I'm certainly willing to be wrong - I'm not an expert in the space beyond having been an enthusiast gamer for 20 years (and I recognize that doesn't give me domain authority) - but I've been waiting for VR to be a thing for a long time now, and while it's had some neat demos, it's almost never something that I look at and decide that prefer over more traditional interfaces.
Carmack is a ridiculously smart guy who is damned good at squeezing things out of hardware that shouldn't be possible, and if there's anyone that I think could work out the how-to of VR, I think it'd be him, but I'm not sure that I trust his read on what the markets want.
The question isn't so much "will VR take off?" as it is "what could VR possibly do beyond FPS games that could make it take off?" and I just don't have any answer to that at all.
Re:Oculus Joins Facebook
by WalterSear on Wednesday March 26, 2014 @02:18AM
(#7471906)
Yes, but first it has to win the gaming market, or it's a non-starter. Games are the Facebokulus's killer, game changing, app. Everything else is just speculation, and will take a while and will build on whatever happens in gaming, because VR gaming is already here.
Sure, I understand that. My point is that perhaps folks who went to the trouble of dedicating their lives to VR might have a larger vision than this.
In 1992, you could have defined the Internet in similarly limited terms -- after all, using the Internet largely meant text interfaces. I'm just positing that the folks who run Oculus are a) smart and b) have spent a lot of time thinking about how best to spread VR.
If VR takes off, by definition it will mean expanding beyond FPS games, because most people do not play those (you could alternatively get VR to go mainstream by increasing market penetration of FPS and FPRPG games by orders of magnitude, which might be harder than putting VR to other uses).