[sdrothrock]

> the biggest application I've heard about receiving VR investment is a desktop replacement - not exactly something from which I'd expect a compelling VR experience.

I completely disagree with this. A good desktop replacement is exactly what you'd want from a compelling VR experience.

1. It's a literal virtual reality that users would use to replace actual reality.

2. If you can make a compelling, usable desktop replacement, then you've successfully made a reason for many VR users to be happy with never taking off their headsets. Tired of a game? Go back to the desktop environment. Want to look up some tips? Go back to the desktop environment. Want to look at links from friends? Go back to the desktop environment.

3. A compelling desktop environment is probably far more technically greedy than an actual game since you need to have a high resolution headset to simulate the desktop with at least the fidelity of a real screen... and most people are going to want at least two of those high-resolution virtual screens in their field of vision.

[monkmartinez]

Except the part about getting sick to your stomach? How many people do not know they have VR induced motion sickness? I know I didn't until I strapped up a cardboard. I do not get sick in less than 13-15 foot seas, but sick as hell with cardboard.

[soylentcola]

A big part of this is due to mobile-grade hardware and no positional tracking. These things are neat little toys and I have both a Cardboard and a Daydream that I mess with from time to time.

But even my old (in VR-industry terms) Oculus dev unit from a couple years ago works much better. The mobile VR setups only track head orientation but the Rift, Vive, and similar devices also track your position in xyz space. This has a huge impact on how well your movements are mirrored in the virtual environment. Ultimately, getting as close to 1:1 mirroring is how you avoid motion sickness.

The other part of that is overall body position so a lot of the attempts to shoehorn traditional FPS games into VR are iffy because even if your head is tracked, your brain knows you're not running around even if your visual input tells you that you are.

It's a big part of why I don't think games (or at least many styles of games that work on 2D screens) are the end goal for VR. They seem obvious since they're already using complex and realistic environments but the VR applications that really work are the ones where your viewpoint matches your actual physical orientation (including the rest of your body).

I also think the big jump will come when someone sorts out how to get a few cheap depth cameras set up around a room to generate a real-time 3d model with video data used to texture the mesh. Send that data over networks and display in a VR headset and you're on your way to 3d/VR telepresence. The hardware still needs to improve and the software developed, but it reminds me of using early smartphones more than anything else.

When I had a Treo or an old Pocket PC I knew that technically these things could be as fluid and smooth as a desktop or laptop of the time. It just wasn't feasible to cram it into a tiny handset for a price anyone could pay. But now 10-15 years later you can spend a few hundred bucks and get something better than your old Playstation or laptop in your pocket.

[josefx]

You are actually comparing a cheap cardboard box with a run of the mill mobile phone to specialized hardware with optimized firmware? Cardboard is the lowest end you can get and has all the latency and fps issues that actual VR hardware had to fix. High latency and low fps are killers for people with low tolerance, for VR milliseconds count.

[meheleventyone]

Cardboard being a set of lenses in a box has tracking latency issues with most mobile hardware. The GearVR gets round this with better hardware in the headset and Google now have the Daydream standard for VR capable phones. Both make an enormous difference and this isn't an issue in the high end headsets either.

[beezischillin]

the sickness happens because your brain cannot correlate what you see and what you feel, it more or less happens when there's actual movement involved in games (that is why most games by default do not let you turn with the analogue stick, but rather move in X degree increments while blanking out the screen for a moment. It would not be the case when you're basically just looking around, but not moving. I recommend SuperBunnyhop's video on YouTube about the issue!