Face-wearables - will any survive or thrive (Rift / Glass / HoloLens / Vive / Apple Vision etc)?

Schpyder said:

I kind of doubt this for a number of reasons. First, VR arcade experiences have been a thing since the 80s. They were expensive novelties then, and they're the same now, regardless of increases in fidelity. Second, arcades are, by their very nature, pretty gross. People put up with that when it's things they're generally used to getting dirty, like their hands or shoes. It's a different matter entirely when it's your face. Unless the headset gets stuck in something like a CPAP sterilizer for half an hour between each session, I don't think you're going to have a lot of takers. Third, arcades are, by and large, an industry on life support. Outside of barcades like Dave & Busters (which already has some VR experiences), or smaller versions of the same (bars with some classic cabinets/pinball/etc), they're basically extinct. That's not a target market where a nascent technology can flourish.

Click to expand...

I've gone to some "VR Experiences" things like the interactive Van Gogh exhibit. Those seem to be going strong, as I see those advertised a lot. But they're also advertised as part of a larger interactive museum-type thing.

Also, they gave us all our own disposable face gasket as part of the VR part. So they have at least been thinking about how to manage the gross factor. My wife even did it and she's a germophobe (granted, she wiped it down with her own disinfectant wipe, first).

Schpyder said:

First, VR arcade experiences have been a thing since the 80s. They were expensive novelties then, and they're the same now

Click to expand...

but.. thats the point of an arcade, the novelty.

Schpyder said:

Third, arcades are, by and large, an industry on life support. Outside of barcades like Dave & Busters (which already has some VR experiences)

Click to expand...

Yea, and the phone market is also on life support when you exclude smartphones. Obviously when you exclude the biggest part of a sector, it will look like its dying. And doesn't the fact dave and busters already have VR experiences completely negate your 2nd point? My city of 220k has 4 arcades with VR experiences, 3 of which opened in the past 5 years.
Just about every anime/gaming convention I have been to in the past few years has had huge areas for people to try VR games. I just went to a free outdoor NASA event last week that even had VR experiences for people to try.

poochyena said:

Yea, and the phone market is also on life support when you exclude smartphones. Obviously when you exclude the biggest part of a sector, it will look like its dying. And doesn't the fact dave and busters already have VR experiences completely negate your 2nd point? My city of 220k has 4 arcades with VR experiences, 3 of which opened in the past 5 years.
Just about every anime/gaming convention I have been to in the past few years has had huge areas for people to try VR games. I just went to a free outdoor NASA event last week that even had VR experiences for people to try.

Click to expand...

I'm not saying you should exclude D&B's, I'm saying that even including D&B's and their ilk, the arcade market is not particularly significant. You're talking about four arcades in a city of 220k (similar-sized to mine) with VR experiences. That's a handful of headsets each. And most of these are using obsolete off-the-shelf hardware like HTC Vives or something similar. What I'm saying that kind of market simply isn't large enough to drive the segment forward. If your primary market for an advanced technological product is tens of units per million metro population and temporary installations at nerd conventions (I'm expanding past your two examples because I'm pretty sure I've seen VR installations at e.g. comic conventions and sci-fi conventions as well), then that product segment is going to wither and stagnate. Which is pretty much the state of arcade gaming in TYOOL 2024.

poochyena said:

Yea, and the phone market is also on life support when you exclude smartphones. Obviously when you exclude the biggest part of a sector, it will look like its dying.

Click to expand...

If Dave & Busters with it's resounding 156 locations is the biggest part of the sector...yeah, that sector is dying.

Echohead2 said:

If Dave & Busters with it's resounding 156 locations is the biggest part of the sector...yeah, that sector is dying.

Click to expand...

Dave and Busters isn't the only business like it. Just in my city there is Stars and Strikes and Main Events. I'm sure there are many other similar places in other cities.

Schpyder said:

the arcade market is not particularly significant

Click to expand...

I'm not claiming anyone is going to build a trillion dollar VR company, but clearly there is demand from businesses selling VR experiences. I think its the better strategy than to market it to consumers who don't want to spend thousands on a device that they will get tired of fairly quickly.
VR has been great at selling an experience, but really bad at selling it as a consumer device that people will want to use for years.

poochyena said:

VR has been great at selling an experience, but really bad at selling it as a consumer device that people will want to use for years.

Click to expand...

I don't disagree with this, but IMO the sustainable way forward for the technology is for someone to figure out how to make VR the latter, rather than hitching their wagons to the clearly dead-end former.

Schpyder said:

I don't disagree with this, but IMO the sustainable way forward for the technology is for someone to figure out how to make VR the latter, rather than hitching their wagons to the clearly dead-end former.

Click to expand...

I don't agree that arcades are dead end. Maybe my city is just special, but its hard for me to see 5 arcades open in my city within the past 5 years, 3 of which have VR, and say that arcades are a dying category. Its also fairly popular on youtube too.
I think arcades were dying, but their reformatting as a place to play games as now being more of a social experience with friends have brought arcades back into popularity.

People are already isolated, and consumer VR is even more isolating. VR at an arcade can be a fun experience with friends with multiplayer VR games. At home, you can't really play VR games with someone else, you can't use the screen to watch a movie with friends, etc. A device that makes you even more isolated from the world is the opposite of what people want right now.

Meta has released a rather visionOS-like take on spatial computing to their test channel.

poochyena said:

I don't agree that arcades are dead end. Maybe my city is just special, but its hard for me to see 5 arcades open in my city within the past 5 years, 3 of which have VR, and say that arcades are a dying category. Its also fairly popular on youtube too.
I think arcades were dying, but their reformatting as a place to play games as now being more of a social experience with friends have brought arcades back into popularity.

People are already isolated, and consumer VR is even more isolating. VR at an arcade can be a fun experience with friends with multiplayer VR games. At home, you can't really play VR games with someone else, you can't use the screen to watch a movie with friends, etc. A device that makes you even more isolated from the world is the opposite of what people want right now.

Click to expand...

They aren't dead, but they are stagnant. There are about 6100 arcade, food, and entertainment complexes in the US (the D&B-alikes, Chuck E. Cheese, etc.), a number that has fluctuated between 6k and 7k for over a decade. Specifically video game arcade sites are in the 2k-3k range, and have been for at least 15 years. Producing relatively technologically simple arcade games for a market of 10k locations might be worth it, and it does still happen, occasionally. But that's not a big enough market for it to be a driver of technological development. And the numbers sold to that market are absolutely dwarfed by consumer purchases. Even if every one of those locations bought 10 headsets (100k total), consumer sales of the Valve Index alone are over 400k units. Never mind the Quest 2, which has sold in the neighborhood of 20 million units. VR might be moderately popular at the arcades that still exist in the US, but that's still just a tiny blip in the overall marketplace. It might be a good fit for the arcades, but they're utterly irrelevant to the development and advancement of the technology.

For the most part, Arcades and even VR-only venues (which are pretty cool as they sometimes offer some level of physical interaction) are running on largely consumer hardware and not cutting edge consumer hardware. Their sales numbers for hardware probably should just be lumped into consumers sales as not much more than a rounding error.

The value in these venues isn't the direct sales of hardware/software for these specific venues, it's the value of giving consumers a chance to experience VR in a low-risk scenario-- well, except maybe the risk of someone's face-germs. If they're generating enough profit to justify their existence, that's sufficient.

Meanwhile they are at least nominally social in ways that at-home use isn't (or is cost-prohibitive for in-home use) but I don't see that as the core benefit other than it justifies spending money at a venue with more advanced facilities than you can have at home the same way you might see a movie in the theater/cinema because you weigh the cost against the experience. Those venues don't need to significantly push the state-of-the art.

The social bit will probably look more like social online gaming from your home now, eventually.

poochyena said:

Dave and Busters isn't the only business like it. Just in my city there is Stars and Strikes and Main Events. I'm sure there are many other similar places in other cities.

Click to expand...

So 3 places, where video games aren't really the main draw (you could argue that D&B it is as you wouldn't go there for just the food) when there probably were a dozen or more plain video arcades in the 80s. Video games are just an add on. I'm surprised you didn't list Chuck E Cheese as another.

Echohead2 said:

So 3 places, where video games aren't really the main draw (you could argue that D&B it is as you wouldn't go there for just the food) when there probably were a dozen or more plain video arcades in the 80s. Video games are just an add on. I'm surprised you didn't list Chuck E Cheese as another.

Click to expand...

At a minimum, it's probably fair to assume this is something with regional differences. I've seen VR in places like entertainment centers/arcades and casinos and malls and it's fine, but it's not the whole market for venues that have VR.

I'm thinking also of places like Sandbox ( sandboxvr.com ) where they have access to adjunct technologies that exist -- like integrating thump vests and mo-cap-- even though the VR itself isn't necessarily anything revolutionary. I'm also thinking about the old "The Void" centers which used, if I recall, off the shelf Oculus hardware. Those didn't survive COVID just like many other social/entertainment venues, but they appear to be primed to re-launch. I'm sure there are others I don't know about because I'm not going to every city.

I've only ever done an experience at The Void, which was Star Wars themed and of course gamified as befits VR... You moved through what were blank rooms in the real world and it started out as an OK experience, but at the mid-point you found an armory and were urged to reach out and grab a blaster to fight the Bad Guys. You reach out in VR space to the virtual blaster and pick up a blaster that exists in the real world. VR "you" is holding a blaster and actual you in meatspace is going "pew pew" to interact with VR. That part of the experinece was magical because you were touching a physical object that more or less matched a virtual object. That's not something anyone can recreate at home with anything like current AR tech. the AVP is probably the closest from a technological standpoint of being able to allow you to reach your hands out and grab physical objects represented in VR, but Apple's push as a non-gaming device completely limits that kind of use case. It could have been a cool option for that technology. Regardless, that's been possible for years with existing technology and while it could get better, the technology at least exists. It's just not accessible for the individual user.

Point being the two are symbiotic-- the venues are mostly just regular hardware with add-ons, including the more vanilla ones in arcades. They're not going to sell in massive numbers but unlike the VR of the '90s, they're not completely bespoke, super expensive gear either.

Nevarre said:

They're not going to sell in massive numbers but unlike the VR of the '90s, they're not completely bespoke, super expensive gear either.

Click to expand...

I could see a market for VR Bars; I'd love to go to a bar to hang out with my friends who are scattered all over the world, especially if we could manifest to each other as our D&D characters or something like that. I'd walk into the bar in my town, which would be a comfy chair with a table (with necessary wait staff and real beer etc.), put on the AVP headset and the plain room with local customers will transform into the Draco Tavern or something. Meanwhile my friends in Vancouver, London, and Madrid sit down at their respective tables, put on their AVPs and key in the code to our virtual room. They appear in my room and I appear in theirs, and we have a few pints in a really cool virtual bar, being served by Pierson's Puppeteers, green Orion slave girls, etc. with suitable ambient sound that does not interfere with our conversation.

If only we could do something about the timezone problem.

I used to be super excited by one possibility of VR...wizard duels like harry potter. I think someone had it...but part of the problem was hand/motion capture and voice capture just weren't good enough to get right, and the clencher...no real feedback. This is also the problem with sword fights...you swing your sword, but when blocked, your arm continues. Feedback is the biggest holdback, imo.

The above post mentioned it "That part of the experinece was magical because you were touching a physical object that more or less matched a virtual object."

Echohead2 said:

I used to be super excited by one possibility of VR...wizard duels like harry potter. I think someone had it...but part of the problem was hand/motion capture and voice capture just weren't good enough to get right, and the clencher...no real feedback. This is also the problem with sword fights...you swing your sword, but when blocked, your arm continues. Feedback is the biggest holdback, imo.

The above post mentioned it "That part of the experinece was magical because you were touching a physical object that more or less matched a virtual object."

Click to expand...

Yeah, the disconnect between what your sense of touch and proprioception are telling you and what you're seeing is still a huge problem. But even with that limitation, I think VR has a huge potential for things like research, medicine and teaching; I envision walking into a confocal data set (or data from CT, MRI, or any other 3D data) as if it were a hologram... just being able to do that by myself would let me see and interpret my data in ways that are just not possible right now. But being able to do it with a student or colleague who may not even be in the same timezone let alone same physical location, presents opportunities for collaboration that are mindboggling.

But as always, the really valuable applications of these new technologies will have to wait until every possible way to use them for war and porn have been fully exploited.

Hey, the military has a deep pocketbook:


Version 1 was Microsoft Hololens based, and the whole program is probably one of the biggest projects anywhere using AR instead of VR.

I leave the possibilities for porn as an exercise for the reader.

TheGnome said:

Yeah, the disconnect between what your sense of touch and proprioception are telling you and what you're seeing is still a huge problem. But even with that limitation, I think VR has a huge potential for things like research, medicine and teaching; I envision walking into a confocal data set (or data from CT, MRI, or any other 3D data) as if it were a hologram... just being able to do that by myself would let me see and interpret my data in ways that are just not possible right now. But being able to do it with a student or colleague who may not even be in the same timezone let alone same physical location, presents opportunities for collaboration that are mindboggling.

But as always, the really valuable applications of these new technologies will have to wait until every possible way to use them for war and porn have been fully exploited.

Click to expand...

Oh....one THOUSAND percent! As someone who has done his fair share of multivariate analysis and data visualization, it could be wicked cool, and maybe even a game-changer.

But I am not sure the market for VR 3-D PCA graphs is going to move the needle.

From a technical perspective, full-body sensations are a solved problem. As with so many things, the issue is implementation and product penetration. It's entirely possible to spend money on a full-body haptic suit. But the number of games that explicitly support such things are vanishingly small. The backup of using vibration signals to trigger the suit technically works, but isn't as immersive as getting granular contact feedback on what part of your body just got hit. You can even run in place on specialized tools these days.

Writing that out, that does leave one major gap that is only semi-solved. Resistance from active motion. While resistance gloves to exist to give a better sensation of picking items up, you still have no solution for resistant if you're swinging swords and axes around.

That means, even in a game like Skyrim, where the world's biggest immersive nerds spend their time trying to get things right, magic is much more satisfying than melee, because magic feels right when you move.