Facebook's VR Headset Not Selling, Literally Giving It Away
news.yahoo.com
Facebook's VR Headset Not Selling, Literally Giving It Away::Last fall, Meta-formerly-Facebook unveiled its Meta Quest Pro, a long-rumored, higher-end follow-up to the company's best-selling Quest 2 VR headset. The sleek device, which initially went on sale for an eye-watering $1,500, has really struggled to catch on since then, just as we predicted at the time. And, as Mixed Reality News reports, Meta is […]
You are viewing a single comment
VR today is what 3D TV was 10 years ago: the fad has peaked and now the sales are starting to decline.
It will still have it's niche, but any mainstream audience will be getting over it pretty soon.
VR was the future of entertainment when I was still in college, and I graduated in the previous millennium.
It's hard to compare the old Virtuality arcade machines to Half-Life: Alyx though. Just a shame that few games are really following Alyx into the future. It's expensive to make a proper VR game (or indeed any big game), and the fact that there's not an enormous number of headsets out there is hardly encouraging devs to make more.
There's other niches besides games. VR headsets would be pretty much the only way to watch 3D HFR movies at home, but nobody really seems interested in bringing them to the format. You can't even get 3D 4K movies on Blu-ray. Plus wearing one for a three hour movie is likely to be tiresome.
Modern VR has modern enemies, and those are price, space, and comfort.
I loved my 3D monitor when playing games like Fallout NV and Skyrim, because I could just sit down, put on some glasses, and play the game as normal. But I can't get used to wearing a heavy, hot, giant pair of goggles to play a game. Plus the learning curve was entirely unnecessary, and the lack of any straight 3D support for existing games is unforgivable.
I've found the idea that modern VR is a "fad" comes from people with limited VR experience. It's not their fault, since cheap consumer VR like the standalone quest headsets is mostly limited to what amounts to the equivalent of mobile games -- they're toys.
I own a relatively expensive setup and have experienced the top tier of what consumer VR has to offer: it's incredibly impressive. But that also highlights the issues. Quality consumer VR is expensive, fiddly, and currently has an extremely limited/niche number of worthwhile games and experiences.
The reality is the current tech is really the first generation of practical consumer VR with capabilities beyond "headache inducing novelty". It'll never replace "2D", it still needs to come down in price, but it's hardly a "fad".
The fad will past much like with the invention of internet.