I see two avenues for great VR games:

1) Cockpit based games. Flying a plane, or spaceship, in VR is immensely better than on a screen. I get nauseous in car racing games but, my friends who do not, rate them as best simulated driving experience ever.

2) Room scale games. Here, I have no idea wich ones. It is a complete green field in terms of gaming. There are some great concepts, like Fantastic Contraption or the "space invaders"-like game in The Lab (with hilarious results for non-playing spectators), but all in all, it's something that is not explored yet and shows fantastic promise.

I totally agree about "room scale games". Has add-on benefits of getting out of the house and getting some exercise. Here's my idea (shh - don't tell anyone). Buy an abandoned roller skating rink and transform it into a VR game space. Of course this assume that some other entity will create one or more compelling games to be played in your space.

> Buy an abandoned roller skating rink and transform it into a VR game space

I also love this idea, but it still has many barriers. Principal technical issue is that these headsets are not wireless, which means you would need anot overhead motor system to follow you around as you walked.

Or everyone wears a backpack containing the computer running the headset.

I've always (wishfully) thought that VR will revitalize the arcade.

VR (or AR) laser tag would be an extremely compelling experience.

It's already being worked on: http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/enter-the-void-the-w...

I've tried DCS with a Rift. It was mind-blowing. I hate using my screens now, I can't wait for a decent priced VR unit.

My biggest gripe was controls. There are quite a few keyboard shortcuts in DCS. Some of them just require looking at a keyboard, since I use them so infrequently. I can manipulate a HOTAS without looking though, so that's ok.

In DCS, some of the aircraft have clickable cockpits (meaning you can use the mouse to do everything, if you wish). If the Rift controllers could manipulate these, I'd be in heaven.

No. You're seeing a low adoption rate and imagining that it's just the typical adoption cycle taught in Business 101.

VR has been the next big thing for twenty years. It's not a niche technology because of Luddites, it is a niche technology because it works against human physiology and only a lucky few are totally unaffected by it. You're targeting an audience of people who find your product merely tolerable.

And since there are no social constructs or visual cues around this division of humans, you'll never get a network effect like you might with, for instance, a pair of pants designed for very tall people.

I may be too young to recall, but I seem to remember 30+ year olds complaining about how touch screens would never catch on around 2005-06. Something about the masses never accepting a product that's "merely tolerable."

I recall the same about the size of a phone in hand a few years after that and we haven't seen a sub-5" phone really sell well in how long?

I remember showing some of my A.V. club buddies my Note 2 not long after it came out and getting laughed at. "It's like holding a magazine to your head!"

Without changing phone size, most of my friends now have bigger or equal sized phones, and I've gotten at least one 'you told me so' since then.

> it is a niche technology because it works against human physiology

I'm not sure I agree. Many complained of motion sickness playing early FPS games, such as DooM or Descent. I wouldn't be surprised if it just takes an equilibration period to get used to the devices. Either way, unless there is actual research that shows a large portion of the population actually has difficulty adapting to the device, I don't believe the tech is fundamentallying flawed.

There are plenty of people who just can't play first-person 3d games without puking. They didn't get used to it, they just avoid those games and the market doesn't care. Even games which could be modified to prevent motion sickness typically aren't.

This doesn't seem quite right either, though. People had been talking about 'virtual reality' for a long time, but only recently has there been so much activity in trying to make available to consumers. It's true that a non-trivial amount of people experience motion sickness, but I'd hardly call the people who use it without such issues the 'lucky few.'

I think you are talking about sickness when you are talking about human physiology.

>only a lucky few are totally unaffected by it

That is true, but what you aren't covering here is that when software (and hardware) is properly designed, almost no one is affected by it! Vive games with physical locomotion do not have complaints of sickness.

Personal Computers had a 15 year adoption cycle. VR will be even longer. We don't really know who is affected or unaffected by it. Only a few dozen people have used real VR on a regular basis. By "real" VR I mean a facility with at least a $M price tag. Let's assume that this raises the percent who find it utterly tolerable to 50%. That's still way higher than the rate for amusement park rides - which is a multi-billion dollar business.

I'm waiting for some sort of Minority Report inspired Excel interface. Manipulating the "minimap" in Fantastic Contraption blew my mind.