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Comment by PetitPrince | Hacker News Reader

Diorama-style VR works very well to reduce or even eliminate kinetosis (motion sickness) for games. I've seen this in Moss and Moss 2 and it works very well.

Too bad many blockbuster games nowadays have a camera-over-the-shoulder approach rather and focus on aiming on stuff rather than fixed camera (understandable since so many of them are open world); this would have given a nice accessibility option for fan-made mods. That said, for character action game with melee combat (the likes of Devil May Cry, Elden Ring, etc), maybe a god-game view centered on the character with a limited field of view could work ?

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Not fully relevant to the comment, but I've noticed that most motion sickness issues derive from an FOV which is too low.Big companies set it lower for performance reasons I guess, but on PC I always loved to crank it. And it's not about sitting closer or about the distance in itself, it's about the ratio of the size of the screen to the vision field it occupies

For me it was more about the mismatch between what my eyes saw and what my inner ear felt.

Running around in first person while sitting or standing in a room took some real getting used to. But cockpit games or mostly stationary (in a reasonably small volume) standing-perspective games were fine.

Agreed. Back when I used my Oculus a lot, a RTS game called Brass Tactics was my favorite.

Brass Tactics is forgotten today, but it represents a way of playing games that was totally unique and might some day be rediscovered.

Glassbreakers: Champions of Moss (same people who made Moss and Moss 2) based a lot of their design on Brass Tactics. I would say check it out but unfortunately the studio (Polyarc) went under shortly after publishing it so probably won't be seeing many updates and I'm not sure if it is even playable anymore.

It did suffer from player base problems you were basically always against bots or very high level players, but I never felt a VR UX (or any UX almost) feel so good and intuitive. It's a bit sad I feel like there is some alternate reality where a game like this would have been huge but there just doesn't seem to be the market there anymore.

I just looked up a video for this game, and looks like a really interesting take on user interface in VR. Thanks for the head's up!

Triangle strategy released a diorama version like this on quest 3, and it worked so well imo that it make sort of sad that more top down isometric games don't do it.

Diorama style games in VR/AR are awesome. I remember Moss fondly. You could even high five the little mouse.

Since getting my Frame I think I've spent more time playing Super Mario Galaxy 2 in 3D than I have doing anything else. 3D in a window is much easier to deal with then full VR from a motion sickness perspective.

I think the VR space made an unforced error by focusing a bit too much on VR and not enough on just plain 3D. VR is cool and it has a lot of interesting applications. But I've enjoyed my time with SMG2 in a 3D window quite a bit. I've enjoyed Triangle Strategy on my Quest 3S, which is a tactics game played on a diorama. There are some other applications based on the idea like shared dungeon crawlers modeled on table-top layouts rather than first person perspective. There's a lot of games that need only minimal tweaking or fiddling that could add a bit more visual interest by being displayed in full, true 3D. The space of games that could be improved by just being playable in 3D is much larger than the space of games that can be improved by VR specifically, since the former is a superset of the latter.

Subconsciously it may feel like if you're developing for a "VR" headset, it ought to be "VR", but that's not the case. It's a well-known trap in gaming in general that when some new tech comes out there's a rush of things that feel obligated to "exploit" the tech so as not to be perceived as being behind the times, but it always becomes clear that is not necessarily. Most famously, the numerous Wii games that had to integrate "motion controls" and turned a nice, easy, concrete button press into a vague, nondeterministic "waggle" until just saying "motion controls" with a certain inflection has become a meme. There's no problem using the VR headset to enhance a game... or indeed any application... without it having to be "VR".

My Steam Frame was cheaper than this 57" curved "gaming" monitor: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CDQM55C9 If gamers are willing to drop that on nice monitors just to play games, it would make sense to drop that much on a VR headset to play them in 3D too... if there was anything to do with that.

I personally don’t like being so closed off to play video games. I like having a screen and awareness of my surroundings. Plus I’m often in voice chat with friends. Also, I don’t have to worry about things like sweat and grease on it.

I have the original PSVR and it’s been fun at times but the whole process of wearing the headset, getting it adjusted over your eyes, etc. Just always dissuades me from busting it out. I know things have gotten smaller, lighter, and easier, but nothing is as easy as simply turning on a monitor.

I don't expect every person to instantly fall in love. I expect that it could be a more popular option than it is now if the industry hadn't been quite as monomaniacal about VR being "VR".

It doesn't help that the headset hardware space has been closed off even worse than cell phones. One of the things I hope the Steam Frame will do is crack open the space of possibilities more by virtue of being a headset that is open, and force even the closed headsets to expand their thinking. More possibilities won't hurt you, even if you are personally uninterested in them.

Not saying it’ll hurt me. I like VR here and there. Just voicing some issues as I see them.

For Triangle Strategy at least, there is a passthrough mode where you have the diorama in front of you but can see your surroundings.

Agree on the comfort. Quest 3 is a pretty good device. The hand controls are horrible but I think could be fixed with some clever hci design. I think it a headset could become a mainstream computing device if they get through the comfort problems (and price for vision pro).

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