Could Apple or Nintendo make VR mainstream?

[potato_hamster]

SvennoJ said:

potato_hamster said:

Wii Sports doesn't give you headaches when you play it. The quality of the screen and the frame rate actually has a very relevant effect on user experience for VR where this was a complete non-issue with Wii Sports. The Wii/Wii sports was a success because it was cheap, easy to play, and fun for literally the whole family. No chance of headaches, no chance of vertigo.  No having to pass around a wearable device to take truns on. I'm not sure why you're suddenly drawing a parallel between the two.

Question: Why do you think a $200 occulus standalone headset will offer a markedly better experience than a $900 cell phone with a $100 case/controller? You can't realistically expect that rumored headset to offer a better pixel density, and higher frame rate than a Samsung Galaxy S8 does, do you? You've already agreed that the Galaxy S8 in a headset isn't good enough. Why would this be better? You don't even know if this headset will offer quality positional headtracking, and you have to agree that at that price, it probably doesn't.

But wait hold up. You just argued that Google Daydream (and thus Gear VR) is the bare minimum of an acceptable VR experience and now it appears like you haven't even used Daydream or Gear VR?  How can you make those claims? Now you're changing your tune to say that these devices are hurting VR when not minutes ago you were claiming they were a way that VR could succeed! You claim that high processing power isn't required for VR, and just completely dismissed the most popular low-power VR experience as "not VR at all". Which is it?

The more this conversation goes on, the more it sounds like you think VR will become mainstream because you really want it to, and not because that's actually realistic. Now you're bringing in Nintendo to the conversation with me? The scenarios you imagine for how this apparently can happen have jumped all over the place that it feels that you're just picturing VR solutions that you'd really like to have, not ones that millions of people are actually willing to pay for.

Let me sum up what mainstream VR needs:
- Standalone, untethered, wireless
- Accurate positional tracking
- No external sensors required, inside out tracking
- Low persistance screen
- Low latency
- High framerate, 90fps or 60fps with positional reprojection
- Low price

Resolution and high end graphics are not a requirement.

Resolution might not be important but pixel density is. Typically that is achieved with high resolution screens. You can beat around the bush all you want, but low pixel density (and thus low resolution) screens lead to screen door effects that make people sick when using VR headsets. You can say that's not a requirement, but realistically it is.

I've never said anything about high end graphics, ever. What I have insisted upon is that VR requires extensive processing power to acheieve things like low latency, accurate tracking and high frame rates. There's no way around this. On top of that, making it untethered and wireless adds additional expense as the processing unit has to portable, and has to have its own power supply. This is completely at odds with your requirement of a low price. Your solutions to make VR mainstream make VR more expensive, not less expensive.

Also, it's super sweet that you believe "that a $200 headset with a screen specifically chosen for VR can offer a better experience than a $900 phone". I mean that's truly adorable, as if a cell phone's cellular antenna and touch interface is the reason a phone costs $900. A Samusng Galaxy S8 will have much a much higher quality, more VR friendly screen, and far more processing power than this apparent budget-oriented screen. There's literally no reason to expect a $200 VR headset can offer a better experience than a S8  in a Gear VR. So why pretend this device will?

So you seem to know enough about Google Worldsense or similar solutions that you can speculate on how feasible it is to implement in a low-cost consumer product or a Nitnendo Switch, so what kind of hardware does this solution require? How expensive is that hardware? How much processing power is required to make the solution work accurately enough for VR, and can that type of solution be implemented in a sub-$200 portable VR headset and still leave enough resources to achieve the frame rates necessary to have a mainstream VR experience? Surely you'd have to know the answer to all of these questions in order to spoeak so confidently about how this technology is going to make VR mainstream. Sounds to me based on the article you presented is that the product hasn't even been seen by anyone outside of Google, and this could be about as awesome as Google Plus.