[partiallypro]

In all of my experiencing of the new VR products, I am firmly in the position that it's not ready for public consumption yet and won't be for quite some time. The only real reason it's being pushed hard is because people have a fear of missing out. Meanwhile, if I were a company I'd be focusing on AR, because at least there you can push for enterprise customers which won't need the full immersion yet that a general consumer will clamor for. (I also think AR has a much brighter future)

I expect a lot of VR units are shown off to friends and thrown into the closet or put on a shelf to collect dust. It's something you show off, but not something you'll (at least 98% of people) use.

[marricks]

It's weird your comment is so far up and you haven't given any reasons as to why VR is not ready for mainstream. You have a reason for why it's being pushed, but not a reason for why it won't take.

Steam sale numbers show tens of thousands of games are being bought by Vive owners, which is a pretty high percentage of the ~90k Vive units out there. Some games are as high as 50k / ~90k units. People are continuing to buy games and play them.*

Where's your reasons for why it's not ready, and numbers to support they will just sit on the shelf? Other metrics seem to point otherwise.

* Best indication we have for Vive sales numbers is bundled game ownership, SteamSpy shows that Job Simulator has ~65K owners, Fantastic Contraption has ~85K owners, and Tilt Brush has ~90K owners.

Two most popular non-bundled HTC Vive games, Audioshield and Space Pirate Trainer, both have a SteamSpy ownership of ~50K.

[pyrophane]

I own a Vive and love it, but I'll give a few reasons why VR may not quite be ready yet:

- The resolution needs to be higher. It is very difficult to read anything but oversized text at a hand's distance. While the low resolution doesn't kill the immersive effect of VR, it is very noticeable.

- The clear viewing angle through the headset is small. You can't look too far off of center screen before everything becomes blurry.

- They haven't found a decent solution to the problem of moving around in a VR world. Right now the best answer is teleportation, but that is an awkward solution that pointedly breaks immersion. We'll see how well that can work in a large open-world game when Fallout 4 VR comes out.

- The catalog has very few complete games at this point. Almost all of what is available is very early access or "discrete experiences" that don't last very long.

So, for the most part the Vive has convinced me of VR. Having played with it I am not sure I would enjoy a first-person gaming experience outside of VR now. Still, it is at the early-adopter stage. Better graphics hardware needs to be cheaper, and a couple of generations of headsets will likely see a drastic improvement in the quality of the experience.

[progressive_dad]

My 8 year old son knows more about the Rift from watching his youtube buddies than I did. That's when I realized its gonna stick this time. He had a chance to use it at his summer camp and now he's saving his allowance so he can ask Santa for one and buy a Kinect to make VR experiences at home (Luckily his superhero dad is a PHP and C# programmer by day)

Little kids love even the simplest buggy broken demos. They go wild for it.

[MollyR]

My niece seems to love minecraft vr on the samsung gear too. I think vr will stick this time around as well.

[marricks]

I think some of those will always be problems or be problems for a long time, but the core experience of presence makes them matter less.

- Resolution: It'll always be worse than a phone because for the foreseeable future VR screens will come from phone screens and the field of view on a VR HMD is many times greater. People liked doom 1 and other low res games for what they were in the day, and I think people will accept the trade off.

- Oculus Rift is pretty sharp across the FOV, I hear Vive is a bit worse in this respect.

- Moving in VR is hard... I think 3rd person view is pretty great for action/adventure games. I think the nature and style of games will inherently need to shift, which we're already seeing a bit in the Oculus Home catalog.

- True, it's the chicken and egg paradox. How can you get big games without a big user base? How do you get a big user base? I think Oculus and Valve are getting this right by directly investing in games. We have more and more fun games from large studios coming out which our current user base size really shouldn't allow for.

I think the first and second points are the strongest as it requires a change of expectations, and highlight the real fight for adoption in VR. FPS games wont work, and the most obvious metric that gamers had for high quality experience, resolution, is going to appear lower.

Only response is current gamers enjoying buying and playing games on Vive. As game developers figure new fun experiences for the platform that overcome those obstacles we'll likely start to see more success. I think a key will definitely be social aspects, as there isn't anything quite like standing next to someone or an avatar that is interacting with you in VR.

[Alphasite_]

From what i have read about both neither has a huge sweet-spot.

[Shorel]

> They haven't found a decent solution to the problem of moving around in a VR world. Right now the best answer is teleportation

I would really enjoy if someone made a game in the spirit of QWOP that uses the two triggers in a gamepad to simulate steps made by each leg.

However, I don't mean that I would enjoy playing that game.

[forthefuture]

I personally think it's not ready for the following reasons:

* Many people are getting sick. They don't even know why it's happening; we're years away from it being fixed. VR right now is the 3d on the 3ds. It's not meant for human eyes and they're rushing it.

* No eyetracking. Your camera focuses on the direction your head is pointed. This is not how humans see. I am virtually never looking the exact direction my head is pointed. This is one of the reasons people are getting sick. Their eyes want to focus on something, and that technology is VirtualBoy level underdeveloped.

* Ouya games. The vast majority of games right now are really bad. They're definitely working on getting real games into VR, but it's going to take time, and most developers will see it as a Vita type situation where it makes more sense to wait to see if people buy it before investing developer hours into implementing an entire different display method for the game. Right now VR companies are paying people to make them games. That money will dry up.

* Price. Most people can't justify spending $300 on a video game console they can hook up to their TV. The market for a $500 head TV for that $300 console (or a $1000 computer) is comically small.

* Version. It's too easy to wait for the next one. At some point they'll make a headset with eyetracking, that doesn't make people sick, that has 4k in each eye, that weighs less, that attaches to your head more comfortably, and it will cost less.

* VersionS. Right now it looks like certain games won't work on every headset. This immediately tells consumers to wait for standardization. It's a fucking monitor. You don't get to have exclusives for your monitor.

* FOV. Human FOV is around 180. We have binocular vision for 114 of that. Oculus and Vive fovs are at 110. That's literally horse blinders.

As an aside, I like moving my focus with my mouse. It's incomparably more accurate than hoping my deviated septim is pointing exactly where I want to look. If you can't disable headtracking that's an immediate red flag for me.

I really like VR, but (like basic income) it is going to lose credibility because of how early it is proposed.

[sergiosgc]

>Many people are getting sick.

Source? It runs contrary to my experience, and my sample is large enough to be data, not anecdata.

> Eyetracking

Not needed for gaming. From your text it looks like you're thinking in terms of virtual desktop, which is not the target.

> Games

Too early to tell. There are already a few very good titles and a promising pipeline anyhow. The outlook is positive, not negative.

> Price/version

It is the same logic that should have doomed the yet undoomed gaming graphic adapter market.

> FOV

Acceptable for first generation devices. Does not prevent immersion.

> Lock-in/exclusivity

Basically the only valid point in your list. True. I don't think it kills VR, but fragmenting a small market is a dumb dumb move.

[Analemma_]

>> Many people are getting sick.

> Source? It runs contrary to my experience, and my sample is large enough to be data, not anecdata.

Here's at least one source: https://twitter.com/JamesStevenson/status/743896444650692608 (more if you count the replies agreeing with him). I picked him because he's a somewhat notable individual in the games industry, but I saw many anecdotes from other E3 attendees agreeing with him.

It seems that while the first few people/companies with major skin in the game (Valve, Oculus) are being very careful with VR best practices, a lot of companies just looking to get into the gold rush are not.

[marricks]

Wait, that is someone saying devs were ignoring best practices. Of course people get sick if their eyes say they're flying around and their body says they're sitting still.

That's the game devs fault, not the hardware or system.

[forthefuture]

In every game that isn't a point to teleport slideshow your character is going to be moving around and you're going to be sitting still. That's exactly why people are getting motion sickness, and why we still have no solution for this problem.

[pekk]

Many people get sick with conventional 3d games, but it hasn't done much to the market's enthusiasm.

Your post convinced me that VR is getting big in the near future. Why? Because your complaints are so closely similar to the complaints about consumer 3d acceleration boards when they were new.

[Suttonian]

> Right now it looks like certain games won't work on every headset. This immediately tells consumers to wait for standardization. It's a fucking monitor. You don't get to have exclusives for your monitor.

Alright...I'm triggered, let's do this!

Here's what a VR consists of, which makes it substantially more complex than a monitor:

* Image warping. This is currently built into drivers, specific devices may require specific warping so that the images look correct after lens distortion.

* Latency reduction techniques - both the Rift and the Vive have different techniques for handling what happens if your FPS drops. I believe both of them take a rendered image that is out of date, and re-project it so its now up to date with your current head position. That is some complex math.

* Head position tracking. This is a combination of accelerometer/gyro and a lower latency but higher accuracy tracking solution like the lighthouse.

* Input devices. For example the Vive controllers communicate directly with the headset. The input devices also track physical position.

* Output - as well as sending position back to the computer, they may also send other information such as controller button presses, your IPD (because different IPDs require different graphical output).

In the future we will have some crazy optimizations going on to improve efficiency. Such as splitting each eye into four renders. Foveated rendering, which would mean the headset would contain a very low latency pupil tracker so that only the area you are looking at would be rendered with high detail, and so your eye direction can be known to the software.

All that said, yeah it's possible to create a standard wrapper around this stuff, but saying it's a monitor is not really true.

>As an aside, I like moving my focus with my mouse. It's incomparably more accurate than hoping my deviated septim is pointing exactly where I want to look. If you can't disable headtracking that's an immediate red flag for me.

Also talking about mouse input makes me feel like you haven't tried the Vive. It's not about giving you an advantage, the draw of these technologies is that they can make you feel like you are there. Think about the difference between playing angry birds on your phone, vs actually picking up a giant bird, putting it in a slingshot and destroying some houses.

[nostrademons]

It's kinda ironic that the Apple Watch can sell 12 million units and be deemed a failure, yet the HTC Vive can sell 90 thousand units and be deemed the next big thing...

[marricks]

That's a big apples to oranges comparison, but breaking it down anyways... for an apple watch all you need is a smartphone which the majority of people have. For one of these VR HMDs you need a 300 dollar graphics card and a capable computer, which is a much smaller market segment for a device which has only been out a handful of months.

So, how will this change? Well GPU's are getting increasingly powerful, Nvidia will likely debut a GPU that is powerful enough for a Rift/Vive on a laptop this year, and AMD will release a graphics card powerful enough for VR on desktop at a price point less than 200 bucks.

[sergiosgc]

I've had my Vive for a bit over a month now. It's definitely past the point of "showing off to friends" and by now I'm pretty sure VR will forever be a feature of any gaming rig I own. I've clocked about 20hrs in Elite:Dangerous, which is a bit above my monthly average, even after having the Vive setup at my company for a week so my coworkers could try it out. Playing games like Elite without VR is now a very real downgrade.

It has all the defects you could expect from a first gen device. It is also way past the point of fancy gimmick and well into routine usage hardware territory.

[Vexs]

I played with a friends one over a couple days, and it's at the top of my must-buy list right now- I rigged up my own cardboard setup, but it's still not the real thing. Mass VR is literally right around the corner, and some of the best evidence to that is how many games are supporting it (fallout 4! WHEE) and that the newest vcards are designed for it.

[sleepybrett]

I will say as a vive/rift owner (i was a kickstarter backer and got a rift for free, but the vive is where my heart is) Elite Dangerous is crazy cool, but only about 20% cooler than just using something like trackir with it.

[loudmax]

John Carmack had an interesting take on AR. His feeling is that AR is a more difficult problem to solve, and for artificial objects to blend nicely with reality you'll probably need to redraw the entire field of vision anyway. By this reasoning, VR is a necessary first step along the way to the development of AR.

[burkaman]

I think it's clearly not ready for anything like the adoption levels of consoles, but people who own VR products definitely use them. It's too expensive, too low resolution, and too clunky to conquer the world yet, but it's an excellent first generation.

What you're describing sounds more like AR to me. Everyone I know who bought Google Glass showed it off to their friends and then never used it again. I know AR has obviously improved since then, but VR seems to be the more proven technology.

[AJ007]

The interesting thing is consoles aren't even the "big" market for games, mobile is. VR could hop past the console market size pretty quickly - though I suspect general media consumption may surpass the game use. (Gaming may win from a $ standpoint.)

Magic Leap is certainly promising, and a more plausible iteration of mass AR than Google Glass. The final form factor on that isn't clear.

I had the Dk1 and Dk2, and they both ended up in the closet largely because I don't have time for the game stuff. The Dk1 was especially hard to use and if you didn't get motion sickness you were really super human.

The right questions to ask about VR aren't what the current or next gen can and can't do, or that if it's prices too high (seriously, the iPhone6 was like what $2 million of processing power in 1995? Not to mention things that were impossible.)

The right question is do consumers want fully immersive media with sensory depravation to the outside world, or do they want some sort of Heads up display? Secondly, some motion sickness issues in VR may not be solvable, like what happens when you are riding in a moving car?

[burkaman]

Well I would call DK1 and 2 more of the 0th generation. The Vive is good enough for regular use, and from what I hear the released Rift is too.

Motion sickness I think will become less of a problem as developers get better, and people just get used to VR. You don't have to be superhuman to have no problem with the current headsets.

And yes, for entertainment, people want fully immersive media. Not for all applications, but it has high appeal for games and other pure entertainment.

> I don't have time for the game stuff.

Well, ok. I guess an xbox would end up in your closet too, then.

[partiallypro]

I wouldn't consider Google Glass to be real "AR", but just a small HUD, it doesn't really map your environment. I'd consider Hololens true AR, it too has a long way to go, but as I said businesses can fill the void between now and then...with VR, what use does it have in business? I would argue very little to none.

[burkaman]

I don't know how successful VR will be in business, but I think that's sort of tangential to this discussion. I am convinced it will be very successful as an entertainment product. Some companies have been experimenting with VR apartment tours, room planning, architecture demos, etc. Not sure how successful those will be.

I agree that Hololens is closer to "true" AR. That's why I said VR is more ready for public consumption, because you can go out and by a Vive right now, and it works great. Hololens isn't out and might not be out for a while, and it's not clear how well it actually works right now.

[ewzimm]

You can actually buy a working HoloLens right now! Limited release though.

https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-hololens

[intrasight]

As was the case with early personal computers - until some "killer apps" arrived. For businesses, the killer app was Lotus 1-2-3 and/or WordPerfect. Rest assured that some clever young things are actively working on the killer apps for VR headsets. I assume there will be at least one, and I assume that it won't be a FPS game.

[sergiosgc]

I see two avenues for great VR games:

1) Cockpit based games. Flying a plane, or spaceship, in VR is immensely better than on a screen. I get nauseous in car racing games but, my friends who do not, rate them as best simulated driving experience ever.

2) Room scale games. Here, I have no idea wich ones. It is a complete green field in terms of gaming. There are some great concepts, like Fantastic Contraption or the "space invaders"-like game in The Lab (with hilarious results for non-playing spectators), but all in all, it's something that is not explored yet and shows fantastic promise.

[intrasight]

I totally agree about "room scale games". Has add-on benefits of getting out of the house and getting some exercise. Here's my idea (shh - don't tell anyone). Buy an abandoned roller skating rink and transform it into a VR game space. Of course this assume that some other entity will create one or more compelling games to be played in your space.

[arcanus]

> Buy an abandoned roller skating rink and transform it into a VR game space

I also love this idea, but it still has many barriers. Principal technical issue is that these headsets are not wireless, which means you would need anot overhead motor system to follow you around as you walked.

[AgentME]

Or everyone wears a backpack containing the computer running the headset.

[malnourish]

I've always (wishfully) thought that VR will revitalize the arcade.

VR (or AR) laser tag would be an extremely compelling experience.

[komali2]

It's already being worked on: http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/enter-the-void-the-w...

[0xfeba]

I've tried DCS with a Rift. It was mind-blowing. I hate using my screens now, I can't wait for a decent priced VR unit.

My biggest gripe was controls. There are quite a few keyboard shortcuts in DCS. Some of them just require looking at a keyboard, since I use them so infrequently. I can manipulate a HOTAS without looking though, so that's ok.

In DCS, some of the aircraft have clickable cockpits (meaning you can use the mouse to do everything, if you wish). If the Rift controllers could manipulate these, I'd be in heaven.

[hinkley]

No. You're seeing a low adoption rate and imagining that it's just the typical adoption cycle taught in Business 101.

VR has been the next big thing for twenty years. It's not a niche technology because of Luddites, it is a niche technology because it works against human physiology and only a lucky few are totally unaffected by it. You're targeting an audience of people who find your product merely tolerable.

And since there are no social constructs or visual cues around this division of humans, you'll never get a network effect like you might with, for instance, a pair of pants designed for very tall people.

[roninb]

I may be too young to recall, but I seem to remember 30+ year olds complaining about how touch screens would never catch on around 2005-06. Something about the masses never accepting a product that's "merely tolerable."

I recall the same about the size of a phone in hand a few years after that and we haven't seen a sub-5" phone really sell well in how long?

[marcelluspye]

I remember showing some of my A.V. club buddies my Note 2 not long after it came out and getting laughed at. "It's like holding a magazine to your head!"

Without changing phone size, most of my friends now have bigger or equal sized phones, and I've gotten at least one 'you told me so' since then.

[arcanus]

> it is a niche technology because it works against human physiology

I'm not sure I agree. Many complained of motion sickness playing early FPS games, such as DooM or Descent. I wouldn't be surprised if it just takes an equilibration period to get used to the devices. Either way, unless there is actual research that shows a large portion of the population actually has difficulty adapting to the device, I don't believe the tech is fundamentallying flawed.

[pekk]

There are plenty of people who just can't play first-person 3d games without puking. They didn't get used to it, they just avoid those games and the market doesn't care. Even games which could be modified to prevent motion sickness typically aren't.

[marcelluspye]

This doesn't seem quite right either, though. People had been talking about 'virtual reality' for a long time, but only recently has there been so much activity in trying to make available to consumers. It's true that a non-trivial amount of people experience motion sickness, but I'd hardly call the people who use it without such issues the 'lucky few.'

[Suttonian]

I think you are talking about sickness when you are talking about human physiology.

>only a lucky few are totally unaffected by it

That is true, but what you aren't covering here is that when software (and hardware) is properly designed, almost no one is affected by it! Vive games with physical locomotion do not have complaints of sickness.

[intrasight]

Personal Computers had a 15 year adoption cycle. VR will be even longer. We don't really know who is affected or unaffected by it. Only a few dozen people have used real VR on a regular basis. By "real" VR I mean a facility with at least a $M price tag. Let's assume that this raises the percent who find it utterly tolerable to 50%. That's still way higher than the rate for amusement park rides - which is a multi-billion dollar business.

[lfowles]

I'm waiting for some sort of Minority Report inspired Excel interface. Manipulating the "minimap" in Fantastic Contraption blew my mind.

[flatline]

VR fundamentally conflicts with how the eyes focus, and it will never be solved with the current technology. For some people it's not a big problem, but a sizeable portion of the population will be unable to use VR at all or for any extended period without ending up with eye strain, headaches, nausea, and/or a general sense of malaise. It will always be something of a niche technology IMO - very cool, but of limited use.

It's the same basic problem that 3D films have. There's a reason that films are still shown in 2D. I have only ever watched one film in 3D and it was overall an unpleasant experience that I don't care to repeat.

Application developers could work to mitigate the worst of the effects on the eyes, and that's something that would help adoption. That has, however, not happened with films and I doubt it will with games - everyone seems to want to give people as great a sense of depth as possible, which simply doesn't work at all for many people.

AR largely eliminates these problems, and I'm inclined to agree there is more overall promise there.

[arielweisberg]

Do you own a CV1 or Vive? How many hours do you have in them? How many people have you demoed them to?

The last pair I demoed to spent 3 hours in the Rift, with a single person spending two hours without stopping. This was their first experience ever with VR.

VR sickness is a thing and it's varies from person to person and use case to use case, but I have never experienced (personally or vicariously) issues related to eye strain. The lenses are supposed to take care of that by allowing your eyes to focus at a distance.

One of the reasons room scale is making so much noise is that it's a very different experience in terms of VR sickness. Far fewer people get sick in room scale because positional and rotational tracking are good enough that it feels "right". There are fewer motion cues mismatched with visual cues because you are physically moving and the headset is tracking 1:1.

Room scale also has vastly improved immersiveness (now we are calling it presence) especially when combined with tracked controllers and environments that afford all the interactions you would expect from whatever environment you are in.

[marricks]

I've had similar experiences. Showed Edge of Nowhere to someone a week ago, they spent 3 solid hours in.

Tried talking to them to see if they wanted to go for a walk or something. No response, too engrossed in game.

[ethbro]

> Tried talking to them to see if they wanted to go for a walk or something. No response, [too] engrossed in game.

Future in a nutshell.

[steven777400]

The Fermi paradox has been solved.

[pushrax]

I've experimented with our own game engine and VR sickness. When the view doesn't accelerate relative to your real-world position, there is no issue. The problem starts when you're using external direct movement control, such as a mouse and keyboard. Moving forward and suddenly starting to move backwards is slightly uncomfortable. Rotating your head while rotating the mouse in the same direction is the worst for me.

It's the inverse of car sickness, and affects some people but not others. My coworker has no issue using full FPS mouse/kb controls within VR.

[peatmoss]

Tangential to your comment: In my experience with VR and IMAX 3D, I find VR much more palatable. For me the nearby focusing issues of VR aren't particularly physically straining / nauseating for me.

On the other hand, the entertainment value of 3D movies is greatly diminished for me because the 3D effect doesn't have realistic parallax. With 2D, my brain happily converts to 3D based on other cues. The 3D plus no parallax effect of 3D movies just gets stuck in some sort of uncanny valley for me.

This is just my anecdata for how the two technologies suffer different weaknesses as far as individuals are concerned. For someone else, I'm sure the near-focus issue would trump the fake parallax.

[burkaman]

Do you have some source for this insurmountable eye focusing problem? Even just an anecdotal one? I've never experienced it, none of my friends have, and the worst I've heard about online is motion sickness issues from certain types of games.

[flatline]

They are plentiful - for one example, see the article and comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11795913

[burkaman]

That Quora post would be very convincing if I didn't own a VR device, but I don't know how to reconcile it with my own experience. Either I and all my friends (and a few thousand people online) are superhuman, or there are some important technical difference that the author is missing.

Thanks for the link though, that's a perspective I hadn't heard before.

[flatline]

Yeah, I'd be happy to be wrong, I've been casually reading about these devices since the 1980s and understood the problem to be more or less unassailable. I will likely still buy one of the new wave headsets at some point because the tech is really cool. So maybe there is a point that is good enough for casual use by large numbers of people. I had friends that couldn't play Wolfenstein and Doom when they came out due to motion sickness.

[sleepybrett]

I've seen the edges of this problem in elite dangerous. Occasionally they put a message in the top middle of the screen that my brain tells me is too close and I need to cross my eyes to see.. yet i don't have to.

It's a small thing though, but a noticeable one.

[rictic]

Anecdata: My partner can't watch 3d movies comfortably. Even the new, top of the line laser imax theater was unpleasant for him. He'll spend an hour and a half playing Job Simulator without even noticing the time pass, and with no apparent discomfort.

[thescriptkiddie]

The problem with 3D films has nothing to do with focus. It has to do with an incorrect projection method[0], inevitable IPD mismatch, narrow FOV, and the distortion inherent in sitting anywhere except the the exact center of the theater

As far a depth queues go, accommodation is a very weak one that your brain learns to ignore after a few seconds. If that wasn't the case, anyone wearing glasses would stumble into things constantly every time they put their glasses on or off. And this doesn't cause eye strain either, unless the focal plane is too close (perhaps less than 60 cm away), in which case it just feels like sitting too close to a computer monitor. The focal plane of the HTC Vive is approximately 75 cm away, which seems far enough. Obviously infinity would be better but compromises had to be made to keep the optics compact.

The real limiting factors on VR right now are the lack of full-body tracking[1] (you can see your hands but not your feet), the lack of simulated inertia[2] (virtual objects appear massless), and the lack of eye tracking[3] (convergence depth queue becomes incorrect as you move your eyes off center, avatars look dead). Solutions to all of these exist, it's just a matter of cost.

Keep in mind that VR is an extremely compelling experience right now. It's just that every feeling of presence is hard to hold on to for more than a few minutes at a time.

[0] http://doc-ok.org/?p=77

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldQDa-IMo7I

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=610iTKlYBVM

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRfthZaBBPY

[abelhabel]

In addition to this I think an inherent problem with occulus rift and similar technology is that as humans in the real world our vision is connected with our body. When we move our head, focus and so on we also use the rest of our body. A visual experience is not just visual but a full sensory experience with visual focus. Occulus rift, then, for example, only works with your eyes and so gives you a disconnected experience.

The VR technology tries to eliminate any real world point of reference which makes us use reference points inside the VR which, I believe, is one reason the experience for us gets disconnected.

The most common symptom of this is that you get nauseous. My guess is that the (sensory) disconnected experience makes us lose balance.

What would solve this problem, I think, is to make the VR work with the whole body. So wearing a suit with goggles and standing on a plate that moves as you move which gets translated to in-game movement.

[deelowe]

Actually, as the OP states, the issue is with focal distance.

The military has been using AR/VR in heads up displays for decades now and have had to work around these issues. When a user is forced to focus on a 2d projection of a 3d field, it creates all the issues people have with VR including: vertigo, nausea, eye strain, anxiety, and malaise. Motion exasperates the issue.

[augustt]

Vive has partially solved this problem with room scale - moving your goggles also moves your perspective in game.

[adam12]

> I have only ever watched one film in 3D

what movie?

[flatline]

The one with the blue people.

[SquirrelOnFire]

Lost your cherry to the Smurfs, eh?

[gambiting]

VR is already being used in enterprise. I know of at least one company that is designing VR software(using common headsets like the Vive) for a major restaurant chain, where the managers will be able to arrange everything in 3D before the restaurant is even built.

[ghostly_s]

We are, of course, already arranging everything in 3D before a restaurant is even built. That's what architecture is. But being able to actually understand the spatial feel of a space is an absolute game-changer, both for the design process and especially for communicating design decisions to clients.

VR is unquestionably going to be ubiquitous in the architecture industry before the year is out.

[asenna]

That sounds awesome. Could you let me know the name of that company?

[drzaiusapelord]

> I am firmly in the position that it's not ready for public consumption yet and won't be for quite some time.

Perhaps right now, but come October the PSVR will be out. Its half the price of the Vive and works with your existing PS4. The reviews for the games have been mostly positive and the graphics in them are incredible compared to the shovelware both the Vive and the Rift suffer from. The move controllers seem to have better back-end processing and will probably never match the smoothness and fidelity of Vive tracking, but I imagine it will be good enough. Sony's 60 to 120fps re-projection seems to be working well too. I'm very impressed at what Sony is attempting to pull off here. VR with maybe 1/3rd the GPU/CPU heft of an average gaming PC is quite the technical hurdle for Sony's engineers.

I think PSVR is going to change everything in terms of VR adoption and how the public sees VR.

>I expect a lot of VR units are shown off to friends and thrown into the closet or put on a shelf to collect dust.

I use mine multiple times a week. Its very exciting to see what the new VR game of the week/month is and try it out. Right now, all the Vive owners I know are enjoying Battle Dome, which is a laser tage/Splatoon style game. Its early access and ugly as sin, but a lot of fun. Or if not that PoolNationVR, which is much more polished.

I've also enjoyed spending some time in AltspaceVR. As far as I'm concerned its the metaverse jr. I am looking forward to what the guys at High Fidelity are doing (which is pretty much Second Life in VR), but I think the more managed, simplistic, and curated AltspaceVR approach will win in the long run.

[GabeN]

There is tremendous potential for this technology far beyond entertainment. It allows the user to perceive themselves to be in another place with minimal need for imagination, abstraction or suspension of disbelief. Those qualities all lend themselves quite well to entertainment, but they also enable many uses as a tool, such as for industry or education. Zuckerberg is counting on this, though I suspect he is thinking along the lines of the social implications (a family on different continents could sit down and have dinner together, or you could play a card game with your grandmother from 1,000 miles away).

VR enables the use of human-operated tools and machines in places we cannot physically be with a minimum of interface limitations. Consider robotic surgery; the current Da Vinci machine uses a 3D view-port at a large station with three small loops to detect the movement of three fingers on each hand. The upshot is that a surgeon can now see a 3D view inside an abdomen and manipulate surgical tools with almost the full amount of dexterity of a human hand. This differs notably from older surgery methods in that only very small incisions are made to access the abdomen rather than a single very large one, greatly reducing the pain, scarring, and risks of the recovery process (though of course laparoscopy also offers similar benefits, save for the tools' degrees of freedom). VR is close to replicating this with much less expensive technology in essentially any environment you could choose, provided latency is kept low. Soon a surgeon could be in a separate, non-sterile room with a VR headset on and manual controls to enable full hand and wrist movement, and software can intervene with safety measures to prevent sudden unintended movements or accidental damage to important structures like blood vessels or nerves. The scale can be altered so that the body is perceived to be the size of a room and tools can be manipulated on a finer scale than the human hand is capable of (think of performing surgery inside a blood vessel as if you were there, rather than manipulating primitive instruments at the end of a single camera on a catheter as they do now).

We could teach physics in a digital space where you can alter physical constants to gain an intuitive sense of their consequences. We could teach geography as if we were flying over any place on earth. We could reconstruct New York City circa 1900 and walk its streets. Walk the ocean floor and collect samples for scientific study. Defuse a bomb from a mile away as if we were standing in front of it. Clean a nuclear waste zone with no radiation risk. See the full scale of the earth as viewed from the ISS or the moon. Conduct rescue efforts in burning or damaged buildings with no risk to the rescue crew.

A lot of these things are already possible, but VR dramatically reduces the level of training needed to adapt to unintuitive user interfaces. And there will be many applications no one has thought of yet. A few days ago I saw a video on YouTube where a Disney artist talked about how Tilt Brush fundamentally alters drawing in a way that has never been possible before. Sculpture is about subtracting or manipulating something already existing to create art, whereas painting generates something wholly new but only in two dimensions. With Tilt Brush be recreated Ariel and met her as he sees her in his mind for the first time - a three dimensional entity taken directly from his mind with none of the limitations of sculpture and all the freedom of painting.

As with most technologies, entertainment will probably drive the initial development of the technology. And I do expect it to be successful - I've demoed the Vive and it does not feel like a flash in the pan the way previous attempts at VR have (here's looking at you, VirtualBoy). The software will need to be there to drive the market, and growth will be slow in the beginning due to cost considerations. But people also said home video with the VCR was a flash in the pan and it was too expensive to ever be successful, people would always rather go to the movies instead. VR represents at least as much of a shift in culture and technology as home video did, probably much, much more. I'm looking forward to watching it happen.