I've never been convinced that physical immersion will ever be as compelling to the human brain as mental immersion through good story-telling. Having my real-life body and physical attributes thrust directly into a story/game just seems like the most non-immersive thing possible to me unless the game is entirely designed around moving the body, like DDR or Beat Saber or whatever.

This is what the makers of text adventures said about graphic adventures, just in a different dimensional context. And we all know how that turned out... :-/

True, although I still feel more immersed in a good text adventure than some of the best AAA games out there. I played 'Lost Pig' [1] about a year ago and the 'visuals' are still fresh in my mind.

https://pr-if.org/play/lostpig/

I don’t understand this comment. Isn’t having your real life body put into the story/game like a textbook definition of being more immersive than just engaging with sight and sound?

"The last rays of sunlight disappear leaving a cold darkness in the Uncanny Valley before you."

How's that going to work in my living room where there's an ottoman, a coffee table, the dog's running around, etc. Or do I need to build a new room just for AR/VR stuff? I mean, yeah you can do some interesting stuff like having virtual Jenga on your coffee table, or whatever, but thinking in terms of HalfLife 4, or even sitting around chatting with 3 other friends who are in different locations, it sounds like it would start to become impossible just because of the space I'd be in. (Or expensive if I have to have a new space that I keep clear all the time.)

The level of magical thinking and SV delusion around the practical downsides of this reminds me of what Steve Jobs apparently said about the Segway "If enough people see the machine you won't have to convince them to architect cities around it. It'll just happen."[1]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20010617162321/http://www.inside...

> Or do I need to build a new room just for AR/VR stuff?

Probably, at least until we perfect the matrix or 360 degree treadmill tech.

Insurance companies will love the metaverse :)

You get a kind of treadmill which is stationary and you move inside it. Come on guys, stuff like that have been described in sf literature decades ago. It's not like we run out of ideas. We already have kinetic games for more than a decade now.

As for your friends, they can sit wherever the fuck they please. They're holograms, or on a more crude version just simulations from an AR/VR set.

The Nintendo Wii was briefly quite popular because it had a crude version of this, and the Switch improved on it a bit.

Even using your fingers, going from keyboard and mouse (on desktop) to touch (on mobile) was a major change.

It's unclear to me that you need realistic 3D imagery versus new kinds of input devices. Maybe smart knobs will become popular?

So basically like "Ready Player One" where you need a full motion capture suit, 2-D treadmill, and handheld controls. There's probably a niche market of hardcore gamers like the people who build full cockpits for flight simulators. But this complicated stuff is never going to penetrate the mainstream mass market.

Maybe a giant inflatable ball in your backyard pool that you climb in.

I mean, cool. If you're already an athletic freak who can do this for a couple of hours at a time with a massive room with no furniture in.

You're basically describing Wii Sports, which was a great novelty at the time. For maybe a year or so.