When will virtual reality take off? The $100 bet
I was tangentially involved with VR as a game developer, in the 2015-2016 timeframe.  Both Oculus and Valve really strongly believed that there was a &quot;there&quot; there, but didn&#x27;t know what the actual killer app would be.  They spent a lot of money trying to find it, and I benefited by getting some free headsets!  I don&#x27;t feel like they have actually found it yet, though they seem to be closer.<p>It probably will eventually be a successful thing, probably slowly and incrementally, but I think that the rush to be first to market caused all parties involved to make some mistakes that prevented the wild success they were envisioning.<p>- They should have been even more experimental.  Bootstrapping a market is difficult.  The way it goes is that the audience is zero at the start, so no sensible publisher or developer would risk their money over the years it takes to build a game, so the platform creator has to fund them 100%.  But that also means that the platform creator gets to control the games and how they&#x27;re made.  I got the sense that the VR platform owners were overly controlling.  I was involved with several different headset makers and they were pretty specific about how the input devices had to be used, limitations on the permissible content, and what kinds of games they were looking for.  That makes sense for a mature platform where you know what a killer app looks like, but I think they needed much more experimentation for VR.  When we first started building for VR, our team strongly believed that it would be the most fun to make games that focused on small-scale, close-up experiences, basically fitting everything on a tabletop.  But we were steered away from such ideas, in part due to platform pressure.  I guess they felt that big, splashy, open experiences were going to dominate (or would at least make good screenshots for marketing), but they were wrong.  Long distance scenes aren&#x27;t actually that cool in VR because the stereoscopic difference goes to zero; it becomes no different from looking at a monitor.  Maybe small-scale stuff wouldn&#x27;t have worked out -- the lack of vergence cues may cause additional eyestrain -- but it still seems like a big unexplored area of potential.<p>- Fragmentation is a huge problem.  Even within one single headset model, developers cannot assume that players have more than a seated chair&#x27;s worth of space.  If you make a game that accepts that limit, it feels like you&#x27;re &quot;not really doing VR&quot; and that pisses off funders.  So you try and awkwardly have some sort of &quot;progressive enhancement&quot; that makes the game more fun when moving around the room, but still playable when stationary.  You really have to build the entire game around such a compromise, so most such games felt very demo-y (e.g. Robo Recall, Job Simulator).  Plus all the options for the inputs -- remember how the Rift shipped with an xbox controller?  Building a game that can use either xbox or 3DOF or 6DOF controller is madness; the paradigms are totally different.  So you&#x27;re pretty much limited to building a lowest-common-denominator system, which sucks.  I think Oculus is trying to address this now, by focusing on standalone headsets, but that saddles them with additional technical challenges so it&#x27;ll be a few years before that can succeed.<p>- Inputs are everything for VR, and I don&#x27;t think people realize how late in the game they actually were.  When Oculus and Vive announced, the problem of having accurate-enough handheld controllers was not known to be solvable.  Valve&#x27;s &quot;room demo&quot; had inside-out head tracking that looked at barcodes plastered on the walls, clearly a temporary hack.  Good game development takes years; not having a reliable input paradigm to count on _severely_ impacted developer productivity.  That said, vehicular games like Elite which can treat the VR headset as a more immersive display were and continue to be some of the high points of the VR experience.  I think that they thought that more genres of games would behave like that, but, no.<p>- I think it was a mistake on Oculus&#x27;s part to have different levels of buy-in for their platform.  It would have worked better if there was one package that everyone bought, even if it was expensive.  Maybe the thought that they could have a cheap version for the masses, and people who wanted a better experience could spend more.  But it isn&#x27;t the case that getting the fancier VR package improves the visuals without affecting the gameplay; the different controller types and increased precision substantially changed the types of games you were able to play, exacerbating the fragmentation problem.<p>- The technical road to having high resolution displays and low-latency rendering was too long.  It may be there now, after 5 years of concerted effort, but it wasn&#x27;t in 2016.  If the renderer can&#x27;t keep up, it&#x27;s super noticeable in VR.  The analogy is capacitive touchscreens.  Until they were _absolutely nailed_, they were worse than no touchscreen at all.<p>Game platforms fail to take off all the time, this was just one of the more well-funded and public ones.  Remember the Ouya?  Google&#x27;s various game platforms preceding Stadia?  Stadia itself?  Failure is the norm; what might eventually turn this around is the very strong dedication some people have to the idea.