Things I like:

Immersed.com (second computer screen): I wish the Quest 2 had 4000x4000 per eye to make this work beautifully but I suppose that will be the future.

Eleven Table Tennis: I practice smashing in this game, the skill transferred. Now I am beating all my friends with real actual table tennis (at an amateur level).

Thrill of the Fight: awesome shadowboxing on steroids workout.

Walkabout minigolf: feels like actual minigolf, except the courses are more fun [1].

Space Pirate Trainer DX: I haven’t played it yet but seems like an enhanced laser tag [1].

What I would like to be solved:

- Excellent passthrough: I want to interior design my rooms with VR

- Excellent screens (i.e. 4000x4000 per eye), it opens up applications/games that are mediocre at the moment

- omnidirectional treadmills fully solved (super hard to do): I want to be able to strafe in place, jump, side jump, duck, crouch, make almost any movement in place IRL and for it to be translated to actual movement in VR. I sometimes muse about how to solve this but I wouldn’t know how.

[1] The biggest benefit that VR/AR has are two things: one, you can make virtual hardware, and in some cases that is about as good as real hardware (e.g. virtual screens). Two, you can make experiences that are as almost as good in real life (e.g. table tennis) but then you can enhance them since a developer has much more control to bend physics than any other engineer does in the real world. The coolest application I saw for that is this model train game, you could scale down and be inside of the train, you could construct train tracks on very small orbs, etc. If I’d be a fan of trains, I’d buy it.

Eleven is an incredible game. I never particularly liked table tennis, probably because I was not good at it. Being able to practice in VR made it a lot more fun for me. The dev is extremely responsive. I even 3D printed a paddle attachment for the Oculus controller which is supported in-game. I recommend it every time I can because it's as much fun as I've had with a video game.

Where can I get more info about the paddle attachment? Someone on Reddit also talked about it.

There are a bunch on thingiverse and also available to buy on amazon and elsewhere. I think this is the one I printed:

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4623428

I used Eleven to learn how to play table tennis during the pandemic and have also become fairly competitive with my friends and family that already played. I now have a real table in my home and my wife and I play regularly. Certainly got my money worth out of that used Oculus.

> Excellent passthrough: I want to interior design my rooms with VR

This is a tangent, but i wish this was a thing now, even without VR. The last few years of iphone and ipad have lidar, which has led to pretty solid 3d scanner apps. In five minutes, i have a whole 3d model of the interior of my house. I wish there were good consumer apps to use that and design in.

The lack of resistance and extremely fast feedback loop give me really bad RSI—which I'm not particularly prone to—if I play Wii Sports for more than a few minutes and try to do the motions as if they were real, rather than just waggling with my wrist. Is that not a problem with VR rigs and "real" sports activities? I've yet to use one.

I wouldn't know, I haven't played Wii sports much. The speed of your movements is tracked, so that's tougher to fake. In your case, if you'd be in The Netherlands, I'd recommend you to buy a Quest 2 at the store with the clear question if you can return it the next day if you do not like it. Create an account, if you have FB issues then make sure you use a Facebook account you don't care about, buy Eleven Table Tennis, play for an hour and then ask for money back for the game (can be done through the app) if you don't decide to buy a headset.

I don't know how the US is.

Table tennis is a great fit here because the physical game isn't reliant on feedback from the ball, either, since it weighs so little. Swinging a bat as hard as you can will easily tire or hurt you in VR, but table tennis transfers really well.

Great list. I would also recommend checking out some movies in Bigscreen. It supports 3D movies.

I have tried Bigscreen and will definitely use it in the future. The problem that I have with it currently is that the pixel density of the Quest 2 is too low. My friend that I watch movies with regularly has a plasma smart tv (or whatever you call them) and the detail is much more crystal clear.

You've not played the right games, then. I mean, take Robo Recall, which is one of the first things that came out. Sure, you can do a shooting game without VR, but then you don't get the experience of tearing a robot apart with your own hands and punching another's head off with a torn off arm.

Or Elite Dangerous is quite the experience in VR too. Less so than Robo Recall, but it works out extremely well if you have a HOTAS. You work as if you were sitting in a cockpit.

Or Subnautica, which in VR gets even more terrifying.

Or VR Chat and similar, where you get to interact far more personally than you would just looking at an avatar on a screen.

Now of course it's not like it solves world hunger or anything, but the tech works extremely well within the right scenarios.

The tech works extremely well at making me feel sick. I enjoyed subnautica sans VR. ED is less interesting than Euro truck simulator. :-)

I get the physical games like table tenis and beat saber, but how is this not a fad? The wii was cool at the time too. Nintendo didn’t retain the ideas in later hardware.

VR chat is about as interesting as second life, and any metaverse that follows will follow the same path.

Well, in that case you've got to make adjustments to your setup (wrong IPD maybe?), or you could just be unlucky and get sick far too easily.

Consumer VR of course involves a disconnect between what you feel and what you see, and that makes people sick when it gets bad enough, but most people can enjoy at least some VR experiences.

By my account, I've managed to spend days of real time within Subnautica exclusively in VR.

If you get sick, what I'd recommend is something like Beat Saber, where you're never moved without physically moving in reality. If that doesn't work something is definitely wrong. The next easiest experience is cockpit simulations. I'd say Subnautica comes somewhere after that, being in the intermediate range.

The worst I've personally tried is Half Life 2 in VR (as in, HL2 just rendering to VR without further changes), and that is indeed not a nice experience because the FPS mechanics just don't work in VR. The acceleration, the need to constantly rotate your view without moving in reality, the need to make very quick and frequent changes in direction are all very hard to tolerate.

> I get the physical games like table tenis and beat saber, but how is this not a fad?

Who cares? What matters if it's fun or not. I enjoy the exercise, I don't do it to fit in. And it's surprisingly good exercise. I lift weights, and Racket NX still is capable of making my arms sore. Then I suppose I have a rather violent play style.

I wish there was some database where users can report comfort level of each game. Oculus rate comfort levels but I find many games rated "comfortable" still make me sick.

Also I love VR and have no major issues with games like Beat Saber, Thrill of Fight, The Climb, Eleven, The Plank Experience, etc.

Whenever there is something that might cause nausea like falling, I just close my eyes.

“Far too easily?” You Sir are being rude, and I feel like you are trying to justify your VR experiences to yourself.

However If you enjoy it, that’s all that matters.

One small tip I'd offer is... try chewing gum next time you're in VR.

I have almost 3,000 hours clocked in VR according to Steam and there are still a few games that can make me nauseous (mostly those with poor locomotion and/or bad frame drops). Weirdly enough, chewing gum seems to help a ton; in some games, I feel like I'm less nauseous next time I play, too. Not sure how scientific this is, but friends say the trick generally works for them too.

Perhaps could be phrased as “more easily than other users”? Dropping in as a quest 2 user to add anecdata of not feeling sick in most games or for extended periods of time. I’m not used to moving around smoothly using controllers though, flying a racing drone is kind of similar in being vaguely disturbing to begin with.

Quest 2 sales over the last few weeks would hint this might not be a fad, though.

Sales… to know if it is a fad or not — we don’t know, at least not yet. Actual numbers of people that use it more than once and put it in a closet? Let’s see.

Steam stats are based on active users iirc - at the moment about 1.93% of all Steam users use VR Headsets, and Half Life Alyx recorded 42k concurrent users. This is keeping in mind Q2 (the current sales winner) is a standalone headset by default. You could argue most of those concurrent users used the headset once and put it away, but that line is getting harder to argue as time goes on and the numbers keep increasing.

If this was 2016-2019 I'd agree it was very touch and go in terms of where it was going. But the investment and interest building around VR now has that here-to-stay feel to it - at least on my sometimes accurate vibe-ometer.

Well, I apologize if it came off as rude, wasn't the intention.

I was just trying to say that different people have different amounts of tolerance for VR, and it could just be that your isn't that high for whatever reason. Nothing wrong with that, but that it doesn't work for you specifically doesn't really mean much for VR as a technology.

There are pills you can take against motion sickness, it is a known problem that some people get motion sick easier and throw up from situations normal people handle just fine.

I disagree with your categorization that 20-80% of users who experience motion sickness are not normal. In fact, it would appear that people that actually like VR are in the abnormal category.

Now we gotta take anti nausea drugs just to play games? Is that reasonable? I don’t think so.

20%-80%? I wasn't aware the proportion was so high. Of the 12-or-so folks I've put in VR over the past few years for more than 1 hour, only one reported experiencing motion sickness, and that was after about 15 minutes. It's certainly a thing that exists. I'm more on the "iron stomach" end of the spectrum, but I hear that ginger candy can help, and as another commenter suggested, chewing gum. Some folks have reported that having a fan blowing air at them can help as well. Those sorts of measures might not be very attractive if a person hates VR anyway, but if they really enjoy it and want to work around the motion sickness, it might be worth it.

For what it's worth, I don't think this is unique to VR...I used to be a big FPS player back in the day (Quake 1-3 mostly), and I had a friend that got motion sick playing Quake 3, so he couldn't play in our matches. It's certainly the case that I've heard more reports of motion sickness in VR, though.

I like VR and get nausea easily in it. I won’t take any drugs just to play a video game though. I just stick with less than 30 minutes session and Beat Saber, Thrill of Fight, Eleven - type of games.

>Nintendo didn’t retain the ideas in later hardware

bruh, have you ever played a Nintendo Switch? It's essentially the culmination of Wii-era motion controls + the WiiU's console/handheld split.

Every fucking shooting game on the Switch is nowadays released with motion controls (for gyro aiming). The joycons are basically sleeker Wiimotes with better motion sensors. Saying that the Wii's revolution was just a passing fad for Nintendo is hella disingenuous.

I own a switch.

It’s not the same as the wiimotes or the physical game gimmick ala wii sports. The physical movement was a big part, similar to what VR is trying to do now.

I think in generally the switch is awesome but it’s closer to a traditional console GBA or DS. Nintendo threw away what was a gimmick and what parts were making good gaming experiences.

Ring Fit Adventure or Just Dance is a very Wii-like experience.

Other games use Switch controllers in a very similar way to wiimotes.

I think what has happened is the platform has opened up to more non-Nintendo games and diluted the focus on movement that was in a lot of games for Wii/WiiU. Motion control has gone mainstream too, all controllers have tilt sensitivity, so that doesn't seem as big a thing. Maybe your right that people choose to use stick controls in preference to macro-movements of controllers.

That's because the motion controls largely didn't work for that kind of thing outside of a few gimmicky titles. Their use in the Switch is far more natural and integrated, so of course it doesn't feel like a gimmick.

So Switch combines DS/Wii/WiiU style game in one hardware. Well done.

The hard thing with VRChat is finding "your" people and particularly people that aren't screaming/younger teens. But it is funny, I still feel anxious talking to a stranger in VR. It's wild though... I mostly spend my time alone (moved to a random state) and I can just dive in somewhere and talk to random people. I do feel old in general though on VRChat ha.

I suffered with motion sickness too it gets better over time.

I will say I'm not a generally all-around likeable cool guy either so you do have to vibe/give something (be interesting). Ultimately as far as making friends or something... that's hard. I'll get invited to discord servers and then it dies off in a few days.

There is one thing I have to try still Fo4 VR.

Come join the other introvert techies on Helios[0][1] Fair warning, it's still under development and the meetups generally operate on a schedule but that also means it isn't overrun with annoying first time Quest owners. The founders are very active and responsive on Discord.

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1047640/Helios/ [1] https://www.helios-vr.com/

That looks interesting I'd be curious to see how it's doing now at least 4 months + later from most recent reviews. I can understand how hard it is to start something from nothing regarding userbase.

I will give it a shot, the game seems too cheap (cost to own) just my opinion.

> but how is this not a fad? The wii was cool at the time too. Nintendo didn’t retain the ideas in later hardware.

Hand tracking (via controllers or cameras) isn’t comparable at all to the Nintendo waggle/point/swing tech.

I guess every "you sit in a cockpit" game works very well with HMDs ... there was an early demo of a Mechwarrior style game that worked very well (for me) in VR.

For me the problem is that the resolution was always lacking. With my glasses I have "better than 20/20"-vision (visus of 1.2-1.6, 120-160 visual acuity). I have not tried the newer HMDs, but with the older Oculus Rift and HTC Vive I could clearly see the individual pixels distracting me from the experience.

The so called "screendoor effect" is not there anymore with the Quest 2 high res HMD's. My HTC vive had it and it was annoying but a good game could rule it out, with video it was visible. But on the Quest2 you can't see it.

For people not into sims in general, I would recommend Project Wingman as a fun gateway to this. It's arcade to the point of your typical space sim, so it's easy to get going.

The physical games are barely VR games imo. Everything is in front of you. You don't physically move where you're standing too much. Beat Saber is great fun but it can be done pretty much the same without VR, and is done, at arcades.

No it can't? There are other rhythm games at the arcade, but they're not Beat Saber.

There's literal beat saber cabinets. In retrospect they may have had a helmet, but it's all rendered in front of you on a screen anyway. Aside from the wall dodging which is pretty minor, you don't need VR to play beat saber at all. All of the action happens a meter in front of you in a constant direction.

What are these cabinets called? I've never seen them anywhere. Do they have a VR helmet or not? If so, they are probably just clones trying to ride on the success of Beat Saber which continues to rank very high in charts of best VR games.

I personally find the best Beat Saber levels are 90 degree and 360 degree, where you have to spin your body around and which wouldn't be possible in such cabinets.

Also the immersion of VR is where it's at - the fact that you feel like a Jedi with your light sabers and you're cutting blocks in time with the music, while the controllers vibrate as well giving you feedback that makes your brain believe you are a Jedi.

They're called beat saber.

Oh, oops, sorry, I somehow misunderstood you. -1 for reading comprehension. Thanks!

I googled them and yeah they have an official arcade version, which are basically a HTC Vive headset with the Vive controllers. Apparently according to several reviews, the tracking is horrible, the headset can't be tightened properly, and the choice of songs is miserable, and they don't seem to support 90 or 360 degrees. And yes of course you are right, you could just render it on a screen, in fact, if you are playing PC VR, it always renders to your monitor anyways. When I have friends over, I always have the view mirrored to a projector for "party mode" - just like in the arcade - which allows spectators to enjoy the show as well.

The real question is, have you played it in VR? You don't "need" VR to play but it's absolutely a different experience than just looking at a screen, for the reasons I stated in my previous comment. It's not even comparable when your brain _believes_ (to some degree) that you are actually inside the Beat Saber world.

IIRC those got canceled a while back. Maybe some are still around, grandfathered in, but I don't think there's new ones.

> The tech works extremely well at making me feel sick.

But you realize this is a you problem, right? Outside the handful of people who get motion sick with VR, the tech is rock solid. Everyone who tries an Index is blown away by how immersive the experience is.

> VR chat is about as interesting as second life, and any metaverse that follows will follow the same path.

You couldn't be more wrong. There's a reason Facebook rebranded to Meta, and Microsoft just purchased Activision with designs on their own metaverse. Big players are putting serious money behind this, and I like those odds.

The literature says it's 22-80% of people get sick using VR. Much more than a handful https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91573-w

"Sick" is definitely a relative term. I've given literally thousands of demos to people--some of which were pretty janky, back in the early days--and I've yet to see anyone throw up from VR.

There is a very small minority of people who put on the headset and immediately can't stand it. I've seen maybe 2 or 3 people in the last 6 years, so it's definitely less than 1%.

Depending on content, I've seen about 50% of women and 25% of men experience mild discomfort after using the headset for about 30 minutes. Studies on simulator sickness include that in "feeling sick".

My current project is not able to use every single sim-sickness mitigating strategy available, due to the sort of source data we're using (a lot of flat, 360 imagery in a multi-user tour-like scenario), but even there, we've only had 1 out of 100 people express actual feelings of nausea after using the headset. If people report any discomfort at all, it's on their first time, after they've not heeded our warning to limit their first interaction to 30 minutes, and then they only mention feeling a little light headed.

People report feelings of nausea after playing 1st-person shooter video games on large screen monitors or watching shaky action movies at movie theaters. This is not a problem unique to VR.

The study was designed to find factors that correlate with VR sickness, and as such, only studied 83 people, all "highly stressed", and showed shaking videos as their methodology. I think it would be a statistical mistake to generalize from this study.

Anecdotal, but a lot of people seem to be able to get over their VR motion sickness. I personally did by just playing the janky Rocket Mode in Richie's Plank Experience a lot. Same goes for heights in VR, at first it's terrifying but if you repeatedly expose yourself to it it loses its effect. There's also a story of a VR dev who built a demo to get rid of his motion sickness, it involved just repeatedly dropping his POV from a height and then looping back to the top. Granted, some people will probably never get rid of their motion sickness for whatever reason but I think those will be in the small minority.

I got rid of VR motion sickness after a while. Same thing with DOOM back in 1994 or so.

There is a problem though with a lot of crap games not implemented with comfort in mind and badly optimised. Stuttering will get you feel bad fast.

To me it sounds similar to all the reports of motion sickness (or worse effects) from playing Doom back in the day. I also suspect most people who do suffer from it can get used to it over time.

OTOH, considering how many people keep having motion sickness in cars (especially when not driving and reading and whatnot), perhaps for some people the issues remain.

Zuck rebranded because Facebook has a bad rep. Microsoft bought AB for their IP and lib, I don’t believe they do any VR stuff. They do online gaming well and will be very successful with Xbox.

I don’t think we will be seeing competitive esports in VR, as we don’t see competitive Wii Bowling as an esport.

> Microsoft bought AB for their IP and lib, I don’t believe they do any VR stuff.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/967490/Microsoft_Maquette...

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/mixed-reality/altsp...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/mesh

It would make more sense that "they" refers to Activision Blizzard. They do very little VR stuff compared to Microsoft.

Doesn't really make sense anyway. If you're building a VR world, you need to fill it with something.

IMO Elite Dangerous is so good in VR I stopped wanting to play vanilla flat E:D. I’d play it more if it wasn’t such a hassle to boot to Windows, haul out all the HOTAS gear and the VR gear, unplug my external monitors, plug everything else in in the right order, find there are 5 mandatory Windows updates and an Oculus update to sit through, etc. You kind of need a dedicated desk and PC for VR.

Quest 2 with a link cable (or wireless link if you have great wifi) makes all this a lot easier!

Virtual Desktop Streamer (https://www.vrdesktop.net/) works amazingly well for my Quest 1 as a wifi solution.

Tip: you can use a spare wifi router as a dedicated link for oculus air link. Plug your PC in with ethernet and your HMD via wifi. I get 200mbps with a very old router.

Subnautica in VR is broken beyond playability without mods. I've tried it and I would disagree with any suggestion that VR enhances the experience of the game.

I'm exactly the opposite. I love VR and I now find non-VR games boring and old like trying the play NES or C64 games (which I used to love).

Half Life Alyx is arguably the best Half Life experience to date. No Man's Sky is amazing in VR but zero interest outside of VR. In VR I'm actually in a spaceship or actually on another planet. Outside VR I'm just looking at someone else's travel photos. Seeing vista's in VR is like the difference between looking at a picture of the Grand Canyon and actually being at the Grand Canyon. The first is a pretty picture. The second you actually feel it's 20 miles the other side and a mile deep. Seeing a smoking volcano in Farpoint, again outside vR is just a picture, inside VR the mountain actually feels 1-2 miles high with 7-10 mile plum of smoke. So now non-VR games that don't get then sense of presence fill like something is missing.

Further, well made VR games (which is definitely not all) are often way more intuitive than non. The 19 buttons on a dualshock or a mouse and 101 buttons of a keyboard, a good VR game you should reach out and touch stuff in the game.

There are also experiences like Jet Island or Eye of the Temple you just can't have outside VR.

VR Rhythm games actually force me to dance, vr non-VR rhythm games which rarely do that.

As for AR, I used to be more excited, but I suspect reality will be tracking, constant ads, and distractions. And further, it's kind of hard to turn reality into any setting, something VR can do easily. In AR, in my living room, maybe I could have an AR pet that runs around my furniture. In VR I can escape my living room for another planet, an underwater adventure, a dragon's lair, a space station, a secret lab, a zombie infested factory, etc...

The biggest problem with VR is just lack of great content. Looking forward to Horizon Forbidden West as the next true AAA VR title.

One of my biggest hobbies is sim racing, and I can tell you that putting on the VR headset is akin to putting on a helmet and setting off on the track. The sweatiness and discomfort is nothing more than a real driver would experience, and turning a wheel feels real without hand tracking.

What you're experiencing with disorientation does tend to go away for most people if they're careful about it. And for me, I literally can't remember the last time I've felt disoriented in VR. Even considering that I've had shunts that have caused me to roll 20 times or more.

I agree, there is waste involved (as with anything), but as a comparison to racing it's much more friendly for the world than burning fuel. I'm in full agreement that Facebook on our faces sounds terrible, and concerns me, but VR can be a very good thing.

> that putting on the VR headset is akin to putting on a helmet and setting off on the track.

It depends on what your brain is used to. If you've never felt the acceleration, you don't know what you're missing. But I've done a lot of skiing in my life, and my brain will not accept VR skiing as the real thing. I feel queasy and have to stop.

I know what I'm missing, and have experienced it. I see this as an environmentally friendly way to do something I love literally whenever I want, and it's wayyyyy cheaper to boot. And the racing quality (competition) is better than any real-world thing too. The skill ranges are so tight in online races, especially iRacing.

The feelings you had with nausea is common for people, and it's possible to get over it if you are methodical. Lots of people I knew couldn't do more than 1 minute when they started, and slowly worked up to it. Trick is to stop the moment your stomach feels unsettled, and try it every day. Don't push though it.

Any racing games you can recommend? I couldn't find a good one (without trying them out).

You could try Project CARS - Pagani Edition on Steam; it's a free (sponsored) version of the racing sim Project Cars "1". Whether you like the controls is up to you, I found the VR experience quite good. Without any Gs however, it is lackluster even in comparison to my not-so-powerful "real" car.

Assetto Corsa's complete edition often goes on sales for ~$5 and can be modded like crazy, and also has reasonable controller support. Wheel and pedals will always be better though.

VR is already an excellent expert tool. VR based visualization of digitally designs - products or houses, is becoming a very pragmatic tool for designers to review their work in 3D, instead of just a flat screen (3D HAS more information).

As a trivial example - when designing our new office, some people reviewed the auditorium design in VR and figured out the screen was too high for comfort, and it was lowered.

Extreme examples go into virtualized surgical training where physics and graphics engine specialized to tissue simulation is used to teach surgeons new procedures.

AR displays such as hololens can be used in construction yards to compare the as built with a digital model for quick review.

Etc etc.

I don't know how good toy VR or AR will ever become, but it already is an indispensable expert tool.

Designers and surgeons would die without it. We have to introduce this unnatural thing to life or FB would lose money and humanity will suffer.

I think young surgeons would get a trauma moving from this nonsense to real surgery. Or maybe they will try to press a button in the patient's stomach.

> Motion Sickness, headaches, sweaty headsets and detachment.

I've bought a Vive when Half Life: Alyx came out and was completely blown away by the first impressions and immersions of that game.

Since then however and after the first "whoa!"-effects faded, every game was exactly what you've just described: Pure disappointment, and my body completely stressed out/sick after half an hour, at best. The only exception is beat-saber, which is a lot of fun for quite some time, but not the kind of game I'd want to play for hours on end.

So far, VR seems gimmicky, and quite frankly is way too much of a hassle to set up to enjoy it often (so many cables!, and I don't have the space for a permanent setup).

The cable thing is pretty solved with the Quest 2. Zero cables there.

Yeah, if you want to play a subset of games that Facebook has deemed you can play. Still salty that Pavlov isn’t native to quest.

Air Link solves this, but boy is it annoying in practice. Setting down the headset always pushes the floor just out of reach when you come back to it. Which is frustrating in a game that makes you pick things up, like shooters.

Not sure if you are aware but you can get Pavlov Shack for free through the AppLab for quest2: https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/3649611198468269

I've had some good fun playing it.

Why is SideQuest and AppLab not sufficient for “unapproved” games?

I was pretty disappointed with Alyx. Little manual interactions like the healing stations and the markers and the reloading felt novel. But the actual meat of the game, the combat, was just not very good. Teleport movement breaks immersion. The hardest enemies in the game were the electric dogs. They did this thing where they drastically over commit to shooting in a specific direction and all you needed to do was click to move somewhere else and you were fine. It was super lame, but, at the same time, not actually super easy to execute. It's like we've taken a step forward on graphical immersion and three steps back on game design immersion.

Valve did a good job working with the constraints they had, but my takeaway is that the constraints are just too vast to make a game that isn't clearly hand holding you because your controls and situational awareness are just kind of bad.

I played on an index and would do multiple hours at a time, with no sickness.

I’m sorry. I have very high VR tolerance and I experience no sickness at all even in the most intense games and VR has been an almost magical experience over the last few years so I’m sorry you’re not able to get that same enjoyment.

Calling it a fad though seems incorrect. We’ve already passed the point of Quest 2 headsets being in over 10million homes and that’s up from 5 million a few months earlier. At this rate it’s following the same trajectory as consoles and because of the headsets general availability a whole generation of kids are getting a Quest 2 instead of an Xbox or pS5.

I bought Oculus Quest 2 about a month ago. The games I play the most probably wouldn't be even possible (or at least fun) without VR - Pistol Whip (you need to evade slow-moving bullets) and Thrill of the Fight (boxing simulator). It's more of a fitness device for me now.

I agree, VR absolutely provides an experience flat-screen gaming can never deliver.

With the Covid situation being what it is and sports halls are closed, I’ve replaced live table tennis trainings with Valve Index and Eleven Table Tennis VR game. It has stunningly realistic physics and the immersion is so good that I don’t miss the real thing much. This wouldn’t be possible in front of a flat screen.

I returned mine after a month but apparently I didn't do enough research into how to get out of the little walled garden that is set up for you. I had the Samsung Gear a few years back and felt like it was the exact same environment.

In both cases one of the most interesting experiences was the movie theater. It somehow works. The social aspect was creepy, i'm an old guy and all i could hear was voices of young children...i felt like i shouldn't be there haha.

I've had a similar problem, I like the tech, enjoy the single player games but when it comes to anything online the number of shrill voices makes me feel like I'm the outsider in their space.

The new oculus quest 2 solved a lot of those issues for me. The only thing that remained was the fogging up part, but I have acquired a fan for that. 1) No cable anymore, streaming it or playing on it directly works fine. 2) Weight is not so heavy anymore. 3) Battery time is also good, just as with the HTC Vive and Wireless kit, minus the bulk of the battery.

The problem for me is the games on it. A few are really cool, but even then I get bored. And to buy another game, sure, but then you get to spend 20 dollars again, way to pricey for just a few hours of gaming.

SuperHot and Half Life Alyx are the games that I like the most.

Tip: if you find the HMD pressing into your forehead or face, make a counterweight and attach it to the back of the HMD. It's completely changed things for me.

I got the elite strap partly for this, but it didn’t help. What does seem to help is to physically rotate the headset up or down. The quest 2 is deceptively rigid, so it’s easy not to realize you can do that.

Does the strap include a counterweight? I see the battery elite strap weighs 179g, but from memory the HMD weighs over 500g.

I wrapped a couple portable batteries (they're dense) in a bag and tied it to the back of my basic strap, and I don't even need to tighten the strap anymore, the weight is mostly pushing down on the top of my head now. It's an incredible difference, to the point that I'm offended they don't include a counterweight by default. From memory my counterweight is around 350g.

Maybe you can try it out by loosening the strap and using a finger to tug down on the back of the strap, and see if it balances on the top of your head and feels good.

Hmmm. Thanks for the tip.

Maybe a dumb question, but how would I even make a counterweight for it? I guess I’ll try tying random things to the back of the headset..

I bought $1 250g soft weight and velcro tape. Just tie to original strap.

> Motion Sickness, headaches, sweaty headsets and detachment.

You can try another headset in a few years.

Lower headset weight, better audio, larger field of view, >= 120 hz refresh rates, frame interpolation, eye/face tracking - not all of these are possible right now, but I think we can expect them in 2024 - 2026.

I find that right now many games are not optimized for VR, which brings FPS drops that kill the immersion and give me a headache after a few minutes. The weight of the headset doesn't help too.

I agree that for business VR may be not as useful as the companies would like us to think. If you jump in and out of meetings, respond in chats etc. the UX should be on par or better than on traditional platforms, otherwise everyone would fallback to their laptops.

But for a casual moviegoers or gamers this may be a good product

My son pushed through his VR sickness, and now doesn't really suffer from it. He plays at least a couple of hours of VR each day. Boneworks, H3VR, Onward, Pavlov, RecRoom, Blade & Sorcery, Half-life Alyx, and other games he just loved. I can go maybe 15 minutes in it, and VR isn't really something I'm that into (despite it being a fantasy of having it since I was a kid). Although VR shooters have kind of ruined 2D shooters for me now :( Thing is, when I play a game, I don't want to move around - as an adult, I've been busy all day, now I just want to sit on a couch and chill.

VR was key to my son making it through the pandemic with his sanity intact. But he does seem to be a rarity - he has a couple of friends that have VR and they just play Beat Saber, if that.

If there was an updated Garry's Mod for VR - we'd never get him out of there!

Facepunch is working on the next iteration of Garry's Mod using Source 2 which will have VR support! https://sbox.facepunch.com/news

One thing that just occurred to me: Maybe the headset was not correctly positioned in front of your eyes or the interpupillary distance was not set up correctly. If these are not perfect (but good enough) you can still get depth perception and immersion but the fatigue will increase a lot.

Also, the headset must basically be “glued to your face”, so it does not sway when moving the head. A high-performance PC is also very important, every FPS drop will induce nausea.

I can play HL Alyx for hours on end but still get dizzy when I become dehydrated or hungry. I only have first-hand experience with an HTC Vive (1st gen) though, which uses room-scale laser tracking. I also only ever played room-scale.

Immersive experiences are primarily a content problem. We've got a big empty room with current hardware solutions. You can play games or mess around in some big corporation's walled garden. That's it. Not very compelling. The games are nice of course but mostly they work without VR as well.

Creating content for these empty rooms is actually a problem as there are no open standards, the tools are complicated, there are lots of hurdles, and a lot of gate keepers with dollar signs in their eyes trying to tap into any value you might create that are actively frustrating each other's attempts to do so. You end up with these exclusives for some proprietary hardware. And that hardware changes all the time so it is time limited as well.

The only people that bother with going through the trouble for this so far are game studios.

Even 3D movies are largely not accessible via VR because that's a different proprietary content silo with misaligned financial incentives. So, even though there is a lot of 3D content in the form of a decade plus of 3D action movies that were released by movie studios, exactly none of that can be enjoyed via VR goggles. That's how hard it is to target these things. I guess movie studios could do it but then they'd be haggling with the likes of Steam about just how large of a cut they would take. Likewise, Netflix is not a Steam VR experience. They are not producing material in 3D and you can't sign up for a 3D Amazon Prime either. If there were open standards, this would be a no-brainer thing for them but there aren't.

IMHO, any content that works in VR should be trivially accessible using a normal 2D screen as well. There is no technical need for any content to be exclusive to VR/AR goggles and if you are the owner of that content, you'd actually want to maximize your audience rather than artificially limit it. You lose a bit of immersiveness but we've been playing 3D FPS games on 2D screens for decades so that does not seem to be that big of a deal. In other words, there's nothing stopping us from building a metaverse right now. You'd buy the VR goggles to enhance the experience in the same way you might invest in a bigger TV or better sound system.

So, why don't we? Well very simply put, it doesn't solve a problem we actually have. We can already immerse ourselves in game worlds (with or without goggles) and we can already communicate with people. And more importantly, 2D UIs are actually pretty nice for a lot of things; especially when it involves text. And in so far some things might actually work, excluding most of the planet that does not own any goggles yet is not a great plan for creating a mass market.

I don't really have a strong stance on the topic, but its worthwhile to consider maturity of technology, 3D virtual interfaces are in relative infancy. Developers are trying out things and figuring out how to do things in this completely new environment.

30-40 years ago UI were quite terrible.

Its natural that we are trying to implement analogous 2D interfaces in 3D as we were train to use those hyper optimised approaches.

What is clear to me is that the VR is new medium for new content. Trying to ram 2D mediums into it and expect it being better is not a way to go.

> Creating content for these empty rooms is actually a problem as there are no open standards, the tools are complicated, there are lots of hurdles, and a lot of gate keepers with dollar signs in their eyes

I have to disagree, most 3D models can be used in VR. There are millions of assets out there that have been produced for the games industry. Both Unity and Unreal Engine have huge communities with lots of tutorials both official and independent on VR development. OpenXR is an open standard supported by many of the big players.

> The only people that bother with going through the trouble for this so far are game studios.

This is wrong, there are plenty of indie studios and individuals building VR experiences. It's actually the other way around, the big studios want to make games that essentially just have VR bolted on whereas the independents are the ones experimenting with the medium.

> 3D movies

I don't see how 3D movies would be compelling in VR. They are still fixed POV so you'd have to watch them on a screen like any other movie. You wouldn't want to have it replace the feed going to your headset since you'd have to keep your head still or risk disorientation and motion sickness. Netflix and Prime are on Oculus btw.

> IMHO, any content that works in VR should be trivially accessible using a normal 2D screen as well.

I'm sorry but that's not feasible unless you use VR controllers with the display set to your monitor. Even then having to control the look direction with a joystick would be terrible compared to just moving naturally and you'd be lacking the ability to dodge, duck, aim, etc. Sure you could make those actions trigger from button presses but then you've just got a bog standard FPS which is not a good VR experience. VR is a new medium, saying that all VR content should be accessible via 2D is like saying all movies should just be filmed stage productions. It doesn't work. Great VR games make use of the full 6DOF, they have you physically push buttons, throw switches, dodge bullets and swords, punch your enemies, walk across narrow ledges. Having these be real physical movements is a radical difference from tapping buttons on a keyboard or controller. It'll only get better as things like full body tracking and haptics improve and come down in price to the point that they are part of the purchase of a headset.

> there's nothing stopping us from building a metaverse right now

Also disagree, I've played Second Life and other 3D chat programs and they can't hold a candle to VR Chat (and VR Chat is put together with bailing twine and bubblegum so I'm not a big fan of it). Presence is a real thing in VR. Our brains really are that dumb (or that adaptive) where chunky polygons presented stereoscopically with a few other tricks really does make you feel like you're in a room with other people. It's weird but also fun. The VR goggles are necessary for any version of the metaverse to get off the ground.

I don't think that our current media will go away any time soon but I do think that VR is here to stay. 10 years down the road I think most households will have more than 1 VR headset. I think it will probably compliment our current UIs, you can put 2D UIs in VR after all and probably make better use of them by having them laid out in virtual space the same way you arrange things in a physical office. Speaking of offices, I'm pretty sure VR will be the default for work from home folks, at the very least for meetings if not for the whole work day. VR is just better than video calls for talking to people and as time goes on we will have a lot more social VR experiences and there will be a lot of people that exclusively socialize in VR.

I've played a few VR games that were better or could only really work in VR that I thought justified it, but I keep my Rift around pretty much just for Beat Saber. Generally speaking I'd agree that VR is pretty disappointing. The best experiences are room scale and need, you know, basically a whole room dedicated to them. Movement is a problem because of motion sickness, tracking tech is still a bit dodgy, and unless you are ok with patronizing Facebook the tech is expensive and requires you to deal with cables.

In a few generations I'd say it might be worthwhile, but for now it's a pretty expensive gimmick.

Watch vr immersive video. Game changing. VR’s perspective makes the actors more life like.

I can totally see VR be the future of tv. Not the 360 vr video, but more like 100-180 degree VR video.

Strong agree. It baffles me that Meta/Facebook isn’t putting up more of that in the media section of the Quest software. Well, there are a lot of videos but most are 2D and/or very low resolution, and just not interesting content.

The best I’ve seen on there are the “Ecosphere” videos (best quality by watching through the actual app). It’s sort of otherworldly feeling like you are standing next to an actual elephant. Awesome use of the medium and totally convinced me of its viability.

I've got the Index, there was definitely some acclimatisation required to dampen the motion sickness (especially for free movement) but for the most part I've had a great experience with it. Half-Life Alyx is an incredible game, although I would like to see more narrative/story driven games for VR. There are a lot of arcade games that are fun to pick up now and again (Beat Saber, Robo Recall), and shooters like Pavlov are great fun to play online

Yeah I had the same problem too at first. I could only play about an hour max before I had to stop. Got better over a few weeks then was able to play like 4-6 hrs straight one time.

I had a similar experience, could only go 30 minutes at first until motion sickness set in or the headset became uncomfortable. After some time and headset strap adjustments though I'm comfortable for a couple of hours or so at least. Although I still struggle with some games like Boneworks which for whatever reason still makes me a bit motion sick

Have you played Lone Echo and “Blade & Sorcery”?

Really think those are the benchmarks for me, vr isn’t about the headset or 3d it’s about rich hand tracking/interactions.

That's really sad. When VR works, your brain totally believes the illusion. I hope better screens and hardware makes it accessible to more people.

Seems that the problem is the hardware, not the software then.

Yeah, major VR fanboy. I have umpteen headsets. Meh. It's just been eye crossing eye candy, who needs it. Even the kids who enjoyed it at first are pretty meh about it.

Still, the idea of working in VR is actually good, not the 3d or VR part, but the efficient use of physical space and replacement for multiple monitors.

But I highly doubt it's there yet, FOV and resolution.

Shades of nomad / lame at this point.

Agree that Facebook being involved is a very bad thing, but don’t overestimate their ability to build something entirely new.

No doubt in my mind that VR will change everything - it’s simply a matter of “when”, but I’m willing to bet that we are now on a slow and steady path of improvement, but that path may be far longer than Zuck imagines.

Pavlov VR is amazing and wouldn’t work as a non VR game. The custom games are really fun and everyone has a sense of humor I haven’t seen elsewhere. PavZ is a blast.

Your distaste for VR is due to genetics. I’m sorry you got the short end of the stick with the motion sickness.

Totally. Why do you need a virtual screen if you have a real life one. I could not imagine myself working in VR, I like to look around from time to time when I'm working, I also like to have some space/depth before me to be able to look far away and I love working from cafes especially. VR seems like a way to get even more cut off from the body / trapped in head (losing body awareness) when working - a problem that is going on which most people are not aware of.

It may make sense for some games, but desktop will be the king of work for a long time - until we get brain-computer interface with some AR glasses, then maybe that would be an improvement.

> AR on the other hand, either as a small projector or special glasses — that is exciting.

Is it? All I have ever seen is floating stuff lagging behind or jumping around. A "proof of concept" level experience, at best.

I look forward to a HUD mapping overlay and other info widgets that would enhance my travel.

It could provide real time info without needing to look at a watch or phone, without distraction. I hope the slab of glass phase ends soon. Too many people looking at their hands and ignoring reality.

Reminds me of Horizon Zero Dawn's Focus gadget.

But I think that technology is still way far off.

My car projects stuff onto the windshield. Is that a type of AR?

Yes and I think this is the most useful kind. This tech is going to get much better this decade.

It would be useful to include what headset you tried in your comment. Consumer VR has progressed a lot in the last few years wrt resolution, refresh rate, and form factor.

Try the Quest 2.

$399 price point for a standalone unit. I didn't experience any motion sickness even though it was my first time with a real VR device.

Games like Superhot VR + Beatsabre + thrill of the fight, are awesome. and can't be made without VR.

Also, it has a passthrough mode - which I'd love to see improved - because it basically trumps AR. By adding high quality cameras in front of the headset you hit 2 birds with 1 stone.

I also kickstarted the original Rift, but have the opposite perspective. It took a while, but VR in the Quest 2 is taking up more and more of my gaming time these days - especially playing Demeo.

What was the last headset you picked up? I can see this critique being valid for early headsets, but a lot of the issues you mentioned are less pronounced/eliminated in recent headsets.

Ever tried it with dramamine? I get motion sick in less than twenty minutes but medicine completely eliminated the problem.

Yeah having to take drugs to game sounds like a problem IMHO. Oculus Quest 2: with included Dramamine subscription from FB marketplace. Yeah opt out pls

It's routine for folks that get on a boat to go SCUBA diving or snorkeling to take Dramamine. Many people take it to go on a car ride or fly in an airplane.

I think we see that as "just fine" partly because boating, driving, and flying are seen as "normal". But maybe it's also because if none of those are normally happening that often, so taking the drug is a special event, in some sense. VR might be an everyday thing, so that starts looking pretty dicey - who wants to take a pill before every gaming session, forever I wonder if folks that are trying to gain their "sea legs" could take it as a stop-gap until their body adjusts. I certainly saw this with folks that had extreme sea sickness when they first joined the Navy.

What, you never thought about taking a chemical sacrament to enter a parallel digital universe? It's cyberpunk as hell.

> and kickedstarted the oculus rift.

Did the kickstarters get some juice when Facebook bought Oculus? Or just a big thank you?

I got a retail kit as well as the DK1, which was nice.

I did feel shafted by Palmer when he took both my and zucks money, but looking back now, it was buying a devkit not equity.

Obviously you were not buying equity but at the same time you were funding the actual creation of a new product, taking a part of the role of an investor. If you do a successful exit I think it would be nice to at least refund the money obtained by the kickstarters. But probably I'm just naïve.

If there is any hope for this space it's in VR, the technology necessary for a quality AR experience is so far away from what is currently possible that it's basically DOA as a product.

>> Never played a VR game that wasn’t better without it, somewhat like 3D movies.

Many people say that VR adult movies are fantastic, and one could find that non-VR ones are not even close.

I like the PSVR headset design because the screen is not glued to your face it is suspended before your face and the whole thing is supported by your head.

Of course if you use garbage hardware that is sold at cost to get you to make a facebook account, it'll be a shit experience

If it isn't tethered to a computer with a 3090, is it really VR? You won't get motion sickness with a index running at 144hz

Correction: majority of people who didn’t spend their lives gaming get motion sickness pretty quickly anyways. This is coming from someone with an index running at 144 Hz on a 3090.

I’ve actively been encouraging friends and family to try it and my experience is that motion sickness hits about 18/20 people within 30 minutes of play, depending on the game.

However I’ve noticed that my friends who have played a lot of computer games (in particular fast paced FPS) tend to fare better, and also that the sickness goes away with practice. I used to get it too but now I can beatsaber for literal hours without discomfort.

The headset does make a difference, (my friend’s Vive was particularly bad), but it’s not as great as you suggest. Time and practice are far more important.

And that's why I have a vive tracker on a bucket at all times. It's my VR bucket, for when I throw up