VR - great or gimmick?

My personal experience on polls like this, often means that those who vote that it's a gimmick, typically haven't used VR, or haven't used high quality VR.

There's a huge difference in experience between "I've used Google Cardboard and looked at a '360 photo'" to having used a Valve Index or HTC Vive and navigated a 3D, stereoscopic 3D virtual environment and interacted with it.

There's no doubt that it's still in its infancy, and it's going from tech' to tech' as it's finding its footing, the fact that HTC are mainly doing 'business only' units tells a lot here, that they've found applications for full body tracking, and eye tracking in commercial settings or research, and typically not in the home.

Where as in the home setting, removing the dependency on base stations have pretty much turned it around, and also hand tracking. The oculus quest really changes things here, a lot of people use it as a social tool on 'bigscreen vr' which is fantastic for interacting with people and experiencing movies in the home, and while the other headsets are good for this also, it really shows promise for the platform.

The software is mostly what's lacking here, two very different experiences are Valve Software's 'The Lab' and 'Alyx' versus playing No Man's Sky. In Valve's software you're using potential finger tracking for interaction and full body motion to play with the environment, in No Man's Sky you're pressing the left trackpad to walk forward. You're mainly encouraged for a sit-down experience, same with PlayStation VR.

There's also the difference in Tech, the HTC Vive and Valve Index support 90hz to 120hz+ refresh rates, and you can get high framerates, this makes it seem more real, and a bigger field of view. Other headsets suffer here, PlayStation VR has lower framerate, as do some models of the Oculus headset and I believe Vive Cosmos, and this isn't even reflecting on the resolution.

I don't believe VR is a platform that's going to go away, especially as the new GeForce 3080 has been released to help power it more, and the lower end graphics cards, the GeForce 1080 is very VR capable, we're starting to move into an era where VR is accessible and affordable, even though the original HTC Vive is out of support, you can pick up most second hand as people buy the new headsets, what we're needing is accessible hardware solutions, and better integration into the software. This was reduced somewhat in the earlier days due to the intention for a singular platform (OpenVR) but is being split a bit by Facebook with Oculus, and pulled back in a bit by Valve with the Index.

More competition and familiarity with interacting with the software environment is where it needs development, and I can see it working better in future. Brain computer interfaces will likely help with this in the future as well, it's certainly a stroll rather than a run to the finish line of it all.

I understand the value of VR, I just cannot use them due to my broken neck.

If they reach a point were the technology does not come in a heavy head mounted unit, I would be more interested.

DAB

Microsoft and Facebook currently, collectively own a bunch of patents for virtual reality/augmented reality technical spectacles as opposed to a full head mounted unit, unless these companies make headway in their own products we will likely not see anything until those patents expire, sadly.

Patents can slow progress by increasing costs, but there are many more patents to be issued before this story is over. I think progress is more about how much money industry is willing to invest, which is linked to perceived demand more than patent roadblocks. Microsoft is currently spending over $1 billion to develop mixed reality hardware and software and have made lots of tools and hardware available to developers. Their best efforts so far with HoloLens II are still too big by a factor of 10 and the computing capability required is still way too big and power-hungry for a comfortable wearable experience.

There are also a large number of other companies developing augmented reality or virtual reality, many that do nothing but AR or VR. So there seems to be lots of perceived demand.

There is certainly a vast unexplored application space that will provide unlimited opportunities for many more individuals and companies, however after being involved in developing AR for over a decade, I am unusually pessimistic about widespread killer apps being developed anytime soon. The technical hurdles and costs are both enormous.

I'd say the main hurdle is hardware and accessible hardware. You don't see many people producing accessories for VR at present as you do other platforms. Part of this is down to the chips used in the 'base station' reliant VR implementations. Though there are some good open sources efforts going on.

I'd say the main hurdle is hardware and accessible hardware. You don't see many people producing accessories for VR at present as you do other platforms. Part of this is down to the chips used in the 'base station' reliant VR implementations. Though there are some good open sources efforts going on.

Also, cost of PC hardware maybe. I get the feeling (maybe it's speculation) VR still requires quite high-end PCs, which the young kids (who could be keen to learn to develop games and demo apps) can't afford, and many adults might just have the one work laptop, which won't have decent GPU capability : ( I actually don't have any recent desktop that could accept a good GPU. I have a small PC (Intel NUC), which is not geared up for this.

It seems a fun thing to experiment with though, and it's nicely become almost plug-and-play for people to develop apps, using (say) Unity and motion capture devices etc, so it's nice to see that development for it is maturing.