I'm not sure I agree with that. Games like Beat Saber and the old demo of Budget Cuts have really made me feel like I'm inside another world, particularly when I was newer to VR.

I say "not sure" because we're not necessarily talking about the same thing—the above are "games" or at least "experiences", not "interfaces. You don't really touch anything in Beat Saber, except for the blocks where a strong rumble is sufficient. Harder to do that in a UI.

> Not sure what you mean by immersion but all of us said how real it felt and how addictive this could be. When I came up to the edge of a cliff, I screamed and stepped back.

I mean exactly the lack of what you experienced. I have no problem stepping off cliffs in vr. I don’t brace my knees for a landing. I have never thought I was somewhere else than my living room.

I wonder if it’s a physical thing because, as I mentioned, I also get zero nausea outside of extreme disconnects from my head motion. Moving around with a control stick is fine for example.

Full immersion is entertainment, consuming your full attention. Like a movie theater or a stage play. That's OK, but not full time. Light immersion is walking around with your nose in your phone for most of your waking hours. That may be worse.

My basic take is that the technology is really impressive; I agree with proponents that the Quest finally nails it technically. However, I don't think it's enough better than other options to make it worth the significant drawbacks. Something being immersive is ultimately a function of the player experience, not the hardware. And as is demonstrated to me whenever I try to get the kids to turn off almost any game, non-VR hardware is definitely immersive.

If anything, facehugger VR seems less immersive, because the stuff is way less comfortable than other gaming hardware. The kid who loved rhythm games would play Beat Saber less than non-VR games because of neck discomfort and face irritation. Battery life was also lower than the Switch, and of course infinitely lower than the Playstation. Which also cut into immersion.

I did really appreciate the new 6-axis controllers; they were very cool, and gave a great sense of spatial freedom. But unfortunately, that freedom is a lie; my sense of immersion quickly ended every time I hit a virtual boundary. To successfully play Superhot, I found I had to continuously maintain two spatial frames of reference: VR and reality. So it ultimately felt less immersive to me than a console game, where I could just plop down on the couch and forget my body entirely.

Which isn't to say all games have to be designed strictly around VR's strengths, there are games that exist in both formats, and sometimes it comes out better than the original version (Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, Super Hot). Other times it's just ok because the game design doesn't translate as well to VR (Skyrim, Borderlands).

If what you're hoping for is mainstream AAA titles to get adapted into VR and achieve millions of sales, then yes I think you'll be disappointed. But Beat Saber isn't the only opportunity to be thoughtful about how VR interfaces work. I doubt I'd have ever bought a minigolf game to play on a TV, but Walkabout Mini Golf is relaxing and a lot of fun. On the shooter side of things, you have games like Half-Life: Alyx or Hyper Dash. Puzzling Places lets you assemble 3D puzzles of scanned real world environments. Tea For God takes a limited play area and carefully designs a continuous level that feels boundless as you walk freely though it.

We're not going to have Matrix-like VR interactions any time soon where you swing a sword and your hands are physically stopped when your opponent blocks it. But I wouldn't look at that and say "No way this goes anywhere, the pinnacle of game design is the limitless interface of two thumb sticks, four buttons, a D-pad, and a pair of bumpers/triggers."

I have shown Beat Saber to probably around 30 people at this point. The game is set up in the living room with the TV mirroring the headset and the audio coming through the living room speakers. So it feels like a party environment with everyone trading off with watching and playing. Without even a single exception, every person who has tried it has absolutely loved it. Even several people who have never touched a digital game of any kind in their life, and took all manner of convincing to even try it at all.

In any other game you play, there is always some mapping of inputs into actions. Doesn't matter if it's MKB or game controller or touch screen; you have to learn that deflecting a joystick moves the player camera, or pressing "A" causes your character to jump. But in VR, at least in games like Beat Saber, you simple move your body in exactly the way you'd expect. You don't press a button at the right time to slice a block, you just slice the block. Couple that with the immersion you get in both sound and visuals, and it adds up to something that feels absolutely magical.

Yes, many things do struggle with clunky movement, nausea, etc. There are many games that I have no desire to play in VR. But the stuff that shines bright shines really bright, and I think there's a huge amount of potential there.

Space Pirate Trainer is another game that did a really good job of this. Before Beat Saber, that was easily my favorite, though wow Beat Saber is _so good_. Blarp is another game that did a great job of immersing you into a single room and making the most of the mechanics.

More "full" games don't work as well, because they have to figure out some way to transport you around the world without breaking immersion or causing nausea. And I don't think anyone has pulled it off well.

I am confident we will have more games that stand up to Beat Saber. It's a platform that requires discarding a lot of the strengths that video games have in order to work well, and developers have to re-learn a lot more from scratch than I think anyone realized when the platforms started.

There's intellectual immersion. Flow. You can be intellectually immersed reading a book or playing chess.

Then there's sensory immersion. Put a VR on, you're immersed this way.

If people want to do that, that’s fine, but I haven’t found many games that haven’t been stripped down to the purely technical, almost “speedrun-esque” competition. Really no fun, because treating the game like some sort of equation to uncover and master totally removes any sense of reality and the ability to immerse yourself.

immersive games are fine. games aren't failing to teach anything or help you relax because they are immersive. they are not teaching anything because they don't have a good story that would teach something, and they don't let you relax because specific game elements are putting you under stress.

to give two examples: i play elite dangerous. i can travel through space with a VR headset and i trade items between various space stations. very immersive and quite relaxing, until pirates come along and want to steal my cargo. that's stressful. and i wish i could turn that off.

likewise i may play some puzzle game, that is not immersive at all, and that could be relaxing if the gamedesigner hadn't added a timer that forces me to complete the puzzle in a certain time. that's stressful.

so i don't think immersion has any impact here, other than immersive games are just more attractive. both are a waste of time however if they are not educational or relaxing.

but now this issue of entertainment vs advancing society is a problem of the whole entertainment industry. very little content produced is entertaining as well as teaching something.

and so for me the question is not about how immersive the games are but how educational. i believe it is quite possible to create fully immersive but educational games.

looking back at elite dangerous again, for example, the universe in that game is modeled after our actual galaxy. where possible, stars are named by their actual astronomical names, and their looks are designed after what we know about them and i can take a star system in the game and look up its name on eg wikipedia and learn real facts about it. compare that to eve online where the universe is completely fictional. in elite dangerous i can fly around and get a sense of the relative distances of say alpha centauri vs the north pole star or of the position of our solar system vs the rest of the galaxy. (assuming that it is all accurate)

immersive and educational and relaxing (as long as i can avoid pirates)

Many games seem to implement motion and interaction controls internally, which is great for experimentation. But for many games, that isn’t the main point. In those, the user could instead select one of their own personal control schemes. Maybe some of those control schemes could even be extensible, for games that want a familiar UI, but also want to experiment a bit.

I'm talking about shoving fire breathing blocks together with fans in the most recent Zelda game (so that you can build your own flying tank or platform). Its designed for fun and play, not immersion.

If anything, VR's issue is that instead of trying to be fun, they're trying to be immersive. No. You know why Beat Saber is one of the best games on VR? Because its fun.

I don't think the Beat Saber blocks realistically represent anything. The scoring system is pretty arbitrary (wider swings for more points as opposed to timing), etc. etc. But it works and is fun. That's the important bit.