QOTW: Do you think virtual reality is a fad?

[Presto86]

It all comes down to price, if it was around £100/£150 cheaper than a lot more people would by into it. But it's not and people will stick with what they are use to. (1080p/keyboard/mouse etc.)

[Ttaskmaster]

Remember you are posting on a tech forum full of techies. You have a GTX980TI - I don't know anyone with one in RL who has a £500 graphics card.

I don't work with 'techies', though, unless you consider Victorian engineering the height of bleeding edge technological advancement...
I also didn't pay £500 for that 980Ti, either. It was much cheaper back then!!

What you are talking about is a company so its "cheap" - decades ago when I visited one of the sites a big pharma company was using,they had 3D virtualisation in use for some aspects of drug design,etc.

What I'm talking about is a company that is also very far behind the times and very flipping tight-fisted.
Being a company does not mean you're rich as Croesus, either. You're not able to just drop a boatload of customer's bill money on random fancy tech, else the regulator (and the newspapers) would crucify you!
This is a company that stopped supplying 15p coffee mugs as Christmas gifts to non-field employees in order to save money, and who regularly let its assets fail catastrophically because it's cheaper to pay the fine than to fix things.
You buy anything here, it has to go through peer reviews and budget meetings and cost-benefit analyses...

If that device was now £200 with the controllers and could be powered off their console or laptop,then more people might throw money at it just for a play around with it.

I'm sure it will go that way.
Given how much money people dropped on peripheral junk for things like the Wii and all those fake guitars for Rock Band games, I'm sure a VR headset that works for more than just one game isn't that much of a stretch.

Plus, people are willing to drop a thousand pounds on some phones.
they're already making cheaper variants on the VR side, including official things like Google Cardboard emulators and VR headsets that even come included with some phones. Just a matter of time before it's cheap enough to be mainstream.

Does anyone remember Quazar / laser gun battles? Cyber cafes where you could game? Now imagine that with VR.

ISTR seeing exactly this, already. Someone's done something just like that. Basic empty room, but with all the scenery VR'ed into your headset, and everyone able to hide behind the virtual walls etc.

[malculator]

I hope it's not a fad. It's not quite there yet in terms of image quality imo. I bought a WMR headset at Christmas to play Elite Dangerous in, but I returned it as I found the "Screen Door Effect" too unsightly. The resolution on the WMR headsets (apart from the Samsung model, which is slightly higher but unavailable in Europe) is 1440x1440 per eye. I'm hoping that a higher res display (maybe 2048x2048 per eye) might eliminate or mitigate this for me. I'm eagerly waiting for news of Pimax's 8K KickStarter HMD.

[nattydread69]

PSVR is fantastic, definitely not a fad. VR movies are more convincing than 3D TV movies.

[DanceswithUnix]

I bought a WMR headset at Christmas to play Elite Dangerous in, but I returned it as I found the "Screen Door Effect" too unsightly.

There are some things you can do that help, the default Elite text is too bright so just turning the text brightness down in the settings makes it much more readable. Some people find changing the text colour helps, though I found just the brightness was enough.

I hope whilst you had the HMD in Elite you stood up and looked around the ship's interior. Not much room to stand up in a Sidewinder mind, your head tends to go through the canopy

[malculator]

I bought a WMR headset at Christmas to play Elite Dangerous in, but I returned it as I found the "Screen Door Effect" too unsightly.

There are some things you can do that help, the default Elite text is too bright so just turning the text brightness down in the settings makes it much more readable. Some people find changing the text colour helps, though I found just the brightness was enough.

I hope whilst you had the HMD in Elite you stood up and looked around the ship's interior. Not much room to stand up in a Sidewinder mind, your head tends to go through the canopy

I had it for about a week and fiddled with quite a few settings, like setting HMD(?) to 2.0 and SS to 1 and vice versa, but I always found that I just couldn't live with the general blurriness. Oddly enough, I could live with the text. I worried that it might be an IPD issue, but on closing either eye, the issue persisted. The sense of scale however is fantastic though. The mail-slots on the stations actually seemed large, unlike how ridiculously narrow they seem on a monitor.

Having had a taste of VR I hunger for more, but I'm going to wait until some better hardware comes along.

[shaithis]

Unless graphics card tech slows to a halt, I only see VR getting bigger.

It's clearly not a fad, if you have played any of the well thought-out games, the immersion is mind-bowing and adds more to a game than any other tech advancements that I can think of.

It is expensive at the moment but hopefully will come down, tread-mills are ideally required for small play areas though, which for many can be another big expense (plus are there any commercially available yet?).

But, when you see how great it is and realise it can only (and will) get better and better...well...

[whatif]

I first saw VR back in the early nineties and then nothing for years, now it seems to be going down the same path. I think it is because there are only so many people that can commit to paying for it, especially since the massive price gouging of video cards needed to run it well. If prices were to come down so that the average person can afford them or cheaper tech that can run it, then we could see it take off again.
As a financially challenged disabled pensioner, I cannot afford it (still using an AMD 7870), although I would love to have it.

[Strawb77]

but reality [I]is[I] virtual

[Corky34]

but reality [I]is[I] virtual

I wouldn't know, i choose to take the blue pill.

[Ttaskmaster]

I wouldn't know, i choose to take the blue pill.

See, everyone does that. Everyone chooses a pill.
The secret is to take them both and wash them down with half a bottle of Balvennie!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

A mate sent me that link - the use of haptics in VR. It will be interesting when the technology becomes less cumbersome though.

[johnroe]

It's modern tech history, but VR is becoming a reality at glacial speed. If you look at early examples like the Sensorama from the fifties, to the large headsets used by NASA in the eighties(+the large amount of back up equipment), then obviously as the tech becomes available, size and weight become less of an issue.

https://www.techradar.com/news/weara...n-1957-1318253

[Biscuit]

Yep.

Don't know anyone who owns the gear and still actively uses it. I know there are people out there who think they are the exception that prove this already annecdotal evidence false, but im just not interested.
The experience itself is pretty great but its not convenient in any tangible way and there doesnt seem to be any obvious path for the current technological milestones to be easily overcome.

It's kinda like the Wii except its crazy expensive and very few people own it...

I keep seeing people make the argument of "the price will come down with the technology improving", but I struggle to see that there there be any software and hardware companies still investing in it for that to happen?

[spacein_vader]

It's kinda like the Wii except its crazy expensive and very few people own it...

So the opposite of the Wii then? Which was cheap and the world and his dog owned one.

[Biscuit]

So the opposite of the Wii then? Which was cheap and the world and his dog owned one.

The same in that its a peripheral based gaming gimmick, but different in those exceptions, yes.