Comment by topherPedersen
4 days ago
I bought my son a Meta Quest headset and a second one for me to use while playing with him. Honestly, it kind of makes me sick when I use it. Will have to see if it gets any better the next time we play. I'm kind of lazy and just want to lie down when using it, but the last time I tried using it I had to stand up to be able to do whatever it was we were doing.
I was a VR developer from about 2014 to 2020 after many years in traditional video games.
The really sad thing about how VR evolved is that sim sickness was not taken seriously as a barrier for mass adoption. Too many devs and players cast it aside as a "them" problem. "They" couldn't handle it. "They" didn't have VR legs.
The bottom line is that most things that became popular in VR were violating the rules which prevented sim sickness. This was a self-fulfilling prophecy that led the VR world into a corner.
I'm hopeful that Valve will be better stewards of VR in the long run, once Meta shuts down its hardware division, which you know is coming in the next couple years.
The problem is that freer movement is more immersive and it’s that free movement that really increases the immersion, and immersion is the product that VR is selling over monitors. I do agree it’s a market limiting problem, but there’s only so many beat sabers and shooting galleries that can lock you in place and still deliver that.
Yep, it's an untenable problem for the medium.
I tried the first Oculus dev kit in 2013 and got instant motion sickness after a short session.
Tried some fancy Quest headset more than a decade later, and same thing.
It's crazy that after spending like $100 billion in the space they still haven't been able to remove the most fundamental barriers to entry.
Apparently you will get used to it over time, I'm still on the getting used to it phase after a couple months.
Though I usually only play around with it on weekends.
I've noticed sitting and playing a cockpit game is more uncomfortable than standing and playing an fps (with teleport movement).
> Apparently you will get used to it over time, I'm still on the getting used to it phase after a couple months.
I think this is one of the reasons VR is niche. You are not going to see mass adoption of a product where you need to get used to physical discomfort in order to properly use it. The use case is not compelling enough to enough people to get over that.