Comment by JKCalhoun
15 hours ago
I tried VR and, as many others have said, it's a novelty that wears thin quickly.
I'm amazed though at the amount of effort and corporate money that keeps being thrown at VR trying to make it a thing.
It feels like, to the public, it's like some tired The Beverly Hillbillies re-run that keeps popping up from time to time.
The younger generation uses VR a lot. It's like Nintendo in the 80s.
Who?
I have a teenager and a 9 year old and I've never heard this from anyone.
I think nintendo for that generation is nintendo switch. Or roblox.
Gorilla Tag alone has millions of monthly active users.
Adults understand the Switch because it’s familiar, but they didn’t understand the NES because it wasn’t familiar (Atari was a failure)
One of the big complaints of online VR games is that it’s overrun by Gen Alpha children. The only mystery is why meta keeps targeting adults instead of Gen Alpha. It’s a marketing strategy that has already failed multiple times now. Judging from most of the comments here, it will continue to fail. IMO only Apple can breakthrough to adults and even they failed with AVP.
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Must be younger than my (20's) daughters then. Their crowd would rather touch grass.
I'm sure they touch their phones a million times more than grass.
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I no longer bother watching movies or shows on my (very big) TV ever since I got an AVP. The experience (lying down on my bed, with gigantic movie screen floating above me) is unmatched.
I sometimes wish that I could read a book like that. But I think the reality is that it would make me tired and fall asleep.
For that use case, why would you choose wearing anything over just having a couple of projectors in the bedroom and living room? That is far more common than owning a vision pro because it's cheaper, more comfortable, more social, etc.
On the audio end of this, you can even throw in some properly righteous speakers in both rooms. All combined, this is still cheaper than or equal to the vision pro price for an objectively better movie experience. The projector image will always be bigger than your TV and speakers that expensive will rattle the walls with bass and shatter your eardrums. It doesn't matter how good earbuds get, there's no replacement for displacement (of air). Don't you like feeling the power?
> a couple of projectors… it’s cheaper
I’m not saying AVP is cheap, I’m saying visually it’s better.
> more comfortable
Nothing could be more comfortable than lying flat on bed with head propped up just a bit, and screen floating at 45 degrees in front of me, which I can easily reposition and resize to perfectly hit my FOV.
> more social
Heh, I’m not looking to socialize while enjoying a movie at home
The only way a physical setup would win is righteous speakers. I suppose I could connect physical speakers, but that breaks the awesome immersion of enjoying a movie in perfect (to the rest of my family) silence.
But really all I can say is that the visual experience and physical comfort (when lying down) of a movie on AVP is unparalleled, and this is not at all why I bought it, and it’s probably something one really has to experience to understand.
It's a novelty because you had to put on a big uncomfortable headset that required wires up until recently went was really fidgety. Once you get the form factor fixed and comfortable everything will change. This looks like a big step in that direction. Too bad I don't want Meta looking through my eyes.
You could be right. But I also keep hearing that excuse (since the Jaron Lanier, power-glove VR days) so color me skeptical.
> Once you get the form factor fixed and comfortable everything will change
Will it? Even if you offer people AR glasses and smartphones at the same price, I'd expect most people to pick the phone. Nobody wants to tap their glasses on a Square reader to buy coffee, or ask their specs to take a picture.
The VR/AR modality struggles when OEMs rely on unique native experiences as a selling point. There's no "killer app" for VR a even decade after the original Oculus DTK. Palmer Luckey sold Oculus to go work on building cruise missiles, to give you an idea of how awful VR's prospects are.
> Palmer Luckey sold Oculus to go work on building cruise missiles, to give you an idea of how awful VR's prospects are.
I too once abandoned a bowl of cereal for a steak dinner, but that says nothing about the quality of the cereal.
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> Nobody wants to tap their glasses on a Square reader to buy coffee, or ask their specs to take a picture.
Nobody used their cell phone to take pictures, that's what a camera is for! And music came from a Walkman. But then the iPhone came out, and the rest is history. A pair of glasses that takes pictures could very well be the future. We won't know until after it's happened though.
You'd use it in conjunction with a phone, just like a smart watch. It wouldn't replace your phone.
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The only thing I've consistently used VR on is virtual biking/walking videos for when I'm on my exercise bike, and a Google VR app called Wander. I don't have the space for anything that can't be done sitting down and I don't have the memory to run VR Chat.
I agree it's a novelty, it's never going to be the mainstream thing that replaces all existing interfaces and transforms the very concept of reality like some people want it to be. But it is fun within its niche.
I think what's holding it back is price more than anything. I'm still hanging on to my Quest because it just isn't worth the money for me to upgrade, even though half the apps no longer even work (fuck you very much DeoVR.)
I was just thinking, I hope meta/apple are hooking up with companies like Peloton, etc for cycling and rowing experiences
It really is a joke. Where are my AR contact lenses? It's 2026 for fuck's sake.