What do you think about that most big VR technology is owned by big companies like Meta and Tik Tok?

Sabata11792, 2 months ago

I love VR, but god damn everything about it is a pain in the ass. You got to already be into tech to be willing to put up with the effort or to manage to get the proper hardware. It's also still uncomfortable after a few hours. I also see a lot of people immediately give up once they get motion sick or never get their VR legs.

It's still got too many barriers to entry to not be a niche. It's a cool nerdy hobby but I don't think It will be mainstream till they can beat the quality of the Index without requiring a gaming PC. If it gets more popular and hardware gets cheap enough, you may start to see some smaller devs trying to make there own headsets while being less evil about it.

Any use in an office would also be for a weirdly specialized job and not likely a daily task, or VR devlopment. VR feels like it's going to be stuck in the roll of expensive hobbyist equipment like those 3d moving chairs or steering wheels. VR is great if your in the hobby but background noise to the world. I don't think it has a place in daily office life outside of specialized roles. Big tech companies know they can sell headsets to businesses by making them trendy but only an idiot thinks they can get the entire office onboard without violence.

bluGill, 2 months ago

They will patent all the important stuff, then the patents will expire before anyone inds something useful and mainstream to do with it, so I don't care so long as it isn't my company investing in it (i prefer they invest in my bonus, but that is a different rant)

nickwitha_k, 2 months ago

I think that most companies have been doing it absolutely wrong. Likely because they’re more interested in sucking more data from people to sell for profit than designing products that would appreciably improve people’s lives. Most of the handful of genuinely useful products are kept priced far too high for consumers. Apple, as insanely expensive as their product is, actually does seem to have identified some of the major issues that others have been completely ignoring but their implementation is a bit ridiculous.

The two companies that I know of that are actually making useful products are Xreal and Viture (haven’t tried the latter but they’re much my FOSS-friendly). For the price of a quality monitor/TV, they provide HMDs in a sunglasses form-factor that are actually usable for productivity despite only having 1080p displays. And don’t have creepy cameras. Yes, the lower FOV makes them less immersive but that’s actually beneficial - you can talk to and see other people in the “real” world. This and low weight makes them comfortable to wear all day and I’ve barely used my laptop or Steam Deck monitor since getting them setup.

Thcdenton, 2 months ago

I’m hype for the Valve Deckard.

StellarExtract, 2 months ago

Assuming it ever comes out. I’m WAITING…

Naz, 2 months ago

Valve is working hard on it to make absolutely sure it doesn’t suck.

xilliah, 2 months ago

I’ve got a quest and meta feels like an overly attached ex girlfriend. The setup experience was terrible, simply because of the meta crap they hacked into the oculus experience.

flashgnash, 2 months ago

Having used someone else’s quest that they’ve already sold their soul to sign up for they’re actually very good hardware wise, just a shame that’s because they’re subsidised by their ability to collect data

Anticorp, 2 months ago

TikTok has a VR now? The company that is tracking people’s retina signatures has a device that people strap over their eyes?

Euphoma, 2 months ago

Ok I found this post like a week late, but TikTok bought a VR company called Pico several years ago and they were investing money into new software and headsets, but recently cancelled all of their planned games. They are still making a new headset, but they also seemed to cancel their entry into the US market. They also had a ton of layoffs last year.

So basically, I think they’ve lost interest in VR.

Anticorp, 2 months ago

Or they got enough eye scans already and don’t need to continue the charade.

*Conspiracy theory intensifies!

Ziggurat, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

I wouldn’t be on lemmy if I wasn’t worried by the weight of foreign bilionaire on technology that should be accessible for everyone.

But I doubt that VR will got that mainstream considering all the practical diffictulties to use-it

SnotFlickerman, 2 months ago

Like a lot of hyped things, people still can’t actually functionally figure out good VR/AR applications that people would willingly strap a hot, heavy headset to their face for long periods. Nobody has time for that, most people are social and want to actually be around other people and not behind headsets. The terminally online and introverted are in the minority in humanity.

People who drive around wearing them in their Cybertrucks are a special subset of stupid. They obviously have not figured out anything helpful to do with them, either. This is why they are doing dangerous stunts instead of anything useful.

Also Valve is still a pretty big name in VR and I wouldn’t ignore the work they have done and seem to be continuing to do based on the Valve Index and rumors swirling about an Index 2 in the works. Valve is probably one of the few major players who take some amount of openness to their approach.

BolexForSoup, 2 months ago

the terminally online and introverted are in the minority in humanity

I am afraid to ask you to unpack this very out of place statement.

Ephera, 2 months ago

Personally, I actually expect VR to disappear from the market once more, or at least for there to be a long gap before the next stuff comes out.
In fact, I think, the Apple headset was the last notable hardware release of the current hype wave.

So, yeah, the big privacy-invasive companies would definitely be a dealbreaker for me, but I don’t think this cycle really matters yet.

i_stole_ur_taco, 2 months ago

VR is the next 3DTV. It’s a neat technology that doesn’t need to be mainstream, but we have no shortage of company marketers desperately trying to create a narrative that every home needs it.

Ephera, 2 months ago

Well, there is the problem that if people spend several hundred dollars or more to buy a VR headset and potentially upgrade their PC/console for it, then they do expect blockbuster titles. A minigame collection, like the Wii had, isn’t going to fly. And blockbuster titles will only be produced, if there’s enough of an audience.

Like, yeah, it doesn’t need to be fully mainstream, but there is currently a disconnect between the number of rich nerds wealthy techies that may naturally be interested in a VR headset and the audience size needed to pay for blockbuster titles.

xmunk, 2 months ago

Beat Saber is ridiculously awesome… but I never want to wear a fucking headset to do my work.

VR is useful for recreation not business.

MxM111, 2 months ago

If it is cheaper to have one headset (and possibly physical keyboard) instead of multiple monitors and computer, then business will start buying them. And quite possibly even before for applications like mechanical design.

shadowSprite, 2 months ago

Modded Skyrim in VR is amazing too. I’ve put my Index on and had hours slip by without realizing it. There’s nothing like wandering around Skyrim and killing dragons in VR. And then of course there’s also Half Life Alyx. That game will make you forget you’re in a game…

wuphysics87, 2 months ago

Yea, but how long did you play it? This generation’s guitar hero

ChrissieWF, 2 months ago

Have it since 2018, currently play about 5 hrs a week.
It’s fun exercise!

skulblaka, 2 months ago

You don’t want to wear the current iteration of headsets for work. Projects are in motion to make much smaller and more lightweight ones. They’re stupid expensive right now but that’ll change with time.

xmunk, 2 months ago

I value my eyesight. I never want to have a backlit screen three inches from my eyes for eight straight hours. I, personally, use a projector for gaming to try and minimize how much strain I put on my eyes.

Working in VR is immensely unhealthy and there simply isn’t a work around for it.

teawrecks, 2 months ago

The brightness of the sky outside dwarfs that of any display we can make, much less a tiny VR display. If they could squeeze the nits needed to make a VR screen look like real life into a display that small while retaining the quality, they would.

It might actually hurt your vision because it’s not bright enough, much like trying to read under a dim light starts to cause eye strain.

xmunk, 2 months ago

The human body is complex and we don’t understand everything that’s going in but heavy phone usage is strongly correlated with myopia - maybe that’s because people suffering from near sightedness really love their phones… but I think I’m going to need strong evidence that it’s not the more obvious reason before accepting that explanation.

VR might actually improve vision because the light level is extremely consistent but early studies don’t support that conclusion. I think long term VR usage is DOA, it’s fun as hell to beat some sabers or spin up elite dangerous, but it should be done in moderation… and definitely shouldn’t be required for 40 hours a week unless we get some really compelling studies.

teawrecks, 2 months ago

Phones are different because your eyes are focusing at a point a foot in front of you, whereas in VR that shouldn’t be the case. You’re focusing on a simulated point a couple of meters out in the distance, though it is usually is still fixed.

Make no mistake, I’m not saying wearing VR for hours every day is healthy, for your eyes or otherwise, I’m only responding to your claim about screen brightness. I don’t think any VR displays have even hit 1000 nits yet, and on the displays that have, that’s peak brightness, the whole display can’t use all that energy at once, only small sections at a time. Meanwhile the sky is on the order of 10,000+ nits. The brightness of the sun will certainly hurt your eyes at over a billion nits.

I would love for an optometrist to explain why I’m wrong though.

Ephera, 2 months ago

Originally, I had typed out that IMHO VR never made it beyond being a gimmick. And yeah, Beat Saber is pretty much the reason why I decided to reformulate. Some people buy VR goggles primarily to play Beat Saber. If they’re frequently doing so, then they’re getting their money’s worth out of it, then that is absolutely legit.

And well, I imagine, there will be use-cases for business, like being able to walk around in a CAD design or architecture draft, that’s probably useful, too. But yeah, just for taking a call, I actively don’t want to be embedded into a 3D world every time.

superduperenigma, 2 months ago

One problem is that there’s a massive upfront cost to get into VR as a consumer. Even the cheaper headsets are several hundred dollars, similar to a full console purchase. Which means not a lot of people are going to invest in the hardware, which means there isn’t as much of a market to produce games for, which means not a lot of people are going to invest in the hardware, etc etc etc.

On top of that, VR has the awkward problem of locomotion. Either you’re teleporting around the game world, getting motion sick moving around the game world, or standing in one place at all times. None of these options are ideal, and the only real solutions to this issue involve insanely pricy hardware purchases.

Maybe one day we’ll figure it out, maybe we’ll all be living in tubes playing games with our minds or whatever.

cypherpunks, 2 months ago

I think it’s pretty great that Zuckerberg went all-in on the thankfully-wrong bet that his Second Life knockoff would somehow be popular and that people would actually want to strap a computer on their face to use it. 🤡

Which is to say, VR isn’t particularly high on the list of things I’m concerned about giant tech companies’ control of.

I recommend reading The Verge’s review of the Apple Vision Pro which concludes:

Apple may have inadvertently revealed that some of these core ideas are actually dead ends — that they can’t ever be executed well enough to become mainstream. This is the best video passthrough headset ever made, and that might mean camera-based mixed reality passthrough could just be a road to nowhere. This is the best hand- and eye-tracking ever, and it feels like the mouse, keyboard, and touchscreen are going to remain undefeated for years to come.

As someone who doesn’t want to live in a world where head-mounted cameras in public spaces become ubiquitous or even socially acceptable, I found that review to be good news.

Niquarl, 2 months ago

I agree the idea of people wearing some Google glasses does kinda terrify me. At least with a phone you can see when somebody is filming you or not paying attention to you but reading their emails or whatever.

cypherpunks, 2 months ago

a sign with a red circle and line through a drawing of an eyeball with a google glass in front of it, above the text “Google Glass is banned on these premises”

cynar, 2 months ago

The big companies can invest the money. That least to “better” products. Small manufacturers will struggle to compete for now.

My hope is, as the tech matures, more good options will become available. I’m also hoping Valve maintain that business model. They seem to have clicked that not screwing over your customers in the short term pays huge dividends in the long term. They also don’t seem adverse to supporting open source, which offers a way through this period.

OsrsNeedsF2P, 2 months ago

Have you used any VR tech? It’s not something to be worried about

retrieval4558, 2 months ago

It’s certainly not ideal but is probably necessary to develop the technology. In a handful of years I’m hoping there will be less toxic options.

xmunk, 2 months ago

Meta bought valve?

mesamunefire, 2 months ago

I don’t.