4 ms·

What do people want?

manbitesdog 1y ago
As a 400h+ VR gamer, more fun games. No AAA stuff, not crazy graphics, just more incentives for developers to build unique experiences that might not be possible if not for VR. I don't think I've met a single VR user that bought the headset for a different reason.
- foobarian 1y ago
  More like Blades and Sorcery! :-) It's impressive that they still managed to brute-force a non-trivial size market for VR games. Having a headset used to be rare but nowadays at least in our neck of the woods everyone knows at least a few other people who "have a VR". Even if it's collecting dust it's still market penetration.
  - fidotron 1y ago
    > Even if it's collecting dust it's still market penetration. The big question is why so many of these things are collecting dust. In my case a huge part of it is resistance to putting it on again to discover what new account/privacy requirements it has today, along with how they've rearranged the UI, when all I want to do is fishing and table tennis.
    - zemvpferreira 1y ago
      That’s easy to answer: there have been no great new games since Beat Saber and that was 6 years ago. People go through a lot of trouble and expense to have fun, but there’s no fun to be had in VR for most.
      - foobarian 1y ago
        As I mentioned above, Blades and Sorcery is my anecdotal counterexample. I will throw money at any new games like it.
        smoothgrammer 1y ago
        Wait for Into the Radius 2. The first was a masterpiece as well.
      - cableshaft 1y ago
        Puzzling Places and Walkabout Minigolf would like to have a word with you. They're the two games I keep coming back to the most, and both have a ton of varied and interesting content. Making 3D puzzles in 3D space where you can twist and turn everything in 3D to see where things might line up and leave the pieces floating wherever you drop them is very compelling. And the puzzles themselves are sometimes animated and/or have dynamic atmospheric audio for some puzzles depending on what pieces you're grabbing. It's great. That being said, they're both getting kind of old now themselves, at 4 and 5 years old.
        zemvpferreira 1y ago
        I don't mean to say that there are no fun games, but they're just not good enough to drive $400 expenses. They're not Pong and they're not Mario. They're not even Fruit Ninja or Mafia Wars. And yeah, your counterpoints being 4 years old isn't helping the case either. New platforms need killer apps like people need oxygen. VR just doesn't have one so far. Gorn got close-ish, Beat Saber got close-ish. That's that. For my money, it'll be something like Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes that makes VR go huge or it won't be anything at all.
    - delichon 1y ago
      Mine is collecting dust because something in my subconscious remembers the (mild) nausea when I use it and diverts me to something else. I think of it as a hind brain reaction, like a memory of a food that once made me sick. Is anyone looking for a good deal on a lightly used Quest 3?
      - glenneroo 1y ago
        That sucks, I think I know your pain. I'm also extremely sensitive (weak "VR legs") even after 6 years of developing for various headsets. Sorry to go into unsolicited debug mode (feel free to ignore) but have you tried any mixed reality games? Personally I have no problems with games like Eleven table tennis in MR mode, which lets you place the table in your living room so you don't have to worry about crashing into furniture (as much) and more importantly > 50% of what you see is color passthrough camera footage so your brain doesn't have to fight (if that's your issue). Also did you play with the IPD settings on the headset? That can also cause nausea if they are set wrong. I always get nauseous with games where I'm floating or that use fake movement e.g. running, flying, jumping, anything my body can't possibly be doing right now. I find teleporting to be the least bothersome, and vignetting sometimes workable (esp. if I look upwards more than at the floor as it's moving beneath me). I always check for games that they are labeled "comfortable"... there's been a ton of crazy indie stuff coming out lately using various creative forms of mixed reality/passthrough which are much easier on sensitive brains.
        foobarian 1y ago
        I found I am not highly sensitive to the VR disconnect but still found that there are a particular type of scenarios that get me nauseous in seconds - similar to yours but more narrowly isolated to motion that doesn't match balance sensations. I am fine with games where you run or float as long as it's in the forward direction. But I played some racing simulator the other day with rapid turns and sideways motion against the biological direction that took me an hour to recover from after having the headset on for a few minutes. Pretty big range of response out there.
        1y ago
    - foobarian 1y ago
      My charitable answer would be it's hard to break the chicken and egg cycle. Not enough headsets -> game developers don't target the platform -> no demand to buy headsets without games. I have to respect how much they were willing to invest to try and break the cycle; for now it seems the headset count at least is nontrivial enough to get at least a handful of appealing games. Time will tell if that continues I guess. (I found kids love to play Yeeps Hide and Seek. I would never in a million years suspect that would be a successful game. It's an MMO, and it has an interesting mechanic of defaulting to voice comms, which ends up with the kids forming an ingroup that rejects anyone who sounds "grown up". There are also levers to deal with griefing behaviors. I think is a great way to filter out the usual internet boogeyman the "creepy perv" types.)
    - sandworm101 1y ago
      >> putting it on again to discover what new account/privacy requirements it has today For me, it isn't the accounts but questioning whether some update in the last month has bricked the thing. Between updates to my OS, my graphics drive, the games, or VR hardware itself, I inevitably have to go through a period of turning things off and on again ... holding the headset or waiving it in front of the sensors as I wonder if it will connect properly. I tried to use it last week, but rage-quit when steam told me it had updates for the base stations. Just ... no. I have better things to do.
      - nolist_policy 1y ago
        That's why I restrict myself to running games standalone on my headset. It just works. Meta got that one right.
- arnaudsm 1y ago
  400h+ VR gamer too, I disagree on "no crazy graphics". The Standalone strategy of leaving PCVR made VR accessible, but killed game innovation entirely. The entire industry was downgraded graphically of 2 entire generations. Sure, there are wizards like StressLevelZero that can ship beautiful games on Quest, but most studios cannot. I wish they hadn't abandonned PCVR, and kept pushing the boundaries of the medium like Valve did with Alyx.
  - atrus 1y ago
    No, the crazy graphics has ballooned the cost of games so much that it's hurt the industry. Making a 3d game is hard enough, throwing the additional complexity and intricacies on top of that would make it too expensive to be profitable. Minecraft and pokemon have famously behind the times graphics and they've done well. Beat Sabre and Gorilla Tag have done well on VR, and those are hardly crazy graphics. Instead of Meta buying game companies and never releasing games, they should have bought those companies, seen how their pipelines looked for a successful release, and then developed software that streamlined those releases, making it easier for outside companies to release more and better games.
    - arnaudsm 1y ago
      Production budget != Compute budget. Minecraft, a 15 year old game, runs at 30fps on the Quest2, which will make anyone instantly sick. Although I've had a blast on Minecraft in PCVR (but you need strong VR legs)
      - atrus 1y ago
        I wasn't using minecraft and pokemon as vr examples, but as examples of good graphics not being a good indicator of a game selling well.
    - BobaFloutist 1y ago
      It's interesting, because 3d graphics are already something that games do very well in 2d. Is it because the platform is more resource limited, so you have to find a way to squeeze high-quality graphics out of less compute? And I guess I don't know that much about the technology, but I assume they're sending slightly different images to each eye, which probably means they need to generate two pictures instead of one, so that might be a multiplier on the compute to get a given perspective? I mean Nintendo is pretty well known for squeezing appealing and attractive visuals out of limited hardware, so I can totally see an argument for going for more BOTW/TOTK-style graphics than your CODs or your Gods of War?
Beijinger 1y ago
Porn?
- spacebanana7 1y ago
  The best thing for VR adoption would be for Meta to send out a few thousand VR cameras to onlyfans creators, and pay onlyfans a $1B to add VR video support. This might sound expensive and wasteful, but it’s actually probably cheaper than the effort to improve gaming or hand tracking by a substantial amounts. Also more likely to drive unit sales.
  - elcritch 1y ago
    Porn is already destructive enough to society. Making it more immersive would be even worse.
    - spacebanana7 1y ago
      Just wait until Meta puts targeted adverts in there too.
- chasd00 1y ago
  there use to be a saying that went like "no internet technology can be considered a success until it's adopted by the porn industry".
spicyusername 1y ago
Walkabout Mini Golf is the only VR experience I regularly dust my headset off to return to with friends. Most everything else is either too gimmicky or is just not fun enough to make it worth the cumbersome headset. VR is still really in its infancy, but with Walkabout I really feel like I can see the vision, can feel what is coming. I don't know what it is about that game, but something about the graphics and the gameplay really come together to make you feel like you're inhabiting the space with other people.
- ashoeafoot 1y ago
  Having meetings while walking? Not to be in office , but appear to be there.
mrweasel 1y ago
A very small VR setup, with a multi-directional treadmill, which can easily fold in under the sofa. Drop anything but first person gaming, just make that work. Oh and make it PS5 and Xbox compatible. Gamers want to walk Skyrim, or the Fallout wasteland, but if it's just a set of goggles on your face then what's the point? You could just get a bigger TV. I doubt that you can actually do it, with current tech, but $60B and we're no closer? It's still just a set of goggles.
- polotics 1y ago
  the only thing that would justify VR for me would indeed be the physical activity angle: a good omnidirectional treadmill to do my 20000 steps while gaming.
Der_Einzige 1y ago
The only, actual objective way for VR to work is for it to be properly world-scale. We need spaces/buildings dedicated for this, and we need setups and headsets from manufacturers which acknowledge this situation. We specifically need users to understand that VR really means VR + giant GPU in your backpack (or I guess laptop in this case). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DvB07X84HM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DvB07X84HM Seriously, this video came out 5 years ago, and nothing has improved what-so-ever with VR.
h2zizzle 1y ago
>Go to open field/park (irl or virtually). >Look at your hand. >There is a virtual Pokéball/Yu-Gi-Oh card in it. Something like that. OR I put on my headset, look at my computer/call for my NAS. I ask to see my photos folder. They appear around me as I'd configured previously: as a mass of images that I can manipulate as if they were real, but also if I were psychic. I wave one over, pluck it out of the air, gaze at it. This is way better than scrolling on a tiny phone screen. OR People don't know what they want yet. All they know is that the offerings so far don't appeal to them, being some combination of geek-niche and corporate blandness. One or two or three megacorporations cannot build and control the successor to the PC and smarptphone ecosystems in the heavy-handed manner that they've tried to. Make the tech cheap enough for everyone to get their hands on and easy to develop for (even if you don't get a cut of every single red cent that passes over the platform). Watch the public weave miracles for you.
markus_zhang 1y ago
I'd like to have arguments reality. For example AR could be helpful for defensive driving. It could also be very useful for, say, reverse engineering a piece of hardware - so instead of taking a picture and get into a software, I can do it in AR glasses. I think it's going to be useful for many scenarios but it needs to be small and comfortable.
Gigachad 1y ago
The only thing I ever hear people do in VR is VR chat. And that mostly seems to consist of virtual sex.
- nolist_policy 1y ago
  > And that mostly seems to consist of virtual sex. That's not true at all.

As a 400h+ VR gamer, more fun games. No AAA stuff, not crazy graphics, just more incentives for developers to build unique experiences that might not be possible if not for VR. I don't think I've met a single VR user that bought the headset for a different reason.

foobarian 1y ago
More like Blades and Sorcery! :-) It's impressive that they still managed to brute-force a non-trivial size market for VR games. Having a headset used to be rare but nowadays at least in our neck of the woods everyone knows at least a few other people who "have a VR". Even if it's collecting dust it's still market penetration.
- fidotron 1y ago
  > Even if it's collecting dust it's still market penetration. The big question is why so many of these things are collecting dust. In my case a huge part of it is resistance to putting it on again to discover what new account/privacy requirements it has today, along with how they've rearranged the UI, when all I want to do is fishing and table tennis.
  - zemvpferreira 1y ago
    That’s easy to answer: there have been no great new games since Beat Saber and that was 6 years ago. People go through a lot of trouble and expense to have fun, but there’s no fun to be had in VR for most.
    - foobarian 1y ago
      As I mentioned above, Blades and Sorcery is my anecdotal counterexample. I will throw money at any new games like it.
      - smoothgrammer 1y ago
        Wait for Into the Radius 2. The first was a masterpiece as well.
    - cableshaft 1y ago
      Puzzling Places and Walkabout Minigolf would like to have a word with you. They're the two games I keep coming back to the most, and both have a ton of varied and interesting content. Making 3D puzzles in 3D space where you can twist and turn everything in 3D to see where things might line up and leave the pieces floating wherever you drop them is very compelling. And the puzzles themselves are sometimes animated and/or have dynamic atmospheric audio for some puzzles depending on what pieces you're grabbing. It's great. That being said, they're both getting kind of old now themselves, at 4 and 5 years old.
      - zemvpferreira 1y ago
        I don't mean to say that there are no fun games, but they're just not good enough to drive $400 expenses. They're not Pong and they're not Mario. They're not even Fruit Ninja or Mafia Wars. And yeah, your counterpoints being 4 years old isn't helping the case either. New platforms need killer apps like people need oxygen. VR just doesn't have one so far. Gorn got close-ish, Beat Saber got close-ish. That's that. For my money, it'll be something like Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes that makes VR go huge or it won't be anything at all.
  - delichon 1y ago
    Mine is collecting dust because something in my subconscious remembers the (mild) nausea when I use it and diverts me to something else. I think of it as a hind brain reaction, like a memory of a food that once made me sick. Is anyone looking for a good deal on a lightly used Quest 3?
    - glenneroo 1y ago
      That sucks, I think I know your pain. I'm also extremely sensitive (weak "VR legs") even after 6 years of developing for various headsets. Sorry to go into unsolicited debug mode (feel free to ignore) but have you tried any mixed reality games? Personally I have no problems with games like Eleven table tennis in MR mode, which lets you place the table in your living room so you don't have to worry about crashing into furniture (as much) and more importantly > 50% of what you see is color passthrough camera footage so your brain doesn't have to fight (if that's your issue). Also did you play with the IPD settings on the headset? That can also cause nausea if they are set wrong. I always get nauseous with games where I'm floating or that use fake movement e.g. running, flying, jumping, anything my body can't possibly be doing right now. I find teleporting to be the least bothersome, and vignetting sometimes workable (esp. if I look upwards more than at the floor as it's moving beneath me). I always check for games that they are labeled "comfortable"... there's been a ton of crazy indie stuff coming out lately using various creative forms of mixed reality/passthrough which are much easier on sensitive brains.
      - foobarian 1y ago
        I found I am not highly sensitive to the VR disconnect but still found that there are a particular type of scenarios that get me nauseous in seconds - similar to yours but more narrowly isolated to motion that doesn't match balance sensations. I am fine with games where you run or float as long as it's in the forward direction. But I played some racing simulator the other day with rapid turns and sideways motion against the biological direction that took me an hour to recover from after having the headset on for a few minutes. Pretty big range of response out there.
        1y ago
  - foobarian 1y ago
    My charitable answer would be it's hard to break the chicken and egg cycle. Not enough headsets -> game developers don't target the platform -> no demand to buy headsets without games. I have to respect how much they were willing to invest to try and break the cycle; for now it seems the headset count at least is nontrivial enough to get at least a handful of appealing games. Time will tell if that continues I guess. (I found kids love to play Yeeps Hide and Seek. I would never in a million years suspect that would be a successful game. It's an MMO, and it has an interesting mechanic of defaulting to voice comms, which ends up with the kids forming an ingroup that rejects anyone who sounds "grown up". There are also levers to deal with griefing behaviors. I think is a great way to filter out the usual internet boogeyman the "creepy perv" types.)
  - sandworm101 1y ago
    >> putting it on again to discover what new account/privacy requirements it has today For me, it isn't the accounts but questioning whether some update in the last month has bricked the thing. Between updates to my OS, my graphics drive, the games, or VR hardware itself, I inevitably have to go through a period of turning things off and on again ... holding the headset or waiving it in front of the sensors as I wonder if it will connect properly. I tried to use it last week, but rage-quit when steam told me it had updates for the base stations. Just ... no. I have better things to do.
    - nolist_policy 1y ago
      That's why I restrict myself to running games standalone on my headset. It just works. Meta got that one right.
arnaudsm 1y ago
400h+ VR gamer too, I disagree on "no crazy graphics". The Standalone strategy of leaving PCVR made VR accessible, but killed game innovation entirely. The entire industry was downgraded graphically of 2 entire generations. Sure, there are wizards like StressLevelZero that can ship beautiful games on Quest, but most studios cannot. I wish they hadn't abandonned PCVR, and kept pushing the boundaries of the medium like Valve did with Alyx.
- atrus 1y ago
  No, the crazy graphics has ballooned the cost of games so much that it's hurt the industry. Making a 3d game is hard enough, throwing the additional complexity and intricacies on top of that would make it too expensive to be profitable. Minecraft and pokemon have famously behind the times graphics and they've done well. Beat Sabre and Gorilla Tag have done well on VR, and those are hardly crazy graphics. Instead of Meta buying game companies and never releasing games, they should have bought those companies, seen how their pipelines looked for a successful release, and then developed software that streamlined those releases, making it easier for outside companies to release more and better games.
  - arnaudsm 1y ago
    Production budget != Compute budget. Minecraft, a 15 year old game, runs at 30fps on the Quest2, which will make anyone instantly sick. Although I've had a blast on Minecraft in PCVR (but you need strong VR legs)
    - atrus 1y ago
      I wasn't using minecraft and pokemon as vr examples, but as examples of good graphics not being a good indicator of a game selling well.
  - BobaFloutist 1y ago
    It's interesting, because 3d graphics are already something that games do very well in 2d. Is it because the platform is more resource limited, so you have to find a way to squeeze high-quality graphics out of less compute? And I guess I don't know that much about the technology, but I assume they're sending slightly different images to each eye, which probably means they need to generate two pictures instead of one, so that might be a multiplier on the compute to get a given perspective? I mean Nintendo is pretty well known for squeezing appealing and attractive visuals out of limited hardware, so I can totally see an argument for going for more BOTW/TOTK-style graphics than your CODs or your Gods of War?

Beijinger 1y ago

Porn?

spacebanana7 1y ago
The best thing for VR adoption would be for Meta to send out a few thousand VR cameras to onlyfans creators, and pay onlyfans a $1B to add VR video support. This might sound expensive and wasteful, but it’s actually probably cheaper than the effort to improve gaming or hand tracking by a substantial amounts. Also more likely to drive unit sales.
- elcritch 1y ago
  Porn is already destructive enough to society. Making it more immersive would be even worse.
  - spacebanana7 1y ago
    Just wait until Meta puts targeted adverts in there too.
chasd00 1y ago
there use to be a saying that went like "no internet technology can be considered a success until it's adopted by the porn industry".

spicyusername 1y ago

Walkabout Mini Golf is the only VR experience I regularly dust my headset off to return to with friends. Most everything else is either too gimmicky or is just not fun enough to make it worth the cumbersome headset. VR is still really in its infancy, but with Walkabout I really feel like I can see the vision, can feel what is coming. I don't know what it is about that game, but something about the graphics and the gameplay really come together to make you feel like you're inhabiting the space with other people.

ashoeafoot 1y ago
Having meetings while walking? Not to be in office , but appear to be there.

mrweasel 1y ago

A very small VR setup, with a multi-directional treadmill, which can easily fold in under the sofa. Drop anything but first person gaming, just make that work. Oh and make it PS5 and Xbox compatible. Gamers want to walk Skyrim, or the Fallout wasteland, but if it's just a set of goggles on your face then what's the point? You could just get a bigger TV. I doubt that you can actually do it, with current tech, but $60B and we're no closer? It's still just a set of goggles.

polotics 1y ago
the only thing that would justify VR for me would indeed be the physical activity angle: a good omnidirectional treadmill to do my 20000 steps while gaming.

Der_Einzige 1y ago

The only, actual objective way for VR to work is for it to be properly world-scale. We need spaces/buildings dedicated for this, and we need setups and headsets from manufacturers which acknowledge this situation. We specifically need users to understand that VR really means VR + giant GPU in your backpack (or I guess laptop in this case). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DvB07X84HM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DvB07X84HM Seriously, this video came out 5 years ago, and nothing has improved what-so-ever with VR.

h2zizzle 1y ago

>Go to open field/park (irl or virtually). >Look at your hand. >There is a virtual Pokéball/Yu-Gi-Oh card in it. Something like that. OR I put on my headset, look at my computer/call for my NAS. I ask to see my photos folder. They appear around me as I'd configured previously: as a mass of images that I can manipulate as if they were real, but also if I were psychic. I wave one over, pluck it out of the air, gaze at it. This is way better than scrolling on a tiny phone screen. OR People don't know what they want yet. All they know is that the offerings so far don't appeal to them, being some combination of geek-niche and corporate blandness. One or two or three megacorporations cannot build and control the successor to the PC and smarptphone ecosystems in the heavy-handed manner that they've tried to. Make the tech cheap enough for everyone to get their hands on and easy to develop for (even if you don't get a cut of every single red cent that passes over the platform). Watch the public weave miracles for you.

markus_zhang 1y ago

I'd like to have arguments reality. For example AR could be helpful for defensive driving. It could also be very useful for, say, reverse engineering a piece of hardware - so instead of taking a picture and get into a software, I can do it in AR glasses. I think it's going to be useful for many scenarios but it needs to be small and comfortable.

Gigachad 1y ago

The only thing I ever hear people do in VR is VR chat. And that mostly seems to consist of virtual sex.

nolist_policy 1y ago
> And that mostly seems to consist of virtual sex. That's not true at all.