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vfguy 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. 

Most of the Oculus stuff consists of small experiences or tiny games.

In addition, looking "into" the screen and watching movies on the second Oculus devkit is not a great experience beyond the initial wow factor of "sitting" in a theater and watching a movie, as the resolution is too low.

Playing retro games on a virtual TV in a virtual room works quite well because those games are low resolution to begin with.

 

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On a separate note, the biggest reason the Wii and Kinect were so popular were the family audience. People would get together and play. That will not be a factor with Morpheus in the same way as it is a solitary experience and less fun to watch someone else play.