VR won't take off until it much cheaper, the devices are less bulky and people have an actual reason to buy them. This strategy feels like a real loser.
The killer app for VR imo is just first person shooter games imo. It’s the most fun I have had in VR after trying almost every game on steam. I feel like a real life terrorist when I shoot my virtual AK-47 in the air.
If they can make it cheaper and less awkward it would appeal to a lot of gamers just for this.
I also thought this years ago, but I didn't foresee what an enormous percentage of the population would suffer motion sickness from VR. And even for the rest of the population, VR headsets are downright painful to wear for long periods; VR headsets will need to be lighter than headphones if they want people to go on long gaming binges. Games will need to have hybrid VR and non-VR modes in order to accommodate players who can't afford VR, or don't have the space for VR, or get sick from VR, or who are sore from using VR too long on a given day, and inevitably one group will start to complain about the other in the same way that controller users complain about mouse users. At best, the tech has a long, long way to go.
Thank you, I've been saying the same thing for years. I interned in a VR lab at NASA Ames in the late 90s, researching precision and comfort, and it was very clear that a significant fraction of people just can't do it, for physiological reasons. VR will never be a universal interface.
As interns and postdocs, we were all lab monkeys, and all got our turn in the helmet. Some people were utterly hopeless, always got sick, couldn't do the tasks. Others took to it like fish in water. I think this disconnect in proprioceptive adaptability leads people who have it to vastly overestimate the general public's ability to remain in a VR space for more than a minute or two.
One of the things the lab's senior scientist was researching was the effect of latency on performance at 3D tasks. For example, moving a ring down a twisted wire without touching[0]. There was a clear effect on both objective performance and subjective reports of comfort as latency decreased, and it hadn't bottomed out at 60 fps / 16 ms latency (one frame). This was true for every test subject, but greatly exaggerated for those with generally poor performance. I doubt even 240 fps / 4 ms would eliminate it. And how are you going to get 4 ms of input latency with modern USB drivers? Not even your keyboard has that anymore.
I share your skepticism, but this is the argument critics were saying about online video back in the day.
Who would want to watch a stamp-size video of horrible quality when we have TVs? This will never catch on.
You have to get started early on these sort of big transitions, otherwise by the time everything to make it successful is in place, you're years too late.
That being said, I don't think this is going to be a winning strategy for Facebook either.
I think a better parallel is 3D TVs which required specialized hardware and specialized content. These never did catch on even though the hardware was less bulky and arguably less specialized than what's required for VR.
