spend a lot of time passively chilling out in VR, it has to be some specific thing I want to do that feels worth it to push through the discomfort involved and can be gotten through relatively quickly. Mostly that ends up being just Beat Saber.
Also a lot of people are lazy. VR requires you to move more than playing flat games. Also it requires a decent PC which is an added cost. As you said - when it works (Payday 2, Alyx) there is nothing better. When it doesn’t, you can end up with physical symptoms.
I’ve enjoyed my VR but rarely. When I game, I’m usually doing it to relax. Getting everything up and running, clearing space, etc so I can wear a device that makes my face sweat while I thrash about isn’t relaxing.
VR is the gaming equivalent of going to a fancy restaurant with a formal dress code. It’s nice once in a while, but most of the time I’d rather just make a sandwich and stay in.
Even though Facebook is a terrible inhumane corporation, they have the best product because it is lightweight, can be used without any base station and can be used without a pc-link.
The fact that a VR set requires at minimum a 5x5 feets space with a computer within the vicinity is definitely hurting the VR market.
So I just hope that we get something akin to the Quest but without the evil corporation bit.
When I played Elite Dangerous with a VR headset, man was it magical. But I won’t dedicate a small room and a PC just for that experience.
Yup, $1k for a decent headset, $1k for a decent GPU, and you also need space to play. It’s a pretty big barrier to entry before you even get into the limited selection of games.
You don’t need anything like that much for a Quest 2/3. Quest 2 is obviously a bit outdated, but I still have fun with mine.
I couldn’t use the quest, it seemed to be on par with the psvr in terms of frames which gave me massive motion sickness
Fair enough. Personally I find the motion sickness mostly down to the game rather than headset, I didn’t know that the frame rate had an effect!
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’
I got a quest 2 a few years back, and it blew my mind. We ended up getting my wife her own so we could play together. Now, my daughter plays a lot of gorilla tag, but other than that, they collect dust.
For me, the biggest thing that prevents me from using it more, is the isolation. You need to find an empty space and remove yourself completely from the world.
On my phone or Xbox, I still know what’s going on around me, and I can hop in, play for a bit, and still know what’s going on in my house. I can walk away for a moment and get back to what I was doing. In VR, it feels like more of an investment. If I’m not sure that I have plenty of time to disengage from reality, I’m not going to bother putting on the headset.
Also, I’m a sweater, and a soggy, foggy headset is just eww.
Bingo. I spent a few hours playing some zombie killer game/demo with the HTC Vive back in like 2017, and while it was actually a lot of fun, it was super disorienting and I definitely knocked some stuff off my shelves by trying to stand in the middle of the room by myself. Someone also walked in without me hearing, and they got a hearty elbow to the face when I swung around to shoot a zombie behind me.
And ugh the sweat is real. After a few minutes the headset fogged up and started slipping off my face, and since that particular headset had porous foam all over it, the sweat soaked in and became gross immediately. That was the last time I used VR.
I know some people hate the idea of VR and want it to go away, others are all in.
I do enjoy it, and I want to be all in, but it’s not worth digging it out and charging it up at this point.
Yeah, I’d be all in if the headsets were small, comfortable, and didn’t necessarily block out the outside world. I think there’s a ton of potential, so I hope development doesn’t completely stall. I wear glasses, and that’s pretty much the maximum amount of hardware I can handle on my face.
This definitely, vr is a lot of fun, especially with friends (in the game or sharing a headset while we all sit in the same room). But it isn’t worth setting it all up (especially if it is pcvr) when I could just play one of the 100s of pancake games I have collected over the years.
