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Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

I think, AR like this is the future of gaming.

VR is a cool idea, but it falls short on so many levels. It looks cool to go into a space that isn't there, but you always have issues with the mismatch of your surroundings and the VR world.

Playing Xing, and the recent Myst remake is awesome on desktop, but very tiresome on VR. The haptics are obviously not there and either you can't really walk where you need to go or you "teleport" around which feels strange. Overall its tiring mentally and physically.

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And the motion sickness, ugh. I'm not prone to motion sickness, but for some reason the subtle delays really affect me. I don't quite feel sick necessarily, but if I do VR for about 10 minutes, I feel just kinda off for about 3-5 hours afterwards. It's not a good feeling.

I honestly don't really think it will become a household thing until they develop black-mirror-type contact lenses.

I am somewhat prone to it, and I got seasick for about 12 hours from 30 minutes of sedate VR once. Eventually I realized what I needed to do was go outside and walk around to reset things. I haven't had anything that bad since- spending a bit more time in VR helps a lot- but it's not like I can just hand someone a headset and tell them to try it for more than a couple minutes without risking ruining their day.

This cracks me up. I don't think you are wrong, but I also remember not liking the original myst, thinking it was mainly a gimmick for cdrom drives.

So, not being wrong doesn't necessarily mean you are right. There is a chance the vr world lights up. Hard to really say.

As someone whose VR headset has been collecting dust for a year, I think the key is movement. Moving in VR just sucks. Either you teleport around which is disorienting or you slide with a stick which is nauseating. All my favorite VR experiences didn't require me to move further than my play area. If someone comes up with a cheap omnidirectional treadmill or something just as good it'll blow the market wide open. Until then, almost everything is more fun on a normal screen than in VR.

I found seated "sims" or games like Elite were fine for me, but anything that tried to replicate the FPS-style running around was a no-go. I guess it's even better in those arcade-style setups with moving seats to help replicate the feeling of movement and position seen with the eyes, but that's even more complicated than treadmills and such.

I think that for VR, the trick is to stick to experiences where your POV matches your meat-space position. Trying to shoehorn the conventions of flat-panel games into 3d VR either requires a lot of increasingly complex sim stuff or is just always gonna give you that mismatch between what you see and what you feel.

In that sense, I agree that AR is probably a lot more doable if you intend to be walking/running around.

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