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I got a quest 2 a few years back, and it blew my mind. We ended up getting my wife her own so we could play together. Now, my daughter plays a lot of gorilla tag, but other than that, they collect dust.
For me, the biggest thing that prevents me from using it more, is the isolation. You need to find an empty space and remove yourself completely from the world.
On my phone or Xbox, I still know what’s going on around me, and I can hop in, play for a bit, and still know what’s going on in my house. I can walk away for a moment and get back to what I was doing. In VR, it feels like more of an investment. If I’m not sure that I have plenty of time to disengage from reality, I’m not going to bother putting on the headset.
Also, I’m a sweater, and a soggy, foggy headset is just eww.
Bingo. I spent a few hours playing some zombie killer game/demo with the HTC Vive back in like 2017, and while it was actually a lot of fun, it was super disorienting and I definitely knocked some stuff off my shelves by trying to stand in the middle of the room by myself. Someone also walked in without me hearing, and they got a hearty elbow to the face when I swung around to shoot a zombie behind me.
And ugh the sweat is real. After a few minutes the headset fogged up and started slipping off my face, and since that particular headset had porous foam all over it, the sweat soaked in and became gross immediately. That was the last time I used VR.
I know some people hate the idea of VR and want it to go away, others are all in.
I do enjoy it, and I want to be all in, but it’s not worth digging it out and charging it up at this point.
Yeah, I’d be all in if the headsets were small, comfortable, and didn’t necessarily block out the outside world. I think there’s a ton of potential, so I hope development doesn’t completely stall. I wear glasses, and that’s pretty much the maximum amount of hardware I can handle on my face.
This definitely, vr is a lot of fun, especially with friends (in the game or sharing a headset while we all sit in the same room). But it isn’t worth setting it all up (especially if it is pcvr) when I could just play one of the 100s of pancake games I have collected over the years.
This is why there hasn’t been a refresh on the Valve Index: not enough interest, not enough games. Half Life Alyx is still one of the few major games with any depth to them in the market, and you can’t access it easily outside of the Steam ecosystem. In other words, it’s unavailable for a lot of VR headsets. They aren’t going to dump more resources into more VR games if people aren’t buying the headsets or the games.
Steam Deck on the other hand? Huuuuuuge market, people want that shit.
True, but there are 2 sides to this: the majority won’t buy VR, unless there are enough games to play.
Studios should be actually investing and taking a risk, maybe it works out and becomes a big market, maybe not. If they keep going the current path, VR will forever remain an expensive niche gimmick. Which they seem to okay with.
There are probably better returns on making games for the existing markets, vs gambling money making games hoping to grow a new market. If VR ever truly takes off, they can always jump in later. (Which is a shame because I would love it if there were a ton of great VR games)
VR will never take off the way some other gaming platforms did. The situations where you can use it are just too limited.
That’s not why. There’s a very high chance Valve is actively working on new standalone VR since some years, there are regular leaks confirming some progress.
I hate to say this, but I played through Half-Life: Alyx and my response was to the effect of “…That’s it?”
It performed badly, gameplay was largely based around very uncreative shooting (take out gun, shoot combine 10 times around corner, eject magazine, reach back, put magazine into gun, pull slide, shoot around corner 4 more times, repeat) and there were only 3 guns. Even the gravity gloves weren’t used in combat.
I was even more wowed by the few VR combat games that made some innovations or had features in the level to outsmart enemies.
Stand alone headsets can play PCVR games too, especially steam games, that is the most accessible market for PCVR on standalone. Most do it wirelessly, which likely isn’t as bad as you are thinking, but some also still do it with wired and some even with uncompressed video over wire. But honestly, as the resolution and bitrate keep going up, the difference between raw and compressed gets harder and harder to spot. At this point, you can only really tell in side by side comparisons of still frames which feed is compressed.
The main remaining problem of compressed streams is the total latency added, most importantly the decompressing time, since it’s done on the headsets mobile hardware. And the networking time. Though a dedicated network device, either a router or a bespoke VR streaming tool can get that down to 5ms or less now. My streams total latency to my wireless headset is about 30ms now. I wouldn’t be able to professionally compete in a frame counting fighter game… but that is about the only type of game where that level of latency is too much. Heck, people of my generation grew up through a point in time where TV screen latency was over 100ms… And while I will admit that there is still a benefit to sub 14ms latency, it’s not as big of a difference as it used to be. And that is only when I stream PCVR stuff, it’s still under that for stand alone content. Which also is not as bad as you likely think it is.
I have a total of about 250 VR games currently, and I only buy about 10% of the ones I want to buy. But I have also been in VR for 10 years now. About 150 of my games are standalone and about 100 PCVR. With about 30 of them being titles that gave both versions for the price of one. There is no shortage of games, I could not possibly play even all of just the good ones.
A VR headset is basically a console now, except one you can stream your PC to if you want. Even just for flat games too, I have a Virtual 4k 120hz monitor in my VR headset because in real life my 4k screen is an older TV that can only do 60 hz pc input or a very janky 120hz for 1080p. The nice thing about streaming to a VR headset instead of some hand held device, other than 4k 120fps, is that I don’t have to look at my hands or hold my hands up to my eyes to play. My neck feels so much better than it did when Phone, Switch, and Steamdeck were the best way to game away from a computer.
My headset is comfortable, I can, and unfortunately often do, wear it for 16 hours a day. I have a single third party mod for it that was less than 100 dollars to convert it from a 2 hour headset, to an infinity headset. There are multiple options, but I went with BoBoVR, dumb name, but quality product.
But my headset has basically replaced my computer monitor, I haven’t used my computer in person in like 2 years now. When I want to play a game on my computer, I just stay in my recliner, put my headset on and open Virtual Desktop, the same software I use to stream PCVR when I’m in the mood to be in the game instead.
There is basically no downside anymore, they aren’t even expensive. While a Quest 3 is notably better, the lower end 3s is a totally viable headset at 300USD, notably cheaper than most consoles. Just do yourself a favor, if a Quest 3 seems too expensive, do not try it on. Stay with 3s and don’t see how much greener the grass is for a little bit more, it’s very easy to talk your way up to a real Quest 3.
Also, Steam deck has sold about 5 million units extrapolating from last known good data, Quest 2 sold over 20 million, Quest 3 is seemingly up to 10-15 million so far judging from old sales data for pacing and some recently reported hardware ratios from game devs, and still has about 4-5 more years left of active sales.
So if the Steam deck is a “huge market”, then I don’t know what you would call the stand alone VR market now. Considering that is just one brand of standalone headset. It’s the market leader, sure, but there are other brands that do at least as well as the steam deck. Distant second as that may make them, seems like it’s still relevant to include given the context.
You have an extremely warped view of the popularity of VR, possibly because you like it so much yourself that you literally can’t imagine how other people feel about it. Wearing a VR headset 16 hours a day? Most people wouldn’t do that if it literally gave them orgasms.
I very much know how other people feel about it, we can be different and both our opinions can still be valid. I don’t think at any point in there I said that everyone is wearing their headset 16 hours a day.
But the matter remains that one headset has sold 4x as much as the steamdeck, and the second most sold is 2-3x as much as the steam deck… so why is the steam deck considered a good seller and VR is considered dying?
I was just making a pre-emptive counterpoint to the arguments people usually make against VR. That the headsets “aren’t comfortable”, which has been less and less true for the out of the box experience over time, and has never been true for people that are willing to tailor the experience to their individual headshape and preferences. I have always worn my headsets for 8+ hours even right from the dk2 days, first step: battery bank on the back, to get the weight counter balanced and for older headsets a different choice of facial interface was often a good idea. Eventually, once I tried a few options, I determined my personal best comfort came from “halo” style headstraps. So I have since just been buying BoBoVR’s kit for each headset I buy that is an all-in-one cenversion kit to take headsets from 2 hours of play time to infinity with no other adjustment needed.
I think honestly most people have only tried VR once or twice, and don’t even know what state it is in now. The Quest 3 crossed a threshold, now that you can use it as a 4k 120hz screen, it’s the first headset I would say is clear enough that normal people would find it worth using. I do still think the tech barrier is a bit too high. I’m very aware that if I didn’t show her how, my Mom would have had trouble figuring out on her own how to do virtual calls with my sister in New Zealand. But she very much appreciates being able to sit in the same room as her and have face to face conversations now. And even though desktop streaming is something built right into the headset, the default option isn’t the one that would sell people on it, Virtual Desktop is so much better. If in the future that becomes the default, and the desktop streaming client half of it is just baked into the headset software. Or if the default solution just learns from Virtual Desktop and at least looks as good as it even without all the extra bells and whistles… either one would be a huge help. The built-in desktop streamer just hasn’t been revisited since the screens are clear enough to actually see 4k, so it’s still unoptimised and kind of muddy looking.
But, my Mom did figure out on her own how to launch and play Tetris Effect, she loves it. Also Puzzling Places and Cubism. My mom is a bit of a gamer though. She doesn’t like anything with killing, but she has made some exceptions like for Stardew Valley. My Dad on the other hand still needs me to launch games for him from the phone app, hehe. He just “doesn’t want to break it”, to be fair he prefers the Quest pro, which is still a pretty expensive headset. So I can understand his hesitation, he’s used to windows 95… where you very much could break it by clicking the wrong thing. But he loves city building games, and there are a few good ones to choose from in VR. Cities:Skylines VR for “professional” city building ported to VR, and Little Cities for “fun” city building made for VR first are his favourites so far.
My brother only really got into it when I gave their family my old Quest 2, he still just plays the default “normal people” games like beatsaber and other exercise stuff. But he doesn’t have his VR legs yet, he does want to play adventure/rpg games with me, but they tend not to have comfort settings, as they would be kinda ruined with teleporting and stuff. I explained to him how to go about training for not needing the safety features any more, but he keeps taking it too far any time he tries, he likes the games so much that he doesn’t want to stop playing so soon when he first starts feeling the symptoms. But that is the most important part, otherwise you are working to make your VR sickness worse instead…
So yeah, there are definitely hurdles still. Maybe there should be supervised programs for getting your VR legs. You very much need to stop as soon as you notice the very first symptom for you, usually face flush, but can be different per person. The earlier you stop, the more you convince your brain it doesn’t need to “save you from the poison berries”. The bodies reaction to a vestibular mismatch is to assume you must have eaten poison, and it should save you by throwing up. But you can train it to leave you alone. Done well, you can gain as much as 5 more minutes of playtime each attempt. Doesn’t take long until you don’t even have to think about it any more.
I imagine the insane price to entry is a big thing.
I had some disposable cash so I went with the index, I love it don’t get me wrong but, 1k is super fucking steep for an enjoyable system, and that’s ontop of the requirement they do it right when they make a game, many of them take vr as a minority and you can tell when a game puts it on the side burner
I have an Index also, one thing I find frustrating is that because the Quest has such a dominant marketshare and packages games differently, some smaller VR games and experiences I see seem to be only available as an apk file for Quest sideloading and there is no straightforward way for me to play them.
The main reason I don’t use it more though is I never got past the physical discomfort, I still feel nausea playing most games for more than a few minutes, and headaches from the pressure on my scalp/face if going longer than that, ie. trying to watch a movie with the headset. So that basically means I’m not going to just spend a lot of time passively chilling out in VR, it has to be some specific thing I want to do that feels worth it to push through the discomfort involved and can be gotten through relatively quickly. Mostly that ends up being just Beat Saber.
Also a lot of people are lazy. VR requires you to move more than playing flat games. Also it requires a decent PC which is an added cost. As you said - when it works (Payday 2, Alyx) there is nothing better. When it doesn’t, you can end up with physical symptoms.
I’ve enjoyed my VR but rarely. When I game, I’m usually doing it to relax. Getting everything up and running, clearing space, etc so I can wear a device that makes my face sweat while I thrash about isn’t relaxing.
VR is the gaming equivalent of going to a fancy restaurant with a formal dress code. It’s nice once in a while, but most of the time I’d rather just make a sandwich and stay in.
Yup, $1k for a decent headset, $1k for a decent GPU, and you also need space to play. It’s a pretty big barrier to entry before you even get into the limited selection of games.
Even though Facebook is a terrible inhumane corporation, they have the best product because it is lightweight, can be used without any base station and can be used without a pc-link.
The fact that a VR set requires at minimum a 5x5 feets space with a computer within the vicinity is definitely hurting the VR market.
So I just hope that we get something akin to the Quest but without the evil corporation bit.
When I played Elite Dangerous with a VR headset, man was it magical. But I won’t dedicate a small room and a PC just for that experience.
You don’t need anything like that much for a Quest 2/3. Quest 2 is obviously a bit outdated, but I still have fun with mine.
I couldn’t use the quest, it seemed to be on par with the psvr in terms of frames which gave me massive motion sickness
Fair enough. Personally I find the motion sickness mostly down to the game rather than headset, I didn’t know that the frame rate had an effect!
It needs to either become a generic commodity like a TV, or it will die.
We can’t have this fragmented system. Imagine if you needed a Sony TV for PS, one for Xbox, one for PC, a standalone one that could run it’s own exclusive content…
It’s good tech, and the immersion is unparalleled, but greedy company are going to burn it to the ground it so they can rule the ashes.
It’s fucking madness that you can’t even use it to watch 3D movies on Netflix etc. There needs to be a generic box that accepts USB or HDMI input from all devices so you can at least use it for things other than gaming, even if it just puts it all in a big virtual screen.
Yep. The Corporate demand for siloed ecosystems is self-defeating. There are other examples of the same paradigm with VHS v Beta, DVD Audio vs SACD, Dvd vs LaserDisc etc.
Frankly, I don’t really care if the tech dies- the companies that “support” it are too flimsy to be counted on as going-concerns, they’re just fighting their own downward spirals.
Half Life Alyx is like if we got Super Mario 64, and then four years later the games influenced by it just didn’t come.
I think it would take off if Facebook wasn’t involved
I’m not going to lie: I would own a Quest 3 already if it didn’t have Meta all over it.
That’s how I feel about it. I don’t know if I would buy one but independence from Facebook is a prerequisite. Can these even be used without logging in?
Yes, I have no facebook account. It hasn’t been a problem. Other than the logo on the headset, I haven’t seen any other downside to it being a meta ptoduct. The money they have put in to make sure they are and remain ahead of everyone else for tech means that until there is an actual downside, I pretty much have to use their headsets. But I will have no trouble jumping ship if there ever is a downside, or if anyone else even comes close to catching up.
They’ve sunk ungodly amounts of cash to create unrealistic expectations for the VR market. Nobody can compete for the low end, and there’s no way meta is profiting, so what’s their end game?
Presumably, they want to get everyone used to their environment so that when their hardware lead doesn’t mean as much in the future, there will be hesitation to leave. We know they aren’t currently doing anything untoward as there is plenty of overlap between paranoid tech experts and people interested in pioneering new tech. Can’t hide from them. The software and network traffic has been thouroughly vetted and everything is so far doing exactly what it would need to or purports to do.
As long as you go into it knowing you will be changing platforms at some point in the future and hedge all software purchases against that in your mind, the only remaining downside is whether you can stomache giving them your money.
And if that ever changes, it won’t go hidden.
There is also something to be said for the fact that everyone in the Meta community see VR as thriving and growing, and everyone that is outside of it sees VR as stagnating or shrinking. So their money is doing that too presumably.
Their ultimate main goal is also, of course, marrying the tech from VR headsets to the tech from AR glasses. Which will be a true ubiquitous product. Being the first one there will be a huge pay day.
Saaame and I have an index and a WMR kit hahaha. But in my house, no Facebook hardware or code on any machines.
…I miss beat saber. I’ve been too lazy lately but I have all the parts I need for a quarantined beat saber computer.
Same. I want to use it as a huge desktop display at work for those days when I need like 40 things visible at once
I blame Meta. My Oculus Rift CV1 was working great until some random software update and now for some reason it won’t read my sensors as being connected via USB3.0 cable despite them being so, instantly rendering my expensive VR device a giant paper weight.
I’m still salty about Oculus starting out crowdfunded then selling to Facebook. What a fucking betrayal.
I loved my original oculus. I thought it was very well built. I loved it right up until having a Facebook account became mandatory… now I love my value index.
It’s only that way because developers don’t seem to be, you know… Developing shit for it.
Like, I love a lot of what’s available and the tech itself is great; but there is no killer app. There is next to nothing but novelty bullshit being made. Even if Meta wasn’t the one with the cheapest headset, people wouldn’t necessarily be buying into VR because there’s not really much to do with it yet.
One Half-Life game, a chatroom, and a bitching rythym game isn’t enough.
It’s killer app to me is sim racing but it requires too much additional investment
What, like a wheel and some pedals? Or would you go full-on actual car stuff? I met a guy once who turned the entire back half of his trailer into a plane cockpit for his flight sims. Had actual instruments and switches and stuff. I’m sure with what it had to cost, he could have just bought a real plane. lol
The cheapest plane I’d feel comfortable flying my family around in goes for about $100k, and you’d better be able to pay ~$5k a year on average for upkeep.
Meanwhile an instrument six pack is cheap buying it off someone that’s upgrading their cockpit.
Well really that’s where I’d say it’s up to you, the quasi real cockpit would not be worth it but most “entry level” sit down rigs and a wheel cost about $4-500 all in
Sony gave up on the VR2 before it was even released. No promotion, hard to even find the games in the store, no free VR games in PS+, barely any investment in developers and exclusives. I don’t understand why anyone would expect a better outcome.
PSVR2 died because it’s not backwards compatible with PSVR1.
That’s another reason, yes
Sony gave up on VR when the PS5 launched without it.
I think that the biggest problem is the lack of investment and willingness to take on risk. Every company just seems to want a quick cash grab “killer app” but doesn’t want to sink in the years of development of practical things that aren’t as flashy but solve real-world problems. Because that’s hard and isn’t likely to make the line go up every quarter.
It’s mostly the price. If you have 500 or even 1000 to invest to play games, first that puts you squarely in the top 1% worldwide but more importantly a VR headset is the worst choice in terms of breadth of games you can play. So the first choice will always be a PC or a console which leave the VR headset for the people who actually have 2k+ to spend for gaming and actually want one. A tiny tiny minority.
If you add on top of it that you still have a 50/50 chance of getting nausea each time you play and that it’s a pain in the ass (or an additional expense) if you wear glasses, and the space requirement. It’s not a surprise if the market is stalled.
As for useful implementation, my cousin is an orthopedic surgeon and they use VR headset and 3D x-ray scanner, 3d printers and a whole bunch of sci-fi stuff to prep for operation, but they are not using a meta quest2, we’re talking 50k headset and million dollar equipment. None of that does anything to the gaming market.
My though is that the tech need to get a couple of order of magnitude better and be usable as a day to day computer for work. When I can code in one 10 hours a day without fucking up my eyes, vomiting myself, sweating like a pig and getting neck strain it will have the possibility to take over the computer market, until then, it’s a gimmick.
Even your hypothetical perfect headset would be useless in so many situations where you can game today, can’t use it in public, can’t use it while watching children, can’t use it while talking to other adults in your household,…
Also, I think the idea that you even need that first person perspective for immersion is deeply flawed, lots of games make you feel immersed without that. Not to mention that it severely limits possible UI elements if you don’t want to break the immersion again.
Oh I agree. Once you already have a PC or a console the added experience of a VR headset isn’t a great value proposition for the price.
As for useful implementation, my cousin is an orthopedic surgeon and they use VR headset and 3D x-ray scanner, 3d printers and a whole bunch of sci-fi stuff to prep for operation, but they are not using a meta quest2, we’re talking 50k headset and million dollar equipment. None of that does anything to the gaming market.
That’s really awesome and I love seeing that the tech is actually seeing good uses.
Yeah. A lot of what you’re saying parallels my thoughts. The PC and console gaming market didn’t exist until there were more practical, non-specialty uses for computing and, importantly, affordability. To me, it seems that the manufacturers are trying to skip that and just try to get to the lucrative software part, while also skipping the part where you pay people fair wages to develop (the games industry is super exploitative of devs) or, like The Company Formerly-known as Facebook, use VR devices as another tool to harvest personal information for profit (head tracking data can be used to identify people, similar to gait analysis), rather than having interest in actually developing VR long-term.
Much as I’m not a fan of Apple or the departed sociopath that headed it, a similar company to its early years is probably what’s needed; people willing to actually take on some risk for the long-haul to develop the hardware and base software to make a practical “personal computer” of VR.
When I can code in one 10 hours a day without fucking up my eyes, vomiting myself, sweating like a pig and getting neck strain it will have the possibility to take over the computer market, until then, it’s a gimmick.
Absolutely agreed. Though, I’d note that there is tech available for this use case. I’ve been using Xreal Airs for several years now as a full monitor replacement (Viture is more FOSS friendly at this time). Bird bath optics are superior for productivity uses, compared to waveguides and lensed optics used in VR. In order to have readable text that doesn’t strain the eyes, higher pixels-per-degree are needed, not higher FOV.
The isolation of VR is also a negative in many cases as interacting and being aware of the real world is frequently necessary in productivity uses (both for interacting with people and mitigating eye strain). Apple was ALMOST there with their Vision Pro but tried to be clever, rather than practical. They should not have bothered with the camera and just let the real world in, unfiltered.
I bought a second generation of Rift (no idea what model it was, but it was the second retail one, not including the CV1 or whatever dev build it was) - and it was fantastic. Thoroughly enjoyed it.
The moment they forced the use of a Facebook account, it stopped getting used. The visor, controllers, and sensors have been sat in a cupboard for a year or two.
I really should see if it has been jailbroken, or if there’s a way to utilise the Rift features without any Meta bollocks.
They stopped that years ago. I refused to buy one until it worked without Facebook.
Awesome, so it’s usable without an account now?
Honestly, I never checked after I stored it.
they seperated facebook and made it specific to a occulus (meta) account. however at some point of having a meta account, there are methods of outright stripping most of the meta connectivity after granting yourself developer mode and sideloading changes.
Well that’s just fuckin awesome, thank you my friend.
That’ll be a giggle on the weekend 👍
people choose consoles over pcs for comfort
people choose pc for its capabilities (and for some, a different kind of comfort)
people choose vr for the experience only - and it can get old quite quickly because the market is too small - not enough ‘content’
I’ve long been skeptical about VR as a mainstream platform. I think the technology is quite cool, but much like those people who used to say “In ten years everyone will have a 3D printer!” and the like, no, I just don’t see it happening. The hassle factor is too great for it to be for everyone. Hell, most people seem to be fine with stereo sound, even though surround sound setups have been available for decades.
Whether it’s space, cost, or lack of software support, it all seems to combine to make it a bit of hobbyist kit at best. If your goal is to sell millions of copies then you need to target a broader market than hobbyists, and it looks like a lot of companies have ploughed enough cash into this that hobbyist sales aren’t going to be enough.
There’s just too many edge cases in VR for it to be a real platform. Movement is hard, there needs to be a lot of space around a person, form factors aren’t great for the hardware, there’s more graphical requirements, etc.
It’d legitimately be easier to fit an arcade cabinet in my house than space for proper VR play.
I imagine when you treat VIRTUAL REALITY BEING REAL NOW as a fad, develop like two or three games for it, then never do anything with it again… yeah I imagine the market would decline…
