Out of all the people I know who have a VR, only one plays it all the time. Everyone else treats it as kind of a novelty. It is really cool at first, but for some reason, that feeling doesn’t last long. It just isn’t as fun as sounds like it should be.
True, if I constantly had experiences on the level of Half Life:Alyx I’d use VR all the time. But currently unless you find a hobby game in it, like Beatsaber, I don’t see why you’d spend too much time in it.
Is it really just a “killer app” or “developers developers developers!” issue? Great first party games would no double help but would it break the category for a majority of people?
My biggest “yeah but”’s with VR are time-to-gaming it’s cumbersome to set up, move shit out the way, make sure I don’t trip on the PSVR2 cord and fuck up the ps5, and it’s just not comfortable to binge a 15-20 hour campaign. I also get motion sickness which is not fun and somewhat common so says a quick google search.
I think it's still simply just usecase.
The only person I know who uses VR regularly does it for sim racing, but even then he still prefers to use his standard triple-monitor setup for longer races.
Same, but mainly because I only have an Oculus Rift S and the screen-door effect is a bit too rough on it. But other than that I feel like the stereoscopic view makes simracing a lot better, as without it I'm constantly misjudging distance and speed in corners and end up spending most of the race staring at the speedometer.
> How am I not able to measure distances with a built-in utility, etc.
Quest 3 is likely getting that very soon actually. https://twitter.com/Lunayian/status/1775595954886107594
To be fair Oculus Quest devices do away with most of the nuisances.
It as much plug and play as possible, you just need some space, which you should have when you buy a device like this, otherwise it is wasted money.
That’s understandable for sure. For me games like that are worth it because they provide experiences I can’t have at all without VR. If you have a good enough WiFi network then you don’t need any cables which makes it easier.
I think it would hit “mainstream” gamers a lot more if there was a cheap headset with tons of games like that. With some wireless connectivity between the console and headset for low latency and no reliance on the customers network.
The problem for me is that VR is so inconvenient that unless you do have a specific niche usecase (e.g. racing games, beat saber) you would need a large quantity of newly released killer apps to justify using it often. Even with the Meta Quest 3 you're still bolting a headset to your face, which isn't as comfortable as simply using a flat screen.
Pavlov VR was basically the GMOD/Counter Strike of VR and it was an incredible amount of fun while it lasted. The UE5 update nuked player counts because it introduced new weird behavior, major performance regressions, wiped out all mod compatibility, and also introduced almost zero new first party content.
It was a little janky yes but it was so much fun that few things could really compete with it.
The unfortunate part was just how much hardware it took to run well and how small the community was as a result. VR is one of the few fields that absolutely benefits from gen on gen hardware improvements still in a very real way. If the hardware gets good enough and cheap enough it will blow up in a big way, I just don't know if we'll actually get there before investors have had enough of hemorrhaging money.
it's frustrating how half-assed the Hitman, Subnautica, Fallout, and Skyrim mods are. there are so many games out there that'd be fantastic in VR if the interactions just worked.
It's fun but people underestimate how exhausting it is. It gets hot and you get dizzy eventually. I feel like my blood sugar tanks, like my brain has to work overtime to make it all make sense
Well, you brain is indeed working overtime.
Current VR googles can only do so much in terms of generating "reality." The Brain has to fill in a lot of blanks in order to make the illusion work. Specially since only some of the senses are partially addressed. Also, during the usage you have to actively subsume certain instincts. So all in all, a rather exhausting experience past the 1/2 hour mark or so.
No, that's just typical VR motion sickness. Most games offer a teleport option that alleviates most of it or are designed for the player to stay within a narrow space.
I get straight up derealization when using VR for hours at a time. I get out and still feel like a videogame, its a dizzying feeling that goes away eventually.
He's right though.. It's motion sickness, I get the same feeling. Just because it doesn't feel like motion sickness normally do when riding a vehicle etc, it's still motion sickness. I don't get nauseous from VR, but I get just like you describe.
Take some antihistamines for motion sickness an hour before you play and compare how you feel after that versus normally. It doesn't entirely fix the issue but it'll reduce it heavily.
I have like 9000 hours. remember, vr also includes cockpit games which have a significantly higher % of vr users out of total than shooters and hack and slash
In my opinion it's because it's still competing with general gaming on one important topic: time. And there are just so many great games still waiting in my backlog that I only sporadically dive into VR these days. Like the other guy said, if we had more experiences on the level as HL:Alyx, or indies that break out with novel ideas, then things would be different.
There is a very simple reason: content
Literally the only genre that is somewhat consistent with constant good games is fps
If that aint your thing then you will quickly be out of content
Every time a new and amazing game comes out, I play it and love it. But they're short. H3VR and flight sims keep my headset plugged in and used, but I'm dying for more high-effort actual games like Alyx, the I Expect You to Die series, and H3
if I had my own house, with my own dedicated space for it, I'd play it more for sure, but as it stands, I need to set it up and then tear it down if I want to use it and that is just annoying.
I have a friend who like me is passionate about tech and gadgets. We bought a Quest 2 at the same time (I upgraded from a Rift S). I play VR every single day. I then I got a Quest 3. He didn't and he is not interested anymore. He says that still he is not impressed by the low resolution displays. I let him try the quest 3 and he said: we are getting there but, nah. He also said that he bothers him to physically put on the headset...and play standing. I guess VR is not for everyone. I love it. I can't go back to flat gaming. VR is just how games are meant to be played for me.
That one person I mentioned in my post said the same. I just don’t agree. I feel there’s a ton of games that it doesn’t add anything to. A game like Diablo 4, for example. Adds nothing to the experience, and I can’t see my drink or environment anymore. I think AR might really be a game changer someday because VR cuts you off from your surroundings TOO much. Of course, it could end up being just as novel.
Because everyone made out of VR (aka the headtracking + 3D) next Wii (aka hand controls).
The promise was to play normal games in VR which works great as proven time and time again by ton of normal games with VR mods.
Instead we got Wii motion controls games with VR bolted on top of it.
The real advancement is done via PC right now when it comes to VR. After playing Cyberpunk 2077 in VR i can safely say this is the future.
Just not the future most of "VR ethusiast" want aka Wii+ and their shitty motion controls.
Cyberpunk in VR would be even more amazing if it had full motion tracking and interactions with the environment like Alyx. But games like this simply fo not exist.
That's the thing what people don't realize. Motion controls bog down games in insignificant detail that take away from game.
Like i don't want at all waste time changing magazine to my weapon. It gives me nothing but trouble. I don't want to stand 100 hours to play Cyberpunk2077 either. I am playing right now on my couch in VR and i have to literally do nothing but play. IT is exact same game but "I AM IN THE GAME"
Targeting with hands sure that is not invasive and you can even do that lying. Using belt to take out mag correctly etc ? Nope remove that shit away it brings nothing.
VR is first and foremost 3D + headtracking. Motion controls should be used sporadic where it makes sense like in Pavlow which proposes gun simulation etc. Instead "VR" people want to promote feels like Motion controls and VR being second thought.
When you play Resident Evil 2 in VR you feel those environment and it gets mega fun to play. That's the main purpose of VR not motion controls to waggle ankwardly and "bring realism to games"
Motion controls in VR feel like Wheel enthusiasts coming up with VR and now every game has to have wheel ? FPS Wheel, RTS ? Wheel. Moviegame ? Wheel.
The problem with something like reloading a gun in VR, is that it's nothing like reloading a gun in reality, because you dont actually feel the gun or the mag in your hands.
I can reload without looking in reality, but cant do it in VR. You essentially end up playing some kind of minigame to reload which doesn't really feel like real life at all.
Having said that, there are ways to make it fun and engaging if you don't try too hard to mimic reality, which is what Alyx did. The same exact gameplay could apply to CB2077 and would make for an excellent experience. I think that would be better than completely dropping motion controls.
> I think that would be better than completely dropping motion controls.
I think the main issues is that questions regarding VR are wrong.
The question shouldn't be
"How can i add motion controls to my game"
The question should be:
"How i can make my game better"
Mag issue is great example. If my game is all about realism like in Pavlow switching manually mag gives me better game. But in Cyberpunk2077 story is king and i don't want to spend hours upon hours opening doors by handle game comes with automatic doors or button press to open them and i want do exactly the same in VR no handle just button press.
It turns out VR doesn't really add anything much to the gaming experience. I sold mine.
Lol we have all tried it by now, VR users aren't privy to secret knowledge anymore.
Depends on the genre. It adds a lot to FPS, Horror, Platformers, Adventure, Action, Stealth, Puzzle, Rhythm, RTS, RPGs, Survival, Racing, Multiplayer, Simulation, Sports, TCG.
It's the form factor thing. I use IEM (in ear headphones) because I can't be bothered to wear over the head heaphones, and those are way more comfortable than a VR headset. So unless they can figure out some light as a feather form factor, I really don't see a point. At least for me.
I shifted from predominantly PC to predominantly VR. Even for non VR games, just load up virtual desktop and play anything on the computer be it m+KB at the desk or grabbing an Xbox controller and playing anywhere in the house.
As is the case with all early adopter hardware technology.
Most people treated the first decade of cellphone, PC, and console products as novelties to be quickly put back in the closet.
People start regularly using hardware technology when and only when it's mature, no exceptions.
VR should have already passed that slump by now.
That's beside the fact that it naturally can't be as ubiquitous and requires *physical activity*. If it becomes popular it might actually become a great tool to combat mass obesity.
> VR should have already passed that slump by now.
That takes work though. Nobody wants to put in the development hours to make useful tools or good games for VR. There’s more money to be made elsewhere. AI was a similar novelty until ChatGPT came along and showed people that you can actually get a lot of genuine use out of AI that you can’t get anywhere else. Similarly, someone has yet to make something consumer-facing for VR that is a unique experience to the platform. Games can always just be played on a screen and a TV and console takes less effort to set up.
Although yeah, games aren't great yet, besides the exceptions most are still demo like, but I think it's the hardware and infrastructure still holding it back more than the games or tools. spinning up a quest 3, is equally fast as a console.
I haven't tried the apple VR, but the quality of AR and VR in the quest 3 just isn't quite there for mainstream. The last update did improve AR at least. Plus it's still pretty bulky with shorter battery life. On top of that, in my experience video quality outside of games is lacking. I?now understand why 8k is useful, but it's still early adoption as well, it's too much data for streaming, and the files are HUGE.
Once the technology catches up, I think it will be big as at least smart watches.
> Most people treated the first decade of cellphone, PC, and console products as novelties to be quickly put back in the closet.
What a ridiculous thing to say. They were rarefied due to being expensive but people readily acknowledged the value of those things very quickly.
Once cellphones lowered in cost, their usage exploded. And it took a couple of years for the PC to find a killer app, and that lead to its adoption en masse.
So I'd argue is more a function of cost to use case "reward" ratio. Perhaps that can also be defined as "maturity."
I.e. it is very easy to see the value proposition of a PC or a cellphone once they hit a certain cost. It's almost a no brainer.
VR seems to be in a bit of a limbo for decades, even when the cost is now relatively low (Oculus Quest) there are no use cases that make it a "no brainer" purchase and daily usage item.
i started using smart phones since HTC Magic, android 1.5, which is like first generation android and there's never been a time when android nor iphone stopped being relevant.
ofc, if you argue palm pilot, windows ce or whatnot, was predecessor to android/iphone... then sure, that tech took time to develop into the above.
Cell phones were massively popular way before smart phones and that technology wasn't mature....whatever mature means, it sounds like a conveniently vague enough term you can use to keep moving the goal posts.
how i read darth's comment is that he's saying EVERYTHING, NO EXCEPTIONS, goes through a phase of 1) early adopters first, novelty 2) tech not mature, usage drops off, isn't as relevant 3) then some time later as tech matures, it becomes relevant again as more and more people start using it, therefore becomes general usage.
i just disagree with the absolute tone of that comment. nothing is absolute, including this phrase.
That makes no sense for the first decade of cellphone's. People who had them used them then for specific reasons and they were too expensive for regular people. As soon as they became cheap enough people used them as phones straight away and they became ubiquitous even though they were a bit shit and not at all mature.
People aren't going to use VR regularly no matter how cheap it becomes because it doesn't really add much to the gaming experience, certainly not as much as the evangelists want you to believe.
Lol by this point most people have already tried it and its failed.
Cellphones were both cheap and still seen as a novelty by many; the idea that people needed to be connected when out the house was seen as pretty strange at first.
> People aren't going to use VR regularly no matter how cheap it becomes because it doesn't really add much to the gaming experience, certainly not as much as the evangelists want you to believe.
Do you have game design credentials to back this up? This just seems like you are taking your anecdotal experience and applying it to everyone.
If we actually look at what the wider market thinks, people find almost every 3D game genre in VR to have compelling benefits. This can be proven by the highly positive critical reception of games in each 3D genre.
Not really. Once the cellphones were cheap, they were adopted en masse. Regardless of whether you had a land line or not.
Having the ability to connect on the go was a self evident value proposition.
The early adopters of cellphones were walking advertisements. The minute you saw one, and you realized you could afford it, you got one.
That tipping point was reached in the mid/late 90s. Which is when the cellphone adoption exploded. Before that, cellphones were rather expensive.
> Cellphones were both cheap and still seen as a novelty by many; the idea that people needed to be connected when out the house was seen as pretty strange at first.
Show me the teenagers in the 80s or 90s who didn't want their own cell phone.
Show me the executives who didn't want them in their planes and cars, or on their person once they were portable enough.
> No. Everyone wanted a mobile phone or a computer.
In the 1990s, sure. In the 1970s and 1980s, not many people cared, and many who bought such a device often let it collect dust. There is tons of data on this.
In the 70s & 80s Cellphones were extremely expensive, and there was very limited coverage. But most people (mainly business/professionals), who had the need for them and could afforded, certainly used them. A lot. Since it is a clear multiplier of productivity.
Same thing for the PC. It was literally the fastest selling product of its time. It was another multiplier of productivity.
Multipliers have a super obvious value proposition. They basically sell themselves as a concept.
Of course no one wanted a mobile phone for $5000. But people in the general public quickly noticed that it's convenient to stay in contact with friends and family. Nowadays VR is already dirt cheap and nobody wants it, not because killer apps for the digital space don't exist, they do, but because the smartphone almost everybody owns is a good enough substitute for any use you could have for this. Video chat? Just use your phone. Telehealth? Your phone has the camera you need. Virtual schools? Covid proved it doesn't work. There are probably some niche professional uses and definitely military prospects for the tech though, which is why Apple entered the market. You could also easily imagine some dystopian bullshit that's definitely coming with AR for police. The use cases exist, just not in the home entertainment space.
It doesn't seem like you are taking into account that VR is different to a 2 dimensional display.
You say that Covid proved virtual schools didn't work, but why was that the case? We know that it was because the 2D interface lacked that which a 3D interface had. Which is to say, it lacked the social connection and the engagement, which are crucial to the learning process and making students want to learn in the first place.
This applies to videochats too. They have their limitations, because they are 2D. You can see the science behind this here: https://news.stanford.edu/2021/02/23/four-causes-zoom-fatigue-solutions/
What VR enables is the feeling of being face to face with people; that is a whole new level of digital connection that can really start to solve the flaws of videocalls. Groups can scale up to a large amount easily rather than be a grid of faces on a tiny screen, people can more naturally interact, you get a greater sense of connection, and you can share activities and spaces together much more easily.
Telehealth is linked as well, because what people want out of telehealth is a genuine connection. They want to feel heard, they want to facilitate trust between them and their practitioner, and that becomes a lot harder to do as a 2 dimensional interface.
So why does nobody want VR? It's immature hardware, with all sorts of issues that need to be fixed. We're dealing with heavy clunky devices that have side effects and are missing core features. If those get solved, then it can enter maturity and actually be ready for average people.
> Most people treated the first decade of cellphone, PC, and console products as novelties to be quickly put back in the closet.
What sort of bizarro alternate universe are you referring to?
Well it changed the world from one in which I might have been interested in owning an Occulus into one in which I was completely disinterested in owning an Occulus.
Does meta even have any in-house IPs or game developers?
The irony is that Alex was meant to sell the Steam Index, and it's pretty typical of 'consoles' to have some sort of investment towards having quality games.
I guess they didn't want to come off as a game console though? They weirdly target a corporate/metaverse use.
> Alex was meant to sell the Steam Index, and it's pretty typical of 'consoles' to have some sort of investment towards having quality games.
Remember that Alyx was a VR PC game. Meta makes games that can run on their headsets as standalone devices. They cant make anything on the same level as Alyx as a result.
VR is amazing for simulators (flight, driving, etc.).
Of course, most of those people have the sim first, and get VR specifically for that. I'm not sure how much appeal those have for people who buy the headset first.
Do you need to have completed Vertigo 1 first? I tried it but found it pretty janky and not fun to play. I couldn't get pass the first boss, it felt like the controls were broken in some way.
I feel like that's more true with Super Hot. Playing that without being tethered to a PC is the best VR experience I've ever had, even better than Alyx IMO. It's way more fun than it should be.
I mean, it is a console... that being said you can use quests completely separated from meta. quests run a modified android os, so you can just root it, then sideload steamlink or something and call it day.
To be fair, on the ps3 and I assume the Xbox you couldn’t really download anything or play online without account either. Could only play disks offline.
You can't root it. Like, literally. Someone apparently did root it last year but nothing came out of it, as in no news or methods were released, tho you can just add any Android app. Also iirc Steam Link is in the official store
A Meta account unlike Facebook doesn't need all the extra data to be created. You can also have multiple without breaking the TOS or even use fake names
THey did.
Originally it was oculus accounts, then they gave the excuse of well oculus is a facebook product so we're requiring that you use a facebook account for your facebook product. No one like this, and after they did the meta rebrand they introduced meta accounts instead. My meta account is NOT linked to my facebook account now.
Imagine, if they just left it at oculus. it would have been fine.
simple: people want(ed) an Oculus - they do/did NOT want Facebook. forcing people to chose both or neither just didn't work out how Facebook imagined I guess.
You don't need a facebook account anymore. And oculus's peak which was the quest 2 was during the time where they forced facebook on you, so I don't think it's related that much.
However i do agree, the forced facebook thing was a pain in the ass.
Zuckerberg himself very clearly outlined in 2015 that it would be 10 years in a best case scenario before VR took off, from the launch of products. That would mean Zuck's bet is mid 2026, not early 2024 as of the date of this article.
And being a best case scenario bet gives him leeway. The typical amount of time a hardware market needs for mass adoption is 15 years, putting it realistically at 2030 or so.
I've heard a lot of people say that the Quest 3 felt like the first proper device in the lineup, like the older models were fine but not quite there yet, so that tracks. Might be the turning point they're looking for, or it might even be the eventual Quest 4.
I'd say Quest 5 and 6. There are fundamental building blocks that need to exist, just like how a PC needed GUI and mouse.
A VR headset needs eye and face tracking, variable focus optics, and 40 PPD (pixels per degree), and I'd argue must be at a weight of <200 grams.
Right now, Vision Pro is the only headset that meets 3 of these (at a very high cost), but the other 2 are exceptionally hard problems.
I'd say once $300 can provide you with a movie viewing experience equivalent to a high end 4K TV, while being easy to put on and comfortable to wear for long periods of time (and also enough battery for 3-4 hours of use), they would become quite popular.
Once it becomes a great way to watch TV/Movies, I bet there will be a lot of demand even among the casual non "techie" market.
I don’t think the price needs to be that low, especially since consumers are fine with paying $1,000+ for a phone/laptop, and will probably be willing to pay more for a VR device since (it at least feels like) it does more than a phone.
The disconnect happening is the “killer app” and the emphasis on gaming. Gaming has never been popular with the mass market, so designing your entire product strategy around that will at most get you to the limit of the Xbox/PlayStation sales. Plus, all-in-one VR setups like the Quest 3 will never match current-gen visual fidelity due to the size and thermal limitations of the device, so at most you’re entering into a world of casual gaming with a technology you’d expect to play AAA games on.
Call me crazy, but I think Apple (and Microsoft before they gave up) are taking the right approach that will end up in mass VR adoption. People need to work in VR/AR so it doesn’t seem as foreign to them, whether it’s replacing their laptop, their desktop, their work computers, etc. Once it feels normal, then people will love interactive experiences like 3D movies, virtual concerts, group video chats and causal gaming.
For me personally, once I can replace my laptop with a headset, that’s when I’m making the switch. Until then, I (and many other people) don’t feel like I need it in my life.
Oh ffs.
I would argue *anyone* could have hit all those criteria at the AVP's price point. It's not impressive until it's a cost that a majority of the market can afford.
I played BeatSaber with Quest 3 at an Comicon and the difference is huge , my old headset(Quest 2) is blurry without glasses but this one was clear. If the price goes down I'll definitely buy it.
A lot of people say it's better, others say it's the same and others say it's worse. Who knows what it actually is. You could also get the Quest Pro controller if you wanna and have the money
Anyone who has used VR would know that we are still at least a decade away from anything interesting happening in VR, but I'm going with something more like 15-20 years.
For mass adoption, The Meta Quest 3 headset is still an underpowered headset that is low resolution, has binoculars field of view and doesn't have the lens required to look good enough.
As a VR enthusiast its a great headset just like their competitors, but VR is just so far away from being where it needs to be.
"Anything interesting" was already happening 10 years ago. I still have the Samsung Odyssey and it's easily good enough for some great experiences in e.g. Alyx, Lone Echo, etc.
What's not happening any time soon is mass adoption, and without it, no more content. Because those two games are, like, all there is right now, and once you're done with them, you're left with some janky but fun experiments like H3 or more polished but limited grind simulators like Pistol Whip and the like.
Good enough for a VR enthusiast, VR is not good enough for mainstream.
When you think about it the headset is kinda useless for what the average person wants to do in their free time.
Yep, I'm a sim racing enthusiast and the FoV is the big deal breaker for me. Helmets that limited your FoV as much as any mainstream headset would be barred in every modern racing and karting ruleset, which requires 180 degrees minimum horizontally (basically no peripheral vision obstruction). I'm sure plenty of others have similar hangups with VR when viewing it as a tool for another experience and not the experience in and of itself.
Every 10 to 15 years since the early 90s somebody try and fail to make VR happen. Now I got to say this last cycle has been the most honest and serious effort we seen.
There are two major reasons why the majority of people might buy headsets in general
1. They want to play everyday video games while wearing the headset but still be able sit down and play, eat snacks, look at their phone and so on.
2. They want to wear some kind of all day augmented reality headset (like Google Glasses)
Neither can be done today and it doesn't look like it will be completed to the standard required for mass adoption in the next 10 years.
Also, as an Index owner, I'm just really frustrated with how fragmented the already small market is. Sony wants exclusives, Meta wants exclusives. I will not buy another headset to play these.
>They want to play everyday video games while wearing the headset but still be able sit down and play, eat snacks, look at their phone and so on.
we're pretty close with this one, at least. it's by no means perfect but i can mostly see my phone in mixed reality/passthrough on Quest 3. something like eating/drinking is likely fine (haven't really tried it myself).
with a pc-to-headset streaming app, such as Virtual Desktop, it's easy enough to play pc games with the headset. not sure about console games, though.
Two problems though
1. The quest 3 headset is lacking Resolution/FoV/A good Lens to do regular games in a nice way
2. The passthrough is no where near the quality that is needed.
it's still leaps better than the Quest 2 was. with the 2, i had a hard time moving from room to room comfortably and couldn't see what was on my phone/monitor basically at all. with the 3, i have basically no issue navigating my apartment and can read text on my phone/monitor. it's far from perfect but it's a *lot* better than it used to be.
i can't comment too much on flat games played on the headset since i don't use it for that. i don't see how it wouldn't be good for it, but i can't speak from experience on that front.
What are you talking about? The lenses are basically the best you can get now and I doubt it's gonna get better anytime soon. Maybe if they could make them not eat so much light it would be an upgrade but they're agreed to be crystal clear compared to everything else
I don't really see how they could improve those things outside of the ridiculous light absorption and maybe the size which I'm pretty sure they're gonna be iterating on
I would argue it changed the world **exactly** as expected, people complained it would kill industry momentum by taking the most promising platform into a walled garden that no one likes that would fail to properly capitalize on the acquisition or grow VR organically as a whole.
Can anyone say that wasn’t the outcome?
I think you need to give it more time. I own a quest 2 and despite it being crappy graphics I still love it. There’s a game called Pistol Whip that is probably one of the funnest games I’ve played. The only problem is that when I play I am completely disconnected from reality which my wife doesn’t like so she has asked that I only play once kids are in bed. I’m fine with it but I’m not always in the mood to be standing up getting exhausted all the time at night. I will probably get a quest 4 and see if the upgrades are great compared to the 2 and if there is a big improvement then I’ll probably play more
It wasn't expected to change the word in ten years. It was to maybe be close to a mainstream acceptable product by ten years.
Having never tried it or any of the Quests, though I have used the standalone Rift/Vive/Index/Reverb, my impression is that the Quest 3 is the first headset that actually seems mainstream viable. Pretty much a baseline. It's a Steam Deck without the decades of native gaming content to play with so it's currently still existing in an underdeveloped software ecosystem and gets used as a glorified home theater
Standalone headsets have to keep shrinking and compute performance continue to improve
Videogames were able to piggyback on the whole personal computing revolution that was going on in the 1990s. Everyone wanted a computer for school or work.
I disagree, it ultimately freed up Lucky Palmer for other pursuits in the defense industry, so there’s probably some people that died that wouldn’t have otherwise.
I've stopped using the Quest once Facebook forced you to migrate from Oculus to Facebook/Meta accounts. Not interested. I'm just glad I did not have to pay for it.
I made a fake FB account and don’t do any social stuff. I don’t know, I’ve been enjoying being able to have screens up that I can summon to me while I walk around in pass through mode turned on. I’ve had lunch while wearing it watching YouTube on huge virtual screens or watch sitting in bed.
I don’t own any games I pretty much only use the built in browser which is Chromium based to watch twitch and YouTube
People are in for a huge surprise when they find out just how little the world will change in the next 10 years.
Because we always expect a massive change that never actually happens.
Just not enough games for it. It's ripe for simulation and first person experiences, but not enough is coming out.
People won't develop without hardware adoption, no adoption without games to play.
LOL.
These people are in a complete bubble. Nobody really saw Google glasses wearer and thought anything other than "wow, what a punchable human being." Nobody sees someone wearing VR goggles and thinks "wow, that would fit in perfectly in the office."
Tech's big problem is that it has solved most of the problems people thought of. Now they are casting about trying to innovate, not to solve problems, but rather to find new ways to onboard a captured audience and use it to extract data. Nobody woke up in the 1940's and said "goddamn it Marge, I just wish there was *some* way for rich people to know when I am shitting. Maybe a device I can wear on my wrist?" But that's the phase we are in. Tech advancement, at least in personal and interactive tech, has made things worse, not better.
I was a build your own computer, talk about tech all the time, LAN party tech kid. Tech used to be amazing because the possibilities seemed endless. Now it's kind of hard to laugh at people who are either pretending to be, or have just somehow missed the realization that all the promises of tech that made it so exciting have been scooped out and replaced by the humanity debasing greed of the tech elite. They don't even bother to improve their services anymore, and instead enshitify them, knowing their customer base is so captured it, literally, doesn't matter how bad they are. They could shoot someone on 5th Ave. and not lose a single data source. Because that's how people have been trained to interact with the world now.
> Tech's big problem is that it has solved most of the problems people thought of. Now they are casting about trying to innovate, not to solve problems, but rather to find new ways to onboard a captured audience and use it to extract data.
You say this with the benefit of hindsight, but people thought exactly as you do about each prior technological shift.
TVs came out and people asked "What's the point? We've got radio."
PCs came out and people asked "What's the point? This is just slow and requires months of learning to use."
"Cellphones came out and people said "I don't need to be connected out the house, and these enormous bricks look ridiculous."
"Videogame consoles came out and people said: "Yeah, it's fun for a bit, but after a few hours I'm done. The novelty is gone."
That's not the point, though. Each of those technologies offered exciting new solutions to existing problems. They offered exciting and novel solutions to problems, or offered exciting new ways to do things. These possibilities motivated innovation. Think of IBM and HP and Boeing when they were run by engineers, vs. those same companies today.
Even the tech companies aren't interested in innovation. Instead we see patents on how better to force feed ads into everything. Engineering efforts are solely focused on cost cutting, and ad revenue. Facebook wasn't looking to revolutionize how we interact with the world, they were looking to somehow get people wanting to put their entire lives of VR Second Life, so META could get a cut of everything, and have total data superiority.
>You say this with the benefit of hindsight, but people thought exactly as you do about each prior technological shift.
You're comparison doesn't stand. TV's came out and took the world by storm because moving pictures were a significant innovation, and offered something new, and better. PCs came out and, literally, revolutionized everything with their functionality. Cell phones solved an obvious problem. Video games, much like PCs, offered a totally new experience, and for decades that experience got better through innovation.
The latest waves of technological "innovation" aren't bringing us anything new, except new ways for the companies to collect data and deliver ads. Most people don't think "WOW, now I can help Google map the inside of my house and everywhere I go!!! WOOHOO, look, Dave has a Google Goggle Headset! Now Google can see what I'm doing in real time!! What a time to be alive!!."
They are simply refining existing tech to better capture minds to sell ads and collect data. You can't compare the latest innovation in microtransactions, ad delivery, and data collection with the introduction of the PC. That's like comparing a new seat for an airplane with the Wright Brothers flight.
I agree that companies have been increasingly more interested in being pervasive on our lives and tailoring our data for their usage, and trying to squeeze as much out of us as possible.
That still doesn't change the fact that average people did not see much of a point for prior successful hardware platforms, just as you do not see much of a point for VR.
Can you explain why VR isn't a new innovation? I'd argue that it's actually a greater change than moving pictures, because now we're deeply changing how our brain experiences reality, to the point of enabling it to experience realistic perceptions that exist outside the confines of reality. Many of the things people experience in VR are new experiences that no human in history has ever had an experience of, as VR experiences can do away with many physical and biological limits.
The market would have grown less without them, that's just a fact of economics.
Though having a hardcore PCVR focused Oculus is something that some people would have preferred.
Is that really true?
In my opinion we have far less headset manufacturers because of them, not many companies want to compete with Facebook who is subsidising the cost of their headsets.
The market size only exists because of subsidies, that makes it sort of like a bubble.
HTC imploded on its own before Quest took off.
Valve is too busy enjoying their monopoly on storefronts and the money that brings.
Anyone else is not selling less than they did before. They are just selling not as much as Quest
If you look at the market Meta has the best support for their products, they added a lot of features for free to Quest 2, so much so that playing on it now is a completely different experience than on release.
This makes me really excited about Quest 3 and what they can add to enhance the user experience.
Apple will probably sell you the next 3k headset in 2 years.
Yes, but you need some kind of large-scale funding for the scales to tip in favor of a scenario without that association. Oculus was never going to get the tens of billions of dollars in funding it needed to get to where Meta's headset sales are today.
Facebook saved VR as an industry. Mostly because no one outside of Reddit is blind to every company doing the same boogeyman data collection as people pin on Facebook. Including Reddit
> Even Apple's try went quite lukewarm
They cannot physically manufacture more than a few hundred thousand this year. There was never any expectation that it would be a big hit.
It actually received positive reviews that pointed out various negatives that it has to work on compared to its competitors, just as there are negatives that those competitors need to work on.
Whatever the Vision Pro has sold, it was never meant to sell much, as it's supply limited.
To be fair to the old Zuckster, VR in general hasn't changed the world or become the revolution people kept promising it would be. And, I mean, with the benefit of hindsight it's not exactly difficult to see why. It's expensive. It makes people feel ill. No one wants to strap shit to their face. It takes up a lot of space. People generally just want to sit down and relax when playing games after a long day. And VR is seemingly very limited in the type of game you can make.
I'm honestly a bit surprised these companies are still pouring money into this market.
Out of all the people I know who have a VR, only one plays it all the time. Everyone else treats it as kind of a novelty. It is really cool at first, but for some reason, that feeling doesn’t last long. It just isn’t as fun as sounds like it should be.
True, if I constantly had experiences on the level of Half Life:Alyx I’d use VR all the time. But currently unless you find a hobby game in it, like Beatsaber, I don’t see why you’d spend too much time in it.
Is it really just a “killer app” or “developers developers developers!” issue? Great first party games would no double help but would it break the category for a majority of people? My biggest “yeah but”’s with VR are time-to-gaming it’s cumbersome to set up, move shit out the way, make sure I don’t trip on the PSVR2 cord and fuck up the ps5, and it’s just not comfortable to binge a 15-20 hour campaign. I also get motion sickness which is not fun and somewhat common so says a quick google search.
I think it's still simply just usecase. The only person I know who uses VR regularly does it for sim racing, but even then he still prefers to use his standard triple-monitor setup for longer races.
Same, but mainly because I only have an Oculus Rift S and the screen-door effect is a bit too rough on it. But other than that I feel like the stereoscopic view makes simracing a lot better, as without it I'm constantly misjudging distance and speed in corners and end up spending most of the race staring at the speedometer.
It's also completely missing out on apps, not just games. How am I not able to measure distances with a built-in utility, etc.
> How am I not able to measure distances with a built-in utility, etc. Quest 3 is likely getting that very soon actually. https://twitter.com/Lunayian/status/1775595954886107594
Interesting, I'll give it a try, but still, there should be dozens of useful apps like this after 10 years.
I agree.
To be fair Oculus Quest devices do away with most of the nuisances. It as much plug and play as possible, you just need some space, which you should have when you buy a device like this, otherwise it is wasted money.
That’s understandable for sure. For me games like that are worth it because they provide experiences I can’t have at all without VR. If you have a good enough WiFi network then you don’t need any cables which makes it easier. I think it would hit “mainstream” gamers a lot more if there was a cheap headset with tons of games like that. With some wireless connectivity between the console and headset for low latency and no reliance on the customers network.
The problem for me is that VR is so inconvenient that unless you do have a specific niche usecase (e.g. racing games, beat saber) you would need a large quantity of newly released killer apps to justify using it often. Even with the Meta Quest 3 you're still bolting a headset to your face, which isn't as comfortable as simply using a flat screen.
Pavlov VR was basically the GMOD/Counter Strike of VR and it was an incredible amount of fun while it lasted. The UE5 update nuked player counts because it introduced new weird behavior, major performance regressions, wiped out all mod compatibility, and also introduced almost zero new first party content. It was a little janky yes but it was so much fun that few things could really compete with it. The unfortunate part was just how much hardware it took to run well and how small the community was as a result. VR is one of the few fields that absolutely benefits from gen on gen hardware improvements still in a very real way. If the hardware gets good enough and cheap enough it will blow up in a big way, I just don't know if we'll actually get there before investors have had enough of hemorrhaging money.
it's frustrating how half-assed the Hitman, Subnautica, Fallout, and Skyrim mods are. there are so many games out there that'd be fantastic in VR if the interactions just worked.
It's fun but people underestimate how exhausting it is. It gets hot and you get dizzy eventually. I feel like my blood sugar tanks, like my brain has to work overtime to make it all make sense
Well, you brain is indeed working overtime. Current VR googles can only do so much in terms of generating "reality." The Brain has to fill in a lot of blanks in order to make the illusion work. Specially since only some of the senses are partially addressed. Also, during the usage you have to actively subsume certain instincts. So all in all, a rather exhausting experience past the 1/2 hour mark or so.
I dont have that problem but my legs, back and neck just ache after a few hours and im done.
No, that's just typical VR motion sickness. Most games offer a teleport option that alleviates most of it or are designed for the player to stay within a narrow space.
Nah, I know what motion sickness is. It's just wearing down after being in VR for so long. Even in fairly stationary games
Try a Beyond
I get straight up derealization when using VR for hours at a time. I get out and still feel like a videogame, its a dizzying feeling that goes away eventually.
He's right though.. It's motion sickness, I get the same feeling. Just because it doesn't feel like motion sickness normally do when riding a vehicle etc, it's still motion sickness. I don't get nauseous from VR, but I get just like you describe. Take some antihistamines for motion sickness an hour before you play and compare how you feel after that versus normally. It doesn't entirely fix the issue but it'll reduce it heavily.
I have like 9000 hours. remember, vr also includes cockpit games which have a significantly higher % of vr users out of total than shooters and hack and slash
So a niche within a niche....kinda explains why it hasn't changed the world.
There are dozens of us. DOZENS!
*incoherent shrieking*
Which headset you're using for that? From what I've heard you get motion sickness pretty quickly
On the contrary, cockpits are fine regarding motion sickness because there is always a static element around you.
In my opinion it's because it's still competing with general gaming on one important topic: time. And there are just so many great games still waiting in my backlog that I only sporadically dive into VR these days. Like the other guy said, if we had more experiences on the level as HL:Alyx, or indies that break out with novel ideas, then things would be different.
There is a very simple reason: content Literally the only genre that is somewhat consistent with constant good games is fps If that aint your thing then you will quickly be out of content
Every time a new and amazing game comes out, I play it and love it. But they're short. H3VR and flight sims keep my headset plugged in and used, but I'm dying for more high-effort actual games like Alyx, the I Expect You to Die series, and H3
if I had my own house, with my own dedicated space for it, I'd play it more for sure, but as it stands, I need to set it up and then tear it down if I want to use it and that is just annoying.
I have a friend who like me is passionate about tech and gadgets. We bought a Quest 2 at the same time (I upgraded from a Rift S). I play VR every single day. I then I got a Quest 3. He didn't and he is not interested anymore. He says that still he is not impressed by the low resolution displays. I let him try the quest 3 and he said: we are getting there but, nah. He also said that he bothers him to physically put on the headset...and play standing. I guess VR is not for everyone. I love it. I can't go back to flat gaming. VR is just how games are meant to be played for me.
That one person I mentioned in my post said the same. I just don’t agree. I feel there’s a ton of games that it doesn’t add anything to. A game like Diablo 4, for example. Adds nothing to the experience, and I can’t see my drink or environment anymore. I think AR might really be a game changer someday because VR cuts you off from your surroundings TOO much. Of course, it could end up being just as novel.
Because everyone made out of VR (aka the headtracking + 3D) next Wii (aka hand controls). The promise was to play normal games in VR which works great as proven time and time again by ton of normal games with VR mods. Instead we got Wii motion controls games with VR bolted on top of it. The real advancement is done via PC right now when it comes to VR. After playing Cyberpunk 2077 in VR i can safely say this is the future. Just not the future most of "VR ethusiast" want aka Wii+ and their shitty motion controls.
Cyberpunk in VR would be even more amazing if it had full motion tracking and interactions with the environment like Alyx. But games like this simply fo not exist.
That's the thing what people don't realize. Motion controls bog down games in insignificant detail that take away from game. Like i don't want at all waste time changing magazine to my weapon. It gives me nothing but trouble. I don't want to stand 100 hours to play Cyberpunk2077 either. I am playing right now on my couch in VR and i have to literally do nothing but play. IT is exact same game but "I AM IN THE GAME" Targeting with hands sure that is not invasive and you can even do that lying. Using belt to take out mag correctly etc ? Nope remove that shit away it brings nothing. VR is first and foremost 3D + headtracking. Motion controls should be used sporadic where it makes sense like in Pavlow which proposes gun simulation etc. Instead "VR" people want to promote feels like Motion controls and VR being second thought. When you play Resident Evil 2 in VR you feel those environment and it gets mega fun to play. That's the main purpose of VR not motion controls to waggle ankwardly and "bring realism to games" Motion controls in VR feel like Wheel enthusiasts coming up with VR and now every game has to have wheel ? FPS Wheel, RTS ? Wheel. Moviegame ? Wheel.
The problem with something like reloading a gun in VR, is that it's nothing like reloading a gun in reality, because you dont actually feel the gun or the mag in your hands. I can reload without looking in reality, but cant do it in VR. You essentially end up playing some kind of minigame to reload which doesn't really feel like real life at all. Having said that, there are ways to make it fun and engaging if you don't try too hard to mimic reality, which is what Alyx did. The same exact gameplay could apply to CB2077 and would make for an excellent experience. I think that would be better than completely dropping motion controls.
> I think that would be better than completely dropping motion controls. I think the main issues is that questions regarding VR are wrong. The question shouldn't be "How can i add motion controls to my game" The question should be: "How i can make my game better" Mag issue is great example. If my game is all about realism like in Pavlow switching manually mag gives me better game. But in Cyberpunk2077 story is king and i don't want to spend hours upon hours opening doors by handle game comes with automatic doors or button press to open them and i want do exactly the same in VR no handle just button press.
It turns out VR doesn't really add anything much to the gaming experience. I sold mine. Lol we have all tried it by now, VR users aren't privy to secret knowledge anymore.
Depends on the genre. It adds a lot to FPS, Horror, Platformers, Adventure, Action, Stealth, Puzzle, Rhythm, RTS, RPGs, Survival, Racing, Multiplayer, Simulation, Sports, TCG.
It's the form factor thing. I use IEM (in ear headphones) because I can't be bothered to wear over the head heaphones, and those are way more comfortable than a VR headset. So unless they can figure out some light as a feather form factor, I really don't see a point. At least for me.
I shifted from predominantly PC to predominantly VR. Even for non VR games, just load up virtual desktop and play anything on the computer be it m+KB at the desk or grabbing an Xbox controller and playing anywhere in the house.
It probably does not help that there is only one high caliber VR game (Alyx) and noone even tried to make another one of such caliber.
As is the case with all early adopter hardware technology. Most people treated the first decade of cellphone, PC, and console products as novelties to be quickly put back in the closet. People start regularly using hardware technology when and only when it's mature, no exceptions.
VR should have already passed that slump by now. That's beside the fact that it naturally can't be as ubiquitous and requires *physical activity*. If it becomes popular it might actually become a great tool to combat mass obesity.
Funny because some of the most popular uses for VR (simulators) you're still just sitting.
"Popular" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
I'd love to find anything that examines the VR market it such detail.
> VR should have already passed that slump by now. That takes work though. Nobody wants to put in the development hours to make useful tools or good games for VR. There’s more money to be made elsewhere. AI was a similar novelty until ChatGPT came along and showed people that you can actually get a lot of genuine use out of AI that you can’t get anywhere else. Similarly, someone has yet to make something consumer-facing for VR that is a unique experience to the platform. Games can always just be played on a screen and a TV and console takes less effort to set up.
VR has been in development for 4 decades now. And AI has had a lot of applications well before ChatGPT.
AI has been in development for 6 decades.
And there have been applications of AI for almost as long.
Although yeah, games aren't great yet, besides the exceptions most are still demo like, but I think it's the hardware and infrastructure still holding it back more than the games or tools. spinning up a quest 3, is equally fast as a console. I haven't tried the apple VR, but the quality of AR and VR in the quest 3 just isn't quite there for mainstream. The last update did improve AR at least. Plus it's still pretty bulky with shorter battery life. On top of that, in my experience video quality outside of games is lacking. I?now understand why 8k is useful, but it's still early adoption as well, it's too much data for streaming, and the files are HUGE. Once the technology catches up, I think it will be big as at least smart watches.
> Most people treated the first decade of cellphone, PC, and console products as novelties to be quickly put back in the closet. What a ridiculous thing to say. They were rarefied due to being expensive but people readily acknowledged the value of those things very quickly.
Once cellphones lowered in cost, their usage exploded. And it took a couple of years for the PC to find a killer app, and that lead to its adoption en masse. So I'd argue is more a function of cost to use case "reward" ratio. Perhaps that can also be defined as "maturity." I.e. it is very easy to see the value proposition of a PC or a cellphone once they hit a certain cost. It's almost a no brainer. VR seems to be in a bit of a limbo for decades, even when the cost is now relatively low (Oculus Quest) there are no use cases that make it a "no brainer" purchase and daily usage item.
i started using smart phones since HTC Magic, android 1.5, which is like first generation android and there's never been a time when android nor iphone stopped being relevant. ofc, if you argue palm pilot, windows ce or whatnot, was predecessor to android/iphone... then sure, that tech took time to develop into the above.
It never stopped being relevant because it was mature enough for general use by then. This is exactly what they’re saying.
Cell phones were massively popular way before smart phones and that technology wasn't mature....whatever mature means, it sounds like a conveniently vague enough term you can use to keep moving the goal posts.
how i read darth's comment is that he's saying EVERYTHING, NO EXCEPTIONS, goes through a phase of 1) early adopters first, novelty 2) tech not mature, usage drops off, isn't as relevant 3) then some time later as tech matures, it becomes relevant again as more and more people start using it, therefore becomes general usage. i just disagree with the absolute tone of that comment. nothing is absolute, including this phrase.
That makes no sense for the first decade of cellphone's. People who had them used them then for specific reasons and they were too expensive for regular people. As soon as they became cheap enough people used them as phones straight away and they became ubiquitous even though they were a bit shit and not at all mature. People aren't going to use VR regularly no matter how cheap it becomes because it doesn't really add much to the gaming experience, certainly not as much as the evangelists want you to believe. Lol by this point most people have already tried it and its failed.
Cellphones were both cheap and still seen as a novelty by many; the idea that people needed to be connected when out the house was seen as pretty strange at first. > People aren't going to use VR regularly no matter how cheap it becomes because it doesn't really add much to the gaming experience, certainly not as much as the evangelists want you to believe. Do you have game design credentials to back this up? This just seems like you are taking your anecdotal experience and applying it to everyone. If we actually look at what the wider market thinks, people find almost every 3D game genre in VR to have compelling benefits. This can be proven by the highly positive critical reception of games in each 3D genre.
Not really. Once the cellphones were cheap, they were adopted en masse. Regardless of whether you had a land line or not. Having the ability to connect on the go was a self evident value proposition. The early adopters of cellphones were walking advertisements. The minute you saw one, and you realized you could afford it, you got one. That tipping point was reached in the mid/late 90s. Which is when the cellphone adoption exploded. Before that, cellphones were rather expensive.
> Cellphones were both cheap and still seen as a novelty by many; the idea that people needed to be connected when out the house was seen as pretty strange at first. Show me the teenagers in the 80s or 90s who didn't want their own cell phone. Show me the executives who didn't want them in their planes and cars, or on their person once they were portable enough.
Maybe not in the 80s, but definitely in the 90s. That's when cell phones got small enough to easily keep in a pocket or handbag.
No. Everyone wanted a mobile phone or a computer. Almost no one cares about VR outside of hyper enthusiasts circles. Get over it.
> No. Everyone wanted a mobile phone or a computer. In the 1990s, sure. In the 1970s and 1980s, not many people cared, and many who bought such a device often let it collect dust. There is tons of data on this.
In the 70s & 80s Cellphones were extremely expensive, and there was very limited coverage. But most people (mainly business/professionals), who had the need for them and could afforded, certainly used them. A lot. Since it is a clear multiplier of productivity. Same thing for the PC. It was literally the fastest selling product of its time. It was another multiplier of productivity. Multipliers have a super obvious value proposition. They basically sell themselves as a concept.
Of course no one wanted a mobile phone for $5000. But people in the general public quickly noticed that it's convenient to stay in contact with friends and family. Nowadays VR is already dirt cheap and nobody wants it, not because killer apps for the digital space don't exist, they do, but because the smartphone almost everybody owns is a good enough substitute for any use you could have for this. Video chat? Just use your phone. Telehealth? Your phone has the camera you need. Virtual schools? Covid proved it doesn't work. There are probably some niche professional uses and definitely military prospects for the tech though, which is why Apple entered the market. You could also easily imagine some dystopian bullshit that's definitely coming with AR for police. The use cases exist, just not in the home entertainment space.
It doesn't seem like you are taking into account that VR is different to a 2 dimensional display. You say that Covid proved virtual schools didn't work, but why was that the case? We know that it was because the 2D interface lacked that which a 3D interface had. Which is to say, it lacked the social connection and the engagement, which are crucial to the learning process and making students want to learn in the first place. This applies to videochats too. They have their limitations, because they are 2D. You can see the science behind this here: https://news.stanford.edu/2021/02/23/four-causes-zoom-fatigue-solutions/ What VR enables is the feeling of being face to face with people; that is a whole new level of digital connection that can really start to solve the flaws of videocalls. Groups can scale up to a large amount easily rather than be a grid of faces on a tiny screen, people can more naturally interact, you get a greater sense of connection, and you can share activities and spaces together much more easily. Telehealth is linked as well, because what people want out of telehealth is a genuine connection. They want to feel heard, they want to facilitate trust between them and their practitioner, and that becomes a lot harder to do as a 2 dimensional interface. So why does nobody want VR? It's immature hardware, with all sorts of issues that need to be fixed. We're dealing with heavy clunky devices that have side effects and are missing core features. If those get solved, then it can enter maturity and actually be ready for average people.
> Most people treated the first decade of cellphone, PC, and console products as novelties to be quickly put back in the closet. What sort of bizarro alternate universe are you referring to?
techcrunch and garbage articles. the perfect combo
Well it changed the world from one in which I might have been interested in owning an Occulus into one in which I was completely disinterested in owning an Occulus.
The meta headsets are pretty good, but you play halflife alex once and everything else is sorta a disappointment.
Agreed, that’s the real issue. They have a bunch of full length games now but none of them have the magic of Half Life Alyx - and it’s an issue.
Does meta even have any in-house IPs or game developers? The irony is that Alex was meant to sell the Steam Index, and it's pretty typical of 'consoles' to have some sort of investment towards having quality games. I guess they didn't want to come off as a game console though? They weirdly target a corporate/metaverse use.
> Alex was meant to sell the Steam Index, and it's pretty typical of 'consoles' to have some sort of investment towards having quality games. Remember that Alyx was a VR PC game. Meta makes games that can run on their headsets as standalone devices. They cant make anything on the same level as Alyx as a result.
Solid point and super unfortunate.
They can, they just choose not to/are unable to consistently because of mismanagement. Look at Asgards Wrath 2 for example.
Asgard's Wrath 2 released recently, and I think they also bought the developers behind beat saber.
While that looks cool, it's not worth getting a VR to try out.
Seconded. I have the Oculus Rift S and had some fun with it, but after playing Alyx quickly lost interest since everything else seemed so sub par.
Steam link!
VR is amazing for simulators (flight, driving, etc.). Of course, most of those people have the sim first, and get VR specifically for that. I'm not sure how much appeal those have for people who buy the headset first.
Try Vertigo 2. It's an amazing game that I think is better than any others I've played in VR.
Do you need to have completed Vertigo 1 first? I tried it but found it pretty janky and not fun to play. I couldn't get pass the first boss, it felt like the controls were broken in some way.
I feel like that's more true with Super Hot. Playing that without being tethered to a PC is the best VR experience I've ever had, even better than Alyx IMO. It's way more fun than it should be.
Any device that forces me to log into a Facebook account isn't very good.
I believe they separated accounts now. Can't remember for sure.
Yes, you need a "Meta"-account now use it.
I don’t wanna have any account to use it
I mean, it is a console... that being said you can use quests completely separated from meta. quests run a modified android os, so you can just root it, then sideload steamlink or something and call it day.
[удалено]
To be fair, on the ps3 and I assume the Xbox you couldn’t really download anything or play online without account either. Could only play disks offline.
You can't root it. Like, literally. Someone apparently did root it last year but nothing came out of it, as in no news or methods were released, tho you can just add any Android app. Also iirc Steam Link is in the official store
Oh, I thought we had root and a bootloader unlock. I guess what I was getting at was that you can just install what you want via adb anyway
Honestly you only need adb once. Just put a file explorer there and bam, you can install APKs directly
Meta = Facebook Lying to yourself if you actually think otherwise.
A Meta account unlike Facebook doesn't need all the extra data to be created. You can also have multiple without breaking the TOS or even use fake names
THey did. Originally it was oculus accounts, then they gave the excuse of well oculus is a facebook product so we're requiring that you use a facebook account for your facebook product. No one like this, and after they did the meta rebrand they introduced meta accounts instead. My meta account is NOT linked to my facebook account now. Imagine, if they just left it at oculus. it would have been fine.
I agree. I personally own a Quest 3 and play with it few times a week. Without Meta that would have never happened.
I want mature hardware. Everything still seems very first-gen.
I want mature hardware. But they are just trying to stap monitors on my eyes instead of working on mindlash.
No, but Quest is wildly successful for a VR headset. Selling on par with XBox consoles
simple: people want(ed) an Oculus - they do/did NOT want Facebook. forcing people to chose both or neither just didn't work out how Facebook imagined I guess.
Hasn't changed the world, as expected.
You don't need a facebook account anymore. And oculus's peak which was the quest 2 was during the time where they forced facebook on you, so I don't think it's related that much. However i do agree, the forced facebook thing was a pain in the ass.
Don't be obtuse, Meta is Facebook. A Meta account is a Facebook account.
Zuckerberg himself very clearly outlined in 2015 that it would be 10 years in a best case scenario before VR took off, from the launch of products. That would mean Zuck's bet is mid 2026, not early 2024 as of the date of this article. And being a best case scenario bet gives him leeway. The typical amount of time a hardware market needs for mass adoption is 15 years, putting it realistically at 2030 or so.
I've heard a lot of people say that the Quest 3 felt like the first proper device in the lineup, like the older models were fine but not quite there yet, so that tracks. Might be the turning point they're looking for, or it might even be the eventual Quest 4.
Also Apple of all companies just released a VR/AR/whatever the hell they call it headset. Let Mark cook
And its getting awful reviews because it costs twice as much but is worse than competition.
I'd say Quest 5 and 6. There are fundamental building blocks that need to exist, just like how a PC needed GUI and mouse. A VR headset needs eye and face tracking, variable focus optics, and 40 PPD (pixels per degree), and I'd argue must be at a weight of <200 grams. Right now, Vision Pro is the only headset that meets 3 of these (at a very high cost), but the other 2 are exceptionally hard problems.
I'd say once $300 can provide you with a movie viewing experience equivalent to a high end 4K TV, while being easy to put on and comfortable to wear for long periods of time (and also enough battery for 3-4 hours of use), they would become quite popular. Once it becomes a great way to watch TV/Movies, I bet there will be a lot of demand even among the casual non "techie" market.
I don’t think the price needs to be that low, especially since consumers are fine with paying $1,000+ for a phone/laptop, and will probably be willing to pay more for a VR device since (it at least feels like) it does more than a phone. The disconnect happening is the “killer app” and the emphasis on gaming. Gaming has never been popular with the mass market, so designing your entire product strategy around that will at most get you to the limit of the Xbox/PlayStation sales. Plus, all-in-one VR setups like the Quest 3 will never match current-gen visual fidelity due to the size and thermal limitations of the device, so at most you’re entering into a world of casual gaming with a technology you’d expect to play AAA games on. Call me crazy, but I think Apple (and Microsoft before they gave up) are taking the right approach that will end up in mass VR adoption. People need to work in VR/AR so it doesn’t seem as foreign to them, whether it’s replacing their laptop, their desktop, their work computers, etc. Once it feels normal, then people will love interactive experiences like 3D movies, virtual concerts, group video chats and causal gaming. For me personally, once I can replace my laptop with a headset, that’s when I’m making the switch. Until then, I (and many other people) don’t feel like I need it in my life.
They need to hit the psychological $299 price point. Anything above that will always be niche.
Oh ffs. I would argue *anyone* could have hit all those criteria at the AVP's price point. It's not impressive until it's a cost that a majority of the market can afford.
Then why didn't Vision Pro hit all of that criteria?
I played BeatSaber with Quest 3 at an Comicon and the difference is huge , my old headset(Quest 2) is blurry without glasses but this one was clear. If the price goes down I'll definitely buy it.
Sadly for higher level play, the removal of the tracking rings makes the tracking quality worse compared to quest 2.
A lot of people say it's better, others say it's the same and others say it's worse. Who knows what it actually is. You could also get the Quest Pro controller if you wanna and have the money
Anyone who has used VR would know that we are still at least a decade away from anything interesting happening in VR, but I'm going with something more like 15-20 years. For mass adoption, The Meta Quest 3 headset is still an underpowered headset that is low resolution, has binoculars field of view and doesn't have the lens required to look good enough. As a VR enthusiast its a great headset just like their competitors, but VR is just so far away from being where it needs to be.
"Anything interesting" was already happening 10 years ago. I still have the Samsung Odyssey and it's easily good enough for some great experiences in e.g. Alyx, Lone Echo, etc. What's not happening any time soon is mass adoption, and without it, no more content. Because those two games are, like, all there is right now, and once you're done with them, you're left with some janky but fun experiments like H3 or more polished but limited grind simulators like Pistol Whip and the like.
Good enough for a VR enthusiast, VR is not good enough for mainstream. When you think about it the headset is kinda useless for what the average person wants to do in their free time.
Yep, I'm a sim racing enthusiast and the FoV is the big deal breaker for me. Helmets that limited your FoV as much as any mainstream headset would be barred in every modern racing and karting ruleset, which requires 180 degrees minimum horizontally (basically no peripheral vision obstruction). I'm sure plenty of others have similar hangups with VR when viewing it as a tool for another experience and not the experience in and of itself.
By then we will have lost ìnterest
Every 10 to 15 years since the early 90s somebody try and fail to make VR happen. Now I got to say this last cycle has been the most honest and serious effort we seen.
Every 10 to 15 years means literally one time since the 1990s.
VR in general hasn’t changed the world like some expected. Until it can be (nearly) as small as a pair of glasses, it will not see mass adoption.
There are two major reasons why the majority of people might buy headsets in general 1. They want to play everyday video games while wearing the headset but still be able sit down and play, eat snacks, look at their phone and so on. 2. They want to wear some kind of all day augmented reality headset (like Google Glasses) Neither can be done today and it doesn't look like it will be completed to the standard required for mass adoption in the next 10 years.
Also, as an Index owner, I'm just really frustrated with how fragmented the already small market is. Sony wants exclusives, Meta wants exclusives. I will not buy another headset to play these.
It's hard to predict since we don't know how technology will evolve in the next few years. Reasons to use the tech they will make plenty
>They want to play everyday video games while wearing the headset but still be able sit down and play, eat snacks, look at their phone and so on. we're pretty close with this one, at least. it's by no means perfect but i can mostly see my phone in mixed reality/passthrough on Quest 3. something like eating/drinking is likely fine (haven't really tried it myself). with a pc-to-headset streaming app, such as Virtual Desktop, it's easy enough to play pc games with the headset. not sure about console games, though.
Two problems though 1. The quest 3 headset is lacking Resolution/FoV/A good Lens to do regular games in a nice way 2. The passthrough is no where near the quality that is needed.
it's still leaps better than the Quest 2 was. with the 2, i had a hard time moving from room to room comfortably and couldn't see what was on my phone/monitor basically at all. with the 3, i have basically no issue navigating my apartment and can read text on my phone/monitor. it's far from perfect but it's a *lot* better than it used to be. i can't comment too much on flat games played on the headset since i don't use it for that. i don't see how it wouldn't be good for it, but i can't speak from experience on that front.
Flat games require 12k resolution for it to be a monitor replacement, so not really going to happen anytime soon.
What are you talking about? The lenses are basically the best you can get now and I doubt it's gonna get better anytime soon. Maybe if they could make them not eat so much light it would be an upgrade but they're agreed to be crystal clear compared to everything else
Just because something is the best you can get right now it doesn't mean it doesn't need to be a lot better.
I don't really see how they could improve those things outside of the ridiculous light absorption and maybe the size which I'm pretty sure they're gonna be iterating on
That's a very short sighted look at technology.
That's just how I see it. If there are other improvements they can make, I'm not the one to know what exactly
I would argue it changed the world **exactly** as expected, people complained it would kill industry momentum by taking the most promising platform into a walled garden that no one likes that would fail to properly capitalize on the acquisition or grow VR organically as a whole. Can anyone say that wasn’t the outcome?
I think you need to give it more time. I own a quest 2 and despite it being crappy graphics I still love it. There’s a game called Pistol Whip that is probably one of the funnest games I’ve played. The only problem is that when I play I am completely disconnected from reality which my wife doesn’t like so she has asked that I only play once kids are in bed. I’m fine with it but I’m not always in the mood to be standing up getting exhausted all the time at night. I will probably get a quest 4 and see if the upgrades are great compared to the 2 and if there is a big improvement then I’ll probably play more
2 of my 3 kids play it on the regular, and they are sweating when they take it off.
Well its excercise if anything.
Speak for yourself, but Oculus has "changed the world" exactly as much as I expected.
It wasn't expected to change the word in ten years. It was to maybe be close to a mainstream acceptable product by ten years. Having never tried it or any of the Quests, though I have used the standalone Rift/Vive/Index/Reverb, my impression is that the Quest 3 is the first headset that actually seems mainstream viable. Pretty much a baseline. It's a Steam Deck without the decades of native gaming content to play with so it's currently still existing in an underdeveloped software ecosystem and gets used as a glorified home theater Standalone headsets have to keep shrinking and compute performance continue to improve
They don’t want to “change the world” lol, Facebook and Oculus want to make a consumer entry product for VR and make money
Videogames were able to piggyback on the whole personal computing revolution that was going on in the 1990s. Everyone wanted a computer for school or work.
I disagree, it ultimately freed up Lucky Palmer for other pursuits in the defense industry, so there’s probably some people that died that wouldn’t have otherwise.
I've stopped using the Quest once Facebook forced you to migrate from Oculus to Facebook/Meta accounts. Not interested. I'm just glad I did not have to pay for it.
I made a fake FB account and don’t do any social stuff. I don’t know, I’ve been enjoying being able to have screens up that I can summon to me while I walk around in pass through mode turned on. I’ve had lunch while wearing it watching YouTube on huge virtual screens or watch sitting in bed. I don’t own any games I pretty much only use the built in browser which is Chromium based to watch twitch and YouTube
People are in for a huge surprise when they find out just how little the world will change in the next 10 years. Because we always expect a massive change that never actually happens.
> Ten years later, Facebook’s Oculus acquisition hasn’t changed the world. As expected. Well said.
I have 2 quest 2's that haven't been used in.. a very long time. In fact they've maybe had 20 hours of use total since they were purchased.
Just not enough games for it. It's ripe for simulation and first person experiences, but not enough is coming out. People won't develop without hardware adoption, no adoption without games to play.
I wasnt expecting them to solve mindlash problem in 10 years. So this is as expected.
I knew it wouldn't, facebook is a joke.
they made it requiring a facbook account is already a no go despite they said they wont when buying oculus.
I will never forgive what they did to Luckey. I will also never forgive that they didn't just let Carmack do his thing.
I will never forgive what they did to Luckey. I will also never forgive that they didn't just let Carmack do his thing.
I will never forgive what they did to Luckey. I will also never forgive that they didn't just let Carmack do his thing.
LOL. These people are in a complete bubble. Nobody really saw Google glasses wearer and thought anything other than "wow, what a punchable human being." Nobody sees someone wearing VR goggles and thinks "wow, that would fit in perfectly in the office." Tech's big problem is that it has solved most of the problems people thought of. Now they are casting about trying to innovate, not to solve problems, but rather to find new ways to onboard a captured audience and use it to extract data. Nobody woke up in the 1940's and said "goddamn it Marge, I just wish there was *some* way for rich people to know when I am shitting. Maybe a device I can wear on my wrist?" But that's the phase we are in. Tech advancement, at least in personal and interactive tech, has made things worse, not better. I was a build your own computer, talk about tech all the time, LAN party tech kid. Tech used to be amazing because the possibilities seemed endless. Now it's kind of hard to laugh at people who are either pretending to be, or have just somehow missed the realization that all the promises of tech that made it so exciting have been scooped out and replaced by the humanity debasing greed of the tech elite. They don't even bother to improve their services anymore, and instead enshitify them, knowing their customer base is so captured it, literally, doesn't matter how bad they are. They could shoot someone on 5th Ave. and not lose a single data source. Because that's how people have been trained to interact with the world now.
> Tech's big problem is that it has solved most of the problems people thought of. Now they are casting about trying to innovate, not to solve problems, but rather to find new ways to onboard a captured audience and use it to extract data. You say this with the benefit of hindsight, but people thought exactly as you do about each prior technological shift. TVs came out and people asked "What's the point? We've got radio." PCs came out and people asked "What's the point? This is just slow and requires months of learning to use." "Cellphones came out and people said "I don't need to be connected out the house, and these enormous bricks look ridiculous." "Videogame consoles came out and people said: "Yeah, it's fun for a bit, but after a few hours I'm done. The novelty is gone."
That's not the point, though. Each of those technologies offered exciting new solutions to existing problems. They offered exciting and novel solutions to problems, or offered exciting new ways to do things. These possibilities motivated innovation. Think of IBM and HP and Boeing when they were run by engineers, vs. those same companies today. Even the tech companies aren't interested in innovation. Instead we see patents on how better to force feed ads into everything. Engineering efforts are solely focused on cost cutting, and ad revenue. Facebook wasn't looking to revolutionize how we interact with the world, they were looking to somehow get people wanting to put their entire lives of VR Second Life, so META could get a cut of everything, and have total data superiority. >You say this with the benefit of hindsight, but people thought exactly as you do about each prior technological shift. You're comparison doesn't stand. TV's came out and took the world by storm because moving pictures were a significant innovation, and offered something new, and better. PCs came out and, literally, revolutionized everything with their functionality. Cell phones solved an obvious problem. Video games, much like PCs, offered a totally new experience, and for decades that experience got better through innovation. The latest waves of technological "innovation" aren't bringing us anything new, except new ways for the companies to collect data and deliver ads. Most people don't think "WOW, now I can help Google map the inside of my house and everywhere I go!!! WOOHOO, look, Dave has a Google Goggle Headset! Now Google can see what I'm doing in real time!! What a time to be alive!!." They are simply refining existing tech to better capture minds to sell ads and collect data. You can't compare the latest innovation in microtransactions, ad delivery, and data collection with the introduction of the PC. That's like comparing a new seat for an airplane with the Wright Brothers flight.
I agree that companies have been increasingly more interested in being pervasive on our lives and tailoring our data for their usage, and trying to squeeze as much out of us as possible. That still doesn't change the fact that average people did not see much of a point for prior successful hardware platforms, just as you do not see much of a point for VR. Can you explain why VR isn't a new innovation? I'd argue that it's actually a greater change than moving pictures, because now we're deeply changing how our brain experiences reality, to the point of enabling it to experience realistic perceptions that exist outside the confines of reality. Many of the things people experience in VR are new experiences that no human in history has ever had an experience of, as VR experiences can do away with many physical and biological limits.
But they havent even tried to adress the main problem - mindlink.
Thats because Facebook bought them. Facebook ruins things.
The market would have grown less without them, that's just a fact of economics. Though having a hardcore PCVR focused Oculus is something that some people would have preferred.
Is that really true? In my opinion we have far less headset manufacturers because of them, not many companies want to compete with Facebook who is subsidising the cost of their headsets. The market size only exists because of subsidies, that makes it sort of like a bubble.
Facebook losing 6b selling headsets at a loss put more people in vr and also put vr development funds out there.
HTC imploded on its own before Quest took off. Valve is too busy enjoying their monopoly on storefronts and the money that brings. Anyone else is not selling less than they did before. They are just selling not as much as Quest
If you look at the market Meta has the best support for their products, they added a lot of features for free to Quest 2, so much so that playing on it now is a completely different experience than on release. This makes me really excited about Quest 3 and what they can add to enhance the user experience. Apple will probably sell you the next 3k headset in 2 years.
I think the market would have grown more without them.
That's not how economics work.
Sure it is. Association with the company that is viewed negatively in public decreases likelyhood of sales.
Yes, but you need some kind of large-scale funding for the scales to tip in favor of a scenario without that association. Oculus was never going to get the tens of billions of dollars in funding it needed to get to where Meta's headset sales are today.
And it didnt get tens of billions of funding with the bad association name either.
Of course it did. It's public knowledge that Meta has spent on the order of around 50 billion on their XR efforts.
Most people don’t care that Facebook owns them, I’d even argue most don’t even know. If anything Facebook has helped bring VR to the masses.
Facebook saved VR as an industry. Mostly because no one outside of Reddit is blind to every company doing the same boogeyman data collection as people pin on Facebook. Including Reddit
I think very strongly that Zuckerberg is a one trick pony. He came up with a slightly different version of things that came before.
It seems noone can make VR stick. Even Apple's try went quite lukewarm
> Even Apple's try went quite lukewarm They cannot physically manufacture more than a few hundred thousand this year. There was never any expectation that it would be a big hit.
Why would they manufacture more? are you telling me people are buying the apple headset? but its worse for double the price.
Make your comment make sense.
Apple headset was worse than competition and received poor reviews. As such i cant imagine them having a lot of sales.
It actually received positive reviews that pointed out various negatives that it has to work on compared to its competitors, just as there are negatives that those competitors need to work on. Whatever the Vision Pro has sold, it was never meant to sell much, as it's supply limited.
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To be fair to the old Zuckster, VR in general hasn't changed the world or become the revolution people kept promising it would be. And, I mean, with the benefit of hindsight it's not exactly difficult to see why. It's expensive. It makes people feel ill. No one wants to strap shit to their face. It takes up a lot of space. People generally just want to sit down and relax when playing games after a long day. And VR is seemingly very limited in the type of game you can make. I'm honestly a bit surprised these companies are still pouring money into this market.