The biggest impediment for VR is the fundamentally asocial nature of it.
If there are fewer headsets in a room than there are people, it’s going to be awkward for at least one person. Trying to help someone debug something in their headset without me being able to see what they see is a problem (granted, this could be solved by software).
Having to share headsets sucks. You have to faff with head straps, adjust IPD, focus. I’ve had exactly one evening where everyone had a headset and things worked well for everyone involved. I’ve had dozens if not hundreds of events filled with awkward moments, setup issues, problems, where everyone is continuously taking the headset off and need to figure something out. And this was while working for a VR company where everyone was quite computer and VR literate.
Reflecting on it, it felt kind of like 90s and 2000s LAN parties, before the days of DHCP. Randomly copying values around, IP conflicts and not understanding subnet values. Good times.
I do wish someone attempted a ground up AR OS where experiences are shared to nearby users by default. AR versions of airdrop are pervasive, that sort of thing.
For example, think of the opposite of Apple's People Awareness feature. Instead of an immersive experience fading away when a person comes near, the AR user's experience fades in as you approach.
I think it would be pretty magical, honestly. One of the wow moments the public never got to (because of adoption rates) is a shared AR experience. Really compelling stuff.
The only thing I regularly used a VR headset for, was to join clubs and socialize in VRchat during covid lockdowns. So VR provided an avenue of socializing when there were no better options. VRChat is still growing and up to 70k peak concurrent users.
These are valid points but the upside of vr is still much bigger than the current downsides. The ability to explore worlds as if you're actually there is something no other medium really offers.
Are video game consoles "fundamentally asocial" because there are likely fewer controllers than people in a household? Are computers, because they only have one mouse and keyboard? The existence of VR chat suggests it handles social gaming just fine.
I can think of a lot of impediments to VR (the weight of the headset and vertigo being the biggest) but needing everyone in a room to share a single headset at the same time seems like an extremely fringe case. The real problem there is just the cost of buying enough headsets.
I completely disagree. A lot of people lead pretty solitary lives explicitly when it comes you how they spend their time with technology. There is a lot of solitary phone, computer and video game time these days.
I think the biggest impediment is just how bulky they are. If we can make them so it’s just like picking up and putting on a pair of lightweight glasses, the same way you pick up a controller, I think that there would be a lot more uptake, especially in the gaming space.
VR's problem, in my opinion, is that I can get immersed (fully, exactly as the author describes it) in a 2D game just fine - the lack of stereo vision or head-tracking or motion controls is no more an impediment to my immersion than the limited binocular overlap or peripheral vision or lag in a VR headset. And 2D is a heck of a lot cheaper and more convenient (and less nauseating).
That's not to say VR can never be successful, but I think it needs to offer something more compelling than just "immersion." Exercise or AR might be viable routes.
I feel that's like saying "I can get just as fully immersed in a book so who needs movies?"
They're different experiences. I don't need Tetris or PacMan in VR. Conversely, Half-Life 1/2 etc are not remotely intense as Half-Life Alyx. In the first 2 you're watching a movie. In the later you're in the world of Half-Life
The frequency of choosing to go out to the movies is also about how often I think "I wish I could do this in VR".
Examples:
- Before going on a trip, pre-visiting the destination in Google Earth with VR is very spatially informative & makes directional intuition memorable upon arrival at the real world destination.
- Virtual role-play with environmental cues that cause make-believe to be ever more real.
But most people don't need this very often. Picking up a book or throwing on some earbuds to listen to a book are far more frequent and compatible with simultaneous other activities. VR feels the same--a high-demand focused experience that is infrequently worth the effort.
The most important quality of any successful trend (eg windows, internet, smart phones, cloud computing) has been convenience. Which is also the reason why I think Meta Glasses have a real chance to take off.
Exactly. It sounds like a detail that you can‘t eat and drink while you‘re in VR - but for casual experience it‘s friction and you resort back to a screen.
I recently started enjoying virtual bike tours on my exercise bike, but vertigo when the camera turns is an issue. I absolutely wouldn't do it on a treadmill.
There are many games for vr that cannot be done without the tech. It isnt all about immersion but facilitating unique experiences.
What held it back from mainstream imo is an inherent space issue (you need room) and a lack of multiplayer participation (need even more room). Compared to sitting on a couch in a small studio with a few friends, it doesnt stand a chance.
The other problem is most peoples first experience is with some shitty mall vr room where the “game” consists of free unity assets slapped together in a way that makes marky marks horizons look polished. Few people start off with something like the half life one.
I like VR and immersion in theory. I like being able to look around, but I absolutely hate the movement controls.
I know some people complain of motion sickness, but that doesn't bother me. I just want controls like Mario or Zelda on a regular joystick. Why can't this be done?
It doesn't even have to be first person. I'd play a third person game like Mario or Zelda with a VR camera tracking them. I just want that kind of movement.
Pushing a button to teleport in short hops is annoying as hell. I hate everything about it.
I always thought a great compromise would be games that gave you an overhead “gods eye” third person perspective. People seem to be obsessed with making VR games first person, but that’s where the movement problems come in.
The game Moss did this well for a platformers. But it could also be really fun for realtime strategy/simulation games (StarCraft, sim city) or sports games like Madden.
With AI, VR is even more promising. I have been working on a Gaussian splat renderer for the Quest 3, and by having Claude and ChatGPT read state-of-the-art papers, I have been able to build a training and rendering pipeline that is getting >50 fps for large indoor scenes on the Quest 3. I started with an (AI-driven) port of a desktop renderer, which got less than 1 fps, but I've integrated both training and rendering improvements from research and added a bunch of quality and performance improvements and now it's actually usable. Applying research papers to a novel product is something that used to take weeks or months of a person's time and can now be measured in minutes and hours (and tokens).
You might be interested in a new experimental 3D scene learning and rendering approach called Radiant foam [1], which is supposed to be better suited for GPUs that don't have hardware ray tracing acceleration.
Sorry if this is a basic question, but what's you workflow for feeding the papers into the LLM and getting the implementation done? The coding agents that I've used are not able to read PDFs, so I've been wondering how to do it.
In my experience in the real word, VR is a lot like racing sims. No one I know owns a VR headset, no one I know talks about it, no one I know is very interested in it at all, but both exist as ticketed experience at places in and around malls.
So from where I'm sitting in my middle class suburbs, it's certainly not dead, but it's basically the modern equivalent of those actuated flight sim entertainment experiences from the 80s/90s.
VR seems to be much bigger among the perpetually online. For us normies VR is hardly a blip on the radar.
I still don't even really understand what Horizon Worlds or the Metaverse even was, or if there's a distinction between the two. I've heard of VRChat, but from the little I've seen, it seems extremely unappealing.
I still think that most people don't want to strap a computer screen to their face, for any reason. I've done it, it's not very pleasant.
As someone who has both interest in VR and racing sims (and other sims), and tried VR and loved it, I am genuinely NOT INTERESTED in owning a headset for the obvious health reasons that come with using one.
There is no way this ever can be close to safe for your health than, say, not using it.
Practically speaking, as a fat guy who sweats from the top of his head a lot, and especially in warmer climates, the idea of having this bulky thing on my head for a large part of the day, is an instant dealbreaker already. I've tried them a couple of times and they just f cking warm my head immediately. Maybe if they built a cooling mechanism that would help.
But then on top of that you add the expensive cost of the headset, the battery issue, the limited mobility, not being able to go to c0rn sites without Meta being all up in my b'ness, etc. etc. etc.
There is like, zero upside to this thing. None. Zilch.
At least the smartphone was easy to adopt en masse cause it combined a music player, mini browser, portability, GPS, game machine and all in a nice portable package that, at worst, just takes up more space in your pants pocket.
But if they can ever invent hardware that doesn't sit on one's head or rest on top of your ears (which also chafes on a hot day), then this thing could really start to get some traction cause much of the friction (figuratively speaking) would be removed. Meta glasses are a step in the right direction but they're not very immersive.
I worked on a software that offered VR as a feature. The user‘s started enthusiastically with eg. dedicated VR rooms. But it became clear that the immersive delta to a screen is surprisingly low. We‘re all trained to immerse into 2D screens on a daily basis. If you then observe how people are ridiculed while wearing a VR headset by their colleagues or how people with complicated hair style hesitate wearing a headset: then you understand why it‘s just not a good fit for B2B.
I’m on my third quest unit (my quest 1 died during the pandemic and I had to buy a new 1, and then the 2 came out). I still use it for around 3-4 hours a week and I’m thinking about upgrading to the quest 3. Just use one or two apps though (beat saber and fitxr), I never really got into actual gaming or social stuff on it. I wish a company would come around and seethe potential for fitness tech with VR, they could come up with better optimized solutions for it (and I don’t really count the mirror or stationary bike stuff). Fitness really fees like the killer app.
(1) Something that would be a wild success to any other company would be a failure for Facebook, Facebook just isn't the right company for this opportunity.
(2) I think the Horizon Worlds problem is not so much that the whole idea is cringe but rather than the authoring tools weren't good enough for users or brands to create interesting worlds. I wanted it to work but I couldn't find worlds I wanted to visit and was strongly alienated by the platform's inability to incorporate JPG images or GLB models. No way I'm going to waste my time learning an awkward interface to make worlds based on dumbed-down computational solid geometry where I can't apply those skills to other platforms.
(3) Part of that problem is that the MQ3 has enough RAM that you can use video game programming techniques to make interesting worlds but very little headroom for user-generated content in systems like Horizon Worlds and VRChat. The 16GB Apple Vision Pro is better but I find it completely comfortable to author for PC VR with a 64GB workstation as much as I love the standalone MQ3 experience.
A new hurdle the VR market will be facing is that Meta bought and burned the Oculus brand, one of the most well-known VR brands in the market. Will be curious to see how the market performs if Meta completely abandons Oculus headset production.
We'll see how it plays out, but Valve is set to release a standalone PC VR headset (that can also pair to a PC for added horsepower). Apparently their software allows it to run Android and Windows VR (and classic) applications. If this space is viable then that sounds like the right feature set to prove it.
These are good points. I don’t think the dev side was the main issue, though. If they had managed to achieve a substantial user base, developers would have adapted and found ways around the limitations, as they always do.
The main issue is that the user experience is not good enough. The headset is heavy, glitchy, you bump into things, and you look awkward using it. It didn’t have to be like this, and it may still improve in the future.
A very light standalone headset that works out of the box, along with something like a compact treadmill setup you can put in the corner, could change things. If enough users start using this, developers will make do with any limitations.
IMO this blog post can be summarized as "Even if nobody actually wants to use VR for extended periods, it's cool so it will be coming in the future eventually!!"
VR is the perfect metaphor IMO for how "the tech industry" at large has lost its way. It's no longer about using technology to solve long standing human problems, it's about how tech firms can find ways to insert themselves in the fabric of human existence so they can suck their rent indefinitely.
I actually think VR is very cool, and I thoroughly enjoy playing VR games like Beat Saber. But building a really fun (short term) gaming platform, or finding some dedicated VR use cases in specific environments like construction, was never going to be enough for big tech. They wouldn't be satisfied unless all of us had goggles strapped to our faces for 8+ hours a day. Everything Meta talked about made this clear - they only invested a ton of money because they saw it as the new "platform" after desktop and mobile that they could own and control. And it's obviously why AI is commanding so much investment now, as companies are scrambling to own the means of production in human society for years to come.
I agree that VR is not "dead", whatever that means, but I do find some joy that tech companies haven't found yet one more way to own the basics in societal existence.
wanting to own the platform first before the "killer application" became known is how they intend to keep extracting rent for said killer application when it appears.
Consumers need to be wary, and take steps to prevent such an outcome. Unfortunately, most consumers just simply dont know they're in a chess game with corporations they deal with, so don't see any setup moves as being threatening.
From the article: "The main theme in the Spanish Golden Age playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s La Vida es Sueño (Life is a Dream) from 1635 is the contrast between subjective and objective perceptions of reality."
Huh? Is this AI slop?
The basic problems with VR are well known. First, the headgear is too bulky. Carmack, who headed Oculus for a while, says that it won't get traction until the headgear is down to swim-goggles size, and won't go mainstream until it's down to eyeglass size.[1] "AR glasses", with just an overlay, achieve that, but it's not a full virtual environment.
Second, a sizable fraction of the population experiences some nausea, and a smaller fraction will barf.[2] That's worse than roller coasters. When visual and vestibular data disagree, the brain doesn't like it. The most successful VR games, such as Beat Saber, keep them locked together, but then you're stuck in one spot. There's a really good discussion of this by Phia, a VR influencer who started using VR as a teenager and spends a lot of time in VR.[3] She has practical advice on tuning VR systems to minimize nausea (interocular distance matters!) and how to introduce new people to VR (it takes repeated exposures of increasing length.)
VR Chat continues to grow, driven by young people who worked through the problems. VR Chat used to prevent free movement - you had to teleport from one seat to another. But experienced users wanted more freedom, and VR chat now allows it if you opt in. Really good users can do gymnastics with full body tracking while in VR.
It's not just put on the goggles and have fun. You have to acclimate. Learn the gestures that drive the system. Practice. If you go for full body and face tracking, your avatar has to be calibrated to match your joint lengths and you have to strap on sensors. (Which are now good, small, and wireless.) You need a safe open space where you can move, where there are no dangerous objects nearby, and the VR system knows the real world safe boundaries. VR is a sport, and takes the preparation of a sport.
VR surged (mainly in the form of VR cafes) in the late 90's, only to fall into obscurity, much like 3D film surged in the 50's, 80's, and 2010's before subsiding. VR now seems to be subsiding again (the number of new VR titles released on Steam has declined year-over-year for several years now). When will it return, and for how long?
3D film offers an added level of immersion, but the technology has had peaks of popularity interspersed with longer periods where it was very niche. Anaglyph 3D boomed in the 50's, but couldn't handle colour. Polarized 3D boomed in the 80's and could handle colour, but often at the expense of reduced brightness and resolution as well as increased prices. IMAX 3D soldiered on, but 3D was all but absent from mainstream movies until the 2010's, when active shutter 3D become popular alongside polarized 3D. Today, only the occasional movie is offered in 3D, and that's declining. Few cinema's are investing in new hardware for 3D projection.
The pattern repeated because 3D always added drawbacks and expense. Films were either made with it in mind (e.g. By deliberately shoving things into the viewer's face) or they just let it passively enhance things. The former made films gimmicky and limited their audience. The latter left it to audiences to choose whether 3D was worth the drawbacks. Audiences decided it wasn't time and again. A 2D window into another world was immersive enough. Studios keep coming back, roughly every three decades, because it seems like that's how long it takes audiences to start getting excited for the same gimmicks again.
VR is currently expensive, uncomfortable, isolating, and (for some) nausea inducing. Any one of these is worse than the sum total of modern 3D's drawbacks: You have to wear glasses, pay $5 extra, and hope the theatre's projector is bright enough. My bold prediction is that VR and 3D will both eventually succeed and stick (perhaps in the same package!), but only when the technologies are without significant drawbacks or extra expense. VR technology has made exciting progress since the 90's but, like 3D, it's not ready to stick yet.
The harsh reality is that, even if somebody were to make a quantum leap forward in VR technology tomorrow that solves all its major drawbacks, it would probably still be years or decades before audiences are willing to reconsider the opinion of VR they've formed over the last several years. People need to forget before they're willing to reevaluate.
It's just not it's time yet for mass adoption, however it might be.
VR/AR continues to have an increasing footprint of usage and adoption as the technologies evolve.
This has been the same cycle for over 20 years.
Once we get past 4K displays to 8K at a reasonable cost level, it again will introduce a new audience to VR/AR, and a larger and larger existing audience will sit here nodding along.
VR has gotten much better and it's fine for whomever it works for, it doesn't have to work for everyone, even if a big company took a bet on the timing of it being now.
I don't think VR will ever reach mass adoption, I don't think there's any reason for it to. It isn't sufficiently superior to screens and keyboard/mouse or phones to warrant it. I liken the hype around VR to the hype around LLMs - it's good at some things, but not everything.
I mean at some point, probably very soon over the next decade or so, we’re going to get to a point where AI is just going to generate extremely convincing virtual worlds on the fly. From what Google has been putting out these essentially immediately look exactly like real life and we will have sidestepped the whole “gradual graphical increases approaching reality” thing we’ve been doing for all these years. AI video right now is insane. It can generate 30 second videos that are completely lifelike. If they can manage to do that in three dimensions and you can walk around in it there’s no way VR is not going to takeoff.
You have guys right now spending $300 a month on Grok Imagine because it puts out extremely realistic soft porn. Imagine what that would be like in a virtual world, that is three-dimensional, looks exactly like real life, the VR headset is in your contact lenses and AI can generate compelling narratives on the fly.
The biggest impediment for VR is the fundamentally asocial nature of it.
If there are fewer headsets in a room than there are people, it’s going to be awkward for at least one person. Trying to help someone debug something in their headset without me being able to see what they see is a problem (granted, this could be solved by software).
Having to share headsets sucks. You have to faff with head straps, adjust IPD, focus. I’ve had exactly one evening where everyone had a headset and things worked well for everyone involved. I’ve had dozens if not hundreds of events filled with awkward moments, setup issues, problems, where everyone is continuously taking the headset off and need to figure something out. And this was while working for a VR company where everyone was quite computer and VR literate.
Reflecting on it, it felt kind of like 90s and 2000s LAN parties, before the days of DHCP. Randomly copying values around, IP conflicts and not understanding subnet values. Good times.
I do wish someone attempted a ground up AR OS where experiences are shared to nearby users by default. AR versions of airdrop are pervasive, that sort of thing.
For example, think of the opposite of Apple's People Awareness feature. Instead of an immersive experience fading away when a person comes near, the AR user's experience fades in as you approach.
I think it would be pretty magical, honestly. One of the wow moments the public never got to (because of adoption rates) is a shared AR experience. Really compelling stuff.
The only thing I regularly used a VR headset for, was to join clubs and socialize in VRchat during covid lockdowns. So VR provided an avenue of socializing when there were no better options. VRChat is still growing and up to 70k peak concurrent users.
These are valid points but the upside of vr is still much bigger than the current downsides. The ability to explore worlds as if you're actually there is something no other medium really offers.
Are video game consoles "fundamentally asocial" because there are likely fewer controllers than people in a household? Are computers, because they only have one mouse and keyboard? The existence of VR chat suggests it handles social gaming just fine.
I can think of a lot of impediments to VR (the weight of the headset and vertigo being the biggest) but needing everyone in a room to share a single headset at the same time seems like an extremely fringe case. The real problem there is just the cost of buying enough headsets.
I completely disagree. A lot of people lead pretty solitary lives explicitly when it comes you how they spend their time with technology. There is a lot of solitary phone, computer and video game time these days.
I think the biggest impediment is just how bulky they are. If we can make them so it’s just like picking up and putting on a pair of lightweight glasses, the same way you pick up a controller, I think that there would be a lot more uptake, especially in the gaming space.
VR's problem, in my opinion, is that I can get immersed (fully, exactly as the author describes it) in a 2D game just fine - the lack of stereo vision or head-tracking or motion controls is no more an impediment to my immersion than the limited binocular overlap or peripheral vision or lag in a VR headset. And 2D is a heck of a lot cheaper and more convenient (and less nauseating).
That's not to say VR can never be successful, but I think it needs to offer something more compelling than just "immersion." Exercise or AR might be viable routes.
I feel that's like saying "I can get just as fully immersed in a book so who needs movies?"
They're different experiences. I don't need Tetris or PacMan in VR. Conversely, Half-Life 1/2 etc are not remotely intense as Half-Life Alyx. In the first 2 you're watching a movie. In the later you're in the world of Half-Life
It is like saying that, and it is a fine response to someone saying "VR isn't dead because immersion."
The reason movies exist isn't simply "immersion", it's a different experience than reading a book.
The frequency of choosing to go out to the movies is also about how often I think "I wish I could do this in VR".
Examples:
- Before going on a trip, pre-visiting the destination in Google Earth with VR is very spatially informative & makes directional intuition memorable upon arrival at the real world destination.
- Virtual role-play with environmental cues that cause make-believe to be ever more real.
But most people don't need this very often. Picking up a book or throwing on some earbuds to listen to a book are far more frequent and compatible with simultaneous other activities. VR feels the same--a high-demand focused experience that is infrequently worth the effort.
The giant advantage regular games have is that I've yet to smash my hand into a wall playing them.
I think that the relatively low living space area for most of the world is a huge strain on VR adoption.
The most important quality of any successful trend (eg windows, internet, smart phones, cloud computing) has been convenience. Which is also the reason why I think Meta Glasses have a real chance to take off.
Meta Glasses will just recreate the whole “glasshole” response that Google Glasses got, except with a company that has even worse of a reputation.
It has a chance because they don't have a reputation to lose.
Also a key single use case that justifies the cost/friction of purchasing a new device.
Meta glasses somewhat justify themselves just for recording hikes/cycles/weddings etc.
> I can get immersed in a 2D game just fine
You're probably the last generation who would think so.
Exactly. It sounds like a detail that you can‘t eat and drink while you‘re in VR - but for casual experience it‘s friction and you resort back to a screen.
I recently started enjoying virtual bike tours on my exercise bike, but vertigo when the camera turns is an issue. I absolutely wouldn't do it on a treadmill.
There are many games for vr that cannot be done without the tech. It isnt all about immersion but facilitating unique experiences.
What held it back from mainstream imo is an inherent space issue (you need room) and a lack of multiplayer participation (need even more room). Compared to sitting on a couch in a small studio with a few friends, it doesnt stand a chance.
The other problem is most peoples first experience is with some shitty mall vr room where the “game” consists of free unity assets slapped together in a way that makes marky marks horizons look polished. Few people start off with something like the half life one.
I like VR and immersion in theory. I like being able to look around, but I absolutely hate the movement controls.
I know some people complain of motion sickness, but that doesn't bother me. I just want controls like Mario or Zelda on a regular joystick. Why can't this be done?
It doesn't even have to be first person. I'd play a third person game like Mario or Zelda with a VR camera tracking them. I just want that kind of movement.
Pushing a button to teleport in short hops is annoying as hell. I hate everything about it.
I gave up trying in frustration.
I always thought a great compromise would be games that gave you an overhead “gods eye” third person perspective. People seem to be obsessed with making VR games first person, but that’s where the movement problems come in.
The game Moss did this well for a platformers. But it could also be really fun for realtime strategy/simulation games (StarCraft, sim city) or sports games like Madden.
That would be fantastic.
I think even being the Lakitu camera in Mario 64 would work.
And you're right, it would kick ass for strategy, sim, and sports games.
I wonder if folks have tried building the movement and camera before the main gameplay loop. Just to see what feels right.
With AI, VR is even more promising. I have been working on a Gaussian splat renderer for the Quest 3, and by having Claude and ChatGPT read state-of-the-art papers, I have been able to build a training and rendering pipeline that is getting >50 fps for large indoor scenes on the Quest 3. I started with an (AI-driven) port of a desktop renderer, which got less than 1 fps, but I've integrated both training and rendering improvements from research and added a bunch of quality and performance improvements and now it's actually usable. Applying research papers to a novel product is something that used to take weeks or months of a person's time and can now be measured in minutes and hours (and tokens).
You might be interested in a new experimental 3D scene learning and rendering approach called Radiant foam [1], which is supposed to be better suited for GPUs that don't have hardware ray tracing acceleration.
[1]: https://radfoam.github.io/
Sorry if this is a basic question, but what's you workflow for feeding the papers into the LLM and getting the implementation done? The coding agents that I've used are not able to read PDFs, so I've been wondering how to do it.
What's your take on WorldLabs and Apple's splat models? Are there other open source alternatives?
How would editing work?
Do you think these will win over video world models like Genie?
Have you played with DiamondWM and other open source video world models?
In my experience in the real word, VR is a lot like racing sims. No one I know owns a VR headset, no one I know talks about it, no one I know is very interested in it at all, but both exist as ticketed experience at places in and around malls.
So from where I'm sitting in my middle class suburbs, it's certainly not dead, but it's basically the modern equivalent of those actuated flight sim entertainment experiences from the 80s/90s.
VR seems to be much bigger among the perpetually online. For us normies VR is hardly a blip on the radar.
I still don't even really understand what Horizon Worlds or the Metaverse even was, or if there's a distinction between the two. I've heard of VRChat, but from the little I've seen, it seems extremely unappealing.
I still think that most people don't want to strap a computer screen to their face, for any reason. I've done it, it's not very pleasant.
As someone who has both interest in VR and racing sims (and other sims), and tried VR and loved it, I am genuinely NOT INTERESTED in owning a headset for the obvious health reasons that come with using one.
There is no way this ever can be close to safe for your health than, say, not using it.
I'm really curious what you consider to be the obvious health reasons - it's far from obvious for me.
Practically speaking, as a fat guy who sweats from the top of his head a lot, and especially in warmer climates, the idea of having this bulky thing on my head for a large part of the day, is an instant dealbreaker already. I've tried them a couple of times and they just f cking warm my head immediately. Maybe if they built a cooling mechanism that would help.
But then on top of that you add the expensive cost of the headset, the battery issue, the limited mobility, not being able to go to c0rn sites without Meta being all up in my b'ness, etc. etc. etc.
There is like, zero upside to this thing. None. Zilch.
At least the smartphone was easy to adopt en masse cause it combined a music player, mini browser, portability, GPS, game machine and all in a nice portable package that, at worst, just takes up more space in your pants pocket.
But if they can ever invent hardware that doesn't sit on one's head or rest on top of your ears (which also chafes on a hot day), then this thing could really start to get some traction cause much of the friction (figuratively speaking) would be removed. Meta glasses are a step in the right direction but they're not very immersive.
„Clearly, VR technology isn’t fully ready yet.“
Disagree. It‘s quite mature and usable.
I worked on a software that offered VR as a feature. The user‘s started enthusiastically with eg. dedicated VR rooms. But it became clear that the immersive delta to a screen is surprisingly low. We‘re all trained to immerse into 2D screens on a daily basis. If you then observe how people are ridiculed while wearing a VR headset by their colleagues or how people with complicated hair style hesitate wearing a headset: then you understand why it‘s just not a good fit for B2B.
I saw a recent comment that a significant portion of the human population wear face makeup that gets wrecked by a VR headset.
I’m on my third quest unit (my quest 1 died during the pandemic and I had to buy a new 1, and then the 2 came out). I still use it for around 3-4 hours a week and I’m thinking about upgrading to the quest 3. Just use one or two apps though (beat saber and fitxr), I never really got into actual gaming or social stuff on it. I wish a company would come around and seethe potential for fitness tech with VR, they could come up with better optimized solutions for it (and I don’t really count the mirror or stationary bike stuff). Fitness really fees like the killer app.
I agree. I've been using the quest to regularly work out for the last 4 years.
It's the only app I use. I think my issue is that VR is very much a solo experience.
It's hard for me to have the free time and room to play with my kids and family. I would rather play 2d games with the kids.
I think zuckberg was infatuated with the social aspect, but really it’s the solo grind that works well with VR.
VR has never been alive for me. If Apple can't get fetch to happen I don't know how anybody can with the current state of the pc hardware industry.
whatwg made fetch a thing.
(1) Something that would be a wild success to any other company would be a failure for Facebook, Facebook just isn't the right company for this opportunity.
(2) I think the Horizon Worlds problem is not so much that the whole idea is cringe but rather than the authoring tools weren't good enough for users or brands to create interesting worlds. I wanted it to work but I couldn't find worlds I wanted to visit and was strongly alienated by the platform's inability to incorporate JPG images or GLB models. No way I'm going to waste my time learning an awkward interface to make worlds based on dumbed-down computational solid geometry where I can't apply those skills to other platforms.
(3) Part of that problem is that the MQ3 has enough RAM that you can use video game programming techniques to make interesting worlds but very little headroom for user-generated content in systems like Horizon Worlds and VRChat. The 16GB Apple Vision Pro is better but I find it completely comfortable to author for PC VR with a 64GB workstation as much as I love the standalone MQ3 experience.
A new hurdle the VR market will be facing is that Meta bought and burned the Oculus brand, one of the most well-known VR brands in the market. Will be curious to see how the market performs if Meta completely abandons Oculus headset production.
We'll see how it plays out, but Valve is set to release a standalone PC VR headset (that can also pair to a PC for added horsepower). Apparently their software allows it to run Android and Windows VR (and classic) applications. If this space is viable then that sounds like the right feature set to prove it.
These are good points. I don’t think the dev side was the main issue, though. If they had managed to achieve a substantial user base, developers would have adapted and found ways around the limitations, as they always do. The main issue is that the user experience is not good enough. The headset is heavy, glitchy, you bump into things, and you look awkward using it. It didn’t have to be like this, and it may still improve in the future. A very light standalone headset that works out of the box, along with something like a compact treadmill setup you can put in the corner, could change things. If enough users start using this, developers will make do with any limitations.
IMO this blog post can be summarized as "Even if nobody actually wants to use VR for extended periods, it's cool so it will be coming in the future eventually!!"
VR is the perfect metaphor IMO for how "the tech industry" at large has lost its way. It's no longer about using technology to solve long standing human problems, it's about how tech firms can find ways to insert themselves in the fabric of human existence so they can suck their rent indefinitely.
I actually think VR is very cool, and I thoroughly enjoy playing VR games like Beat Saber. But building a really fun (short term) gaming platform, or finding some dedicated VR use cases in specific environments like construction, was never going to be enough for big tech. They wouldn't be satisfied unless all of us had goggles strapped to our faces for 8+ hours a day. Everything Meta talked about made this clear - they only invested a ton of money because they saw it as the new "platform" after desktop and mobile that they could own and control. And it's obviously why AI is commanding so much investment now, as companies are scrambling to own the means of production in human society for years to come.
I agree that VR is not "dead", whatever that means, but I do find some joy that tech companies haven't found yet one more way to own the basics in societal existence.
wanting to own the platform first before the "killer application" became known is how they intend to keep extracting rent for said killer application when it appears.
Consumers need to be wary, and take steps to prevent such an outcome. Unfortunately, most consumers just simply dont know they're in a chess game with corporations they deal with, so don't see any setup moves as being threatening.
From the article: "The main theme in the Spanish Golden Age playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s La Vida es Sueño (Life is a Dream) from 1635 is the contrast between subjective and objective perceptions of reality."
Huh? Is this AI slop?
The basic problems with VR are well known. First, the headgear is too bulky. Carmack, who headed Oculus for a while, says that it won't get traction until the headgear is down to swim-goggles size, and won't go mainstream until it's down to eyeglass size.[1] "AR glasses", with just an overlay, achieve that, but it's not a full virtual environment.
Second, a sizable fraction of the population experiences some nausea, and a smaller fraction will barf.[2] That's worse than roller coasters. When visual and vestibular data disagree, the brain doesn't like it. The most successful VR games, such as Beat Saber, keep them locked together, but then you're stuck in one spot. There's a really good discussion of this by Phia, a VR influencer who started using VR as a teenager and spends a lot of time in VR.[3] She has practical advice on tuning VR systems to minimize nausea (interocular distance matters!) and how to introduce new people to VR (it takes repeated exposures of increasing length.)
VR Chat continues to grow, driven by young people who worked through the problems. VR Chat used to prevent free movement - you had to teleport from one seat to another. But experienced users wanted more freedom, and VR chat now allows it if you opt in. Really good users can do gymnastics with full body tracking while in VR.
It's not just put on the goggles and have fun. You have to acclimate. Learn the gestures that drive the system. Practice. If you go for full body and face tracking, your avatar has to be calibrated to match your joint lengths and you have to strap on sensors. (Which are now good, small, and wireless.) You need a safe open space where you can move, where there are no dangerous objects nearby, and the VR system knows the real world safe boundaries. VR is a sport, and takes the preparation of a sport.
So it works, but is not mass-market.
[1] https://next.reality.news/news/oculus-cto-john-carmack-outli...
[2] https://www.pcgamer.com/vr-still-makes-40-70-of-players-want...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixdNKc53VZQ
VR surged (mainly in the form of VR cafes) in the late 90's, only to fall into obscurity, much like 3D film surged in the 50's, 80's, and 2010's before subsiding. VR now seems to be subsiding again (the number of new VR titles released on Steam has declined year-over-year for several years now). When will it return, and for how long?
3D film offers an added level of immersion, but the technology has had peaks of popularity interspersed with longer periods where it was very niche. Anaglyph 3D boomed in the 50's, but couldn't handle colour. Polarized 3D boomed in the 80's and could handle colour, but often at the expense of reduced brightness and resolution as well as increased prices. IMAX 3D soldiered on, but 3D was all but absent from mainstream movies until the 2010's, when active shutter 3D become popular alongside polarized 3D. Today, only the occasional movie is offered in 3D, and that's declining. Few cinema's are investing in new hardware for 3D projection.
The pattern repeated because 3D always added drawbacks and expense. Films were either made with it in mind (e.g. By deliberately shoving things into the viewer's face) or they just let it passively enhance things. The former made films gimmicky and limited their audience. The latter left it to audiences to choose whether 3D was worth the drawbacks. Audiences decided it wasn't time and again. A 2D window into another world was immersive enough. Studios keep coming back, roughly every three decades, because it seems like that's how long it takes audiences to start getting excited for the same gimmicks again.
VR is currently expensive, uncomfortable, isolating, and (for some) nausea inducing. Any one of these is worse than the sum total of modern 3D's drawbacks: You have to wear glasses, pay $5 extra, and hope the theatre's projector is bright enough. My bold prediction is that VR and 3D will both eventually succeed and stick (perhaps in the same package!), but only when the technologies are without significant drawbacks or extra expense. VR technology has made exciting progress since the 90's but, like 3D, it's not ready to stick yet.
The harsh reality is that, even if somebody were to make a quantum leap forward in VR technology tomorrow that solves all its major drawbacks, it would probably still be years or decades before audiences are willing to reconsider the opinion of VR they've formed over the last several years. People need to forget before they're willing to reevaluate.
VR isn't dead. It's not alive either.
It's just not it's time yet for mass adoption, however it might be.
VR/AR continues to have an increasing footprint of usage and adoption as the technologies evolve.
This has been the same cycle for over 20 years.
Once we get past 4K displays to 8K at a reasonable cost level, it again will introduce a new audience to VR/AR, and a larger and larger existing audience will sit here nodding along.
VR has gotten much better and it's fine for whomever it works for, it doesn't have to work for everyone, even if a big company took a bet on the timing of it being now.
I don't think VR will ever reach mass adoption, I don't think there's any reason for it to. It isn't sufficiently superior to screens and keyboard/mouse or phones to warrant it. I liken the hype around VR to the hype around LLMs - it's good at some things, but not everything.
I mean at some point, probably very soon over the next decade or so, we’re going to get to a point where AI is just going to generate extremely convincing virtual worlds on the fly. From what Google has been putting out these essentially immediately look exactly like real life and we will have sidestepped the whole “gradual graphical increases approaching reality” thing we’ve been doing for all these years. AI video right now is insane. It can generate 30 second videos that are completely lifelike. If they can manage to do that in three dimensions and you can walk around in it there’s no way VR is not going to takeoff.
You have guys right now spending $300 a month on Grok Imagine because it puts out extremely realistic soft porn. Imagine what that would be like in a virtual world, that is three-dimensional, looks exactly like real life, the VR headset is in your contact lenses and AI can generate compelling narratives on the fly.
VR is gonna be insane once hardware catches up. It’s the natural next frontier imo.
This has been the sentiment for nearly a decade now.
Much longer. We had VR in the '60s.
I think the current generation of VR hardware is pretty great.