Comment by BigglesB | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BigglesB | Hacker News Reader

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Not saying it can’t or won’t be used for gaming, but the lack of precisely tracked 6dof controllers does severely limit it from being usable with a lot of popular genres of VR games: thinking Beat Saber & Pistol Whip specifically but anything with swords/guns/bows & arrow or generally precise twitch-based mechanics will likely not work well with just hand tracking.

MiFi support down the road will be unlikely to solve the issue since without bundled controllers, the market size for games that require them won’t be big enough to justify making them & vice versa… unless each studio does something like Guitar Hero & releases their own peripheral & bundles it together with their game…

I can imagine lots of game genres that could work fine but they’ll only be economically viable if the market for VisionOS games itself is big enough to support such a business model or if Apple jump-starts things by investing heavily in individual titles. Their messaging to date hasn’t really suggested that they’re interested in playing that game though.

We’ll see, though.

> MiFi support down the road will be unlikely to solve the issue since without bundled controllers, the market size for games that require them won’t be big enough to justify making them & vice versa… unless each studio does something like Guitar Hero & releases their own peripheral & bundles it together with their game

Yeah, you're already talking about the most expensive headset, nevermind that added cost for controllers. With this price tag you're going to be talking about a tiny installed base.

If it's easy enough to port stuff... and the controller ecosystem develops... well, sure, I guess this thing could find its niche. From an ROI perspective though it can't possibly be the primary target for game developers, which means it gets ports... and with ports to niche platforms there's always the risk of low quality / jank, which would only hurt the brand.

I think eventually we may see some tracked controllers, perhaps they shied away from them for launch because they would add to the already higher than expected price point and won't be used in most of the work-focused scenarios they seemed to present. Having to stop typing to pick up a controller to twiddle some 3d ui and then swap back to keyboard seems .. shitty.

Absolutely, controllers don’t make sense at all for most of those kinds of use cases, and would only add friction.

A device like this already has so many conflicting constraints to deal with that I’m not really surprised that they didn’t prioritise the things that would benefit gaming.

Hand controllers may well come a few years down the line (if the product line survives that long), but it’s very much in line with their behaviour historically to initially avoid requiring additional input devices: anyone remember how long it took Apple to release a stylus for the iPad?

Also seems like their efforts to protect privacy by restricting direct gaze input access may make certain kinds of gaze-related input actions tricky to implement, but the Unity video shared earlier suggested that they may be giving developers more access to that stuff (at least via Unity-based apps) than they’d previously implied.

Assuming their hand tracking is super fast (no noticable latency over controllers like on the quest), the biggest loss to not having controllers is haptic feedback. I can see haptic feedback being useful even in non-gaming situations, feeling buttons is better than not feeling buttons.

also other things like doing two things at once... On my knuckles I can pull the trigger and run the thumbstick or other buttons at once.

Hand gestures are cool and all but i have yet to use a gesture system that isn't more than a little 'lossy'...

Oh that also, though I'm not sure how useful that is in productivity scenarios (I don't have enough imagination). IF gesture tracking was super accurate, there would still be the problem of haptic feedback. Someone needs to invent a VR glove that allows us to feel things.

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