I don't know about your friends, but playing Alyx opened my eyes to the level of immersion VR can achieve. It's a kind of gameplay that can't be repeated with 2d screens. I really do think it could be revolutionary, based on playing that game alone. If you can get ahold of a headset and a powerful gaming PC - I recommend giving it a try.

The problems right now are very fundamental. The quest 2 out of the box is supremely uncomfortable. Casual users will put it on and not want to use it due to VR nausea and the discomfort of the headset after wearing it for 20 minutes. The hardware is not powerful enough to create an experience like Alyx - all the headset games just have basic polygons and colors. Resolution is still poor, FOV is poor. We're still in the infancy of immersion/comfort/usability. I played Alyx on the Quest 1 which I actually think had better immersion due to the OLED screens.

IMO the trick is going to be whether Meta can pull off a usable, immersive device in the next 5 years without their revenues completely tanking. The problems to overcome are really hard and still at "basic research" level which takes years to develop. The other issue is the killer game or app that gets people into VR en-masse.

I guess my point is I think writing VR off completely is a mistake - like someone saying what is the point of a cell phone in the 1980s when they were giant bricks and cost a fortune. VR will get good enough at some point that it's like putting on a pair of glasses and stepping into another world without any friction. It's just a question of how long until we get there and who will bring it to us.

Disney World's Animal Kingdom has an Avatar-themed "ride" where you are linked to a banshee rider. And they make you wear these silly glasses, with thick, bulbous lenses.

So I'm there, mounted on a plastic motorbike, staring down in disbelief at the smaller-than-iPad display where the tachymeter and gauges would be. In front of me, in front of everyone to my left and right, is just plastic nothing. Plastic. And I think aloud, "Okay, are we gonna look down at this little screen the whole time?" The guy next to grins too: Where's the screen?

Then it starts. Holy crap. My entire field of vision is Pandora--up, down, left, right, everywhere.

And we are flying on banshees! I feel a moment of weightlessness as we careen down a canyon at the speed of gravity. I want to hoot and holler. It's pure joy, and my heart sings.

That's virtual reality, to me.

Absolutely—it’s also imagineering! Disney has done that for almost a century. But they make money because that’s their bread-and-butter. You’re buying an amazing experience at Disney, VR or otherwise.

Meta’s bread-and-butter is selling peoples data, irrespective of whether teens are committing suicide on their platforms.

You’re definitely right the technology has tons of potential. Lots of applications in, for instance, content-creation space as well.

The problem Meta ran into is that it’s difficult/impossible to make money on it. It’s a niche market at best, and it’s much more difficult to prove the value when compared to something like Facebook. Facebook is easy to use and provides social value to everyone on the planet. And I say that not using it myself but I live in a small town and all business here rely on Facebook; the municipalities use it to communicate; elderly use it… it’s accessible.

I’m sure the wall Carmack ran into was the shareholders. To shareholders it’s more often than not about profits. To Carmack it’s probably about the product he envisions, not the profits. But you can’t have both sustainably when folks can live without VR.

I would jump on the bandwagon if my VR headset was mine: like a computer I can install whatever I want there—not in a walled garden owned by Evil Corp.

The proper VR solution needs to be open source hardware and software. By the people, for the people. Reduce the barrier to entry and people will use it.

One more thing: those virtual avatars are impossible to take seriously. If I’m in a virtual boardroom filled with those, I might as well be playing Minecraft.

> if my VR headset was mine: like a computer I can install whatever I want there

fwiw - you can install anything you want on your Quest.

> I don't know about your friends, but playing Alyx opened my eyes to the level of immersion VR can achieve. It's a kind of gameplay that can't be repeated with 2d screens.

Every time I read something like this about VR I hear the same stuff I hear from like, audiophiles talking about gold plated cables and shit. I have a Rift, and I get a lot of use out of it for Beat Saber and VTOL VR, but there's no reason the latter can't be non-VR and I would categorize nearly everything I've ever played with it as a gimmick.

The experience is a little more immersive than a screen, but in my opinion not that significantly so especially considering all the drawbacks.

Yeah, physical movement is a big advantage. Gorn and Creed were also fun, but most of my time was spent with Beat Saber. Never tried Kinect / PS Move, but i doubt it's even close.

> a little more immersive

I wouldn't say a little... 10% to 20% maybe. That can be quite a nice bump for stuff counting on immersion. But again, the software has to properly use the system... my neck really hurt after playing Subnatica, and the play-through pretty much ended anyway due to Cyclops being pretty much uncontrollable.

My experience is completely different. I haven't tried the oculus but I did play around with game development with the Vive 2 at university about 4(?) years ago. Maybe because it was room scale VR (eg you were physically walking around) but it was extremely good at immersing me to the point where memories of being inside (our rudimentary) game feel like memories of being in a space rather than memories of playing a game.

I think it's dumb to compare this to audiophile stuff with no proven benefit, it is a fundamentally different way of experiencing. The feeling of presence (as it is called in VR terms) is something that was really noticeable for me.

I suspect that maybe the immersion/presence just doesn't stick for certain people? I do know that I'm unusually good(?) at suspending disbelief and getting totally absorbed in media.

> Maybe because it was room scale VR (eg you were physically walking around) but it was extremely good at immersing me to the point where memories of being inside (our rudimentary) game feel like memories of being in a space rather than memories of playing a game.

Two things: One, room scale is extremely problematic for most people because they simply don't have an empty room to do it in. I own my own home and have a room free of obstacles to play VR stuff in, and yet I still occasionally hit walls with my fist and once slammed my head and shoulders into one pretty hard. Frequently in-game objects seem to be placed physically out of reach.

Second, I get that "I remember it like I was really there" feeling from a lot of 2D games I've spent significant amounts of time in. Recently while playing Scavenger SV-4 I felt distinctly unsafe during a certain in-game event despite being aware on some level that I wasn't actually in that situation in real life. Maybe there's only a certain kind of mind that can get that immersed on a screen though.

I am starting to think that Alyx is VR high tide point. It was either going to be the thing that makes folks and developers run to VR or just stand out there is a neat proof of concept that gets ignored. Alyx is now 2 years old, there hasnt been a rush towards the space yet...

I think the high tide point will be the replacement of desktops/screens.

Compute should be offloadable with "5G E" (low lag, 500Mbps+, already out).

The speed of light really hurts when your gpu is several milliseconds from your screens and your motion controllers.

Offload to local device with, yes. Offload to server farm elsewhere ... naaah. You have at most a few ms to compress - stream - decompress - refresh. Any latency, jitter, stutter, etc has a very negative impact in vr. Much more so than on a regular monitor.

You can run compositor locally.

    I don't know about your friends, but playing Alyx 
    opened my eyes to the level of immersion VR can achieve.

I've had a lot of friends who liked a few VR games like Alyx but never really touched their headsets after that.

My feeling is less "VR stinks" and more "yes, it can be a really nifty gaming controller/display but there's a big gap between 'nifty gaming thing' and Zuckerberg's opium dream of a fulltime VR revolution."

    The other issue is the killer game or app that gets people into VR en-masse.

We've already had a few five star VR games, so I don't think that's sufficient.

Maybe the "killer app" is more of a paradigm or framework. Like how we didn't have killer GUI applications until Xerox/Apple/Microsoft created the environment in which those apps could be created.

But, I don't know. Fundamentally I just don't think people want to strap these things to their heads.

Nausea issue is not solvable by any standalone device. We'll either have direct brain jack-in that can override full range of sensory input (so there will be no dissonance between your sense of balance and vision) or we're stuck with mostly static experiences (teleporting point-to-point instead of moving etc.) which are not immersive.

Not seeing the first one delivered within 5 years for sure and probably not within 50.

Do you have numbers of the percentage of people who do get motion sickness from vr? Perhaps 50% of the population not going vomity is a large enough market? Perhaps 10%? As devices get better the market will grow. I can definitely feel off at 60Hz, but no problem so far at 120 if the latency is kept to a minimum.

Plenty of people get seasick, but there are still quite a few of us who enjoy sailing a day through a proper October Storm.

I don't have an exact number, but let me answer your question with another question — why else are the most popular VR games (Beatsaber, Alyx etc.) either completely static or move-by-teleport? My suspicion is that they were playtested _ad nauseam_ and this showed significant portion of the players to be affected.

> I can definitely feel off at 60Hz, but no problem so far at 120 if the latency is kept to a minimum.

This is a common misconception and the type of nausea I'm talking about has nothing to do with the screen update latency or head tracking latency. Strongest effect happens when you're mostly stationary in the real world (sitting or standing on the floor) but moving in VR (let's say riding a rollercoaster). In this case, your vision tells your body that you should feel acceleration/deceleration, but your inner ear tells your body you're completely stationary. This is a contradiction commonly associated with intoxication and body deals with it accordingly.

I accept that strength of the effect is different for everyone, for me personally when I tried the rollercoaster demo on Quest 1 nausea lasted for 2 hours (!) despite the fact that I was never seasick in my life before.

There's a critical faulty assumption in your logic above ... we are on the verge of seeing multiple simultaneous technical barriers fall that will seriously alter your equation around comfort and immersion. micro-OLED screens are shipping this year which enable full immersion with pancake lenses at half the weight and greatly improved FOV. The next gen of chipsets will support resolutions and frame rates that eliminate screen door effect and nausea for a wide swathe of people.

Within 2 years we'll be looking at very different landscape for VR hardware. This is why people like Zuckerberg and companies like Apple are excited about it - they can see where the puck will be and they are skating to it, ignoring the critics operating on obsolete assumptions.

Carmack explicitly addressed this in his keynote last year https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnSUk0je6oo at around 43 minutes in.

> Wii Sports was a "killer app" for motion controls and that doesn't mean it was a technology that shaped our lives in the long run.

Perhaps it could have been different if companies didn’t just focus on using these technologies as leverage to increase their profits at “unicorn” levels and for unimaginative reasons. Carmack should have known better than to expect a huge, boring company like Facebook to be a good place for a maverick to make a major breakthrough.