Taking a look at news about the Tomodachi Nintendo Direct, Fable coming to the PlayStation and the impact on Xbox, the disappearing Metaverse, fantastic articles for the community spotlight, and more!
My opinion on VR, having watched it trying to become mainstream even in the 90's, is that it is too niche to take off fully; games are the only logical application for them.
When PC's expanded, games were a popular option, but the fact that you could do word processing, spreadsheets, then eventually use the internet is what made them appear in every home. When smartphones appeared, it was the ability to make phone calls but also access the internet from anywhere, use dedicated apps to all your platforms, share your experiences with others far more easily (maybe too easily). And of course games are an option too.
With VR, you play an interactive, eveloping experience, but what else can you do? Not tried these, but I imagine "typing" in midair is not tactile enough, so all the regular apps you need are less useful. For meetings, we have other, simpler options - we may complain about them, but audio and video is all you really need. Feeling more present is not really a large enough benefit.
So I think VR was always going to be a sci-fi dream, just like flying cars and jetpacks - they could exist, but why bother?
Thanks for sharing and reading Peter! I love that perspective, and definitely agree with you on that! The only appeal I ever saw for VR in a workplace setting was during COVID, and VR being used for virtual meetings. In theory, it might sound good, but I would imagine how annoying/terrible/expensive it would be in practice compared to just using typical meeting applications.
Gaming definitely seems like the main niche/application that has been consistent with VR for years. I would love to try some different games out on modern tech to see how it works, and maybe to even try out some of the things that Jim Mander had mentioned in his comment about using a headset for a visual display, which would be pretty neat. I just don't know how much I would actually use them though for the upfront investment to get into VR in the first place.
Thanks again Peter! Greatly appreciate you taking the time to share and for reading 🙌
SAME! After the Developer_Direct, I honestly am looking forward to Fable more than I am GTA: VI at this point! They made it look really good with a lot of neat features and mechanics!
I'm a huge fan of VR in general - I've been using headsets since the very first Rift, and some of my favorite games from the past few years have been VR exclusives, VR ports, or had VR as an option. I think there's some niches that VR just does extremely well, some reasons to use it beyond the niches, and some reasons why it was doomed to fail at scale.
The niches are pretty obvious - games with high immersion and tactile feedback, like the Walking Dead survival FPS games, are a perfect fit for motion controls, limited physical movement, and a slow, tense pace. Same with STALKER-likes like Into the Radius - you're very slowly moving around, pulling open cabinets and fiddling with your weapons and inventory, and then when things start popping off and you start dropping your weapons or fumbling your gun, it's something that just can't come across on a flat screen with traditional controls. Ports are also sometimes great - the Team Beef ports of classic FPS games like Doom and Jedi Outcast are some of my favorite things in VR, because the perspective change and immersive controls really do a lot to spice up a replay of something you've done a hundred times.
And then there's things I think people don't give enough credit to VR for. I've used the Quest 3 in the past purely as a display - the passthrough is good enough that you can still see the whole world around you relatively clearly, you can pull video in and stretch it into a virtual monitor of arbitrary size and location, and watch videos, play flatscreen games, and multitask without a bulky multi-monitor setup in whatever room you happen to be in, on the couch, for example, without distracting anyone else or even having people looking over your shoulder. I even think it's genuinely a good platform for more social interactions, just not in the forced way Meta was trying to ram through with 'AR work meetings' - I've had great times with friends in VR fishing and minigolf, I've spent a lot of time putting together jigsaw puzzles and chatting with my mother in VR, and I've even really enjoyed going on VRChat and, yes, the Meta Horizon Worlds and joking with or even just people-watching in virtual spaces where you can get by with just a nod and a wave.
But there are a few things that kill it, including what you listed - the comfort and the price. But beyond those, there's also something that's in my opinion more damning - an environment that drives developers and gamers away. For developers, the overhead to start development in VR, much less to stay up on hardware changes and the constant firmware updates, cannot be tenable outside of a handful of mostly established, externally supported studios. The buying base isn't big enough, discovery is terrible, press is almost non-existent, and so prices have to be artificially high. Then the high price feeds into all the other problems for players, who have already had to opt in to several levels of hardware investment themselves - the terrible discovery and glut of shovelware make it hard to find worthwhile games that aren't highlighted by the hardware developer, and even keeping those few games running reliably is sometimes more headache than it is worth.
And none of the big players in the headset market have managed to look like they know what they're doing, at least in cultivating a market for the games or applications that would drive sales of the headsets. Meta has come the closest, funding an exclusive, full, and genuinely great port of Resident Evil 4 [the original version], playing around with creating virtual social spaces and eventually providing decent dev tools and support, but all with too much wishy-washy corporate oversight that wound up choking any promise out, and failing to sell it at all to consumers. Apple was roundly ridiculed for their promotion of the Vision as basically just a virtual display, and they absolutely could have taken the opportunity to prove everyone wrong and show why that's a perfectly valid use-case for VR... and instead they over-built it, overcharged, and had people wondering why they'd pay twice as much for a headset as they would to put a separate big-screen smart TV in every room they spend their day in.
I'm cautiously hopeful the new Steam headset comes with a Steam Deck level of broad support from Valve, encouraging smaller devs to take swings at a VR ecosystem that has some life breathed into it besides 'wouldn't you like to look at Facebook or work emails all day with a damn helmet on?' But until it comes out, and probably until a year or so in, we won't really know.
That was an awesome read, thanks Jim for sharing all of that!
The idea of just using it as a display is something I wish was marketed a bit better. Even the reasons you listed made me start thinking of different applications that I could use a headset for. The perspective on the developer's side is also something I hadn't thought of, and I could see how problematic that would be for them to make investments into VR.
My opinion on VR, having watched it trying to become mainstream even in the 90's, is that it is too niche to take off fully; games are the only logical application for them.
When PC's expanded, games were a popular option, but the fact that you could do word processing, spreadsheets, then eventually use the internet is what made them appear in every home. When smartphones appeared, it was the ability to make phone calls but also access the internet from anywhere, use dedicated apps to all your platforms, share your experiences with others far more easily (maybe too easily). And of course games are an option too.
With VR, you play an interactive, eveloping experience, but what else can you do? Not tried these, but I imagine "typing" in midair is not tactile enough, so all the regular apps you need are less useful. For meetings, we have other, simpler options - we may complain about them, but audio and video is all you really need. Feeling more present is not really a large enough benefit.
So I think VR was always going to be a sci-fi dream, just like flying cars and jetpacks - they could exist, but why bother?
Thanks for sharing and reading Peter! I love that perspective, and definitely agree with you on that! The only appeal I ever saw for VR in a workplace setting was during COVID, and VR being used for virtual meetings. In theory, it might sound good, but I would imagine how annoying/terrible/expensive it would be in practice compared to just using typical meeting applications.
Gaming definitely seems like the main niche/application that has been consistent with VR for years. I would love to try some different games out on modern tech to see how it works, and maybe to even try out some of the things that Jim Mander had mentioned in his comment about using a headset for a visual display, which would be pretty neat. I just don't know how much I would actually use them though for the upfront investment to get into VR in the first place.
Thanks again Peter! Greatly appreciate you taking the time to share and for reading 🙌
CAN NOT WAIT ANY LONGER FOR FABLE!! haha 😂
SAME! After the Developer_Direct, I honestly am looking forward to Fable more than I am GTA: VI at this point! They made it look really good with a lot of neat features and mechanics!
I'm a huge fan of VR in general - I've been using headsets since the very first Rift, and some of my favorite games from the past few years have been VR exclusives, VR ports, or had VR as an option. I think there's some niches that VR just does extremely well, some reasons to use it beyond the niches, and some reasons why it was doomed to fail at scale.
The niches are pretty obvious - games with high immersion and tactile feedback, like the Walking Dead survival FPS games, are a perfect fit for motion controls, limited physical movement, and a slow, tense pace. Same with STALKER-likes like Into the Radius - you're very slowly moving around, pulling open cabinets and fiddling with your weapons and inventory, and then when things start popping off and you start dropping your weapons or fumbling your gun, it's something that just can't come across on a flat screen with traditional controls. Ports are also sometimes great - the Team Beef ports of classic FPS games like Doom and Jedi Outcast are some of my favorite things in VR, because the perspective change and immersive controls really do a lot to spice up a replay of something you've done a hundred times.
And then there's things I think people don't give enough credit to VR for. I've used the Quest 3 in the past purely as a display - the passthrough is good enough that you can still see the whole world around you relatively clearly, you can pull video in and stretch it into a virtual monitor of arbitrary size and location, and watch videos, play flatscreen games, and multitask without a bulky multi-monitor setup in whatever room you happen to be in, on the couch, for example, without distracting anyone else or even having people looking over your shoulder. I even think it's genuinely a good platform for more social interactions, just not in the forced way Meta was trying to ram through with 'AR work meetings' - I've had great times with friends in VR fishing and minigolf, I've spent a lot of time putting together jigsaw puzzles and chatting with my mother in VR, and I've even really enjoyed going on VRChat and, yes, the Meta Horizon Worlds and joking with or even just people-watching in virtual spaces where you can get by with just a nod and a wave.
But there are a few things that kill it, including what you listed - the comfort and the price. But beyond those, there's also something that's in my opinion more damning - an environment that drives developers and gamers away. For developers, the overhead to start development in VR, much less to stay up on hardware changes and the constant firmware updates, cannot be tenable outside of a handful of mostly established, externally supported studios. The buying base isn't big enough, discovery is terrible, press is almost non-existent, and so prices have to be artificially high. Then the high price feeds into all the other problems for players, who have already had to opt in to several levels of hardware investment themselves - the terrible discovery and glut of shovelware make it hard to find worthwhile games that aren't highlighted by the hardware developer, and even keeping those few games running reliably is sometimes more headache than it is worth.
And none of the big players in the headset market have managed to look like they know what they're doing, at least in cultivating a market for the games or applications that would drive sales of the headsets. Meta has come the closest, funding an exclusive, full, and genuinely great port of Resident Evil 4 [the original version], playing around with creating virtual social spaces and eventually providing decent dev tools and support, but all with too much wishy-washy corporate oversight that wound up choking any promise out, and failing to sell it at all to consumers. Apple was roundly ridiculed for their promotion of the Vision as basically just a virtual display, and they absolutely could have taken the opportunity to prove everyone wrong and show why that's a perfectly valid use-case for VR... and instead they over-built it, overcharged, and had people wondering why they'd pay twice as much for a headset as they would to put a separate big-screen smart TV in every room they spend their day in.
I'm cautiously hopeful the new Steam headset comes with a Steam Deck level of broad support from Valve, encouraging smaller devs to take swings at a VR ecosystem that has some life breathed into it besides 'wouldn't you like to look at Facebook or work emails all day with a damn helmet on?' But until it comes out, and probably until a year or so in, we won't really know.
That was an awesome read, thanks Jim for sharing all of that!
The idea of just using it as a display is something I wish was marketed a bit better. Even the reasons you listed made me start thinking of different applications that I could use a headset for. The perspective on the developer's side is also something I hadn't thought of, and I could see how problematic that would be for them to make investments into VR.
Thanks again for reading and sharing 🙌
This was so nice thank you 😭!
No problem! Loved those articles, and thank YOU for writing them 🙌
I appreciate that. Thanks for spending time with them 🙂