[lm28469]

No matter how you spin it it's still a gimmick and will probably stay a gimmick for a very long time. I was present at the HTC vive release in LA, none of the promises realized since then. It's the same hype cycle since the 70s or so

Everyone I know who tried VR has 30 minutes of excitement and literally never mention it ever again.

[diggan]

> Everyone I know who tried VR has 30 minutes of excitement and literally never mention it ever again.

Well, except of they like simulation games like flight simulators. Then they surely have already migrated to a VR setup and won't ever go back. Yes, I'm one of those.

[flohofwoe]

How long do you typically spend under the goggles? Back when I played Elite Dangerous in VR, 4..5hr sessions were completely exhausting. I since switched back to traditional head tracking for flight simming (although I have to admit that at least for helicopter landings the spatial awareness and depth perception in VR is extremely useful - but it's just too damn exhausting).

[treprinum]

Not the OP, but I spend in FS2020 up to 5 hour flying with HP Reverb G2 (2048x2048 per eye) without any issues. Frankly, it feels like being in a real airplane and one can visually recognize all their real favorite spots without any issues. Losing this would be a major blow for me to run any simulators as it's just so much better and outclasses any 3D projections on the screen.

[diggan]

> How long do you typically spend under the goggles?

Max around 3 hours I think, that's the longest amount of (consecutive) free time I have available.

I remember in the beginning (First version of Oculus I think?) I could play for something like 20 minutes before being tired from it. Not sure if it's because of the HP Reverb G2 I have now, or because I got used to it.

[usrusr]

What flight simulator game would consider existing VR resolutions good enough? Reading tiny dials on a virtual cockpit? Not really. Visual IFF in a combat sim? Not a snowball's chance. That leaves us with arcadey games that put everything you need conveniently in some not-sim-at-all HUD overlay, and perhaps some paragliding sim where the only instrument is the variometer and that is mostly read through audio cues. Now racing sims, that's a different beast: two large dials and huge demand for spacial awareness. I'd be surprised if screens where still around in that scene five years down the line.

[diggan]

I use a HP Reverb G2, with X-plane and Microsoft Flight Simulator. I can read the dials (yes, even the tiny ones) just fine with the built-in controls. But most of the stuff I do is programmed with keyboard shortcuts/my HOTAS flight controller.

I would not be able to go back to standard 2D-view-of-3D experience again after getting used to VR. Can't even effectively look around your shoulder, and a bunch of other things.

[numpad0]

I still remember the time when airspeed and altimeter reading on the HUD on a Rift DK1 were literally just ":::" and "::::", they just were. But that's a long time ago.

[sio8ohPi]

I'm using a Pico 4 with Il-2, no assists. Dials are 100% a non-issue (headset resolution has been good enough to read them easily for years). Spotting and recognition are fine.

[usrusr]

Is the Index that far behind? I basically bought it with IL2 as my main excuse (mostly hoping for some magic hack to repurpose lighthouse for desktop head tracking, but I never got around to adding a Vive tracker) and for me it was a clear not even close to acceptable. Tolerable for some quick "blow up some AI targets" but super far using a screen with my old webcam wannabe-trackir.

[sio8ohPi]

I've never used the Index so can't personally compare them. vr-compare.com shows it as having about 30% less pixel density, which is substantial; the pancake lenses of the Pico 4 also offer a large sweet spot. (The Reverb G2 is perhaps the most popular headset for Il-2, and sacrifices a little FoV for a little more pixel density than the Pico 4). The only annoyance with the Pico is that it's not really intended for PCVR, so you'll need to pay $10 for Virtual Desktop. But once set up I've found it to work well.

[usrusr]

Trading FoV for density would certainly be the correct choice for flight sim, not much value in peripheral vision while scanning horizon or instruments.

Do you spend much time zoomed in, losing the angular 1:1 mapping of the viewport? I did that a lot with a headtracker (makes you really strive for precision, I had a custom build of freetrack with generous per-pixel hystheresis), but under the headset zooming felt more wrong than expected.

[makeitdouble]

By that token we had viable PDAs (Palm Pilot) since the late 90s and it took 2 decades to get smartphones. The first consumer level VR headset (the Rift CV1 ?) launched in 2016, so we're still less than a decade into it.

Comparing the windows CE devices we had in the early 2000s and the Quest 3 for instance, I think the stages are not that dissimilar: they require enough effort and compromises that the general public would not care, but there's actual real world use cases and enough companies willing to invest in the field and bringing incremental and not so incremental evolutions.

[kibwen]

You appear to be in violent agreement with the parent commenter. What everyone in this thread is saying is: VR might be big someday, but that won't be this year, or next year, or possibly even this decade or next decade.

To continue to use the PDA analogy, if you went back to the mid-90s and told people "these will be everywhere in 20 years!", people would still shrug their shoulders and go about their daily lives same as ever, because 20 years from now ain't today. And when it comes to VR, we're all shrugging our shoulders.

[makeitdouble]

I agree with your general take on the time line, but people mid-90s were definitely seeing where it was going. The move from phones in cars, to pagers, to cell phones, feature phones, and win CE phones happened in about a decade and some. That's enough evolution speed to understand that the next turn will happen within a few years.

The same way I think everyone sees smart glasses coming. We just have no idea which company will crack the nut, what will be the twist, and on what timeframe.

[dangus]

You have to admit that the promise of true pass-through capabilities have been achieved with the Quest 3 (e.g., watch YouTube videos in a screen overlaying your vision while doing laundry), and that Apple's solution promises to finally make VR something that can work for general purpose computing.

Not that I don't agree with you, as someone who sold my Valve Index. I consider it to be a technology that takes a wild amount of development money and technology to basically take solved problems and put them in an interesting perspective in front of your face.

Also, I've seen reviews of spatial videos (Apple's marketing term for stereoscopic surround-y video capture) that describe them as eerily real, like you're living inside a memory. I think that may be an interesting use case (plus, unlike Apple's silly tech demo showing a dad capturing a video with a big VR headset strapped to his face while he watched his kids play, you can capture spatial video with a phone).

[tbrownaw]

It'd be kind nice to replace my set of 4k screens with something physically smaller.

But that would need AR rather than VR (excessive isolation from the real world is bad), and way better resolution than headsets currently have.