[heather45879]

Honestly no one really cares about VR that’s the problem.

It’s cool in concept but whose going to shell out cash to be tethered to a machine wearing goggles sitting in a chair?

AR has potential but even that is marginally better than alternative solutions.

Also, I don’t know about y’all but I don’t trust Facebook so I don’t trust Meta. They are a data-leach.

We still probably have a decade or more to go with this technology it has to be affordable, lightweight, AR glasses not tied to a company that sells peoples data!

[JohnBooty]

    Honestly no one really cares about VR that’s the problem.

I feel like this is definitely the elephant in the room everybody is ignoring. Almost nobody gives a hoot about VR!

I'm a software engineer with a lot of (surprise, surprise) nerdy/geeky/whatever friends and interest in VR is close to zero. A few friends vouched for various games like Half-Life:Alyx and Beat Saber, but nobody was claiming it was a life altering experience and nobody is clamoring to live more of their lives in VR. VR definitely makes a great game controller for some kinds of games and there are even a few killer apps, but I mean like... Wii Sports was a "killer app" for motion controls and that doesn't mean it was a technology that shaped our lives in the long run.

And needless to say non-technical folks have less than zero interest in strapping a computer to their head and face.

God bless John Carmack, but it feels like he and FB are arguing about execution issues on a product nobody cared about in the first place.

[nvarsj]

I don't know about your friends, but playing Alyx opened my eyes to the level of immersion VR can achieve. It's a kind of gameplay that can't be repeated with 2d screens. I really do think it could be revolutionary, based on playing that game alone. If you can get ahold of a headset and a powerful gaming PC - I recommend giving it a try.

The problems right now are very fundamental. The quest 2 out of the box is supremely uncomfortable. Casual users will put it on and not want to use it due to VR nausea and the discomfort of the headset after wearing it for 20 minutes. The hardware is not powerful enough to create an experience like Alyx - all the headset games just have basic polygons and colors. Resolution is still poor, FOV is poor. We're still in the infancy of immersion/comfort/usability. I played Alyx on the Quest 1 which I actually think had better immersion due to the OLED screens.

IMO the trick is going to be whether Meta can pull off a usable, immersive device in the next 5 years without their revenues completely tanking. The problems to overcome are really hard and still at basic research level which takes years to develop. The other issue is the killer game or app that gets people into VR en-masse.

I guess my point is I think writing VR off completely is a mistake - like someone saying what is the point of a cell phone in the 1980s when they were giant bricks and cost a fortune. VR will get good enough at some point that it's like putting on a pair of glasses and stepping into another world without any friction. It's just a question of how long until we get there and who will bring it to us.

[shimfish]

Carmack explicitly addressed this in his keynote last year https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnSUk0je6oo at around 43 minutes in.

[cudgy]

> Wii Sports was a "killer app" for motion controls and that doesn't mean it was a technology that shaped our lives in the long run.

Perhaps it could have been different if companies didn’t just focus on using these technologies as leverage to increase their profits at “unicorn” levels and for unimaginative reasons. Carmack should have known better than to expect a huge, boring company like Facebook to be a good place for a maverick to make a major breakthrough.

[andybak]

> Honestly no one really cares about VR that’s the problem.

For some values of "no one". VR has been hanging on quite nicely despite repeated reports of it's demise. The problem is that some industry people keep expecting it to be iPhone huge and it's never going to be iPhone huge.

So - the truth is somewhere inbetween "no one" and "every one". Something above "niche" but below "mass market".

[pvaldes]

Virtual reality has been too abused. Is introduced typically a humorous home video when people is startled, hits some furniture with their fists or jumps over it, and unavoidably broke the very expensive TV in the wall.

Is shown as a room disaster, much more funny for the people watching the player than for the player itself.

And the people still wonder why people is not playing it in mass when you are mocking your own target? This is not how you sell a product.

Maybe stopping the "need for jumpscare to show how awesome is our game" would help. Dunno. Maybe just making the game aware of he surrounding would help (This big square is the limit, if the player walks next the frontier show a warning or made it take one step back).

[ghosty141]

VR shines in simulators, flighing, driving etc, there the immersion is key but thats really the only domain in private life where VR really works.

In corporate there are bunch of neat areas but AR is defintely more useful right now. E.g. support, meetings, teaching

[andybak]

> AR is defintely more useful right now.

VR and AR have essentially merged at this point. Nobody is releasing VR headsets without passthrough (and non-passthrough VR still isn't viable tech yet. cost, brightness and poor FOV are holding it back).

So every VR headset is also an AR headset.