VR Is Not Dead

The biggest impediment for VR is the fundamentally asocial nature of it.

If there are fewer headsets in a room than there are people, it’s going to be awkward for at least one person. Trying to help someone debug something in their headset without me being able to see what they see is a problem (granted, this could be solved by software).

Having to share headsets sucks. You have to faff with head straps, adjust IPD, focus. I’ve had exactly one evening where everyone had a headset and things worked well for everyone involved. I’ve had dozens if not hundreds of events filled with awkward moments, setup issues, problems, where everyone is continuously taking the headset off and need to figure something out. And this was while working for a VR company where everyone was quite computer and VR literate.

Reflecting on it, it felt kind of like 90s and 2000s LAN parties, before the days of DHCP. Randomly copying values around, IP conflicts and not understanding subnet values. Good times.

VR's problem, in my opinion, is that I can get immersed (fully, exactly as the author describes it) in a 2D game just fine - the lack of stereo vision or head-tracking or motion controls is no more an impediment to my immersion than the limited binocular overlap or peripheral vision or lag in a VR headset. And 2D is a heck of a lot cheaper and more convenient (and less nauseating).

That's not to say VR can never be successful, but I think it needs to offer something more compelling than just "immersion." Exercise or AR might be viable routes.

With AI, VR is even more promising. I have been working on a Gaussian splat renderer for the Quest 3, and by having Claude and ChatGPT read state-of-the-art papers, I have been able to build a training and rendering pipeline that is getting >50 fps for large indoor scenes on the Quest 3. I started with an (AI-driven) port of a desktop renderer, which got less than 1 fps, but I've integrated both training and rendering improvements from research and added a bunch of quality and performance improvements and now it's actually usable. Applying research papers to a novel product is something that used to take weeks or months of a person's time and can now be measured in minutes and hours (and tokens).

In my experience in the real word, VR is a lot like racing sims. No one I know owns a VR headset, no one I know talks about it, no one I know is very interested in it at all, but both exist as ticketed experience at places in and around malls.

So from where I'm sitting in my middle class suburbs, it's certainly not dead, but it's basically the modern equivalent of those actuated flight sim entertainment experiences from the 80s/90s.

VR seems to be much bigger among the perpetually online. For us normies VR is hardly a blip on the radar.

I still don't even really understand what Horizon Worlds or the Metaverse even was, or if there's a distinction between the two. I've heard of VRChat, but from the little I've seen, it seems extremely unappealing.

I still think that most people don't want to strap a computer screen to their face, for any reason. I've done it, it's not very pleasant.

IMO this blog post can be summarized as "Even if nobody actually wants to use VR for extended periods, it's cool so it will be coming in the future eventually!!"

VR is the perfect metaphor IMO for how "the tech industry" at large has lost its way. It's no longer about using technology to solve long standing human problems, it's about how tech firms can find ways to insert themselves in the fabric of human existence so they can suck their rent indefinitely.

I actually think VR is very cool, and I thoroughly enjoy playing VR games like Beat Saber. But building a really fun (short term) gaming platform, or finding some dedicated VR use cases in specific environments like construction, was never going to be enough for big tech. They wouldn't be satisfied unless all of us had goggles strapped to our faces for 8+ hours a day. Everything Meta talked about made this clear - they only invested a ton of money because they saw it as the new "platform" after desktop and mobile that they could own and control. And it's obviously why AI is commanding so much investment now, as companies are scrambling to own the means of production in human society for years to come.

I agree that VR is not "dead", whatever that means, but I do find some joy that tech companies haven't found yet one more way to own the basics in societal existence.

„Clearly, VR technology isn’t fully ready yet.“

Disagree. It‘s quite mature and usable.

I worked on a software that offered VR as a feature. The user‘s started enthusiastically with eg. dedicated VR rooms. But it became clear that the immersive delta to a screen is surprisingly low. We‘re all trained to immerse into 2D screens on a daily basis. If you then observe how people are ridiculed while wearing a VR headset by their colleagues or how people with complicated hair style hesitate wearing a headset: then you understand why it‘s just not a good fit for B2B.

VR isn't dead. It's not alive either.

It's just not it's time yet for mass adoption, however it might be.

VR/AR continues to have an increasing footprint of usage and adoption as the technologies evolve.

This has been the same cycle for over 20 years.

Once we get past 4K displays to 8K at a reasonable cost level, it again will introduce a new audience to VR/AR, and a larger and larger existing audience will sit here nodding along.

VR has gotten much better and it's fine for whomever it works for, it doesn't have to work for everyone, even if a big company took a bet on the timing of it being now.

VR has never been alive for me. If Apple can't get fetch to happen I don't know how anybody can with the current state of the pc hardware industry.

I’m on my third quest unit (my quest 1 died during the pandemic and I had to buy a new 1, and then the 2 came out). I still use it for around 3-4 hours a week and I’m thinking about upgrading to the quest 3. Just use one or two apps though (beat saber and fitxr), I never really got into actual gaming or social stuff on it. I wish a company would come around and seethe potential for fitness tech with VR, they could come up with better optimized solutions for it (and I don’t really count the mirror or stationary bike stuff). Fitness really fees like the killer app.

From the article: "The main theme in the Spanish Golden Age playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s La Vida es Sueño (Life is a Dream) from 1635 is the contrast between subjective and objective perceptions of reality."

Huh? Is this AI slop?

The basic problems with VR are well known. First, the headgear is too bulky. Carmack, who headed Oculus for a while, says that it won't get traction until the headgear is down to swim-goggles size, and won't go mainstream until it's down to eyeglass size.[1] "AR glasses", with just an overlay, achieve that, but it's not a full virtual environment.

Second, a sizable fraction of the population experiences some nausea, and a smaller fraction will barf.[2] That's worse than roller coasters. When visual and vestibular data disagree, the brain doesn't like it. The most successful VR games, such as Beat Saber, keep them locked together, but then you're stuck in one spot. There's a really good discussion of this by Phia, a VR influencer who started using VR as a teenager and spends a lot of time in VR.[3] She has practical advice on tuning VR systems to minimize nausea (interocular distance matters!) and how to introduce new people to VR (it takes repeated exposures of increasing length.)

VR Chat continues to grow, driven by young people who worked through the problems. VR Chat used to prevent free movement - you had to teleport from one seat to another. But experienced users wanted more freedom, and VR chat now allows it if you opt in. Really good users can do gymnastics with full body tracking while in VR.

It's not just put on the goggles and have fun. You have to acclimate. Learn the gestures that drive the system. Practice. If you go for full body and face tracking, your avatar has to be calibrated to match your joint lengths and you have to strap on sensors. (Which are now good, small, and wireless.) You need a safe open space where you can move, where there are no dangerous objects nearby, and the VR system knows the real world safe boundaries. VR is a sport, and takes the preparation of a sport.

So it works, but is not mass-market.

[1] https://next.reality.news/news/oculus-cto-john-carmack-outli...

[2] https://www.pcgamer.com/vr-still-makes-40-70-of-players-want...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixdNKc53VZQ

(1) Something that would be a wild success to any other company would be a failure for Facebook, Facebook just isn't the right company for this opportunity.

(2) I think the Horizon Worlds problem is not so much that the whole idea is cringe but rather than the authoring tools weren't good enough for users or brands to create interesting worlds. I wanted it to work but I couldn't find worlds I wanted to visit and was strongly alienated by the platform's inability to incorporate JPG images or GLB models. No way I'm going to waste my time learning an awkward interface to make worlds based on dumbed-down computational solid geometry where I can't apply those skills to other platforms.

(3) Part of that problem is that the MQ3 has enough RAM that you can use video game programming techniques to make interesting worlds but very little headroom for user-generated content in systems like Horizon Worlds and VRChat. The 16GB Apple Vision Pro is better but I find it completely comfortable to author for PC VR with a 64GB workstation as much as I love the standalone MQ3 experience.

VR is gonna be insane once hardware catches up. It’s the natural next frontier imo.