> After the first few minutes both VR and non-VR games are the same once you're fluent with the controls.

This couldn't be farther from the truth.

Take a game as simple as Zombie Training Simulator. Holding your hands up and firing virtual guns is a completely different experience than pointing a mouse and clicking. Physically bending over to pick up a grenade, then throwing it, is far more immersive than pressing the number 5 and holding a mouse button down to prime it, then releasing it to throw.

Then there's Ultrawings. Having head tracking, being able to look around by just pivoting your head, makes the flying experience feel so much better, even if the graphics are dated by 10 years in terms of texture and model detail.

When I got my Vive and was playing around in The Lab, and one of the experiences puts you on the side of a mountain, I stepped off a cliff edge and I could feel my heart rate increase slightly as my brain was expecting me to fall to my death. The immersion is real.

And I have plenty of gaming experience. I've been gaming since I got an NES for Christmas when I was 5 in 1987.

> When I got my Vive and was playing around in The Lab, and one of the experiences puts you on the side of a mountain, I stepped off a cliff edge and I could feel my heart rate increase slightly as my brain was expecting me to fall to my death. The immersion is real.

Not disputing anything you're saying but I actually have this same experience playing games where you can fall and the player accelerates (particularly if the camera is first person or right behind the player). Just looking at the screen when I jump off a cliff in something like WoW makes my stomach feel like 20lbs of iron while I'm falling. I've kinda learned to enjoy it at this point.

I have experienced both, and they are rather different. On the computer, I just get this sinking feeling in my stomach when falling, but there was no hesitation before jumping. In VR, my brain did not want me to step near the ledge at all. I had to probe the floor with my foot, make sure there actually is solid floor there in reality, and really will myself into moving there.

In the end, I ended up making a tiny tiny step and leaning forward enough that the game registered me as having jumped. The two experiences aren't even comparable. In one game where I was in a hot air balloon I even freaked out and panickedly searched for the button to exit the game.

Yeah playing The Climb sets off my fear of heights pretty well. I’ve climbed a lot in the real world and I think the lack of input from my feet actually heightens that fact as they are pretty integral to having the strength to hold yourself on.

I get the same thing, but it only kicks in once the fall is long enough that you know that your character won't survive.

What's interesting is that after far too many hours of WoW, that fall distance is so ingrained that I get that feeling at the same point in other games, even if they have a longer 'safe' fall distance.

In my experience every little bit of verisimilitude makes a huge difference. Little things like Oculus' hands which line up perfectly with your proprioception and have the fingers move depending on your finger position make a huge difference. Just a few of these little things and you get new people in a horror game completely forget that they even have the option of taking the headset off.

> new people in a horror game completely forget that they even have the option of taking the headset off.

Or closing their eyes. Something they would do for a movie when there is an uncomfortable segment.

I think there will be a lot of difficulty with wording and meaning here, because we don't have a consistent terminology for the different kinds and levels of immersion or focus.

For example, the distinction between being deeply involved and distracted in a game (which does not require special tools) versus the extent to which the game will trigger automatic bodily reactions.

In other words, someone deeply "immersed" in a chess-match isn't quite the same as someone "immersed" in a VRv game so that they fall over at a jump-scare.

I don't want to pick on this person, but imagine if someone said "from a couple of decades of watching movies, I know that all a movie needs is.." Experiencing a medium is very different than developing a medium. And there are a lot of rules that hold true for your subjective experience of a medium that may not be universal rules.

It's even worse because they are using one medium to infer the needs of another medium. It's more like saying "From a couple of decades of reading science fiction books, I know all a science fiction movie needs".

Feet help. Feet & legs help a lot.

FEAR is a game that really underscored this to me - and every game I see it in afterwards just adds evidence for it.

Required? No. But adds to immersion a LOT.

Reminds me of the Jurassic Park PC game where you could look down and check out your character's gender.

Given that you had to enter pin codes by setting the hand to pointing mode and move around with the mouse, i wonder how it would translate to a VR experience today.

Trespasser yeah there was a bit with a keypad for getting into the Ingen employee village, I spent ages trying to use the pointy finger and a mouse to press the keys on the keypad... I couldn't do it, but there was a break a bit further along the fence/wall. They wrote the code on the wall (upside down) next to the keypad, but I guess they realised it was too cumbersome so they made a break in the wall further along.

> After the first few minutes both VR and non-VR games are the same

Again proving the point that VR has no actual use case.

I said they are "the same" only in terms of how your brain can immerse/rewire itself to understand those new controls as if they were artificial limbs. Even with the same level of fluency, some controls are definitely better than others depending on the domain.

So VR is definitely not pointless. Motion tracking for your head/arms/feet unlock many applications that are previously hard or impossible (e.g., 3D sculpting using mouse/tablet vs a motion controller).

But it's not always better than mouse/keyboard input for let's say typing or shooting a target. Having more irrelevant degrees of freedom makes it harder to master your input controllers, even if you already had a lifetime of practice with it in the real world (e.g., I am okay with doing parkour levels of movement with WASD/Space but won't ever try it with my real limbs even though in theory I know how to climb over a real world fence).

VR games that allow you to physically move around are immersive in a way that is unprecedented, IMO, even with very simplistic graphics.

10 seconds of thinking: new gameplays, training, simulations, non-game immersive experiences, communication, art...

I'm not an ayatollah of VR, but without any foundation to support it this is a pedantic and ignorant comment

Sorry to break it to you but many games (like first person shooters) currently have no depth perception and would be greatly enhanced by it. Literally every 3D game you play today can and will be enhanced in VR because of this reason.

I don’t think this is true. In a gaming context VR provides more immediacy of immersion, much greater presence and wider accessibility. These factors also make VR a compelling case outside of gaming for all sorts of tasks.

have you tried a vive?