Where is VR lacking?

[phoon]

My general question is:

 

What is limiting advancements in the VR industry?

 

Obviously there is accessibility because of high prices.

 

But other than that, what is stopping VR from becoming the next big thing?

[minibois]

It's a vicious cycle between lack of compelling content (not otherwise available to people) and the lack of users, meaning companies won't make more content, exclusive to VR.

If there was a large userbase, companies would make a lot of content for it.

If there was a lot of (exclusive) content, there would be more users.

 

Just take these two examples.

Mobile gaming: "Everyone" has a smartphone or tablet, so a lot of games are made.

Nintendo Switch: There is a lot of good exclusive content, so people bought the device.

 

The other thing I would say is accessibility, in terms of people being able to comfortably use it. A lot of people get nauseous from VR, or can't use it because of glasses incompatibility, so that deters a lot of users.

[RONOTHAN##]

I would argue that it is actually starting to come into the public, thanks to the Oculus quest. One of the main drawback with VR, at least before the quest, was the need for a dedicated computer as well as a dedicated space for running the headset with the need for base stations and everything. Because very few people had the space and the funds to buy it, developers had no reason to develop for it. There is also the problem that VR games take longer time to develop than tradition games, with the amount of optimizations needed to keep the framerate above 90FPS on the majority of hardware. Because VR kinda flopped when it first released, even though everyone thought it was cool, game developers didn't want to spend valuable dev time making games for an incredibly small audience that would have a limited ROI. Because very few games came out, there wasn't much incentive for consumers to go out and spend $1000 on a way to play 2-3 games and some tech demos. Thanks to the quest, however, the entry cost is lower, so the market is growing. I would not be surprised if in the next 3-4 years VR does become the next big thing that it was thought to be when the Vive and Rift C1 was released

[Action_Johnson]

I've got mixed feelings about VR. I tried it out in DCS and thought it was pretty neat. Hard to read gauges, but neat. Also spent a few minutes in HL Alyx and thought the controls were pretty terrible, and the gameplay had to be extremely slowed down to make up for time clumsily moving around. Definitely not the "killer app" I expected it to be. Alyx should have been a normal fps. 

 

At the end of my attempt with it, it was like using a Wii, but with a scuba mask on.

 

Good

The idea of it is really cool. Especially for sims like DCS, F1, FS2020. It's an obvious thing to do, except:

 

BAD

-It needs a constant 90fps at minimum, which means even an RTX3090+R9 5950 can't drive FS2020 unless every setting is practically bottomed out, and even then it's iffy. 

-It needs a total beefcake of a computer to run without console-levels of dynamic resolution scaling

-Facebook account

-Most headsets are kind of low res, so seeing gauges and text can be kind of hard

-It usually looks like you're seeing the world thru a scuba mask

-Facebook, or spend $1000+

-Kludgy interfaces when using it in first-person

-Did I mention Facebook, unless you want to spend a grand on a tech-demo?