I know a bunch of people who use it daily. They are all using Immersed[0] for work (disclosure, I'm an investor, but I invested because of the love their early customers had for the platform). Basically, you get a bunch of virtual monitors in VR.
It's way cheaper and much more portable than dragging five massive screens around, and the isolation is the point -- you can focus better when you have the headset on and headphones in.
But you're right, that is a niche, and not the social product Meta is hoping for.
We all had fun and that's it. Nobody ever talked about it again nor did anybody purchase a VR device themselves. It was more like a one-time ride in a theme park. Mind you, these are tech people with a good income. If here the hit rate was zero, that's quite telling.
I think VR will at one point have a true mass appeal, and when it does, it will change everything. Personally, I hope that moment is far away. This "let's add even more options to never leave the house" trend is backfiring.
People who don't want to leave the house already have plenty of options.
People that love the outdoors or being sociable probably aren't going to swayed either.
I don't think VR will change much in either direction for most people. Personally I like a mix of things. I value staying indoors and experiencing media that is rewarding. I like getting out in nature when the climate permits. And I'm not a total hermit. I don't think VR change things for me or others. Digital crack already exists.
Flight sims aren't terribly mainstream, sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's enough of a crowd between flight and racing sims who are willing to spend small fortunes on peripherals to keep VR going at some scale.
For gaming generally, there's a lot of friction that'll have to be removed before mainstream success is a possibility, I think--reducing the weight of headsets, reducing the cost, solving motion sickness, improving the game selection, improving situational awareness with the real world, reducing the setup effort, etc.
A lot of current games aren't worth the effort of dealing with all that, at least not once the novelty of VR wears off.
When Nintendo sold the SNES it wasn’t one person here and another one there playing it. It sold millions and a good percentage of your friends had it.
Isn't there a middle ground?
Having worked in VR since 2015, I don’t know of a single person who uses it for their entertainment, period. Some folks here in the comments saying they use it for flight or racing sims, in which case Meta is sinking billions into an expensive peripheral for sim players, similar to a flight joystick.
I think you're overstating things but I agree to some extent. It's a niche product but there's more niches than just "industrial". There's still a lot of interest from the arts and creative sectors for example.
It’s mind boggling to me why or how Zuckerberg decided to invest so much on it. I wonder if it’s just a screen for the stock price not to collapse as he loses DAUs, and certainly young people, to TikTok and other apps. Because otherwise it doesn’t make a lick of sense to me.
Meta wouldn’t have to spend billions jump starting something if it was a commercial success. No commercial success in history needed tens of billions for commercial success. It either sells or it doesn’t.
You obviously mean "there's no field fulfilling criteria X that I haven't spelled out".
VR predates Meta's acquisition and took far less than "tens of billions" to get to commercial readiness. Several small-ish companies have got products to market. Heck, even Google's half-hearted attempts resulted in a fairly decent 6DOF headset.
VR in its currently incarnation will not make a system that will sell 100 million units, which is the regular size market of the leading home console in a generation (both switch and PS4 sold this much).
I’m surprised they sold as much as they did tbh.
facebook and Zuckerberg may be unethical monopolistic robber barons, but unlike some of the other big players in the industry, they're not incompetent, and they never have been
I would guess that they believe the VR industry is awaiting a critical mass of adoption where, like computers, then the internet, then social media, it will suddenly go from being a techy niche to a viable alternative platform for society. presumably they're gambling that the negative anecdata you're reporting will reduce as the UX improves, and I personally think they're probably right
But XR will. It's clearly the future of general purpose display tech.
You should check out Half Life: Alyx to get a glimpse of what VR could be someday. It's a super-polished, super-fun game, and even just standing around in it doing nothing is mindblowing compared to any non-VR game
* There are some good multiplayer action games, but so far as I know they all require you to "get your VR legs" which is a non-starter for me
Maybe if you’re mildly autistic or remarkably introspective it works for you. For most people it’s a fundamentally alienating experience, like taking LSD but with none of the joy.
VR is fundamentally an industrial technology, good for training and other purposes. For entertainment or home use it’s purposeless. Ask anyone (non techy) who has one. They don’t use it.
The focus on VR is how I know Zuckerberg has no idea what he’s doing. VR is never going to work, not in its current incarnation. It just demonstrated that he has no idea how normal people work, and that he’s decided (for some reason) to completely ignore whatever data they have, which would show him that people just don’t use it.