from Hacker News

I've Been Waiting For The Oculus Rift, But Now It's Sitting In My Closet

by r0h1n on 5/28/16, 9:33 AM with 150 comments

• by newhouseb on 5/29/16, 6:47 AM

  To me, the most exciting thing about VR (particularly on the Vive) is not anything gaming related but the possibilities around creation and collaboration that are opened up by being able to program in "the real world." If you've played with Tiltbrush at all you can see a glimpse of this. Your brain's implicit understanding of your presence in 3D space is incredibly vital to understanding the shapes and structure that you see with your eyes. You can imagine many design fields: fashion, furniture, architecture, etc can all have a dramatically reduced leap between conceptualization and realization.

  A lot of people are quick to dismiss VR and present AR as the future, but I think a more constructive way to think about it is that VR is AR without the walls punched out (yet). Realistically, we all spend the majority of our lives in a couple rooms (an office and a bedroom), so by moving to AR the largest benefit is going to be comfort. So many potential new interactions are ripe for exploring today, even in VR (not to mention the Vive has a front-facing camera anyway, although the latency can be a bit nauseating).

• by onewaystreet on 5/29/16, 4:23 AM

  There's been a lot of fighting between Vive owners and Oculus owners over which HMD is the best, but they both miss the reality that the biggest challenge to getting the average person to adopt VR isn't room tracking or motion controllers, it's getting them to even want to put the things on. There is very little compelling software at this point that would make anyone but an enthusiast want to use either of them for more than a few hours.

• by kranner on 5/29/16, 4:29 AM

  It's especially a problem if you live in a hot and humid climate like I do. No matter what I did I could not prevent the lenses from fogging over and I tried everything from antifog sprays for ski masks to stuffing paper towels into the sides of the headset.

  The steamy, foggy, bad-smelling experience contributes as much to the nausea, or at least it exacerbates it in my experience.

• by BuckRogers on 5/29/16, 4:19 AM

  A few points that stood out to me.

  1. He has the wrong headset. VR needs roomspace or it's just not going to be worth it. Yes gametime on the extreme end will go down in VR. That's very welcome by many of us finely aged gamers who don't have much time anyway for 6 to 12 hour sessions anymore (or don't want to invest that kind of time). I'd rather put in 1 to 2 hours a day of insanely immersive gametime than 12 hours of Civilization (which I already put countless hours into during the early 90s anyway).

  2. He did nail the second thing that needs to happen when he said the cords were a mess: the need for a self-contained VR system with no cords. Cell phone VR for the basic setup and a more powerful and immersive but also wirefree all-in-one VR outfit is where it'll be at in the longterm. Think Powergloves and the whole deal.

  3. Main issue here is that this as an author who doesn't know what he needs. But what he needs is a killer app. Once someone figures out what that is, it'll explode.

• by vectorpush on 5/29/16, 6:47 AM

  I think the problem isn't so much that the tech isn't ready, it's simply that the software is immature. Everyone has been rushing hard to get this tech out the door, but software developers haven't really had time to produce much beyond "app-store" quality content which tends to lack lasting replay value. We all know it takes a lot of time to produce high quality software and there is still a lot of experimentation that needs to happen before developers lock onto the techniques that provide the optimal experience.

  People aren't going to keep putting on their headset just to look at tech demos, they're going to keep coming back to experience the well designed, super fun, highly addictive title that they've been playing obsessively, just like on every other platform.

• by wmeddie on 5/29/16, 4:34 AM

  VR headsets that are attached to big PCs are very much a solo-thing at the moment. I can understand wanting to play a multi-player game like Halo while visiting a friend's house.

  I got my Oculus Rift a few weeks ago and absolutely love it. Practically use it every day. Lucky's Tale was surprisingly good, and I can no longer Elite: Dangerous without the headset.

  There's not enough software at the moment. I still want to see a good flight simulator and Altspace-like spaces with actual things to do with people.

• by vmp on 5/29/16, 8:09 AM

  I had the DK2 and pretty much the same thing happened, boxed and shelved after a week, after I tried all the best demos - although for a different reason: the eye-strain and nausea was too much to bear for me. I couldn't really explain it since other people, family members and friends, could wear it just fine for any amount of time. I wear glasses but neither lenses or any settings offered relieve, guess I'm simply too sensitive to enjoy current-gen VR. Also the DK2 drivers were glitchy - had to plug in an old 19" monitor because the only way the rift would run at its designed 75Hz was with a primary monitor that supported it too, it's been a real hassle to switch from a nice 27" 1440p display to 1280x1024 and back, only to get really bad judder ingame because either the game wasn't using the latest SDK version or my GPU couldn't keep up (gtx 670 with an i7-2600k). Direct-To-Rift mode should have fixed these issues (judder primarily) but it rarely worked for me. Note that I never tried the CV1 or any other HMD so far, nor do I really plan to. My DK2 experience has been sobering but I am hopeful for future generations.

• by jkelsey on 5/29/16, 4:57 AM

  I did the Oculus demo at a Best Buy. The technology is incredibly impressive, but I found the experience annoying. Besides the face sweat, I just can't envision myself coming home and enjoying my time in a headset the same way I can enjoy myself in front of a TV or computer, and I think that's because you can't see around your physical space without taking the headset on and off.

  Maybe I'm just being a troglodyte about VR. I can admit that much.

• by bunkydoo on 5/29/16, 5:43 AM

  VR is going to be somewhat like the advent of the 3D television in 2010-ish. Every manufacturer will make one, few people will buy one, and the people who do will likely only use it on novelty occasions. VR is really only a stepping stone to augmented reality, and mixed reality mobile operating systems. On a side note Oculus and WhatsApp seem to be some of the dumbest expenditures Facebook could have ever made. 13 billion dollars for a messaging app. Thats 13 trips to the moon and back... But fuck it, we will just eat Cheetos and do a computer simulation of a moon mission in an Oculus. #MillennialLyfe

• by greenspot on 5/29/16, 10:05 AM

  Not sure but the current and next VR gen might be the next smartwatch. Overhyped.

  Why =>

  1. You need an highres screen which must be pixel-free. Even if you throw Samsung's ppi front runners Note 5 or S7 into a Google cardboard you definitely see pixels; it's not crisp, it's not clear, it's just annoying and those monster phones have already 500-600ppi, more than any Oculus. So we need screens with 1000 ppi minimum because they sit so close in front of your eyes. We are used to crispy Retina noteboks and even higher res smartphone screens for years and shall now go back?

  2. People are annoyed by Androids micro stuttering here and there, even the mainstream users and now we believe some milliseconds latency and stutter won't hurt VR? So here we need minimum 60 fps and even more since head movements can be quite quick and morever, even subtle movements which happen with your head all the time must be reflected with same sensivity. Didn't see this yet.

  3. 1000ppi at 60fps? Ok, let's try to get hardware for this; you need hardware with the best avail GPUs, coolers, heatpipes, and fat cables to your lovely headset since batteries won't help. So we talk about a non-mobile product, something with cables keeping you at one position. And a price tag far away for the mainstream user.

  Once this thing can be sold next to the Playstation for few hundred bucks at the quality mentioned in 1 and 2 + killer apps we are ready to go and we can talk again about mainstream adoption. To get there I assume that we need min. 10 years if not more.

  And even then, if we are there and have 1+2+3 fulfilled I come up with my 4th point:

  4. Great about games is that I sit on my sofa and can conquer the world without moving at all. All is done with my fingertips on my controller. Moving is exhausting--and thats the point of video games: to not run yourself and climb mountains like you do in Uncharted 4 for days--even moving my head can get exhausting after a while and anyway head movements are also much faster done with my controller's right analogue stick. So, what's the point? Why do I need an headset when a large screen and my proven Playstation controller can do the same? Better immersion?

• by symlinkk on 5/29/16, 4:08 AM

  > The headset doesn’t always fit quite right, and the experience can be straight up exhausting

  I agree, moving your head around all the time to look at things does get really tiring after a while. I hope - and believe - that as game devs get more experience with VR, they'll design VR games differently to take into account its strengths and weaknesses. This is actually one of the reasons I think Oculus has a good chance at succeeding in the VR world - they've had the tech for quite a while and have had time to figure out how to make a good VR experience. The camera on a rail in Lucky's Tale is a good example of Oculus Studios thinking in new ways about how to design VR games. It's a new medium, and it's going to take some trial and error before we figure out how to use it correctly.

  > telling them to spend $600+ on a headset right now would just be madness, given the relatively small scope of the software at present

  I think the author should have expected that there's not much software out there, after all this is a totally new market, there's not going to be many games for it after all. I remember the day the PS3 came out there were very few games for it, and that was Sony's 3rd console. Give it some time.

  Overall, I think VR has enormous potential. Give Virtual Desktop a try, or a deep VR game like Elite: Dangerous, or even something simple but polished like Lucky's Tale.

• by cheerioty on 5/29/16, 4:43 AM

  Wrong headset :# I could spend days in the Vive and Google Tiltbrush alone.

• by Viper007Bond on 5/29/16, 5:17 AM

  Honestly the only reason I'm excited to get one is for racing simulators. Rather than trying to sit close to a big TV or having multiple displays, you can just use one of these for the immersion. Plus you can look around like you would in a real car.

  Great example (with a bit of augmented reality via green screen mixed in): https://youtu.be/LlFKjWGxZqk

• by Aelinsaar on 5/29/16, 4:11 AM

  The Vive has issues, comfort issues especially, but it's a good setup. I can't say the same for the Rift, and the controls don't help.

• by RyJones on 5/29/16, 4:01 AM

  I'm in the same place - I probably got 12 hours of gameplay out of it before I unplugged mine. It is exhausting and frustrating to use.

• by creed on 5/29/16, 7:06 AM

  I think the fact that we don't know how to use any of this at the moment just shows how new and game changing this all is.

  You can't just copy/paste any of the old stuff onto this new medium, it just doesn't work that way and you certainly cannot compare this to 3D tv/cinema...

  ..and I think the people that got hyped the most also completely underastimated the tectonic shift needed in order to make any of this really entertaining.

  I think of the "visual" component of the VR problem as solved and am now looking forward to seeing how the "interactive" component of the problem will be solved. Because you need to perceive the world, check, but now you need to be able to interact with it: not solved yet.

  But people got waaaay to excited seeing only the visual aspect solved...

• by reedlaw on 5/29/16, 7:35 AM

  I know a few people who feel sick just playing a FPS game on a regular computer monitor for more than a few minutes. Even on a high-end system 3D environments can cause motion sickness. So I believe it will be a long time until VR technology overcomes these problems.

• by cm2187 on 5/29/16, 6:43 AM

  Entirely agree with the article. There is a quote by Clemenceau: "the best time in love is when I walk up the stairs". I'd say by best time with VR is the time between ordering and receiving it...

• by frik on 5/29/16, 7:34 AM

  I tried various VR, AR, 3D glasses (shutter, anaglyph) and autostereoscopy displays in the last 20 years.

  There were several hypes and fads (like 3D TVs and movies) and VR glasses seems like another fad - especially as soon as more and more tried them and cannot imagine to use it for general purpose gaming - it's more relevant for niche topics. Autostereoscopy displays and AR might get a broader audience in future. But current prototype AR devices like HoloLens are a far cry what would be possible, and at the moment a lot of demos are faked to hype unfinished devices, as the reality is that AR is won't be ready for another 3 years (e.g. http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Microsoft-HoloLens-im... ). A problem of VR and AR-prototypes is motion sickness, that some people have (from my experience often people who have not 100% eye sight) - I never got motion sickness, but I saw some fellows vomitting on the lab floor (carpet).

  Autostereoscopy displays like in the Nintendo 3DS handheld console have its appeal as there is no ugly glass needed and technically it's possible to support a group of people, instead of just one person. So in near future our smartphones and TVs may have such a 3D display. And given a 4k LCD panel one can still get a 1080p or 720p 3D resolution out of it, that's already enough and it will be cheap. And with back projection technology even projectors could be used for 3D autostereoscopy.

• by Negative1 on 5/29/16, 6:40 AM

  Summary; VR is a great novelty but it wears out and then you're just left with sub-par looking games lacking replay value and quality. It's super expensive and the games aren't very engaging (no killer app yet). The competitor landscape is also confusing and there's a lot of innovation still left to be done by industry heavyweights (namely Google and Apple).

  Basically, VR is here but the experience isn't sticky enough due to lack of great software. Sound familiar?

• by SystemOut on 5/29/16, 6:54 AM

  I have to agree with most, if not all, of what this article is saying. Some friends of mine brought over their gaming rig and the Vive over. My kids loved it, it was pretty cool and all but there is no way I'm spending 2K to buy a gaming PC and the Vive. On top of that, you need a 3m by 4m room to play the better games so anytime I want to play I have to clear out a room in the house or dedicate it basically. For a game system? No.

  For this to go big, and eventually I think it will, you need the headset to be wireless, the goggles have to be lighter, and the video card necessary to power the thing needs to be an appliance. I'm guessing once the consoles can handle it we might see more traction.

  I also would like to see the hand controllers something more along the lines of a set of light weight gloves or something that allows finger and gesture tracking. Basically, Minority Report. When I was playing hollow point and budget cuts on the vive I really wanted something like that.

• by laichzeit0 on 5/29/16, 5:05 AM

  This is not surprising. VR is currently in the "peak of inflated expectations" in terms of the Hype Cycle [1]. Sit it out for another 2 years before taking another look at it.

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle

• by yarrel on 5/29/16, 4:39 AM

  They need to open up the wire protocol. Let people innovate outside their walled garden.

• by Animats on 5/29/16, 5:02 AM

  I still think VR headsets are the next 3D TV. Yes, they're cool, for a few days. Yes, some hardcore FPS gamers like them. There's a modest market for them. But it may not be that big.

• by partycoder on 5/29/16, 6:38 AM

  Well... I was an early adopter for the Amazon Echo. Initially it was about the same, novelty but practically useless, until new integrations were added and now I make extensive use of it.

• by gear54rus on 5/29/16, 4:21 AM

  Gonna derail this a bit, but what the fck is up with stock indicators in these 'news' posts? Seeing more and more of that lately.

  Who even cares about that: https://i.imgur.com/TI5T7ah.png when they came to read a story such as this. Is this some useless bs marketing move or am I missing something.

  Please explain.

• by philliphaydon on 5/29/16, 4:12 AM

  I was going to preorder but ultimately I opted not to simply because there's no real use case, yet. It's still too early. I believe in a few years it will be worth it but I just don't want to be an early adopter on demo ware.

• by pdimitar on 5/29/16, 1:44 PM

  Damn, an overhyped tech carried by massive paid PR campaigns is not holding up. SURPRISE! Never seen that before in human history, no sir.

  I find Jeff Atwood's piece on VR to be the truest of them all. He nails it at every point.

• by dclowd9901 on 5/29/16, 6:32 AM

  It's been my complaint since the beginning: This isn't virtual reality. It's clever, non-sickening head tracking. Great. Now I won't throw up when I move my head around in a 3D space.

  We're a bit closer, but not nearly close enough, to total immersion. You can play a racing game or a flying game and get some pretty good immersion, maybe even trick your brain here or there. But VR is a fever dream until we understand how brain impulses work and can manipulate them directly to simulate experience.

  Of course, by then, we'll probably be questioning the whole thing altogether.

• by Blackthorn on 5/29/16, 5:43 AM

  Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for mine to ship at the end of June / start of July :-(

  I love flight and racing sims, so I expect to get a lot more use out of it.

• by cloudjacker on 5/29/16, 5:24 AM

  > Despite my surprising lack of interest in VR, I recognize that it is the future. This isn’t one company making some gimmicky piece of tech .... and lord knows when Apple unveils their own VR headset, it’ll be game over.

  oh geez, this means nothing.

• by sillysaurus3 on 5/29/16, 4:07 AM

  Apparently I can't read this article due to using adblock. Neither visiting the article nor the "web" workaround work. http://i.imgur.com/8LN6ec0r.png

  Fascinating. I wonder what the web will look like in a decade.

  On-topic: I was one of the original backers of Oculus, but missed the opportunity to get a free Rift. I guess it didn't matter much.

  It seems like what happened to the Oculus is what happened to many platforms throughout history: No killer app on launch day = no uptake.