I'm a gamer, my spouse is a gamer, and we have a Quest in the house because of my spouse's job. We're free to use it to play games or whatever, but we never do. We both tried Beat Saber the day she got the rig, and haven't done anything with it since. That was months ago.
I have a gamer friend with a gamer spouse with multiple VR rigs from his spouse's job, similar situation, job doesn't care if they play with the hardware. He says he played them a bit for a couple months a couple years back, did the very small number of must-play games (mostly just Alyx and SuperHot, I think) and that was it, all of it's sat unused since then.
Maybe we're not representative, but that's four-for-four of not really giving a shit about VR even when we're all gamers and the hardware's free.
In our case, just the headset. I think my friend has at least two or three, and whatever the "good one" is requires some sensors around the room or something, so there's a bit more to that one.
I played an HTC Vive once, it was fun but it was a lot of stuff to play... I don't have the space for anything like that. Happy with consoles and Steam Deck (mostly in desktop mode) for video games lately.
It's pretty much an accepted reality that VR has not been a big success for anyone. Disney failed early with DisneyQuest. Second Life hasn't become popular even though VR hardware has existed for a long time. There's the complete joke called Magic Leap. MS decided to pivot to military applications because theirs didn't sell. Google gave up on Daydream. And Facebook just laid of 10,000 people, many of them in the metaverse department.
The most likely reason is physics. These devices aren't fun to use. They're disorienting and make people sick. In practice, they add nothing to the experience -- certainly not the experience of a business meeting! It seems quite ridiculous to think that would ever have been a use case.
So, the article really isn't a hit piece but perhaps a rather late and rather obvious commentary on something that even Zuck has to admit isn't a thing.
I’d say PSVR did quite well. Your examples above - from FB or Google - failed for the same reason everything else they try ends in failure - it’s a problem with those corporations and their “engineering culture”, not with VR.
Microsoft recently laid off nearly the entire HoloLens team. Even groups working on AI/ML for things like computer vision and scene detection / 3D understanding weren't spared. All they care about is a Chatbot these days.
I agree with almost all of what you said. There's basically nobody who's made money selling VR hardware, 99% of VR games are extraordinarily primitive, motion sickness is a major barrier to making more diverse kinds of games, the barrier to entry is high (you need a high end PC and you have to set the damn thing up, both initially and every time you want to play it).
But there's one small thing - it can be fun! and LOTS of it!
Job Simulator is my go-to so-you-wanna-try-VR game. It's fun. It knows what its limits are and create fun within them. It's silly. Anyone can play it! It's like the fun of the point-and-click games of old but in VR.
Every single person who I've shown - from my mom to my wife to friends - has been absolutely blown away by how readily your brain accepts the VR world as "real". Your brain's ability to "adopt" the VR hands is just a magical thing to experience, and so fun!
The same goes for the Valve VR demo thing whose name I forget, where you're in an Aperture lab or something and can go through portals to do different minigames as well as mess around in the lab itself.
It reminds me of Wii Sports for the Wii and the motion-sensing wiimotes. Some cute demos (and nearly some full games in their own right) that show off the hardware, and the spark is truly there and your grandparents play 200 hours of wii bowling, but then nobody can figure out where to go next. People didn't like it in Skyward Sword. So eventually it's kind of ditched for the Wii U and then kind of brought back for the Switch Joycons but only to be trotted out every once in a great while for a quirk.
We seem to kind of be somewhere in there for VR except that some companies scented THE NEXT BIG THING and tried to be the google/facebook/amazon/etc of this new paradigm but they all got collectively wiimote'd. So the comedown is a lot more dramatic than just the WiiU not having a remote.
I hope someone figures out google glass and AR stuff though. And not just the garbage AR that pokemon go et al call "AR" where it's just "look we put your phone's camera as the background of the scene" and they use GPS + PoI's. Real AR like I'm the pilot of a damn evangelion and it's giving me readouts. (JARVIS/Iron Man might be a more recent reference that I would also accept as well).
I recall a story from a colleague who knew some folks who had worked on the game System Shock (this was in the early nineties). System shock was one of the first games that had an engine that implemented real 3D physics; so when you threw a grenade, it would describe a real parabola. And you can lean around a corner and sneak a peak without exposing your entire body to enemy fire, and when you did that, the 1st person shooter rendering would realistically reflect that. They had an experimental version of the game that was hooked to a virtual reality headset at the time, and gave up on it because, as one of them joked, it was "virtual reality, real nausea".
This was 30 years ago, and things haven't improved since then.
"Descent" goes back 28 years and I remember getting pretty disoriented and a little nausea, worse than I ever experienced flying a small airplane.
"Descent" was the game where you blast robots in a very 3-d mine.
One oddity of "VR" is it initially attracts people with excellent visuospatial analysis skills; the problem is the majority of the population is not good at it. It would be like implementing a user interface based on bench pressing 275 pounds of real world weights; it would be an incredibly popular fad among people already qualified to participate, then the general public would LOL and that's it. So that's the problem selling VR to the general public; most folks aren't very good at solving maze puzzles and drawing 3D CAD drawings in their heads so a UI based on that will be a hard sell.
When I started out in web design and development in 1995, a lot of companies were showing early "VR" and 3D interfaces, touting them as the next great thing. Somehow, people got the idea that reaching around in 3D space for everything was better than just picking from a menu, a list, or an index -- like we have done for 1,000 years.
I feel like all the 3D hype is just that. While it could be fun in games in a holodeck-type environment (but probably not outside of that, 'cause physics), I don't think the majority of everyday human interactions with information are better off in 3D. Why would anyone think so? We don't read in 3D. We don't write in 3D. We don't make pictures in 3D. Why would a 3D interface be better?
A lot of the tech will eventually see widespread use. AR will be a huge deal when they get it right, just because having HUDs will be a game changer for a lot of jobs.
I think the most promising VR technology might be something like Starline [1]. No headset to wear. No disorientation. You just sit down and you're there with somebody else. It's a more limited use case, but one with many business applications as well.
>The Xbox series S/X sold 20 million, the PS5 sold 30 million. Looking at these numbers, I'd say the Quest is pretty mainstream, no?
Meta spent $100 billion[0] on VR to sell 20 million Quest headsets that most people have put in the closet. That's 30 years of total Sony R&D budget, including all the Playstations, Walkmen, VCRs, DVDs, Blu Rays, cameras, sensors, TVs, speakers, headphones, and even their own VR device.
I just can't believe figures like $100bn. How? On what? Spending $100bn is _hard_.
For comparison, the Mars Science Laboratory project had a $2.5bn budget and sent a spacecraft that landed a rover on another planet. Yes, the MSC built on existing NASA infra and previous rover R&D ... but so did Meta's VR division.
Lots of fundamental investment in hardware and tech that is multiple years out. Displays, chipsets, input devices, etc. multiple lines of hardware beyond what you see today. Multiple OSes, lots of application teams, middleware, services, frameworks, etc etc.
It wasn’t $100bn spent on VR. There is a ton of research happening inside of RealityLabs, which accounts for the vast majority of the investment, but yes the only product so far is the VR headset. Here’s a roadmap (supposedly based on leaked presentations) of what’s on the horizon—no pun intended
Carmack strongly hinted that a lot of the research going on wasn't productive. How much of it will go anywhere versus being another "stupid thing" which takes forever to kill?
Does Facebook have any significant VR revenue outside of headsets? What is their total ecosystem revenue? They didn't break that out in their last filing, so I can't tell.
I think the point was exactly that - even it the Quest numbers don't look so bad when compared with XBox / PS5, they Quest ecosystem is actually peanuts when compared to the XBox or PS5 ecosystems.
Its different. Arguably all 3 is sold at a loss, they make it up with additional game/application purchases. Most game developers are making their games for xbox, ps5, and/or pc. They aren't making it for vr. There is a lack of application development for the metaverse. This is why zuck is spending 13 billion a year. They are trying to make the applications themselves. There's a lack of third party app/game developers
I think most Quests are doing what mine is doing: sitting in a drawer unused.
In my case it was because my pupillary distance is too wide for the Quest (and almost every other VR headset) so everything looks blurry all of the time no matter what.
It sucks being only slightly smaller than Hafþór Björnsson.
Every person I know who has a Quest bought Beat Saber and Job Simulator, played for a couple of weeks, and then put it away.
Has anyone actually met anyone who has visited the metaverse? Admittedly, I don’t live in SV (or CA), but I do know a lot of developers, tech people, nerds, etc. and none of them have visited the metaverse. I keep assuming it doesn’t actually exist yet. It’s like a story of this far off land that people have heard of, but nobody has actually visited.
There is no the metaverse currently, but there are many metaverses. The definition itself is shaky and contradictory across sources. But to summarize, a metaverse is a "set of digital spaces that you can move seamlessly between", it will include "familiar 2D experiences, as well as ones projected into the physical world and fully immersive 3D ones too". It can be accessed via your phone or computer, or a VR reset for "full immersion". Fortnite is a metaverse, but some say Roblox and Minecraft aren't. I couldn't tell you how that distinction was drawn.
My favorite metaverse is RuneScape, but I unfortunately haven't visited in a decade or more. Steam might also be considered a metaverse. Which would imply Xbox Online and all that are too.
Not sure the Roblox and Minecraft exclusions make sense. Maybe they used to in the past but they act as all other current forms of metaverses do, like VR Chat or Second Life or GTA Online.
The consideration of Steam and Xbox Online as a metaverse is one I'm not too fond of. It kind of messes the entire idea up as you're not really using 3D avatars to communicate with others in a way that sort of replicates reality. If Steam and Xbox get considered as metaverses, we're now suddenly calling Twitter and HN also metaverses which is a bit absurd when we have perfectly reasonable names for them.
Also while the current implementations of metaverses are quite limited and mostly game related, people are setting their sights on future goals. Mainly interoperability. Right now you can't go from Runescape to VR Chat in any seamless way, you lose your friends lists, items, accounts, expectations and standards, etc. There is some work being done here, for example Epic created EOS as a layer of interoperability between any games without the usual restrictions, however the project is still very much in early stages and acts as nothing more than a universal friends list/account for now.
I was thinking more of TF2 when I brought up steam (I suppose my age is showing...). The momentary interaction is using TF2's models and game logic, but all the "metaverse" stuff is using Steam's logic (chat, inventory stores, trading, etc.)
That I definitely agree with. I also think you're right here in regards to viewing Steam's Steamworks as a sort of abstraction layer or prerequisite for their metaverses to work. Without Steamworks, TF2/CSGO/L4D/etc become isolated experiences.
I don't buy this definition where everyone is having their own metaverse. There's nothing meta about that. If anything is a metaverse it's the internet, and it just sucks as a metaverse because we've let big companies and their walled gardens dominate it and prevent freedom of movement. Practically, metaverse is now a useless word since Zuck and team started promoting/misusing it.
Prior to the misuse, it had always meant a single unified network[0]. I maintain that if there is no one metaverse, there are none. Don't let the confused BS that comes from marketing people change the meaning of words.
There may have been only one metaverse in Snow Crash, but there's absolutely nothing that requires there to be only one metaverse. Hell, practically the whole point of virtual reality is to remove the limits and scarcity of the physical world, and thus limiting yourself to a single metaverse is antithetical to the very concept.
At its most basic, a metaverse is just a persistent virtual space shared among multiple users. We have lots of those, and have had them for years, and unsurprisingly they're pretty much all video games.
> but there's absolutely nothing that requires there to be only one metaverse.
Aside from how it was specifically used, the way the word is formulated alone suggests there should only be one. Meta loosely means above, and encompassing, on a higher plane. Verse comes from universe obviously. The unified world, above everything.
This is just another case of people confidently misusing words so prominently that the meaning changes, which "is allowed", obviously.
> a metaverse is just a persistent virtual space shared among multiple users. We have lots of those, and have had them for years
Yes, we've had them for years, and we didn't call them metaverses, and nothing was lost in that time. That's good evidence for my prior assertion that the word (with its new definition) is practically useless.
I think we're just having a semantic argument now; just because meta roughly means "above" doesn't imply singularity (you could envision a metametaverse above multiple metaverses). And the existence of a singular observable universe doesn't preclude the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics or the accompanying "multiverse".
> limiting yourself to a single metaverse is antithetical to the very concept.
I want to also dispute this point. The idea of the metaverse from Snow Crash was one that was federated and interoperable, like the internet was historically, and still remains, at a low level. The standardized nature of the metaverse's spacial analogy was key to the concept. It was the internet, but represented and navigable as physical space. I'd say it's "independent metaverses" that are antithetical to the concept of a metaverse.
Yeah came here to say the same. We’ve had the metaverse for ages in a much better and broader form factor than fiction portrayed. Most “metaverse” projects want to build something more limited which seems backward.
One day in the middle of the day I visited the "Soapstone comedy club" world in Horizon Worlds. People were actually taking turns going on stage and telling jokes. Then in the course of general conversation, one person said she wrote and sang songs and someone asked her to get on the stage and sing. She did, and it was beautiful, almost a magic moment of discovery. Afterward she told us that she was a twin who recently met her brother and both were into music so they formed a band. The band is called Cave Twins and the song was "A Little Longer".
It's the one redeeming moment in Horizon Worlds that I have had. I continue to check in once a month or so but have had no other meaningful interactions since.
What you describe also happens periodically in the real world :). It doesn't require any technology; it just requires getting out and going places (and a city/environment with a lot of different things happening).
oh yes, of course it does. I just wanted to mention the one instance where I had a good experience in "The Metaverse". Something like this could be nice if the experiences could be repeatable and you happen to live in a place where you don't have such venues like you mention.
> you happen to live in a place where you don't have such venues like you mention
This is a topic which I am currently experiencing and thinking a lot about.
For those who truly cannot be in lively areas, technology can provide at least some level of connection to the rest of humanity. But I realize now that living location choice can make an enormous difference on quality of life just based on the availability of good social options. And as a techie who has lived most of my life behind a computer, I have recently discovered that real life is much, much more rewarding - if you're in an area where people are not just boxed up in their own homes every night from 6pm+.
I agree. Interestingly enough, I find talking to real people much easier than talking to people in Horizon Worlds, where it just seems kind of strange to me, I usually keep my mute on and observe there whereas I am pretty talkative in reality.
Any time someone describes 'metaverse' they just end up describing Minecraft, which I've played for quite a while and I really enjoy it. I don't think Minecraft is the future of all human interaction, but that hasn't detracted from Minecraft being successful.
Unless 'metaverse' is supposed to only mean 'VR platform sold by Facebook'.
>Unless 'metaverse' is supposed to only mean 'VR platform sold by Facebook'.
That is exactly what Zuckerberg is shooting for, and why he is failing on an epic scale. He doesn't really care about VR and virtual universes so much as he cares about ownership of the 'one true metaverse'.
I realize this is in jest, but Minecraft is owned by Microsoft, and the prime directive of FB/Meta in the last 10-15 years is to own their own platform instead of building on top of platforms owned by other tech giants.
I’m a tech nerd and developer who enjoys social VR, whether Horizons, VR Chat, or Rec Room. One issue is that the public rooms are usually full of annoying griefers, all the nice interesting people have retreated out of the public areas and into private rooms and parties. This means if you just drop in to one of these systems casually you don’t get to see all the interesting private events happening, like lots of private DJ and music concerts in VR Chat for example.
Nah, this is the nymwars argument and Facebook comments on news articles + the period of real names on YouTube shows that does not help as much as you think it does.
Outside of my regular group of friends, I've met people who were regulars within AltSpaceVR which has now closed. They've now shifted to Horizon and avoid VRChat which is full of kids or people pretending to be a mouse in a race car.
Horizon has given me the ability to make friends from other parts of the country and the world. People that are actual friends, not just people I talk to online.
I do think Horizon would fare better with the same tech (features/capabilities) but a different look to it. I've hung out in it a bit and certain spaces kind of evoke the old feeling back when I was in college and hanging out at an apartment or around a campfire and just quietly listening or chatting with other people bullshitting with each other. And I also got to go to a 'club' where people were dancing around a DJ another time.
I'm a bit too old to feel comfortable doing that in person anymore. So it was nice to have that feeling again, as fleeting as it was.
Too bad it has to be in an environment that looks like it came out of the PS1 era with the blandest art direction possible.
Both of my kids play Fortnite, as do I on occasion. During COVID, they had concerts (Marshmallow), movie nights, and BLM-adjancent lectures. Anyone who had an account could fire up their rig, jack in, and attend--even with friends.
This is one of the many metaverses. Minecraft is a pretty readily available one too. Neither required VR gear, either.
I was involved in Second Life around the turn of the century. I've been ignoring the metaverse since giving up on SL a long time ago. Obviously the resolution, frame rate, and software integration in metaverse will be somewhat better than SL; aside from that, can anyone tell me the difference between modern metaverse and SL, also how does that difference translate into profitable sales?
The new hype wave for SL sounds like someone hyping up the "new" idea of a CLI, and me feeling, uh, I think I've seen this before...
VRChat is less LARP-heavy than SL. VRChat is more proprietary than SL. VRChat is more custom than SL in some ways and less in others. The SL people tried to make a VRChat clone. They sold it off, and now an EDM label uses it for virtual raves.
VRChat is significantly more voice-heavy than SL, which is better or worse depending on your use-case.
The best thing about VRChat is that you get to wear a toaster on your face and get physical interaction with people. If you want to take a dancing course in VRChat, you can. Buy a few gadgets to track your limbs, and it'll be shown accurately.
VRChat is essentially the next step in the user-programmable social video game, and the community seems more ambitious. The platform is so open that they've ran emulated Linux on user avatars.
> Obviously the resolution, frame rate, and software integration in metaverse will be somewhat better than SL; aside from that, can anyone tell me the difference between modern metaverse and SL, also how does that difference translate into profitable sales?
Most of the modern metaverses are worse than Second Life. Their big advantages were VR, browser and mobile clients. Second Life is getting most of those features now.
Their dev team finally got out of "can't do" mode.
(That's client side. Server side, they still have trouble fixing long-standing bugs.)
They hired some good game devs, and graphics started to get better.
* Frame rates have increased substantially.
There's more multi-threading in the clients now, and the servers have
been upgraded to better AWS instances. Still OpenGL,
but work is going on to use Vulkan.
* Graphics realism has increased, again. Physically based rendering
with high dynamic range lighting is in test. Not subsurface scattering,
though, so skin still looks plastic under some lighting. Graphics
realism is becoming comparable to GTA-V, but not Red Dead Redemption.
* There's a mobile viewer in test. Uses Unity as the graphics engine.[1]
* Full body tracking is in test, and being demoed. It's striking to see
how someone rigged for full tracking dominates a meeting.
Second Life may end up being the metaverse, after everybody else fails.
It's one of the very few systems with a large, continuous world, one
about the size of greater Los Angeles.
Facebook failed to deliver much, the NFT guys delivered even less, and
the people who announced and didn't ship probably never will.
A few months ago during the height of the metaverse craze, I mentioned that it seems forced by some companies. I was told by HN that I live in a bubble ;) So there are probably tons of people who care a lot!
I have, it was quite insane. I played Catan, a board game, with people online. Most immersive social experience I’ve ever went through.
I also went into a cinema, thought I was alone but when I turned my head to the room realized that people were staring at me lol. I screamed of surprise, they heard it and laughed, it was too real so I disconnected.
I did VR chat a bit but in general the feeling of presence was too strong when I wanted to chill so didn’t experience as many things as I could.
I’ve had friends visit my space and play chess with me there as well. But at the time our headsets would only last for like 30min and they would overheat easily. I got the Quest later and every problem had been fixed. Perfect headset. Can’t imagine what the quest 2 feels like.
You're correct, nobody has. It's so dumb. I saw ads for the Metaverse in SJC today... there is no product to show. It's not even a scam or pyramid scheme, they're just burning money selling nothing for no money. It's like those oil company ads showing random stock video with voiceover about synergy and sustainability, except at least they sell oil.
Closest is VRChat, the most excessive users are there from their morning workout, maybe a work meeting, to their evening socialization. Though everyone pretends the game doesn't exist, especially Facebook (too embarrassing to not match such a small team)
Thankfully it's not the dystopian warning of being a "browser" with unlockable ads, tracking (including new stuff like always on cameras, eye tracking, and everything you fit in a fitness watch/ tracker), and all wrapped up by like a proprietary walled garden.
I own Valve Index. State of the industry is not very bright. The best VR game so far is HL2 VR mod. Alyx the second. Looks like investors are pretty shy to put money in VR game studios to make big and story rich content.
The worst will be that when somebody, sometimes actually creates an actual immersive small-to-be-worn VR/AR glass - one that will be very much unlike the current generation of headsets - journalists along with these companies will trumpet "this was the idea we had, the product was there but before its time".
No sir. The idea of virtual reality and "holograms" is at least here since the early 20th century. It's just that these people burnt billions of dollars on some tacky tech demos and empty marketing promises, and the industry believed them for years.
I'm convinced this is why Apple and Microsoft (among others) keep putting money into AR development. It clearly sucks to use right now, so it doesn't make a lot of sense that they're putting significant money into it... but when someone (possibly one of those two companies!) finally puts out AR glasses that aren't awful, they'll be ready.
I remain unsure whether Zuck is running that same playbook, or if he legitimately thought bulky-ass VR goggles were the way of the future and expects to have a smash-hit before marketable AR glasses exist.
I had an inside view of things, but all of the work being done is actually a long term roadmap towards building AR devices that don't suck. There many complicated issues to deal with, including batter life, processing power, input and control, heat management, placement of self and objects in a virtual world, safety, and on and on. That's all on top of figuring out what content is interesting and compelling.
Devices being made by these companies all embody elements of solutions to these challenges, but they all recognize it's a long road, and there's a lot of learning still to be done.
Apart from the fact that people might not want it, even technically you might still have latency issues, our eyes are extremely sensitive… also keep in mind: the sensors and displays you need on head might still weigh a lot and consume a lot of power on your head, even if all processing power is relegated to an external unit.
Why not? Do you think AR-on-a-slab-of-glass is going to become something people actually use, or that VR headsets are going to get way more popular before sleek AR glasses are available? Neither of those things seem likely to me, but maybe I'm wrong. I do think if someone gets AR glasses hardware right, it's gonna be the next "smartphone revolution".
I never used a Google Glass, but it seemed like they got at least part way there -- essentially a light weight hud. I guess that doesn't have to deal with any eye tracking or motion latency. Also don't know if the limited Glass applications / interface just sucked.
Overall it seemed like they weren't too far from {something_useful}.
I think about the same thing. I wonder why they shut down the project. Maybe it wasn’t useful enough, maybe it was harmful to the eyes? Maybe they just couldn’t price down the tech
Facebook clearly tried it with a huge amount of money.
I think the illusion was the problem. Suck wanted it to work without realizing his gadget.
I'm much more curious if Tim will really release apples version and if it will burn him.
And I only mean for broad consumer vr/ar not for industry etc.
Forcing a worker to wear a headset is much easier and there are fast financial benefits. Alone when you can train someone virtual before letting them on the real thing.
> The worst will be that when somebody, sometimes actually creates an actual immersive small-to-be-worn VR/AR glass - one that will be very much unlike the current generation of headsets - journalists along with these companies will trumpet "this was the idea we had, the product was there but before its time".
I had an AR startup in the "pre-Pokemon Go" times (2015). Explaining what we were doing and what AR was capable of became significantly harder after Niantic launched their second game (remember Ingress?).
The main reason was that the definition of AR changed from "augmenting reality" to "3d floaters". It was much easier to work with people who had no prior experience with AR as we didn't have to help them unlearn whatever marketing bullshit they read at the time. Now I think that sound is the most immersive AR platform.
Incidentally, we had a project called Metaverse as well. Let's say it was smaller in scope and much more "boring" though (boring is good, I like boring).
I think we shouldn't underestimate the leaps that have been made in R&D just to improve VR in the past years.
Companies invested billions in tackling all those fundamental technology limitations (reduce motion-to-photon latency, higher refresh-rates, global refresh, lower pixel-persistence,...).
The dilemma is, that in VR everything "sucks" until you achieve presence (the feeling of really being somewhere else) or at least full immersion.
So how do you fund all this development? By releasing iterative products which sadly harm the wide adoption more than they help, because "it still sucks".
At best, VR drove mass-production of necessary technology in other industries (i.e. adoption of >60Hz displays, high-resolution sensors, eye-tracking, OLED, immersive audio,...), which ultimately helps the next entrant to create a more-affordable AR/VR-device.
At the very least, it created IP that this "somebody sometime" will then have to license.
I doubt it will be possible to create a new VR-device without the patents of Sony, Microsoft or Samsung.
How much this helps to really innovate is another question, arguably it means Apple is the only new entrant large enough to cross-license and still disrupt...
> I doubt it will be possible to create a new VR-device without the patents of Sony, Microsoft or Samsung.
It's easy to avoid the patents by waiting for them to expire. This is the traditional way of doing things, and is why there are so many instances of technologies not becoming commonplace until 20 years or so after they are patented.
It might be a stretch to judge "Wait 20 years" as "easy". I doubt that the XR-market will remain dormant for 20 years.
We're still in the competition for the leading XR ecosystem. If a company wants to establish themselves in this space, "just wait" is not an option. Quite the opposite, now there's still a chance to shake-up everything by delivering a strong user-experience
It means in 20 years when the patients expire someone will take another look at it. The only worry is minor modification patients that keep extending the original
The problem I have with VR is the space requirements. You have to dedicate pretty much a whole room for VR. Most people don’t just have a room spare to play some slightly more immersive shooter games.
I played about 300 hours of VR, then moved somewhere that didn’t have the space, and I haven’t ever felt the desire to play VR since. Regular PC games are just as fun if not more so.
I doubt that VR will be the disruptive factor for the success of Mixed Reality.
Required physical space and overall utilization are commercially limiting factors, achieving the required level of "presence" (which is beyond immersion) is still a major technical hurdle.
After all, the human brain is preconditioned to detect if something is "off", VR needs to achieve a level of performance that doesn't trigger any of this senses.
AR on the other hand has none of the above limitations. It's comparatively easy to develop a good experience there, and much more simple to develop applications once a strong ecosystem is in place. AND it contributes heavily to the VR-evolution as well.
If XR will disrupt in this "round", expect VR to evolve slowly until AR has appeared and scaled. Without AR fueling it, VR won't be able to accelerate in evolution and affordability.
I’ve still not really seen a single compelling mixed reality product. The google glass was cool but everything it did ended up being put in a smart watch.
From the outset, people pretty unanimously called bullshit on the metaverse and ridiculed Zuckerberg. Facebook's own advertising of the metaverse wasn't even ever designed to attact users, it was very obviously designed to make people think there were revenue sources buried in the multiverse. They never had a product or even a particularly coherent idea for one.
This essay brought back memories from the last millenia, from the IRC / ICQ / webchat days. Except things were much simpler then, and the whole point of chatting with someone was to meet them IRL (OK, I was young back then, maybe older people had different motives). And the least important thing about it was how "realistic" of an experience it was, because of the textual interface things were very restricted anyway, but in hindsight it was all the better for it.
As with all of these articles that follow this same script, the author conflates "the metaverse" and all of the monetary investment being made in Reality Labs with just Horizon Worlds. Makes it hard to take anything said in this article seriously.
As others have already commented, most of that money has gone towards longer-term bets on hardware and other investments. A small percentage of that $36 billion mentioned by the author was directed towards Horizon Worlds.
You are conflating the industry term 'metaverse' with Facebooks billions of investments and huge PR push on their 'Metaverse' which has so far been solely Horizon Worlds.
Similarly, despite the obscure industry term predating Facebooks push, it is not a common term, and even techies do not think of Minecraft and other digital worlds as being 'Facebooks Metaverse'.
A company cannot just start using a term and then retroactivly justify their expense based on other external examples.
Note that link would have returned a page saying the article didn't exist prior to Facebook's announcements.
While the term certainly existed prior to Facebook what made it anywhere close to common was Facebook's investment and media coverage which not only resulted in the above article but general use of the term for the first time, see the first small bump and the second overwhelming bump: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
Sometimes a big corporation coming along and taking over a term that was barely ever used happens. When people talk of it having happened you can still take them seriously even if you don't like that the word was co-opted.
Agreed. I felt like I needed a "Meta's Metaverse Bingo Card" throughout the whole article too. When it started off whining about legs I almost stopped reading bc come on we've had various styles and kinds of avatars in games the entire time they've existed and not having legs in VR games is very common and really NOT that jarring. Then the author continued on to talk about it being empty and do the Facebook...er Meta thing and while I really dislike Facebook/Meta all those things just meant the tone for this article was going to feel like some cringey magazine author trying to seem relatable and going in with a bias.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending any of the metaverse branding crap but your point about this just being the same stupid scripted article about Horizon Worlds is accurate and I'm not sure how this reached the front page.
> As with all of these articles that follow this same script, the author conflates "the metaverse" and all of the monetary investment being made in Reality Labs with just Horizon Worlds. Makes it hard to take anything said in this article seriously.
The author wrote about his experience using the system as designed and promoted towards end users. This isn't some deep business analysis or some investigation into the lesser-known corners of VR development, it's a normal user wanting to try out "the metaverse" as promoted by the global megacorporation "Meta."
It's reasonable to want other kinds of reporting as well, but there's a lot to learn from a user recounting their own personal experiences in the space. You don't get a second chance to make a first impression, and if this is what users on the happy path will see, their disappointment is completely understandable.
This is true. Horizons is so polished and manicured. I don't want that. Plastic life is not fun, VR is better when you can explore the rough edges like on other platforms.
For me the biggest failure of all the VR headsets is there is no demo units at big box store and the lack of a TV app to see what the user is doing.
People don't want to blindly buy an unproven expensive gaming system without trying it out first. You can't go into a local Best Buy, Walmart, or Target and try the units out. You have to wait till someone you know gets it an is kind enough to let you give it a go.
With all the money Zuck has spent on developing these devices, it is surprising that no money was spent on demo kiosks.
I refer you to this delightful paper: "Bacterial Load of Virtual Reality Headsets"
> The results of these tests indicated that the Staphylococcus aureus strains isolated from the headsets possessed high levels of antibiotic resistance.
They did. That was what lead to me buying my first headset; I tried a demo of the Oculus Rift at Best Buy. I'm pretty sure they did demos for the Rift S and Quest 1/2 as well once those came out. I agree it wasn't nearly as visible as it should have been though, and I don't think they were offered for very long.
Fundamentally, VR just isn't very social unless all participants have the proper hardware already. Sure, you can have a TV output to see what the headset user is seeing, but the TV-viewing experience is still very different from the headset experience. Not to mention, it looks really jerky and jarring as a non-interactive user.
I feel like VR is a technology that has no idea where it fits into the world. It's cool, but why should anyone care about it before they've put up the money to buy into the ecosystem? It's not like a TV which is an easily shared experience.
I used to watch this reality TV show with my girlfriend. Metaverse was such a big deal in 2022 that one of the main characters of the season was a Metaverse real estate agent.
> Jess is a beautiful Metaverse real estate agent, investor and entrepreneur from Los Angeles. After Jason slid into her DM’s, she was excited to join the house and show off her wild side to a completely new group of friends. While her party girl behavior gets her into hot water with some of her housemates, she’ll also explore a romance that has the potential to last beyond the winter vacation.
I wonder if that's still her job now that it isn't as relevant anymore.
This is what a decade of effective 0 rate interest created. Flippers and nonsense that contributes nothing to society. Same in China with ghost real estate.
I'm reminded of Aggretsuko where Retsuko and Fenneko become obsessed with a VR app that features a virtual romantic partner who flirts with you, and after a short while, nags you into buying DLC in the form of scenery and outfit packs.
The subtly funny bit is, in this world of talking cartoon animals, the virtual romantic partner was an impossibly handsome male unicorn.
Nobody seems to mention the fact that most of VR games out there require using the hard-to-familiarize hard-to-memorize joysticks to interact with the game.
I own a Valve Index and I mostly don't play it because of it's just really a hassle to have to physically stand up (or even seated) and to wave your arms around, only to forget how to reload your damn gun after a couple of weeks/months of not playing.
I wish that people built simple keyboard-and-mouse VR games that I could enjoy the VRness of the experience using my fingers and palms like I'm used to in the past 30 years.
I want CSGO VR, not a good-looking-cheap-knock-off that I need to figure out how to reload each gun and where to draw the grenade from. I want Cities Skylines VR where I can see my city from above wherever I look.
I want Red Alert VR.
The most enjoyable games I currently have that is worth whipping VR out for are those I can play with a regular XBox controller which I'm quite familiar with already.
Any game where you're seated in some kind of cockpit is my idea of a perfect VR game. This way you can be comfortably sit at your desk with familiar controls, but still have immersive head tracking. For me, I'd love to see a WWI or WWII air combat kind of game like the old Red Baron or IL-2 Sturmovik.
Star Wars Squadrons really excels with this. It seemed like it was a VR only game before being released non-VR, but the style of game really would take well to VR.
I couldn't get that one working with my controllers in VR (HP Reverb G2). I could see the initial screen and being seated in a cockpit, but nothing responded to anything I was doing.
I couldn't even get a handle on mapping to my throttle/stick. There were so many odd controls that didn't map to intuitive keys and I got frustrated trying to manually map everything when I didn't have any real idea of what all of the controls were without playing a bit of the game.
I kept getting stuck unable to control or do things during the game and eventually gave up since it had been a promotional free download and I wasn't invested enough to spend more than an hour or two trying to get it set up.
I find those types of games intolerable due to motion sickness - the inner ear is at odds with what the eyes are seeing.
In-game, the aircraft's seat is constantly rotating and accelerating all over the place. The seat I'm physically sitting on is not moving. This causes a great deal of motion sickness.
Is that why I got motion sickness I wonder? I spent a couple of hours trying out various vr experiences and after sitting to look at a video of whales, standing to play various first person shooters I sat down to play a racing game and got motion sickness. Affected me for the rest of the day and really put me off vr, which is a shame as I thought it was incredible at first.
It's a big part of the "comfort" rating that Oculus has in their store. Some games have a lot of movement (e.g. a table tennis simulator), but as long as the movement matches up there's minimal risk of motion sickness.
I even can't handle first person shooters where the camera moves around using a control stick (the sensation of movement is unpleasant). Some games solve this with a mode where you sort of "snap" from one position to another rather than "moving".
VR motion sickness is a tricky problem. Much like regular motion sickness, some people get over it after a period of time, and some never do.
It's highly dependent on the type of VR content you're looking at. For most people, the moment the camera or your character moves at odds with your real head, they get uncomfortable. My job is developing VR stuff and still when head tracking gets out of sync for more than a second, I get dizzy and have a headache the rest of the day.
If you want to continue with VR, I'd say stick with standing experiences. Try out the racing game now and then, but quit at the first sign of discomfort. You may find that your brain gets used to the conflicting input over time, or it might not. No way to tell without trying it.
Interesting! I just assumed if the latency was consistently good enough that motion sickness wouldn't be a problem. I'd feel dumb buying a fancy VR rig only to not be able to play for fear of barfing all over my keyboard.
I played a lot of Descent in the 90s and beyond, and got really used to 6dof flying, which at the time some folks couldn't stomach, so perhaps I'd do OK.
Ironically you get motion sickness on a real plane, as a passenger, for the opposite reason... you can feel the forces, but you can't really see the motion.
That's not ironic, it is perfectly consistent with the phenomena of motion sickness -- sight not correlating to motion. Irony is when Ronald Reagan got a gunshot wound when the bullet bounced off the bulletproof window and hit him in the chest.
Neither you nor GP gave an example of a traditional meaning of the word Irony. Both of the examples represent the more modern definition of situational irony as "something that is amusingly unexpected". I don't think you can say anything is not ironic under that definition. After all, everything makes sense if you understand it well enough, so any level of surprise would be ironic because what you understood pointed to one outcome and a different outcome was produced. All that is left is whether you find the difference to be amusing or not.
Older usage of the word does not include amusing coincidences such as this. It used to be used to describe speech which intentionally meant the opposite of its plain meaning for humor or emphasis, such as sarcasm, or in dramatic context a situation where the audience has greater awareness than a character.
Words change and this is a meaning everyone seems to want I guess. I was just pointing out that once you go down this route, its pretty hard to differentiate between what is ironic or not because its a broad and subjective definition.
Your assertion does not make sense to me. Your definition is that the situation is ironic because a slightly broader statement of that situation is ironic? It sounds like you are just saying its ironic because it seems ironic. All that means is that it gives you a feeling which you associate with that word. The reason it seems ironic is that the unexpected outcome of a "life-saving" thing actually resulting in injury, is amusing, because it is the opposite of its intention. In fact almost every time something has a net positive influence on overall outcomes, there will be cases where some outcomes are worse. If you are shot and the surgeon goes to perform life-saving surgury, but it turns out you have an allergy to the anesthetic and it kills you, is that ironic? A doctor who was intending to save you actually killed you. I don't know about this definition but I guess its the one we're stuck with. I'll probably just call it an amusing coincidence though.
> If you are shot and the surgeon goes to perform life-saving surgury, but it turns out you have an allergy to the anesthetic and it kills you, is that ironic? A doctor who was intending to save you actually killed you.
Oh come on.
A device which was made for one purpose and one purpose only -- to stop the president from getting shot ends up getting the president shot. This is the direct opposite of the intention of the thing's existence -- hence "intentionally ... the opposite of its plain meaning".
If you want to purposefully dilute things to make a point you can do that, but it is dishonest.
You selected the relatively modern definition from the dictionary. That usage is fairly recent and is very broad in definition. The verbal and literary definitions are usually the ones that pedants are protective of. I specifically said that it fits that modern definition. I was actually criticizing the parent for calling out your usage, as if his example was more ironic than yours.
It was inspired by motion sickness prevention glasses I heard about. They are hollow with water inside halfway to provide a horizon that reflects real motion. I think the perk to the VR thing is to be able to watch movies or read books without that little line getting in your way. But I don't know how pronounced that line is.
Edit: Interesting, the glasses actually have hollow rims with a blue fluid.
You can get motion sickness in a real plane as a pilot too. In flight school I saw many cases, in the summer they used to fly early morning and late afternoon to avoid strong thermal currents. The situation is more similar to seasick on rough seas, everything is moving and sometimes in unpredictable manner.
Have you tried doing "VR" with a large monitor or TV and a simple webcam on top? There are apps available that let you do this. Basically it just adds some basic head tracking (limited range of course) using off the shelf hardware you probably already own. I have yet to see anyone in my personal life (limited anecdotal evidence of course here) get sick from this type of "VR" and it is also much easier for your computer to run (basically just requires as much compute as the game without head tracking) since there is only one screen instead of two. Also allows you to make sure to keep a very high framerate which is the most common cause of motion sickness.
I messed around with ViewTracker and FaceCamNoIR years ago before I got one of the early Oculus dev kits. You had to limit your motion a bit, but it was somewhat cool for changing the angle of perspective in flying games. But honestly it just made me want to try out VR even more.
Nowadays I haven't used any of them in a long time because the Oculus is outdated and barely usable. None of the newer options seem worth the cost for me (in money or Facebook attachment) so I haven't played with any of that in a while.
Supposedly you get much better results using a phone actually ( maybe becuase of the DoF camera?). SmoothTrack for iOS comes up ( I have not personally used it). I was already using an old phone as a webcam however for my desktop so I have the thing on a big gooseneck arm already - might try this myself!
Looks like people are saying the other issue with webcams is they are low framerate - there are dedicated devices it seems like TrackIR (more money) but I bet a phone with a decent FPS camera could work well. Theres also software called OpenTrack (and people are saying to get a high FPS webcam with low latency). Some people on reddit are even using a wiimote to reduce CPU useage supposedly.
Biggest thing though is you want the largest screen possible - otherwise you will barely be able to move your head and still be looking at the monitor (best experience I had was in a theater with 3 full imax screens side by side)
I found cockpit games to be the least nauseating since my "avatar" was seated, just like I was. The only thing moving was the view outside of the cockpit so it was like having a window into another scene. For bonus points, I would arrange the throttle and stick so they were in the same place as their virtual representations, so when I moved my hands, they matched the character's hands in the game as long as I kept them on the throttle/stick controllers.
Anything where I was "walking" around gave me the same disconnect you mentioned - my avatar was walking around but my body was seated in a chair with hands on a controller or joystick.
VTOL VR is fucking amazing for this. You're right there in the cockpit, and you have to reach out and hit buttons and fiddle with dials around the MFDs and everything. Its so, so, so good.
This seems like a strange example because out of my fairly large VR game collection, I can't think of a single shooter where reloading is anything different from just physically doing a reload action like you would with a real gun. I can only think of two games where the ammo is stored differently than real life (Compound and Alyx), the rest have ammo pouches and belts.
I can think of one smaller game where reloading is different, and that's Space Pirate Trainer, where you bring your guns behind your back for a moment. But that's more of an arcade game than what most people mean when they talk about shooters.
Maybe give Subnautica a try. Or the old version of HL2 on VR.
It’s common beginner gamedev thinking that making things more realistic makes them better. It’s only fun if it’s fun. Realistic is usually != fun. Maximizing the core fun element, taking away everything else, is a good way to make a fun game.
Realistic skydiving game: Start! Drive your civic to the DZ. Oh no there’s traffic! Wait for plane. Get in plane. Take 20 minutes to fly to altitude. Fall for 1 minute. There are no obstacles, nothing around you so you don’t die. Land. Wait to get picked up, take 1 hr to repack your parachute. Talk to your friends about how cool it was.
Fun skydiving game: Start! Jump out of airplane immediately. Skydive for 15 minutes. Surf on the wing of a plane. Avoid obstacles. Fly around buildings. Try to land in a swimming pool on the side of a mountain. Land. Parachute repacks automatically. You’re back in the air automatically.
We need a cops and robbers game where the robbers serve their prison sentence in real time, and the cops have to fill in mountains of paperwork for every shot fired :)
> It’s common beginner gamedev thinking that making things more realistic makes them better. It’s only fun if it’s fun. Realistic is usually != fun.
As another case in point: movement speeds in most first-person 3D games are unrealistically fast (like, walking at 10 mph, running at 20+ mph), because realistic movement speeds would make navigating around the game world painfully slow.
Because if you hit "R" and your in-game model does something that you are not doing physically in real life, you will likely get motion sick or at least disoriented. It is a very unnatural feeling, and why VR games are so hard to design for.
The focus in VR games right now is creating realistic interactions. Ideally, your controllers should be only for interacting with meta content, like menus and other things "outside" of the game, or for controlling virtual hands.
Pushing a button to trigger a visible sequence of actions from your character breaks the immersion. It creates a separation between you and your character in a scenario where you're supposed to be the character.
Ultimately it is a stylistic choice. There's definitely room for both types of game in this space, but combining realistic and arcade style interactions in the same game tends to not work that well.
A big part of VR is manipulating psychology to fool you into feeling more immersed. It works pretty well until it doesn't, then users can become very uncomfortable.
I think the main problem here is semantics. We use the term VR to describe wholly-immersive games as well as traditional flat games with a 3D head mounted display, and everything in between. OP seems to just want a HMD experience tied to a traditional game. The industry really needs to come up with new terms to disambiguate these ideas.
Reloading typically involves disengaging and removing the empty magazine, sliding in a fresh magazine, and then pulling back on the gun's slide to chamber a round.
If you shoot real guns a lot, it's probably second nature. But it's a fairly involved motor process that's cumbersome to implement in VR. Furthermore, different guns in FPS games can have different (often creative) reload animations; Reaper from Overwatch for instance, simply discards his twin short-barrel shotguns and pulls out two new ones. Will these different reload animations necessitate different VR gestures?
Going for realism in VR or any video game is fraught with these kinds of problems. "The more you get specific about situations analogous to reality, the more you have to stipulate on." --Egoraptor
(There's a YouTube channel of a guy who makes different "reload animations" of himself wielding various objects (smoke detectors, caulk guns, toasters, Furbies, etc.) as "guns" with a different, unique way of reloading each: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHi-xECyGTU )
> Why would you want that, rather than just hitting 'r' or whatever?
I think it's more engaging/immersive not because it's more realistic, but rather because it adds nuance to the action and makes it more of a skill to be learned. The lows of the "oh shit" moment of flubbing a reload in the middle of a firefight and the highs of pulling off a perfectly timed John Wick-esque reload in the middle of a firefight are much more intense than just tapping a button.
It's a more embodied version of the "reload bar" mechanic in some games where you can just hit the reload button for a normal reload or hit it twice with good timing to get a better/faster reload, but if you miss the sweet spot you get a worse/slower reload.
> I can't think of a single shooter where reloading is anything different from just physically doing a reload action like you would with a real gun.
I'm fairly confident that more people have experience reloading video game guns (just press Square) vs. the motions required to reload a real gun.
I know that when I'm playing Pavlov, every time I spawn with a new gun, I have to relearn how to reload it (and then die surrounded by all the clips I've dropped).
> I know that when I'm playing Pavlov, every time I spawn with a new gun, I have to relearn how to reload it (and then die surrounded by all the clips I've dropped).
That is realism. Real guns are quite different in this regard too.
I understand you would prefer to just push a button but this makes it more realistic and adds another factor of skill.. Just like taking cover in real life.
Situational awareness in VR is better than pancake games. But a lot of other things are more difficult because it's more realistic.
No, you misunderstood me. I like the realistic reload mechanisms in Pavlov, I think they're fun and wouldn't change anything.
But the parent comment complained about having to relearn complex control schemes every time they pick up a VR game, which is valid. Effectively nobody is going to have the muscle memory for reloading a gun, making it strictly more complicated than just mashing a reload button.
Is that really different though from consoles? Most console games have control mechanisms that need to be learned for each game. Often with really complex button mechanisms. And as another poster pointed out, often you can have a button reload option too. Pavlov is different in this because it's a player versus player game, thus giving the option for a one-button reload would put the others using the more realistic option a disadvantage (so many times I've dropped a clip in Alyx and scrambling trying to grab it :D ).
So in PvP you need to make one choice and stick with it. Single player games don't have this issue.
The only game that really messed this up IMO was Lone Echo. There's a tutorial for a new thing every 2 minutes and that really gets annoying.
> physically doing a reload action like you would with a real gun
More like physically doing a reload action while wearing a thick pair of well-buttered gloves.
Each game does have small differences in the reloading process, be it pressing a specific button to release the slide or (strangely) pulling the charging handle every reload. Even firearms enthusiasts would have to learn these details.
Beyond that, VR controls are still limited. You have little to no tactile feedback, so you don't intuitively know when you failed to grab the magazine off of your belt or failed to grip the bolt. You have to learn the exact positions and tolerances to avoid slipping up and botching an entire reload in the heat of the moment. I find this to be completely unsatisfying in comparison to mastering a real life manual task.
I also often find myself banging my controllers together, especially when handling pistols.
I think most people find this kind of thing frustrating and immersion breaking, which pretty much defeats the draw of VR gaming.
My favorite VR game is Resident Evil 4 partly because it seems that they focused on reducing the friction of weapon handling. Most processes are fairly simplified and the tolerances are generous, but you still get that heightened level of intractability in VR vs a simple button press.
I'm kind of sick of the realistic reloading being so prevalent (and mandatory) in VR. It was novel for a while, but it really takes me out of focusing on what the enemies are doing. Especially since it's not something that 'just works if you get it somewhat right' for pretty much any of those games and sometimes requires more precision for grabbing ammo out of your belt than for shooting the damn enemies.
Many of them require you to grab something in your belt area (and I'm a fat guy, so several games already require me pushing into my body to get to the right position), and/or I'll try to do it without looking down (like I would in real life) but then the game thinks I clicked in the wrong area, so I have to look down each time and even then it seems I clicked just slightly off 2-3 times before I can grab the damn clip off my belt, and by then the zombie or whatever has closed half the distance to me.
You're already breaking immersion for movement by having a stick to move you around and not walking 1 to 1, just let me press a damn button, wait a couple seconds while focusing on the enemy, and keep shooting.
Also, requiring you to grab ammo from your belt pretty much stops the game from being able to be played seated, because you'll be jabbing your couch or chair arm trying to get to your virtual belt. Sometimes I just don't want to stand in place for an hour. For most of those games, that's the only thing keeping them from being playable while seated.
One of the reasons I like Space Pirate Trainer so much is because there's no immersion breaking there, it's all energy weapons and you just have to slow down or stop shooting for a moment for it to recharge enough to shoot again, no reload required. And I can keep my focus on the enemies swarming around me. But I want more games besides that, and there doesn't seem to be that many (at least not that I'm aware of).
Compound is another one I like, although it does have several steps for its more complicated guns (although not the basic guns, and I tend to rely heavily on those), and sometimes requires you to drop your second gun (for it to float in midair, mind you) so you have a hand free to reload your other gun. How's that for immersion breaking?
> only to forget how to reload your damn gun after a couple of weeks/months of not playing.
I played that Jedi game on PS5 the other day and found it really intuitive how they implemented the reloading. There you have to pull back this little virtual lever with your non-gun hand. I liked that much better than remembering some button even if it's not 100% realistic.
MS Flight Simulator 2020 or Automobilista 2 are absolutely awesome VR games that can be controlled by keyboard only in real time and there is vorpX allowing older games to be played in VR. Surely, Alyx is slow, Hellblade has restricted movement, but those strange VR controllers allow some interesting experiences like Adr1ft when one feels like a real astronaut in open space.
Seems like a wild take to me. VR is not nearly as immersive as people say. But reloading guns with physical interactions is one of the few bits that does feel very good.
I agree that for AR/VR or motion based "experiences" and games, the controls always are the weakest point, and I think this is crucial to understand the slow adoption.
This is also more fundamental and difficult to solve than it seems.
Beating the seemingly low-tech but widely successful existing control systems is not a given.
The Wii did it easily. Racing simulators and flight simulators do it all the time. Gamepad controls exist because they have been iteratively refined to be the best way to play a game sitting on a couch.
Existing VR controls are great now that the Quest Pro controllers can self-track. The problems have been that you either had to setup lighthouses around your room to track you or have your hands always be in sight of the headset cameras. However, the QPro controllers can track independently like the headset itself by using SLAM and the difference is huge.
I don't see why you would think that the controls are difficult to solve. The problem isn't the controls -- the problem is that people don't realize how tiring it is to actually physically do the things you do in a video game, even on a very basic level. This makes VR great for getting physical activity -- but it makes for a very bad 'lazy day gaming' or 'after work gaming' recreation.
It sounds awesome to think about being in VR and being in the FPS until you realize that people who fight wars as infantry for real have to be in amazing shape.
> It sounds awesome to think about being in VR and being in the FPS
Yes. This is one of the things that leads to the counterintuitive truth that if you want a fully immersive and fun game (defining "immersive" as "the player is no longer aware that the game world is not their actual reality), you don't actually want too much realism.
What you want is an "effortlessness" -- the ability for the player to trigger an action without effort or conscious thought.
There are places like Two Bit Circus in Los Angeles that do this beautifully - they have odd VR games that you could never play at home because they have a crazy unique controller setup.
One in particular that I feel like is critically underrated (mainly due to the game itself being a bit boring) is a flying game. You lay down in this bird like giant controller with your arms at your sides and there are multiple fans blowing in your face. You can tilt the whole thing, move the "wings" to change your speed and angle / elevation and do lots of other movements. The game itself is basically just cruising around a virtual world (they have a few different types) but I thought it was super cool. The fans even change speed and direction based on how you are flying.
If the game itself was more engaging (like say it was multiplayer and maybe you were piloting a mechanical "bird" with lasers and whatnot) I think it would be pretty freaking awesome. But the "controller" of course must be very expensive and takes up a ton of space so it is really not useable at home unless you have a ton of extra space and disposable income. And of course it is a bit of a one trick pony.
There is a lot of work going into hand tracking and natural interactions these days. People seem to feel much better and more immersed when they can use their hands to manipulate virtual objects.
Oculus has this very neat trick with their controllers. Most of the buttons and sticks have some type of sensor that detects if you're touching it, even lightly. They use that information to alter the pose of the virtual hand. When the controllers are visible, your virtual fingers mostly match where your real ones are on the controller.
At least one company builds unique user profiles that make your virtual hands the same size and skin tone as your physical hands, as well as adjusting for height and other parameters. Personally I find it gimmicky, but some people like it.
Unfortunately, the technology isn't quite robust enough that we can fully get rid of controllers. Ultraleap is working on a system with multiple 3D IR cameras to track hands from multiple perspectives. I think this is the most likely path forward. There's some really crazy alternatives like strapping dozens of electrodes to the forearm to record muscle impulses that get fed to an ML model which extrapolates hand and finger movement.
You're right, there's a lot of fundamental problems we have to work around, and it's far from easy. Even with Facebook's ridiculous resources, the oculus hand tracking is hot wet garbage for anything even slightly abnormal, like wearing a jacket.
But, the industry as a whole is really picking up steam. It won't be too much longer before we solve most of the big problems.
Weird take if you ask me. The 2D versions of those games seem to be what you want, but with 3D visuals I guess. Some kind of 3D monitor seems more fitting than "VR".
VR is all about the immersion, and that means doing physical actions that approximate real world actions. That's the whole point, and that's why the vast majority of VR games (and the popular ones of course) incorporate that physicality.
This is fascinating, because my instinct is completely opposite :)
I enjoy VR games for their easy-start/easy-stop hassle-free/memorization-free aspect. If I want a 3 hour session of complex game, I start my PC. If I have 10 minutes and just want to PLAY during those 10 minutes, I pick up my Quest2 and just... go. Whether I played yesterday or month ago, they tend to be intuitive. I absolutely positively do not want mouse and keyboard to be part of my VR experience :-).
Maybe your complaint is about bad VR games, because those certainly exist!
If I want to go back and play GTA V or RDR2 after a few months, I'm going to spend ~10 minutes finding a guide to my Xbox controller and trying to remember how you do all ~30 actions. And then still spend the next 30 minutes pressing the wrong buttons until I finally get back in my muscle memory.
On my Quest 2, you just go. Of course the games tend to be much simpler too. But memorizing how to use the controllers has just never been something I had to do.
I assumed this was possible - it was when I was working with very early VR prototypes.
I think what is going to end up being big is the setup where you have a camera on top of a monitor or TV that just does head tracking. As TV's get larger and cheaper (and projectors better and better) having no headset but nice head tracking is a great middleground to VR. Plus other people can easily watch you play (and it is easier for noobs to get into). Most games do not really need full 360 degree head movement - you can just turn around with a keyboard or controller as you normally would.
> Nobody seems to mention the fact that most of VR games out there require using the hard-to-familiarize hard-to-memorize joysticks to interact with the game.
> I own a Valve Index and I mostly don't play it because of it's just really a hassle to have to physically stand up (or even seated) and to wave your arms around, only to forget how to reload your damn gun after a couple of weeks/months of not playing.
> I wish that people built simple keyboard-and-mouse VR games that I could enjoy the VRness of the experience using my fingers and palms like I'm used to in the past 30 years.
all I hear you saying is that you're an older person now, and that you learned to play with a controller and that's how games should be.
well, I'm even older (or lazier) because I never even learned to play FPS games with a controller. WASD+mouse for me please.
I always see people confusing familiarity with "simplicity" and "ease of use". of course familiar things are better! but let's not mangle together the simple and well-made with the familiar; though it's hard to do this.
The part that you quoted says "I wish that people built simple keyboard-and-mouse VR games" -- that sounds to me like they mean the same thing you mean when you say "WASD+mouse for me please".
The VR version is more often than not more intuitive than the mouse/keyboard combo or even a traditional controller.
Furthermore, the idea that having to stand up (not always true) and perform natural arm movements being bad is just silly to me. Arguably, the best performing VR game is Beat Saber.
Red Alert VR! I too thought RTS would be awesome in VR. But alas, making games was beaten out of me by the sentiment that game development isn’t professionally viable without major crunch time. Failing of my own, but I hope someone tries!
I had Oculus Rift in my living room, then upgraded to Index. The difference in lighthouse placement basically reduced my usage of Index vs Rift by 75%. It’s impossible to get out and use casually.
What I find absolutely mystifying about Meta's VR experiment is that they did not leverage the colossal advantage they have in that for facebook users, they know your friend network and interests.
Why is the Meta product so catastrophically naff? What went wrong?
There have been studies available for years now that show people only spend about twenty minutes at a time in vr. It's ludicrous that Zuck was willing to bet the future of his company knowing that.
I never understood the metaverse thing. Was Zuck unaware of vrchat? I was always confused why they thought users of a niche market geared towards hackers and nerds would gravitate towards the soul-less corporate solution as opposed to the existing one.
He bet the farm on VR being "the next big thing". I very much think he's right on that count.
The plan was most likely to try and disrupt the VR market like they did social media, and attempt to capture (hold hostage) a significant share of VR users.
But they forgot that users need a reason to use the product. It wasn't fun, the avatars are bland, sterile Mii-like characters that nobody likes, and the disclaimers about legs are absurd beyond reason. They failed at every turn. VRchat was the main competition, and Facebook forgot that they needed to be competitive.
Even inside the VR industry, the metaverse is regarded as an abject failure. It's more or less the antithesis of what makes a good VR experience: fun, engaging, immersive. Facebook went with bland, boring, and intrusive.
The only good thing Facebook has done in the VR space is getting Quest headsets onto millions of heads. This drastically lowered the barrier to entry for new users, which increases the audience for good developers. The quest hardware isn't good by any stretch, but it's good enough for people to judge whether VR is for them without spending $1000.
I finally tried to make my metaverse avatar a few days ago. I couldn’t even make my glasses blue. BLUE. My Memoji looks just like me, which I recall taking minimal effort. My metaverse avatar just looks like a weird pretentious dude with a very effete pose and beard. But at least I can give myself a bindi if I want. Which like, that’s great I’m not knocking on it but I don’t even know what’s going on there that I can’t make my fantasy avatar have the same glasses color I have in real life. Isn’t the promise of VR to make things more interesting than real life?
VR sickness is still the largest barrier to large scale adoption. I've been following research by Meta/Reality labs closely but despite them investing billions in VR they seem to have not bothered investigating VR sickness at all.
Still waiting for a polished multi-monitor replacement option for macOS that would allow me to travel with a headset and a laptop and not have to worry about finding a large external monitor to plug into for my dev work. Please someone make this a thing.
Also excited for the first glasses that can achieve this. The Nreal Air looks close, but text is apparently still not good enough. Would love to just attach it to my phone over USB-C/HDMI and be good to go.
It works fine in normal mode, albeit 1080p, but when you do multi monitors, essentially it is still using that same pixel density to render those 3 screens, so that's why text looks bad. single screen though, I use it all the time for code.
Rec Room and VR Chat are examples, but personally I'm in the camp that you should focus on building fun games that people want to play first then worry about turning it into an evergreen experience if you really want to make a 'Metaverse' (ex: like what Fortnite has done).
Right? It's always just "I got on Horizon Worlds and it sucked" like completely ignoring VRChat and RecRoom and all the really cool stuff a VR headset can do in favor of just bashing Meta. I'm all for bashing Meta but it's so boring at this point. Yeah, they suck and Zuck's stuff sucks but VR isn't the metaverse. Zuck kind of ruined VR to some degree by buying Oculus then locking it to facebook accounts then doing all this garbage branding about The Metaverse making it sound like some sort of dystopian nightmare for him to mine data from when realistically VR games are COOL AS HELL.
Like I've killed the battery on my Q1 multiple times playing Minecraft in VR (vivecraft + a host app for Quest) or the TWD games. Heck even beat saber. Sure they're not all magical social experiences but I hate that Meta turned VR into that. That's why I didn't want to link to facebook. I don't play VR to play with people I play it to be immersed in the game I'm playing.
This quote tickled me the most - His curious IRL appearance — of a human designed by a computer or of a Styrofoam cup that a wizard decided to turn into a person but then changed his mind about halfway through — adapts unexpectedly well to the Meta-cartoonization algorithm
All in all a great bit of writing and commentary on something shit. The metaverse.
Flashbacks to Second Life, New World Notes, Active Worlds, LambdaMOO... the writing in this piece is brilliant. But it's the same old story again and again. Different time, different technology, same old loneliness.
I've enjoyed a few VRChat things of watching movies with a random group of mst3k like mindset - but I'm not social enough to have created any contacts, so it's hit or miss if you'll find one of those rooms with a compatible mindset.
The Meta Horizons stuff though - was creepy. There seemed to be people that must've been paid to be there to excite the newcomers, and once I sort of got away from that I ran into the "these are obviously children" problem. I can't help but think that there's a huge COPA fine at the end of that rainbow.
I read through part of it and I had enough. I quote one of the many misleading statements:
"So far, the gamble hasn’t paid off. Only 20 million Quest headsets have been sold"
The Xbox series S/X sold 20 million, the PS5 sold 30 million. Looking at these numbers, I'd say the Quest is pretty mainstream, no?
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