| I feel like it was a missed opportunity not making this a mixed reality headset. VR is great for completely immersive experiences but otherwise becomes a nuisance. Problems I've had with VR: 1) Audiovisual Isolation. With immersive VR you are unable to interact with the real world and often unable to see or here what is going on around you. It always feels creepy to me to put on my VIVE and not be aware that someone has walked into my room or has been knocking on my door. 2) Very poor multitasking. VR experiences demand uninterrupted focus. I'm often not 100% immersed in whatever I'm doing at any given time. I will share my focus with other activities and other external events. I don't like having my focus locked onto a single activity for long spans of time. If I'm gaming, I'll probably alt-tab once in a while to send a chat message. If I'm watching a movie, I'll likewise pause or shift my focus if something demands it. There are very limited blocks of time where I'm willing and able to give a VR experience uninterrupted focus. 3) Inability to physically interact with real world objects. If you don't need to do that, that's fine. But what if you want to take a sip of your drink? Eat a snack? Have a smoke? When you have 0 spatial awareness, that is very difficult to do. Even putting down your controllers and switching to a keyboard is hard to do when you cant see where it is. You could just remove the headset every time you want to do this, but that's very cumbersome. This headset doesn't even have a fliptop so that makes it even more cumbersome. All in all I'm not sure how much utility fully immersive HMDs have outside of some unique interactive experiences that are short enough to mitigate some of the above problems. Remember that "dumb" HMD displays (like this: http://www.siliconmicrodisplay.com/uploads/9/0/4/6/9046759/_...) have been available since the 90s. They were also billed as the future of entertainment and TV/monitor killers, but adoption never picked up for the reasons above. People don't like giving up all their focus. That's why mixed reality headsets are more promising to me. If you can insert virtual windows/objects into real world spaces, you can introduce immersion without necessarily sacrificing awareness. Let people jump in and out of virtual reality without having it be an all or nothing compromise. |
