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VR's Tough Demand: Your Undivided Attention (axios.com)
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."
Crack that nut (ha-ha) and you have your compelling reason.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
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.
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)
After playing my oculus rift for 5 minutes, VR is here and it is going to be everything and everywhere. Don't worry about social feeds, games will figure out a way to shoehorn feeds in. Was it the Populous game that would have one of the little people run up to you with a sign when you got an email? Games will figure out a way for people to get their social drugs mainlined while in the rift.
VR is the future and nothing will stop that. Eventually, and I'm guessing within 8 years, VR will not only be with the huge isolation googles, but will be also be possible with the Oakley style glasses as well.
Nothing I regularly watch/consume has a compelling VR port or option. There are multiple vendors, I don't know what's compatible with what, or what's exclusive to what. Reminds me of VHS/Beta and HD-DVD/Blu Ray. There are wires and cables and drivers and bits and parts. Some days it's a hassle to find the remote control when the kids hid it somewhere, let alone digging up all the bits of a VR rig. Also, I'm the only one who can enjoy it. Will we need to have family movie night sharing the VR goggles? Lastly, price -- looks like a VR rig is something like $500. I can buy a fairly decent television we can all watch TV/movies on, or play games on. If we wanted to have a family VR night I'd have to spend $2K on VR stuff, plus whatever they might need to plug into (console? PC?). I'm not interested in buying four playstations, xboxes or PCs.
I don't do FB or twitter.....and have no problem putting my phone down.
Do people out there really have it so bad that they can't bear to put down or miss a FB post or tweet?
Sounds borderline addiction to me.....is it really *that* widespread?
Is this generational (mostly a millennial thing)?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Put your grandma in front a big screen, 3d shooter. Bet she gets motion sick.
You build tolerance, but the content has to be carefully written to not make you motion sick.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I disagree, you can to some extent. Robo Recall being a great example of what's possible.
VR's advantage is immersiveness. Multitasking isn't the point.
True but immersive to do what exactly? That's the problem with VR and has been since its inception. Aside from a few vertical simulation use cases (like flight simulation) and more recently some niche gaming it simply don't have that killer application to make to go mainstream. It's not that the technology is bad or anthing like that but it's hard to imagine any use cases where your grandmother is going to be strapping on a VR headset either. I think the main use of VR will be as a technology test bed for AR applications which is actually pretty useful - just not in the way people imagine. AR has FAR more and more obvious use cases than VR and a lot of the technology will likely be shared. I used to have a day job working on VR technology and it's cool stuff but people imagine it to be more useful than it really is in the real world.
I've had some very compelling experiences playing with a friend's Vive, in a relatively small room. I think the hardware is "good enough" for a wide range of compelling experiences, but developers haven't yet worked out how to make compelling use of it outside a narrow range of experiences.
Focal distance is certainly a bit of an issue, but honestly I doubt it's a dealbreaker for most gamers - we're all already acclimated to staring at a flat screen a fixed distance from our face. I only even really noticed it when trying to look at things up close (less than a a few feet away)
As for smooth motion - you left out one big solution: cockpits. Most people have little problem with artificial motion, so long as they have a well defined stationary enclosure around them. Cockpit games have fallen out of the mainstream for some time, but they seem to do wonderfully in VR. And they could be adapted to a wide range of game genres. Mech deathmatch was quite popular back in the day, and could be adapted to most first person experiences. There's not even any reason you need actual mechs - just present players with a "drone operator booth" lined with 3D windows looking into the world as though you were sitting inside your avatar's head. Similarly most any strategy or other "tabletop" game could easily be controlled from your hovering "god-mobile".
As I see it, the biggest problem with motion is that it's been a long time since "smooth motion" was popular in games - pretty much any modern FPS puts you in control of a twitchy superhuman avatar that races around the playing field at dozens of miles per hour, making sudden turns and lunges that would give any real human whiplash, if it didn't outright liquefy them. And yeah, it's probably rather difficult to simulate that in VR without causing acute nausea, even with a cockpit.
Space is a bigger issue - backpack VR in an empty warehouse seems like it would have some real potential. But then so does an omni-directional treadmill. Personally I haven't had the opportunity to try either, but have heard some great things about both. Of course neither is cheap.
As I see it there are really only two problems:
1) Lack of compelling software - largely because it's difficult if not impossible to port mainstream games directly to VR. It's an entirely new interaction paradigm with poorly understood "solutions", and resources spent on making it work well could be more cost-effectively spent on improving the mainstream non-VR experience.
2) Cost. By it's nature its consumer market is pretty much limited to hard core gamers, even at half the price. And yeah, I've spent almost a grand on a 40" HDTV to use as a monitor over a decade ago, and never regretted it, but that instantly enhanced all the games I was already playing, as well as being great for working on various other projects. And it didn't require a major PC upgrade to use. And I could be confident that it would continue to be supported by games for many years to come.
VR doesn't offer that. I mean yeah, Steam offers it's "virtual theater" mode, but I'm not paying $600 and isolating myself from the real world for the same basic effect I could get by just sitting a bit closer to my monitor.
Now, if they offered a true 3D window into the game world it might be different. I'm actually rather surprised they don't - 3D shutter glasses were an interesting flash in the pan years ago, showing that modern games could be shoehorned into displaying in stereo. That might well require videocard driver support, but seeing how as VR seems to be a more promising long-term driving force in videocards than the pending jump to 4k, you'd think they'd be willing to get in on the game.
Even game makers themselves could get in on that action - I mean yeah, it's going to be totally lack-luster "VR support", but even just implementing a floating 3D window into the game world, combined with head tracking so that you could look over your shoulder, would add a lot to the immersiveness of a game, and serve as an extra carrot to attract VR owners, while costing almost nothing to implement.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.