Comment by wpietri
3 years ago
Sure! But I would enjoy most or all of those the same way I play Fitness Boxing: with a screen. I think what makes VR good for fitness is the motion controllers, not the facehugger stereoscopy.
Conversely, when I rented the Quest, the kids ended up playing Beat Saber by sitting on the couch and twitching their wrists. They liked it, but they didn't find the motion part compelling. So although I totally believe you and others get fitness value out of VR, I just think that's not an intrinsic to VR.
> I just think that's not an intrinsic to VR
It is for now for at least half or more of the current apps. The exceptions tend to be the driving or flying sim games. Developers do try to cater to less active users, but from my personal observation if you don’t like being active then you probably won’t enjoy VR in its current state, which your first hand experience supports. It looks like Apple will change it though, and I’m sure their competition will copy them shortly
When I say it's not an intrinsic to VR, I mean that one can have physical motion games without having facehugger 3D, which currently defines the VR space.
I'll note that Wii Sports came out in 2006, for example. And it sold 8.9 million copies. But I also note that motion games remain a niche interest. I like them a lot, but they're a small fraction of game usage. That suggests to me that VR can't bank on that as a big enough consumer interest to keep VR economically viable.
There are a trickle of games that are not first person. This will grow as the anemic VR AR market grows.
VR’s biggest problem isn’t 1st person interaction, which btw isn’t a gimick like the Wii. It’s that most adults are intimidated by the face bucket of isolation UX. People won’t even try it let alone buy it to use it enough. Until XR can get over this hurdle, I feel that we won’t really know what people like or dislike.
It’s also hard to make good predictions and assumptions about a technology that you’re not really using yourself
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