[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.

[marricks]

There are other solutions then teleporting. 3rd person views are pretty great and a lot of the better games use them. Ede of Nowhere, Chronos.

Then of course there are cockpit games which many people love, elite dangerous being the big one.

Another genre is room scale which Vive people are all over now.

So many options for new and old types of games to be made in this platform, first person was the old popular for 2d games and it just can't be done the same way.

[AgentME]

>your character is going to be moving around and you're going to be sitting still

No game that I've played that was developed for the Vive does this.

[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.