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VR's Tough Demand: Your Undivided Attention (axios.com)

Posted by msmash on from the one-perspective dept.

Ina Fried, writing for Axios: If you want to know why virtual reality hasn't taken off, you might want to blame our addiction to smartphones. Why? While the power of VR is to be transported into an immersive experience, consumers will demand a lot out of something that makes them give up Twitter and Facebook, even for a few minutes. One perspective: "It has to be a really compelling reason to get you to give up all that," Shauna Heller, a former Oculus worker who now consults on VR projects, said Thursday at the Mobile Future Forward conference near Seattle. "There aren't just a ton of those reasons just yet."

3 of 115 comments (clear)

  1. The explanation is bullshit. by klingens · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Apologies for the real reason: the games suck. No one wants to buy them, so no one buys a headset for this one awesome game one can't live without.
    People play games all the time, in fullscreen, no twitter.
    Even if there were a twitter addiction: one could easily integrate it, it's simply a monitor like any other, it doesn't matter if I display twitter on it or a game. Even the input could be managed: every Windows Version has speech recognition for years. A microphone isn't really new tech when you have a VR headset.

    1. Re:The explanation is bullshit. by Immerman · · Score: 2, Insightful

      > any remotely interesting game requires serious hardware

      Hardly. Realistic graphics aren't required for an interesting game, they just make for better advertising footage. And as long as you're okay with stylized graphics, most any budget gaming PC has the chops to run VR without trouble.

      Now, convincing people to pay $600 to interact with a VR world that would look more at home on the Wii... that might be a challenge. Get Nintendo to release a mainline Zelda game on it to set people's expectations appropriately, and it could take off.

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
  2. Oh, please by JohnFen · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Smartphones have nothing to do with it. I see three things impeding the mass acceptance of VR:

    1) It's expensive
    2) You have to wear it
    3) There's no use case compelling enough to overcome 1 and 2 (unless, perhaps, you're a hardcore gamer)