That depends entirely on your living situation. If you live on your own, a VR headset becomes just the opposite - you go from being isolated to being in a room full of people. Those people can be on the opposite side of the world, but you're carrying on a conversation and playing mini-golf with them.

Or for local play, there are one-vs-many party games where one player wears a headset and interacts with a group of people in the same room who aren't in VR.

Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes is a great example of this where the other players are referring to a paper manual to help you defuse a bomb. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqelfBKuiic

There's Acron: Attack of the Squirrels where one person has a headset and other people play against them as the squirrels with their phones. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP29BxhvHfc

Or Davigo, maybe a less social one because it's VR vs PCs and not likely to be in one room, where the VR player is a giant trying to swat at the tiny humans who are playing a 3rd person game where they team up and throw bombs at the giant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL7a63MMx6Q

Even if you don't have a game where other people can be involved, you can still cast the headset view to TVs and tablets. It can be plenty of fun to pass a single headset around taking turns in Beat Saber if everyone else can see what's happening.

I'm guessing none of that was the case in 1995, so I wouldn't be so quick to stick to a 25 year old judgement of what the technology can do.

And on the other end of the spectrum, sometimes you just accept that isolation for a while because you get to fly an X-Wing. A Quest V1 with Oculus Link is far from an optimal PC VR setup, but even with that Star Wars: Squadrons is an experience I’ve been waiting for since I first saw A New Hope. It’s hard to convey how cool it is to be sitting in a spaceship cockpit, dodging through asteroids and chasing down TIE fighters with the pew pew pew of four KX9 laser cannons on your wingtips. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vE90KIBlWyk

Would I play it in VR mode for hours on end every night and stop talking to real people? No. But not all my activities need to be social either. I can go for a four hour hike in the woods by myself and no one gives me a hard time for being too isolated. Or maybe they do, but I don’t care because sometimes that’s how I want to spend my time. To each their own.

One other feature of the Quest that I should mention - you can double-tap the side of the headset at any time to turn the game world off and immediately switch to "passthrough" mode where you see through the headset's tracking cameras. This obviously works best with single player games that can pause themselves until you tap back in, but in those games it makes it no big deal to drop out of the game for a moment to interact with people and things in the real world. A bit weird to talk to you while you have a big headset on your face, sure. But this was added in a software update well after launch, and it's way better for staying available to the real world than needing to take the headset on and off.

>That depends entirely on your living situation. If you live on your own, a VR headset becomes just the opposite - you go from being isolated to being in a room full of people.

That is a really depressing and dystopian future that I am not sure if I want to live in. Yes, MMOs and games like GTA-O, Roblox, or Fortnite are in the same area already now available. But in my opinion this only increases the actual isolation and I would believe that the post VR experience emotional drop down could be severe. It also brings up the backdrop of Ready Player One, where everybody is occupied by the VR while living in decrepit containers seemingly without a desire to fix it.

Telephones increase my isolation compared to taking face-to-face but I’m still glad to have the option

Even single player VR games can be fun in a party setting. In our group we sometimes let one person play VR and mirror it on a TV. The rest of us continue talking while casually watching and taking turns.

The player is not isolated because they know they are being watched. Works good with BeatSaber, SuperHot, etc.

It's basically the same as a group taking turns at an arcade machine — not solitary.

My experience is that people are getting increasingly isolated anyway, so VR is great in this regard for more and more people. Even when people are social they're increasingly glued to their phones, and distant from each other.

A friend and I bought quests and we both loved them except for one really annoying problem: space

At least as of early 2020, there was a huge market mismatch with VR: the people that have 6'x6' or more space to play in live far out in the suburbs, but the people that have the disposable income to just by a quest just for fun tend to live in apartments in the city. My friend and I both had pretty spacious living conditions for living in a city, but we perpetually joked about the dream of one day having enough room that the occulus didn't warn about having less space than required.

But with the sudden migration of many people out of cities and into more spacious suburban housing I'm curious if this will create an increase demand for VR. If you have an extra 10'x10' room that can dramatically change how fun the VR experience is.

Yes, and even if the room is large there are tables and break-y things that invariably interact with shins, swinging controllers and your ability to just fully immerse.

I stopped playing VR mostly because I was tired of re-arranging furniture and re-calibrating the Index when I did so.

I guess if you live in a house and have a basement or 'rec room' with no furniture, it's less of a hassle to play ping pong or Beat Sabre in VR. Otherwise it's VR Poker with its random social toxicity where I can sit on the couch and interact with people if I find a table without kids or mean people in it.

I live in house with larger room, but I don't want to use the room now because the room is cold and I need to warm the room before I use Quest. So I use Quest in my small room.

The Oculust Quest 2 is my first VR headset, and it can cast to the TV. That helps tremendously with the social aspect, rest of the room can see what you're doing and give feedback. In addition we've been playing Eleven - a table tennis game - in multiplayer with two people in the same room (with two headsets) which is tremendous fun, but requires a second headset.

What else do you recommend with two headsets? My significant other and I are getting two Oculus headsets next week.

Try Echo VR, Population One, Blaston, Hyperdash, and Walkabout Mini Golf. There's no real advantage to being in the same physical space to any of these games, but they are all great multiplayer titles.

+1 to Walkabout Mini Golf, it is a blast!

Im surprised at how much time Ive clocked in this game. I've been playing it with a friend who lives a few hundred miles away, and we just put around for hours while catching up in virtual space. Highly recommend, if you know someone with an Oculus Quest 2 (not you, OP, just anyone reading this.)

Most multiplayer video games today don't ship with splitscreen co-op, people just play with their friends remotely over the internet.

I agree VR isn't great for a party game or hanging out with your friends in your living room, but that's OK because that's not the experience most people are having today.

When I had a headset, I think the main thing that kept me from using it was the inconvenience. You have to keep part of a room clear, deal with a mass of cables, the weight of the headset, its positioning on your head, finding somewhere in reach to store it, etc. The lightweight wireless headsets of the future will help a lot. Smartphone vr is promising from this angle

Honestly, the privacy policy made me a bit uncomfortable too

I did a bit of VR around 1995. I added CAVE support for the molecular visualization program VMD and had a key to UIUC's CAVE to test it out.

The CAVE approach projects images onto wall-sized screens (eg, via back-projection), and can be 1-wall up to 5- or 6- walls, if the floor/ceiling is categorized as a "wall".

This is massively expensive compared to the VR that's widespread/affordable these days.

But it's also far more social, where multiple people can be present, though at least in the 1990s the head-tracker only followed one person. And they could easily see each other.

Handwaving, with the right synchronization on the glasses and high frame rates, I could imagine multiple head-trackers. Back then our frame rate was limited by the decay rate of the green phosphor in the projector. These days I suppose a wall of large displays, edge-to-edge, with very high frame rates interleaved for multiple users, might work. Again, I haven't followed what's going on in VR, but it might be a technology which addresses at least some of what you correctly point out.

Carolina Cruz-Neira, the developer of the CAVE (and at the time with the email address "cavewoman"), has some lectures on the social VR and her research, on YouTube. Don't remember which ones specifically talk about it, and couldn't find one in a quick look.

> Then I said to myself "this is not the future", and haven't touched VR since.

Yeah, nothing has changed in social VR in 25 years.

/s.

There are multiplayer async party games that can be played with 10 people (I've done this a lot!). There is online multiplayer. Dismissing VR because you played descent on a 3dof box 25 yrs ago is kind of lame.

> There is no amount of technology that can get over this problem. It's not about FOV or resolution or immersion

This is frustratingly dismissive and easily disproven. Look at Acron: Attack of the Squirrels! Look at Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes!

Now compared to 1995, gaming in general seems a lot closer to the VR experience you describe. Local multiplayer is uncommon, shared gaming spaces like arcades and LANs are gone and people are playing games on their own devices alone.

I'm as isolated playing Counter-Strike on my PC as when I am on the Oculus Quest.

“ There is no amount of technology that can get over this problem.”

Wouldn’t each person in the room having a VR head seat solve this problem?

Or just throwing the gameplay up on a monitor (either with cables or via chromecast)

That's a great story. I remember being blown away by Descent - probably the second 3D-type game I played after Doom. The thought of free spaceship movement through caves with 6-axis control was amazing - though IIRC the level design was carefully done to keep mostly 2D-ish with a clear up-down orientation. Must have been mind-blowing in VR in 1995.

All that said, I think people playing alone is a big enough demographic to support a VR breakout, if the killer app comes along.

I've logged over 200 hours in Beat Saber, mostly playing with friends. What you're talking about is definitely a real problem, but the solution is to just have the game rendered to the TV as well as the headset. Everyone sees and hears what the person is doing, even though they're the one in VR.

My wife watched me play the entirety of Half Life Alyx that way, and she enjoyed it a lot. And were were able to talk and share the experience the entire time.

There's a basic usability problem I found with my VR experience that I cannot see what I am doing in my room, unless you have a large dedicated space its easy to injure yourself by accident because the real world is still there with AR you can literally still see what you are doing in the physical world while interacting with the tech.

The other day I was looking around in my living room and every family member was staring at a screen.

You just need a VR headset for everybody...

That's an interesting take. I have some contradictory anecdata, though, in that my friends and I love getting together and taking turns playing VR games. And I'm not talking about nerdy hard core gamer friends. Pre-COVID we used to get together every few months or so for a "VR Night" at my buddy's place because he owned an Oculus w/ a living room TV set-up. And we'd just spend a few hours taking turns cycling through the game library and playing all sorts of stuff, and everybody loved it.

It depends on the game. There are asymmetric games like Acron and Takelings

https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/2345082335516570

https://takelings.com/

You can also stream the VR game to your television if it's a single player experience.

You're also discounting the fact that we have the internet now and we can do multiplayer online.

> So I invited them over that weekend. And that's where the problem set in. When one person was using the headset, they were gone.

That sounds like a "not enough headsets" problem.

Also, that is like lamenting the lack of co-op split-screen games. Many games supported that mode back in the day, they don't anymore. Because people are either playing over the internet OR bringing their own consoles.

It's a great opportunity to prank people though. There was someone testing some kind of VR app in a co-working space I used to frequent, and people would do things like sprinkle confetti on them or move things around on their desk while they were jacked in.

Ha, the first time I tried VR it was a multi-person experience. Back in the early 90s, I played Dactyl Nightmare at some tourist location. All 4 members of my family were in the same "world" and could see each other. It was, like most VR games today, fun for about 10 minutes. There's still some interesting experiences being developed at portable venues (ie, thevoid.com).

But I'd also say that FOV is really, really important. Right now the experience is just like putting a little TV on your face with an IMU. Immersion requires peripheral vision and spatial audio.

I was playing VR shovelware and pavlov pretty regularly for a while, we just put mirror the game to the monitor so the spectators can spectate, and the headphones float off the ear a couple inches so they can hear us.

It helps to have at least two friends for that scenario. for Just one friend you're probably better off playing a non-vr game and trading the controller.

these days we're farther apart and one friend has a child so he's worried about covid. we play "ghosts" (Phasmophobia) once in a while.

in summary: 2 friends required (minimum) mirror the screen headphones off the ear

There are all kinds of technological solutions to that:

Both have headsets (used to be a cost issue, gradually getting solved) and play the same thing.

Or one has AR glasses and can peek into what the other is doing and communicate with them.

An internal camera captures the face under the headset and presents it on the outside with correct parallax (could be presented with AR or with auto stereo display), AI in the headset can tell when someone is wanting attention etc. and use other cameras with depth reconstruction or depth sensors to fade them into the VR player's world.

We’re talking about widespread adoption of consumer technology. Everything you just mentioned is a niche workaround, and to be blunt, not very good ones. Sure, there are always going to be people who love VR, and it’s really cool! But there’s no way it becomes as popular as TVs or smartphones.

Maybe that's the case but you haven't really presented any convincing arguments.

I agree that technology isn't the problem. I don't know if the problem is exactly what you describe or something else along those lines. But I think you are on the right track.

You can do have a sort of VR studio akin to a gym. The spots in these "gyms" would accommodate for everything that is needed, space and equipment wise.

That would solve the problem the parent is stating.

Monthly membership. You go there to play, later to socialize at the "space bar" exchanging tales of lore with other like-minded people.

There's a business near me that seems to be pretty much what you describe. I keep meaning to stop in and check it out. https://www.portalvr.us/

Physically sitting in the same room with a bunch of people who are not in VR is not the use case for VR. You might as well say that telephones are useless unless they are speakerphones.

Part of the problem is thinking in "all or nothing" terms. Don't be a Sith.