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TheSpindler on 05 March 2015
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Scoobes said:
TheSpindler said:
Yeah I've been seeing the VR hype-train for a while now, and I still don't get why people think this will be successful anytime soon.

VR being successful needs to be taken up by the masses and there are too many roadblocks to that atm. Sony coming in wont really help as Sony has a checklist approach to tech like this. It exists but they wont go full steam ahead with it for it to be successful. A few games will come out from them, they'll fund a few more through third parties and some indies will jump on, and maybe some of the bigger companies will have a VR mode or something, and that'll be it.

How it looks, its graphics really don't matter, its success depends on developer support(which it seems will be a pain, along with the fact that most developers wont be supporting VR anyway) and it being cheap enough to afford and appealing enough for the consumer to pick up, which again comes down to games and how much games and which high profile or good games will have them.

There's also stuff like aesthetics(while wearing them) and awkwardness for the average consumer, but i don't think that its that much of a problem for most.

Really? Considering there's not a full blown commercial product out and there are an increasingly large list of developers on board with different VR projects:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_Oculus_Rift_support

With only the Occulus Rift dev kit, there are already nearing 200 games with native VR support plus others with unofficial mod support. That list is obviously not including studios involved with Sony and we don't know if any additional studios are involved with Valve and HTC's project.

The other factor that sceptics are completely ignoring is the fact that VR is also becoming a great medium for showing movies:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jan/27/facebook-oculus-story-studio-virtual-reality-films

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/534791/a-film-studio-for-the-age-of-virtual-reality/

So I very much doubt content will be a major hurdle.

The last problem for VR I see is cost, but we don't know how much these devices will cost yet. Obviously, costs will come down as time goes on though. 


 I think I should clarify a bit to make sure my point is coming across.  When I said development is going to be apain, I meant withthe Morpheus, as the developer in his comments as said.

Now the key points of what I said, which you have in bold, are that high profile games(no, not just high profile games with a VR mode, but built around and made for VR and done well) and the hardware being cheap enough to adopt for the veryday consumer are vital to its success.  Currently it is niche, adn will be niche for the forseeable future until those two things and others have been solved.

I'm not sure why you mentioned that VR film thing, as that's niche as can possibly be.  Just to be sure, I'm taliing about mainstream adoption of the tech for it to be successful, not small projects, or hardware selling in the thousands.  Sony would need to go far beyond setting up one studio for VR.  I doubt they can go further right now though.

Funny to think, if Microsoft had their way with always online they might be in the best position to push this whole VR thing with movie content streamed on Xbox consoles day one with theatre release with VR enabled.  But that's just a theory about their plans anyway.