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Comment by SulfurHexaFluri | Hacker News Reader

There will never be an iphone moment because its not a product useful to literally every person. Gaming consoles and PCs have not had an "iphone moment" after decades because their market is and always will be limited.

I don't see why people are so obsessed with instant and explosive growth. Almost no recreational product has seen this kind of growth and they have all continued to exist just fine.

VR is ready today if its something you want. Its fun, cheap enough and has loads of games. If you hold out for something better you will always be waiting because there will always be something much better in 5 years.

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Gaming is a only small part of what VR can do.

Education (language learning, geography, biology, engineering...), real estate, porn, psychology, situational training (firemen), scientific visualization and collaboration, spatial painting and other artforms, social interaction, movie shots planning, etc.

All of the things mentioned are already being done without VR headsets. People can go through their entire lives not realizing they've been stereoblind. The world seems as real to them as to anybody else. It's not obvious to me VR is such a huge game changer.

Suppose we had 2 computer games.

One that perfectly reproduced real world "graphics" and "gameplay", looks like a real life high resolution video. Everything is life-like but you use fairly standard controls and a regular display.

Second that comes with perfect VR integration including physical resistance somehow, unlimited running space, ability to taste foods and whatnot. But the mechanics and graphics would still be off (current-gen).

It's pretty clear to me #1 would be way more immersive and the bottleneck is game/simulation tech, not VR tech.

> All of the things mentioned are already being done without VR headsets. People can go through their entire lives not realizing they've been stereoblind.

This comments sounds like what people would've been saying of smartphones: "I've gone my while life without a smartphone, why do I need one now?"

I said the same thing about smartphones, big screen TVs, good office chairs and a few other things. You either learn from your mistakes, or you don't.

> All of the things mentioned are already being done without VR headsets.

Not all, no.

You can't lay paint strokes in mid-air around you if you are not in a virtual reality with different physics. That art form simply did not exist before.

You can't understand whether the dimensions and arrangement of a not-yet-built house or movie set is appropriate if you can't visit it in person. It's a threshold change from seeing a model or a 2d tour.

If you are a burn victim, you can't "escape" your thoughts unless your visual cortex is completely flooded by imagery. Similarly, researchers trick the brain of people with spinal cord injuries to reconnect or regrow neurons. Again the "headphones-for-your-eyes" aspect that floods your input channels is used to trick the brain, and this was simply not imaginable before.

Depending on your definition of "mechanics", the second sounds significantly more immersive to me. If the graphics look like Toy Story, so be it. I don't mind if the movement is slightly janky, considering how imprecise a keyboard or controller is to start with.

It can be used for these things but is it really an improvement ?

> real estate

How often do you do that ? Once every few years ? Aren't regular 3d models / regular virtual visits enough ?

> porn

Tried it, extremely awkward at best

> psychology

> situational training (firemen)

You can train in your Vive for 5 years straight, nothing will prepare you to the real deal. Just like playing a racing video game doesn't make you a racer.

> scientific visualization and collaboration

It's neat but does it change anything fundamentally ?

> social interaction

Nothing will replace real world interactions, be it facebook or VR it's all a gimmicky at best

> movie shots planning

Sounds like a solution looking for a problem. VR isn't new at all and besides gaming it really didn't pick up speed in any other industry. If anything AR could be a "revolution", if miniaturised enough (contact lenses size).

I received a free HTC vive after participating to a conference in 2016, used it a month and it's in a drawer since then. None of what the speakers were promising happened, VR is still the thing you get out once every 6 months to show it to a friend, the wow factor lasts 30 mins.

Isn’t gaming a larger industry than the movies, driven largely by consoles? Seems like gaming had its iPhone moment a generation ago.

Edit: gaming is larger than the movie and music industries combined

Yes it's true it's larger than books and movies, but games in the end just compete with other forms of media for customers' entertainment dollars.

Unless we can come up with a use case for VR beyond gaming and fulfilling escapist fantasies. It will likely just be another contender for entertainment dollars.

Smartphones on the other hand essentially made it possible to do anything a general desktop pc could do for people on the go without having to be tethered to a chair infront of a desk. Phones can be used for payment, notetaking, etc. There are people who use smartphones and don't play games at all.

And the ultimate use case of VR is that you will be able to be "on the go" without ever leaving your chair -- in a form that's good enough that it doesn't feel inferior to being in person.

It's sort of the inverse of the smartphone use case.

Is it there yet? Of course not. But if/when it does get there... that's a much more compelling use case than a smartphone.

This is true but I think this is mostly irrelevant to the topic at hand. If VR was as popular as PS4 then we'd have said "VR took off". It doesn't need to be as popular as smartphones to be called successful but it's arguably not successful yet by many definitions. It certainly hasn't "taken off"

Most gaming accessories never took off. The racing wheel has been available for decades now and never "took off" and yet it never went away either. Racing wheels have a market and will continue to forever.

I predict VR will be slightly larger than the racing wheel market but they will not become super common in the next decade because they require a large amount of space. This doesn't matter at all because even today VR games and hardware are great fun to use.

The usecase I always envisioned was an all-in-one replacement for multi-monitor setup, TV, and essentially all visual media. I also imagined the flexibility to operate a computer in bright sunlight or while laying in bed thanks to a the goggles being sealed and replacing your vision. This is surely only a matter of the technology improving a bit. I believe a redesign of periphals suited to the ergonomics of VR would be required for my particular vision to be achieved. I suppose what I'm talking about is just a HMD but it could be optionally combined with head tracking like the implementations that exist now. I recall many years ago that HMDs where available so theyre nothing new. Why didnt they take off? Too clunky? Unpleasant somehow?

> Isn’t gaming a larger industry than the movies,

nowhere near comparable in reach. Way more people watch movies than play games. Since movies are typically cheaper to consume, it appears as a smaller industry while it is actually bigger in reach.

> Way more people watch movies than play games.

I don't believe that is true, any evidence for this?

Games cost a lot more than music and movies. $50, $60, $70 per game...

Gamers like to pay for collectables, DLC, limited editions, figurines, steam sales for games they don't play, etc.

Meanwhile unlimited music streaming is $9/mo. (Are concerts and merch considered in the "industry" revenues?)

Unlimited steaming on Netflix is $13.99/mo for their mid-tier plan.

If games had an "unlimited streaming" subscription equivalent, the industry's revenue would be much smaller.

I'd imagine the $ spent per unit of time for games today (especially live service games) is very low. In fact, I believe gaming is one of the most cost effective forms of entertainment. There are games that can be completed in a few hours, but on the other end of the spectrum you have people playing a single game for thousands to even tens of thousands of hours.

In addition, there are unlimited streaming services for games, one of which being Xbox Game Pass which is growing in popularity. Unfortunately it doesn't feel the same because how many games can one truly complete on a monthly basis?

It’s close between books and video games, depending on which examples you choose. If you chose a best seller from 2020, say A Promised Land, it’s $25 for approximately 15-20 hours of entertainment. I think most books are at a $/hour or less.

Single player video games are also in that range - 30-40 hours of gameplay for $60. But where it gets really crazy is endless games (Sims, Factorio, Simulators) or free to play games (League of Legends, Fortnite) where you could be entertained for thousands of hours for a couple of dollars. I personally played a free to play game for 2000 hours while spending about $40 total on it.

Even movies are pretty cheap, considering we most of us watch what’s included in our monthly subscriptions of Netflix/Amazon/Disney. Even buying/renting movies works out to about 1$/hour.

Conclusion - we’re in a golden era for entertainment where the options are nearly unlimited and dirt cheap.

> Games cost a lot more than music and movies. $50, $60, $70 per game...

That's only half the gaming market by revenue. The other half is mobile gaming and those games are typically under $5.

If you count by player, then the mobile market is larger.

Once upon a time, the iPod wasn't useful to every person, because not everyone wanted to take music with them wherever they went. Nowadays, if you don't have a phone in your pocket that can play music, you're in the minority of the world population.

I think that at some point there will be an iPhone moment for VR. However, I think we're still far enough away from it to not know what it'll look like.

> Gaming consoles and PCs have not had an "iphone moment" after decades because their market is and always will be limited.

56% of US households have at least one gaming console.

81% of Americans use a smart phone. Likely almost every house in the country contains one and usually many smartphones.

Likely no consumer product will reach the success of the smartphone.

The oven in all of it's forms? The light bulb? The washing machine? The refrigerator? The clock? The knife?

It's not just the market penetration of the smartphone but time spent engaging with it that makes it so successful as a platform. VR's biggest handicap is that it tends to be tethered/unwieldy to be useful for day to day applications.

The Quest (1/2) isn't tethered, and runs for hours off battery. It's about as wieldy as I can imagine these getting for a while...

Which is to say, it's still an unwieldy box you put on your head. But even hand-tracking works well now, so for a lot of games you don't strictly need the controllers.

My bet is when someone makes a spoon that can reproduce any flavor. I think everyone will want that.

Why would that be anything more than a novelty? It completely misses the joy of sharing food and cooking.

Why can't you share while using the fancy spoon?

And while cooking is enjoyable, that doesn't mean you want to spend the time on it every single day, twice or more!

Do you think restaurants are a novelty? Takeout/delivery/fast food?

It is possible that AR could become a useful product to literally every person. I'll be waiting as always.

I'm not sure why there's an expectation that the consumer VR market is going to grow by orders of magnitude. I think the market is basically what it's going to be.

It's a great demo but not something I want to spend much time in.

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