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SvennoJ on 17 July 2017
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potato_hamster said:
SvennoJ said:

VR makes 3D actually work though. 3D alone doesn't add anything to the experience since your viewpoint is still stuck in place. VR unlocks 3D, at least in games. 3D videos are almost worse than 360 videos. Both suck with plenty of distortian and scale issues. Nor is watching a movie where you could be looking the wrong way any fun. Only the Joshua Bell VR experience impressed me so far from video content. Yet that's very expensive to make with 3D mapped environment with plenty of video streams merged and projected in that space to give you the illusion you can move your head around (within a small area)

So yeah, for video it might go the way of 3D. For games it's totally different.

I totally disagree.

VR is not a new idea. People have been making VR solutuons for decades now (remember Lawnmower man? That's 25 years old!) , and it's never seen mass success. I can remember going to a theme park decades ago and playing Duke Nukem 3D using a VR headset with a gun shaped controller. Two years after that VR area was replaced with something else because no one gave a shit anymore. This new VR fad will come and go too. Maybe next time it becomes a fad (and it will) it'll finally reach a point where it'll have mass appeal, but it definitely isn't close to there yet.

VR is just 3D + Expense. Once the novelty wears off, all you're left with is a handful of experiences that actually offers a legitimately enhanced experience and isn't a gimmick that people will become bored with. The vast majority of VR games are literally taking a game that doesn't need VR at all and making it VR for the sake of VR. But the expense? That's means that this round of VR was once again dead on arrival. It's still way, way, way too expensive for it to see mass adoption. You'll have to see great VR solutions for less than $100 that is easy to set up, maintain, and support before you'll ever see mass market success, and that's probably still decades away.

Yet 3D stuck around this time in the cinema, and doesn't seem to be declining at all. VR arcades aren't quite there, but developments are going very fast atm. Lightweight high res glasses for VR arcades aren't far off.

I had 3D in the 90's on a CRT projector. That was a fad and the fun wore off quickly. Great to play Descent 2 in 3D with fire balls floating through my room and behind the wall I was projecting on, yet after a month I was back to gaming in 2D. 3D didn't add anything. Yet this time, even with low res VR with all its problems, I don't want to go back to old fashioned gaming. It's very liberating not to be stuck to a fixed viewpoint with limited fov. It's not a gimmick. But it doesn't help the industry seems to be hell bent on promoting it with gimmicky experiences.

Will the mass market care? I dunno. I love dedicated surround sound yet most people are satisfied with headphones or tv speakers. Perhaps VR will become like that. Every movie and tv show support at least 5.1 sound though... Perhaps it will be easier to add a VR option in future game engines. Perhaps we should simply forget about special VR games and treat it as another display option. Perhaps social multiplayer games can break through in VR. Perhaps natural language interaction with AI characters will be the breakthrough point. The only thing I'm certain off is that I'm enjoying every bit of it right now and amd looking forward to all the things that are coming out soon.