Why virtual reality makes a lot of us sick, and what we can do about it.
Even if the sickness issue is solved at some point I just don’t ever see VR become a dominant way to game. There are just too many downsides.
Story-focussed games can not direct you where to look. You are completely cut off from the world so you can’t e.g. watch a child or elderly relative while you use it or chat with friends while you work using it. Environments need a lot more work for a smaller market share if you can look at them from any angle. Hardware is much more expensive (and always will be) compared to a system that just needs to render a screenful of content at the same quality level. Your UI options are more limited if you want to keep things immersive.
Exactly, and that’s why we don’t have one. Maybe I’ll get one when my kids are a little older, but for now, it’s a lot more fun to experience things together than to have someone completely closed off in a VR world.
Even if I didn’t have kids, I still probably wouldn’t want it because I’d like to spend that time with my spouse, and looking at an avatar just isn’t the same.
I think the entire line of thinking that you need a first person perspective to be immersed in a game or virtual world is also flawed. As someone who has been on Second Life for more than 16 years now which uses neither VR equipment nor a first person camera 90% of the time I can certainly “feel like I am there” despite all of those factors and in the presence of many other factors that do not exist in RL like teleporting and camming through walls just fine.
Is that ever claimed anywhere? AFAIK, VR has just been marketed as a new way to experience a virtual world, not as the only way to be immersed in a virtual world.
I think VR would be really cool, but it just doesn’t seem to fit with my lifestyle at this point. And I’m not sure if I would be able to handle it since I and my spouse get motion sick quite easily.