How much VR have you tried? After just 10 minutes of Beat Saber I was left with an odd feeling after taking off the headset. I think your standards for VR are unreasonably high, considering how utterly addicting it's likely to be to huge numbers of people if it just gets fairly engaging.
Put another way, both Roblox and Minecraft look like crap, and are largely graphics we could have replicated on the the Playstation 1 or N64, but Microsoft bought Minecraft for $2.5 billion, and Roblox has a valuation in the tens of billions. The threshold between "there's no killer app" and "yet" is razor thin.
Beat Saber is the only reason I still have a VR rig and I still feel like I agree with parent. It is a solid rhythm game and decent upper body workout on higher difficulties, but if I hadn't already bought a friend's used Oculus I don't think it would convince me.
A big part of it is how damned inconvenient the whole thing is. I need all these long high-quality USB3 cables for the headset and sensors, a beefy video card, and most importantly an otherwise empty room to play it in safely.
The Quest, the most convenient system, only kinda deals with the first two problems and does nothing for the third.
I don't know about you guys, but I can't just have the servants clear out the tertiary ball room whenever I want to play a game. In the normal sized bedroom I've allocated for VR I have managed to slam into walls on more than one occasion when moving quickly trying to hit something or dodge something.
I would definitely say the whole thing is still pretty far into "gimmick" territory for the vast majority of gamers.
There are some "solutions" to the third, but they're all just workarounds to what is a very hard limitation that I don't think we should expect to ever be fixed. I think games just need to design around it.
Putting a small mat on the ground gives you a reference to where you are in your room, if need be maybe you just make sure you never stray from the mat. One of the reasons I got an "inside out" style headset is so I don't have to worry about all the cables and base stations, with the tradeoff that the hand tracking isn't quite as robust. Much less faffing about.
I even managed to slam into a wall in a VR demo, the guy who was my "guardian angel" wasn't paying enough attention..
When you think about all the things which can be on the ground in a typical house..
I've tried an Oculus Go for maybe 12 hours? Some of it was interesting but it always felt gimmicky to me. A bit like 3D in movie theaters. Like it was all so... forced.
The Oculus Go was a 3DOF headset. That's basically a glorified 360 movie viewer.
6DOF is the absolute bare minimum and I feel we should have reserved the term "VR" specifically for 6DOF devices. The immersion just isn't there without positional tracking.
And positional tracking with the controllers is another huge factor. So - I would argue you've never really tried "real VR".
People don't realize it, but without positional tracking, even seated experiences feel very "off."
Consider where the joint is that moves your head. When you rotate your head, you're not rotating through an axis in the center of your head; you're pivoting a spline describing your neck. That's a very complicated motion and it can't be faked by just turning the view without moving the view also (and if you try to simulate it without full 6DOF tracking, you'll have to model the user's neck length and curvature profile, and that'll get very messy, with disorientation consequences when you get it wrong).
With that said, head tracking just on it's own adds a new dimension to the experience of a first person game. Sitting in the cockpit of a spaceship and moving around with the mouse feels like a game, but being able to tilt your head around, move it side to side and experience the parallax of all the different elements moving around eachother is astonishing.
Even if you're one of the types that can't quite get into VR or wearing the headset, I'd recommend trying out some TrackIR, or for free you can try Opentrack + AI track and just use your standard webcam.
Actually 3dof headsets did try and compensate for this by modelling the human neck. But that still ignores a lot of the range of movement that one makes even when seated and relatively still.
I have a VR headset. What I don't have in my apartment is a lot of empty space, nor do i want to move furniture around to create a play area whenever i want to do something in "real VR."
Everyone dismisses 3DOF VR but that is realistically the only form of VR that is widely consumer friendly. If I can't stand or sit more or less in a single place, I'm simply not going to use an app despite having a headset that supports it.
Yes. It's worth it. It's such a significant difference that I just have zero interest in 3dof headsets for anything other than 360 video (and I've got very little interest in 360 video)
With 3dof, the minute you lean or move your head by a small amount, the whole illusion is shattered and you are reminded that you're just watching a stereoscopic skydome that's glued to your head. It's also why lag and low refresh rates are an immersion killer for 6dof.
Plus - even seated experiences allow a lot of mobility. You can lean towards things to examine them closer. You can duck to either side. "Seated" doesn't mean "immobile apart from your head"
I wonder if susceptibility to accept VR as more "reality" than "virtual" is something that varies per person. All of the VR I've tried has felt completely unforced. I accepted it all immediately.
Half life alyx is extremely gimmicky if you stop to observe how it works. Enemies are stupidly generous in telegraphing their moves. The game, correctly, expects you to be very slow and unable to integrate moving and shooting.
Boneworks is a game that does the opposite, but is similarly disappointing. You get fast walking speed with the analog stick allowing you to be very agile. Presuming you don’t get nausea… this is by far your most useful asset in a fight. The real world movement is basically nothing and a lot of the fighting is better done as a sort of jousting with your weapon held in front of you and your move stick held forward.
Not liking it is pretty different to it not being here though. I think people expect VR to be something more than it is, but it is just some sensors tracking your body and a screen strapped to your face. That enables some unique experiences, but it's no braindance.
Everyone loves to bring up beatsaber when discussing the future of VR but beat saber is so carefully designed to avoid its pitfalls. You don't move more than a few feet irl or in game. Everything you need to see is in front of you. You have infinitely light weapons with no resistance.
Everything is designed around its own pitfalls. Books, podcasts, movies, television shows, flatscreen video games, they all have their own strengths and weaknesses. When a movie comes along that does an astounding job of playing to cinema's strength, people are going to bring it up as an example of a good movie. Beat Saber is the same.
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."
This is true, but it’s also true that most things don’t claim to be major paradigm shifts and “the future”. Designing VR around these limits won’t satisfy people who have been promised ready player one. It’s a gimmick with some good potential, but it’s just a gimmick.
That's how all 80s and 90s games were carefully designed with limited memory/cpu. They designed to avoid those limitations by limiting play or encouraging other actions.
I love beat saber, but I feel like it is VR at the space invaders stage. I think in the next ten years we will see the platformer and beat-um-up stage games; I just don't have the imagination to predict what they will be like.
Memory limits are still problems on my c64 but clever people came up with ways around like[geos windows before windows) or There is a guy who appears on here powering his website off a c64.
Whatever limits vr creates there are people who can work within those limits.
The problem is so fewer developers are making indie vr because it is locked down and expensive.
One of the giant limitations for VR is physical playing space. Memory and processor can always get better, faster, and cheaper, but I don't see how available playing space is going to improve in the future.
It definitely beats me sitting in this char for playing space. I had a Quest 2 and I can say the playable space is pretty large, more than enough, and I walked away from the experience feeling that it was absolutely profound. I haven't had such a game changing experience since I bought my Diamond Monster 3D (3dfx Vooodoo 4MB).
It's not going to be for everyone. Games today aren't either. Some people just don't like gaming, reading, VR, sitcoms, etc.
I don't think I'd really want to be running around my living room anyway, too dangerous. I'd rather see improvements made to controller locomotion in VR. Even if all experiences were seated I think it's still a huge canvas, beatsaber is a very basic game even in respect to other VR games.
> You don't move more than a few feet irl or in game.
Maybe that's the real future of VR? I enjoyed Half Life Alyx as it was a really polished feeling VR shooter but trying to move in that game was always a janky experience - I think VR exploration when things are peaceful is interesting and fun but, since you're never going to be able to freely navigate a scene by walking around alone it'll always be quite immersion breaking. I'd be more excited to see something like a mech warrior game with a navigable bridge than a COD style shooter - if you design the setting around having a fixed limited environment you can freely move around in in VR that you then move around in a larger environment... I think that's the sweet spot for VR for the foreseeable future.
As a seated experience (in a spaceship, where my Star Trek fantasy training has taught my brain, oddly enough, that motion in space should involve no feeling the acceleration forces), it's really quite good. Night-and-day from the same experience mouse-and-keyboard or HOTAS.
The game itself, sadly, doesn't hold my attention for very long, but I think the VR UI is nearly ideal for it.
Elite Dangerous VR almost requires something like Voice Attack but if you set it up like that I think it's immensely immersive - I've always had issues with the gameplay itself though so it's still not completely my cup of tea. I personally want a space freighter game where I'm drifting between breaktaking vistas - or an exploration game where I'm probing the edges of civilization - Elite Dangerous allows both of these to an extent, but it's strongly focused on dog fighting mechanically.
Haven't played it but at a glance its a cockpit game for VR. So again, no moving, no local physics interactions that the players hands have to deal with. Looks pretty cool.
But when people think vr, and they look at the movies, they're thinking about games where you are a person in a place that feels alive.
Then they're kind of mistaken I guess. Even in something like Ready Player One, that is simply not how the VR tech would actually work. Haptic suits, running treadmills, full body tracking and VR headsets all exist. They do not feel the way they're portrayed in scifi, and never will.
I am being hyperbolic, but not that much. Certainly running the full simulation of either Minecraft or Roblox (not to mention the network bandwidth requirements) is well beyond anything that old, but purely the level of visual detail would barely be out of reach of that generation.
Put another way, both Roblox and Minecraft look like crap, and are largely graphics we could have replicated on the the Playstation 1 or N64, but Microsoft bought Minecraft for $2.5 billion, and Roblox has a valuation in the tens of billions. The threshold between "there's no killer app" and "yet" is razor thin.