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Why virtual reality makes a lot of us sick, and what we can do about it.

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[-] lloram239@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago

Meta struggles because their content in trash. Quest2 is a mobile phone strapped to your face, with games that look exactly like what you'd expect from that (overly simplified cartoony graphics, very basic gameplay). And the sad part is, that it's not even really a technical limitation. Quest2, while slow, is still fast enough to play ~20 year old games in VR and it has a few ports of those games (e.g. Doom3, RE4), but it has nothing new at that level of quality. Even the port of GTA:SA that they announced two years ago hasn't been heard from since.

Meta just seems unable to both secure quality new content and can't even manage to get enough of those older games ported either. Despite Meta burning literally a billion dollar on VR each month, nothing interesting is happening in VR gaming, they can't even manage to keep the existing stuff up and running (e.g. EchoVR servers were just shutdown).

I have more hope for Apple's approach, as they essentially completely sidestepped the VR content problem by focusing on making their VR headset work for 2D content. VisionPro has enough resolution to work as both monitor as well as cinema screen replacement, and they are smart enough to build a UI to take advantage of the 3D, eye and hand tracking. That's again something Meta could never figure out. QuestPro was their take at an VisionPro'ish headset, but despite the $1500 price-tag and a whole lot of tracking cameras, it ended up as little more than a Quest2-with-better-lenses, as none of the additional features found much use in any software. The resolution of the device was also low enough to render it unusable as monitor replacement.

Now, don't get me wrong. Cheap VR is super important and $300 is a great price for a headset. But you aren't going to get gamers to give up their PS5 or gaming PCs with the lackluster games offering you find on Quest2. Even in the best of cases, Quest2 feels like stepping 20 years backwards in time. Simply put, Meta managed to make VR look boring and out of date.

[-] MudMan@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

You can use the Quest as a PC HMD, both wired and wireless. So no, it's not a problem of performance.

The reason the Quest can't secure content is the content doesn't sell. Which is the same reason Sony struggles to secure content. They both basically have to finance the entire library. Sony and Valve sidestep this by having VR be a feature in flatscreen games, but even then people arent' queuing up to get them.

And nobody wants to use VR as a monitor, either. Maybe in a plane if you're a weirdo or to watch movies in private if you live in cramped quarters, but nobody is going to get to their desk and slap on a face-screen to type a text document, no matter how fancy and expensive it is.

The application is just not mainstream enough.

this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
626 points (96.3% liked)

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