Comment by saberdancer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saberdancer | Hacker News Reader

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How can you drive adoption with that kind of setup. Most people do not have a spare room just for some kind of 3D setup, even if you could develop a technology to turn your walls into 3D images, you still cannot interact with the environment as you cannot project the image in the "air". You cannot grab things or turn things around as you can in VR. Given that your perspective should change depending on your head positioning, this kind of system should reproject everything as you move your head (even turning of your head should affect it).

There are a lot of issues with this kind of tech, at least for the mass market. For niche uses like driving simulators it can work, and I am sure with enough cash you could set it up.

Even VR has issues, data collected by SteamVR and Oculus shows that most people have very small playspaces, this means that roomscale experiences are much harder to pull off. Right now, the main problem is barriers to adoption, having a headset that you can just put on your head like you turn on your gaming console, that is what is needed. Needing to take 5 minutes to start everything up, or half an hour to setup your tracking cameras is not acceptable for average consumer. Oculus Quest works great in this department and is the way VR will go forward.

Frankly, I don't think the AR/VR market is going to get much bigger than it is right now. For consumers, adoption might go up by a factor 2, but probably not a factor of 10 with a few exceptions. For example, I think HUD systems in cars will use a lot more AR ideas.

There are a lot more opportunities in the commercial space.

I really feel that VR headset could replace game consoles. Quest is pretty much a game console in a headset. When technology improves, it could become good enough for most gamers just like aging technology of Xbox and PlayStation is. This alone could push adoption by a factor of 10 or even more.

They should follow the console model.

I think Facebook missed a big opportunity with the Quest. It should be $100 and have an app store where Facebook makes 30% on the software.

Uh, what opportunity did Facebook miss? This is exactly what they're doing with the Quest. Yes, Quest isn't $100, but at $400 for full entry it is by far the cheapest 6DOF VR solution on the market. It is already sold at a loss, and its hard for 30% of app store sales to justify a $500-$900 (guessing) loss per unit at $100. Even with the most privacy destroying datamining and advertising I don't think Facebook could justify taking that big of a loss on the hardware. As components get cheaper Quest will price drop. This is one of the problems with VR market adoption. People essentially want cutting edge hardware, for nearly free, games for free, and don't want to be monetized in any other way, to the point that people complain about how evil Facebook is when they suggest you link a Facebook account to your Quest.

I agree, although replace isn't quite the right word (assuming by replace you mean traditional console gaming goes away in favor of VR). I think it will establish itself as a console sized gaming market (10-20 million active HMDs) in the next 5 years. A 2x sized market is an absolute given, that would put VR at more than 10 million 6DOF HMDs total. I think 10x is likely (50 million HMDs), which also put VR. This will be number for the entire VR gaming market, not a single device. Valve will own PC VR, probably with a wireless future Index. Sony will own console VR, and Oculus\Facebook will own mobile\standalone with Quest like devices. This market is the size of a single mid-level success game console (Xbox One and Switch are ~40 million), but big hit consoles like PS4, Wii and PS2 are closer to ~100 million units for a single console, and I don't think VR will be there for a long time. Still this is a big enough market to support a couple of AAA VR games a year, including a few big games as service\free to play multiplayer\MMO games and a relatively "healthy" indie game market (regular hits, but most developers still complaining about discoverability and lack of funding).

For enterprise use cases I think VR will continue to grow in training, but teleconferencing and remote work (true killer business apps) won't land for a while. Whoever wins this market (my guess is either Facebook or Microsoft) will make a ton of money though. By land I mean, there are and will continue to be many applications that attempt to support remote work, but there won't be a useful one that gains enterprise adoption and is better than traditional video conferencing for a while.

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