I think a large part of the problem boils down to how a not-insignificant percentage people get motion-sick easily from conventional analog stick movement in VR, which is why you have things like comfort vignettes and teleportation all over the place.
Iâm fortunate enough to be able to handle analog stick movement without comfort vignettes just fine, and thus get quite annoyed when games donât support conventional movement at all, but @kunedon told me before that he felt ill just trying to demo a PSVR. Thatâs an even bigger barrier than spending $350+ on the VR hardware itself, on top of the modest expense for a PS4 or the considerable expense for a âVR-readyâ PC with a GPU that doesnât suck.
Itâs why the Vive developers emphasized room-scale so much, never mind that even a roughly 8â˛x8Ⲡplay space gives you about one step away from center before youâre within armâs reach of a boundary, and most people simply do not have 15â˛x15Ⲡof uninterrupted space in their homes to dedicate to the closest thing current consumer technology has to a holodeck. Especially if you donât live in the US or Australia; I always wondered how room-scale was going to take off in places like the UK and Japan.
Want to know why thatâs such a problem? Go watch the launch trailer for GORN, itâs pretty appropriate given how many things people end up breaking in their rooms during all the virtual melee carnage.
Or try immediately diving into prone position on the floor, which is what many Onward players will do if it keeps them from getting shot. Youâll most likely end up very close to a boundary no matter which way you dive in such a confined space, and if you were already close to begin with, you might end up smacking yourself into a wall, desk, or something else.
Funnily enough, I mostly got into VR for seated simulations, which really donât require that much modification for a good VR experience beyond making the menus work in VR. Stuff like Elite: Dangerous, DCS World, IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad/Moscow/Kuban, DiRT Rally, Project CARS, Enemy Starfighter House of the Dying Sun, now X: Rebirth...
The big thing here is that youâre no longer just looking at an image of a cockpit, youâre IN the cockpit, and you donât have to deal with janky TrackIR issues every time one of the three LEDs or reflectors on your head clip leaves the camera FOV! There are no words to express just how much of a leap in immersiveness this is.
However, even the flight sim enthusiasts arenât entirely won over, and this has everything to do with the limited resolution. Both the Rift and Vive are like taking a step back to 1280x720p HDTVs, and this makes visually spotting targets in the distance more difficult than it would be on a typical monitor, alongside requiring a bit of a lean-in to read cockpit instruments clearly.
Despite all this, I love my Rift and Touch setup. The potential is clearly there, but the software overall hasnât quite caught up yet, unless you really like a specific subset of genres. However, if the hardware didnât exist now, the software certainly wouldnât. Gotta love these sorta catch-22 situations.
