It's Becoming Increasingly Unlikely that We'll See a Major Shift To Virtual Reality Any Time Soon (theoutline.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: VR was supposed to be a revolution, with companies like Oculus pioneering a whole new way for gamers and non-gamers alike to be immersed in digital environments -- but that excitement has markedly cooled. The media has gone through several cycles of fawning, optimistic prognostication, and... wishful thinking? -- but for all the hype we have very little consumer interest to show for it. Oculus sold off to Facebook and has become little more than a parlor trick Mark Zuckerberg shows off at every F8 event. As Ben Thompson recently noted, the bet on the company is an awkward fit for Facebook that strays from Zuckerberg's strengths in several ways.

Oculus founder Palmer Luckey is now tooling around on right wing defense projects, while co-founder Brendan Iribe has just left the company amid rumors of future headsets being shelved. Several prominent studios have shut down or ceased VR efforts, including Viacom and AltspaceVR, and Microsoft is a steadfast "no" when it comes to dipping its toes in the water via the Xbox. Sony has boasted about sales of the PSVR hitting 3 million in two years, but there are 82 million PS4 units in the hands of consumers (and keep in mind that Microsoft sold 35 million Kinects but still discontinued the product). With cumbersome hardware (which, let's be honest, looks really stupid to most people), absurd PC requirements, and nearly no AAA titles to lure the curious into the world of VR, it's becoming increasingly unlikely that we'll see a major shift to virtual reality any time soon.

Also worth noting: if you're looking to Magic Leap for a kind of bridge to the future with its AR efforts, don't get too wound up. Brian Merchant's excellent and detailed feature story for Gizmodo on the company's struggles to get around the same hardware, software, and consumer adoption issues that plague VR make it clear there is no easy answer in this space. In my opinion -- as someone who watched this new generation of virtual reality emerge from the earliest days, and was one of its biggest fans -- VR adoption will only happen when the barrier to entry is akin to slipping on a pair of sunglasses (and even then it's no sure thing). Most people don't want to wear a bulky headset, even in private, there's no must have "killer app" for VR, and no one has made a simple plug-and-play option that lets a novice user engage casually. Everyone I know who's tried a VR headset is blown away by the experience, but no one really wants to go deep on it except for what amounts to a rounding-error percentage of enthusiasts. Further reading: 'We Expected VR To Be Two To Three Times as Big', Says CCP Games CEO.

Comments

The reason is that it sucks.

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought into the hype, having wanted to try VR since 1992 when I first saw it on TV as a small child, never having even tried it at any convention or anything like that since, and in 2016 (right?), when the HTC Vive came out, I went crazy and wasted a ton of money on it and a whole new crap consumer PC with a beefy graphics card... and it was all garbage. It's really too many things to even bother listing them, but it also didn't exactly help that all the *software* for it was worthless bullshit. Even the VR porn couldn't have been more obnoxiously shot/directed, and I watched a whole lot of that before finally giving up on it. Very disappointed.

Re: The reason is that it sucks.

[reanjr]

The reason it's ideally suited is because it's a cockpit. VR works best when it simulates something akin to sitting on a couch with your hands on controllers that match those in the VR world.

Re: The reason is that it sucks.

[Baloroth]

There was this idea that people would make a VR room and walk around in it, and this was driven by the idiots at Oculus more than anyone, as a means to lock out competition.

This is just straight-up not true. Oculus didn't even support room-scale VR at all for ~8 months after launch (and really never intended full room-scale VR, as shown by the fact that they still don't sell a setup with 3+ sensors you really need for decent room scale), it was Valve with the Vive that did that. Also that had nothing at all to do with locking out competition because that doesn't even make sense (how would room scale help lock out competition?)

Yet, there's absolutely NO way to "float" around a room-scale VR solution at all while seated.

Also not true. Many (most?) VR games support smooth locomotion and/or turning. I'm actually wondering if you've ever even played VR, because most of what you're saying is just, well, wrong.

The reason VR isn't "successful" is because it's just not ready for mass consumers yet. The hardware isn't there (low resolution, you need a very beefy computer to run even the current resolution), and the software honestly isn't fully there either. A fully consumer-ready VR probably needs to be lighter, wireless (or even self-contained), and have a much better display than is currently available. That'll happen, eventually, but probably not for another 5-10 years. VR is basically in the same place as early cell phones: really really cool technology with tons of potential, held back by hardware that while it works, just isn't really ready for widespread use. And that's fine: the technology is on the table, it's not going away, and it will only get better with time.

Key problems

[AJWM]

There are a couple. The obvious key problem with Oculus is Facebook and Zuck. Most people I know who own VR rigs go with Vive.

On the hardware side, it didn't help that cryptocurrency miners sucked the air out of the high-end graphic card market (and ballooned the prices) just around the same time that HTC, Oculus, etc were introducing their gear. If you bought VR gear, good luck finding a card to run it on at less than some multiple of what you paid for the headset. (That has changed in recent months, thankfully.)

Some of the problems others have mentioned above are there too, but are already being worked on or have solutions.

Public use VR

[BankRobberMBA]

I volunteer at my local library and they have a Vive that anyone over 10 years old can just walk up and put on. They have a smallish selection of games and demos.

I often spend afternoons helping people put on the headset and try out the experience. They all agree that it is awesome. They all agree that they love it. Only the kids feel like it is sufficient reason to go to the library all by itself.

Usually it gets less than three hours a day usage. Sometimes less than one.

I agree that the lack of a killer app or AAA titles is hurting.

Re:Public use VR

[quantaman]

I volunteer at my local library and they have a Vive that anyone over 10 years old can just walk up and put on. They have a smallish selection of games and demos.

I often spend afternoons helping people put on the headset and try out the experience. They all agree that it is awesome. They all agree that they love it. Only the kids feel like it is sufficient reason to go to the library all by itself.

Usually it gets less than three hours a day usage. Sometimes less than one.

I agree that the lack of a killer app or AAA titles is hurting.

VR's problem isn't the lack of AAA titles. It's the lack of game ideas that would be fun enough to justify a AAA title.

It's a fundamentally different kind of gaming experience and no one really understands how to make a great game for it yet. Is it a walking simulator where you're in an alien environment? A strategy game were you float over the field of play? What are the controls like? What style of animation?

They need to explore the idea space until they find stuff a concept that works, and once that happens game studios will start turning those concepts into AAA games.

Re:Public use VR

[Opportunist]

Finally someone gets it.

That's exactly the problem, people simply don't know (yet) how to put the technology they have available to good use. It's similar to what happened when movies started a century ago. When you look at some works of early cinema, you'll notice that they feel a lot like glorified theater production. Much of it looks like there's a stage and you're sitting in front of it, with the big difference to a normal theater being that the changes of backgrounds happens "instantly" instead of enforcing a pause where the stagehands put the new props on.

Only slowly movies started exploring what we now take as granted in cinema. Point of view shots, taken from the viewing angle of a protagonist. Dialogues happening so camera shots show the one talking only, with the camera in or near the position of the person being spoken to. Dynamic shots where the camera actually moves about in the scene. These are fairly new concepts that had to be developed. Citizen Kane isn't really that good a movie IMO, but it premiered a LOT of movie tricks that are common today but were groundbreaking when it came out.

When you look at VR games of today, you'll notice that they are essentially the same kind of games you play on a normal screen just "VR-ified". What's needed is to find out what possibilities VR offers to makers of games and then explore them.

This of course will take time and we'll see a few horrible flops in the process, much like we did when 3D and first-person views became a thing for the gaming industry. But we learned and now we've arrived at something where the "formula" is developed. That's still ahead of us for VR gaming.

Re:Public use VR

[Miamicanes]

There's a reason for the lack of AAA titles that goes beyond mere economics -- it's fucking IMPOSSIBLE to efficiently do VR development with current hardware and workflows. As the developer, you're CONSTANTLY putting the headset on... taking it off... putting it on... taking it off. And waiting... a lot. The integration of development tools into the headset environment itself is practically NONEXISTENT today. It's a definite, and very real handicap.

At least Rift has the advantage of using the same host PC to run the software that you're developing on, so the main limiting launch-to-view constraint is "how quickly can you put the headset on or remove it". With Android, VR development is downright excruciating... you can get piss-poor previews that are the equivalent of using the Android Emulator with the headset as a blurry remote display (with all timing completely shot to hell), or you can launch build+deploy and twiddle your thumbs for 30-70 seconds waiting for it to compile, upload, and launch.

What we REALLY need is a Rift-type display that can do the equivalent of overlay three virtual 27" monitors in an arc ~20" in front of you, with realtime camera-vision of the rest of the room, so you can develop without having to actually take the headset off (and sufficiently high resolution & optics so that you won't feel like someone who's legally-blind trying to sit at a desk and read those same three monitors in real life). Aside from improving game-development workflows, a capability like this would also give people who aren't even INTO gaming to invest in a headset, because it would let you have the equivalent of three large monitors in an arm's length arc around you in places where you CAN'T have three monitors (like on a plane, when traveling, etc).

Defense is right wing?

[DigressivePoser]

Oculus founder Palmer Luckey is now tooling around on right wing defense projects

The project referenced in theoutline.com link uses cameras, infrared sensors, and LiDAR to monitor the border. So that's right wing? Give me a break.

The killer app is porn - but it's not ready

[Sarusa]

There is a killer app - it's porn. But the current experience is like two virgins fumbling in the back of a cramped car and nobody can figure out how to get the bra off and you can't really see anything well. It looks meh, controls suck, and for filmed stuff camera problems make it look like people are about to rip their skins off and expose their lizard forms near the edges of the screen. Just not worth it in the current form.

Re:The killer app is porn - but it's not ready

[apoc.famine]

I agree. But porn has had about a century to refine the art. VR porn is radically different from traditional porn, and still different even from POV traditional porn.

Porn isn't easy to do well, as we all know. You need it lit right, you need to get the angles right, you need uncomfortable, weird-ass positions to let the viewer see the good stuff happening, etc.

VR porn has to work through all of these issues just like regular porn did. I'm not a fan of a lot of POV porn because they aren't looking at what I'd be looking at, the lighting is often awful, and it's a little motion-sickness inducing because that's a lot of motion my eyes are seeing that I'm not doing. VR porn hasn't solved any of these issues, as far as I'm aware, and has made some of them worse.

VR porn needs time. It needs that one great director who gets it, and is able to make a leap forward in the art. Once we get a couple of those, VR porn is going to take off.

Re:You mean...

[avandesande]

Generally avoid things that make me throw up.

Paperless office

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Yes, and I remember when computers were going to usher in the "Age of The Paperless Office"....the result was that paper usage went up about 500% because suddenly anyone and everyone could print whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted...and boy, did they ever.

Canon, Xerox, and Boise Cascade pretty much defoliated the Amazon rainforest to keep up with demand for that sweet, sweet paper.

My VR killer app

[swillden]

The place I think I'd use VR is in the office. I currently have three largish monitors, a desktop environment with virtual desktops and layered windows... and I still don't have enough screen real estate. A VR headset with sufficiently-good movement tracking and resolution opens up the possibility of sitting in the center of most of a virtual sphere of high-resolution monitors -- ideally with some AR so that the monitors appear to be floating in my office, so I can see my office walls, my desk, keyboard, the cup of tea on the desk, etc., and interact with all of the physical stuff naturally while being able to see my virtual displays. The headset would also have to be light and comfortable enough for all-day wear. Bonus points if I can replace my office walls with a beach scene, etc., while still being able to see and use my desk.

I have done no investigation to see how far we are from making that possible. I suspect we're not there yet, even without the AR requirements.

"right wing" defense projects - LOLZ

[iggymanz]

pretty sure that battlefield VR and related wil alsol be used by left-wing administrations and Congress's in the future

Re:Nobody is using it correctly.

[Aighearach]

The reason for that is prices. When the US arcades were still popular, and tried out some of those games, they made them 4 to 8 times more expensive than the regular games, and so nobody played them. Then when arcade popularity went down, the owners usually blamed any gruffy-looking teenagers hanging around for having destroyed society with their evil young-people politics.

In Japan business people are expected to know about money. In the US, only larger businesses are run that way; small business, like arcades, the business culture is anti-intellectual which can't help but also be accidentally anti-business.

VR is likely one of those ideas

[hey!]

that need a bunch of other things in place to become available before they really are successful.

The iPHone wasn't the first smartphone; as a developer I used a number of early attempts at "converged" phones. The first was probably the IBM Simon A massive 18 ounce brick of a phone with a monochrome display and a one hour battery life. These early converged phones were tour-de-forces of the day's technology, but they were still too big, too slow, too crude, and too battery-hungry to be anything more than curiosities.

What Steven Jobs did with the iPhone was catch the wave at exactly the right moment, when screens and processors and batteries and networks and UIs all got good good enough, cheap enough to make a blockbuster product possible. Other people were close -- Palm's Treo devices were pretty good, but ever-so-slightly clunky due to their legacy tech. Jobs had the advantage of a clean sheet.

It's not vision that's lacking in most failed attempts to get a new concept off the ground, it's timing.

VR is a technically challenging problem

[vadim_t]

No big deal, there's room to grow. Back in the 90s, when the first 3D games were appearing, people also dreamed up a bunch of stuff quite prematurely. But I'm quite sure that by now we've surpassed those expectations by far, it just took a bit longer than some expected.

So I've got a CV1. Here are the issues so far:

The resolution is too low. It works for gaming, but barely so. You won't really want to even browse the web on this if you can avoid it. So that currently puts a limit on using it for any kind of non-gaming use. This is a technologically solvable problem, but it will take time.

Dual 4K displays at 90fps would be cool, if there was hardware to support such a thing. USB C + Thunderbolt 3 does two 4K displays, at 60 FPS. Almost there, but not quite yet.

Cables are limiting. While the resolution is not huge, it's big enough to be challenging even over wires. Doing it over some kind of wireless is even more of a challenge.

Control is limited. The controllers are nice, but they're nowhere near as good as my hands.

Current tech just happens to exist at the edge of reasonably available technical capacity -- while they could do dual 4K displays right now if they wanted, only really, really hardcore adherents would pay what it takes to provide that. So it'll have to wait until today's bleeding edge becomes the next normal.

Fortunately, it's nothing tech and money can't fix. The basics are already there, now all that's left is to refine existing tech and make it better. Doing last year's hardware 20% better is what's the industry has been doing all along.

The Oculus Quest seems like a promising development -- no wires, which should make it a lot easier to use in some kinds of setups, though it will have to sacrifice 3D processing power to do so. I think at the very least it'll be a good test of how big of a deal a wire is.

Re:VR is nauseating

[Wescotte]

Massive progress has been made on the motion sickness front since the release of Rift/Vive. If you avoid artificial locomotion (moving the camera in conflict with the players movements) altogether very few (probably less than 1%) people find themselves getting sick on current PCVR HMDs.

The ultimate solution for VR movement might require vestibular stimulation technology but they have been able to drastically reduce the number of people impacted with some clever tricks. In early VR games I personally would get sick in minutes when using a joystick to move around a virtual environment but as they've refined the techniques I can play for hours without issue.

Re:Because VR isn't VR

[HatofPig]

There's a good point buried in your dismissal that is worth responding to. Do we listen to canaries in coalmines who are tweeting in distress? Because in 20 years a ton of kids are going to find themselves where I am today.

VR control is complete garbage

[Pinky's Brain]

As Carmack said :
"Stick yaw control is such VR poison that removing it may be the right move -- swivel chair/stand or don't play."
Shame he couldn't convince his employer to ship with a ceiling mount HDMI+USB slip ring so you could actually fucking do that.

The swivel chair should have been part of the default control scheme for VR ... so it wasn't just a couple of genetic mutant who could enjoy free motion inside the 3D world. Sure that would have been a lot more niche and unappealing to the couch users Facebook wanted to woo, but at least it wouldn't have been complete garbage.