> It's similar to 3D TV in that it presents content in a better way that nobody asked for...
No, that's where VR is so different from 3D TV. Nobody was making 3D TVs in their basement. But people have wanted VR for so long that they have been hacking together their own VR headsets. I had been experimenting with using smartphones in cardboard boxes for years before Google Cardboard came out. The significance of Google Cardboard is that it signaled a moment when smartphone hardware was finally "good enough" to do it.
And while Google Cardboard is of course not a great experience, in a lot of ways it's still the basis of the core technology behind most of the other headsets. The Rift and the Vive wouldn't have their relatively high DPI display modules if it weren't for the advances in display module tech built for smartphones. The original Rift DK1 and the Gear VR wouldn't have their motion tracking tech if it weren't for the advancements in high-frequency, low-cost IMU technology built for smartphones.
And the problem is not that VR does not have a cool solution for any problems. It has plenty of those. You just don't personally care about the problems that VR solves. And that's fine, we all have our different interests. But don't assume that means that nobody wants VR.
> "You just don't personally care about the problems that VR solves."
On the contrary, I do. I have the Oculus Rift and the Touch controllers, and I enjoy trying all the content there is. I also love VRs and flight sims - but I've been a flight sim nerd since I was a kid...
The problem is that I don't think the vast majority of the world cares about the problems that VR solves, and that's precisely the similarity with 3D TVs.
I still know some people who love their 3D TVs and watch as much content in 3D as they can get their hands on, but ultimately these people are a very small market, and manufacturers have decided this market isn't serviceable profitably. VR faces the same issue - the places where it's truly well integrated are very niche, and despite multiple attempts at broader appeal, has yet to break out.
Heck, you say mostly the same:
> "But people have wanted VR for so long that they have been hacking together their own VR headsets."
"People" being a vanishingly small community of makers and tinkerers.
VR has been a dream for a long time for many people - especially in the hacker community - but it was never a mainstream desire. In the same way people have been hacking stereoscopic tech together for a long time before 3D TVs, and yet 3D TVs still failed in the mainstream.
VR will always have a place in some niches - the issue here is if major hardware manufacturers will be able to support this niche at the level they are doing right now. The Rift and the Vive are both incredible leaps in VR tech, but both are predicated on the expectation that VR goes mainstream in some major way. Both products will not be sustainable if VR continues to be a very small market like it is right now.
I think one major difference between the two will be that VR content should be much more accessible. A lot of computer games were already trying to be VR, just with clumsy controls and a fixed monitor. Taking a typical first-person game and VR-izing it is pretty easy, and there's a thriving indie game scene. 3D movies require quite a bit more effort and have much more room for stupid stuff like using parallax on an object that's supposed to be gigantic and distant.
Having the hardware be something totally different may well be helpful too. A 3D TV is just a regular TV with a weird feature tacked on. It's hard to justify a higher price, so there isn't much incentive to add that feature. VR headsets are seen as a totally different technology, so their price can be set independently.
> "Taking a typical first-person game and VR-izing it is pretty easy"
This isn't true, though. Developers have found that existing genres are incredibly difficult to adapt into VR. First-person games have had the most trouble adapting to VR because moving the player without a corresponding real-world movement is disorienting.
The abstraction of moving with a controller actually made FPSes even possible - what we've found is that allowing free-look with a VR headset and movement with a joystick is basically impossible to implement well.
If you're looking to your left and push up on your joystick, should the player move in the direction you're looking? Or in the direction of your torso? Worse, having the player move through the world even though the player is physically still causes nausea and disorientation in even seasoned VR users.
First-person game devs have largely settled on teleportation as the replacement - you can't move the player around like you do in a normal game, you can only teleport them to fixed positions. This has solved the disorientation problem at the cost of immersion - most games don't have a convenient in-world explanation for why the player gets to teleport around - and also removes dimensions of gameplay (teleportation makes dodging enemy attacks stupidly easy, after all).
Some modders have shoved VR support into traditional FPSes, and for all of the above reasons these are unplayable. Some have altered their gameplay to support teleportation, and some have disallowed player movement at all (see: Superhot VR). In any case, adapting games to VR is really hard, and in many ways controllers/keyboard/mice were much easier.
Thanks for the info. There are, however, a lot of first-person games where the player controls some sort of vehicle, where all of this is basically solved by default. That's still enough for a lot of content.
No, that's where VR is so different from 3D TV. Nobody was making 3D TVs in their basement. But people have wanted VR for so long that they have been hacking together their own VR headsets. I had been experimenting with using smartphones in cardboard boxes for years before Google Cardboard came out. The significance of Google Cardboard is that it signaled a moment when smartphone hardware was finally "good enough" to do it.
And while Google Cardboard is of course not a great experience, in a lot of ways it's still the basis of the core technology behind most of the other headsets. The Rift and the Vive wouldn't have their relatively high DPI display modules if it weren't for the advances in display module tech built for smartphones. The original Rift DK1 and the Gear VR wouldn't have their motion tracking tech if it weren't for the advancements in high-frequency, low-cost IMU technology built for smartphones.
And the problem is not that VR does not have a cool solution for any problems. It has plenty of those. You just don't personally care about the problems that VR solves. And that's fine, we all have our different interests. But don't assume that means that nobody wants VR.