VR is absolutely amazing. I don't really understand why it's not taking off in the mainstream. Especially with the low prices of quest or pico headsets.
Not that I really care, there's enough usecases where it adds value (eg simming) to support a cottage industry. And I'm not a trend follower anyway, I like to make my own choices. Most of the things I'm really into are very niche.
But it would be nice to see a bit more content for it.
VR games are immersive and exhausting, you kinda have to be “in the mood” for one, and it kinda works mostly if you’re living alone, as its just very socially awkward to do your vr thing while someone else is in the room.
I think that’s mostly because you are doing something physical (interesting) but nobody else is allowed to participate. Which can feel kinda rude.
Compare that to normal games which you can “relax to” at the end of your work day.
I love playing beat saber myself, one of the more “casual” games, but its always been weird with people around.
Its not a coincidence that the apple vision pitch was mostly “this is the best HD screen that you’ve seen you just put it on your head” with a lot less movement emphasis, and I think it has a bigger chance of “taking off” than the current gen of vr, hopefully.
During parties at my place my guests used to often play BeatSaber on HTC Vive. The video is mirrored to a TV screen at the table, audio is on. Colored smart lights connected to the tv provide mood lighting and react to what's happening in the game. We talk, drink, etc. and watch the person play in the background.
Of course players swap and compete against each other (there is an arcade mode for that).
I generally don't play games with someone else in the room because it feels a bit rude. I don't tend to hang out with people that want to watch someone else play a game. Is that an age thing?
I might use VR when someone else is in the house however. That's different.
Having friends over, ignoring them and playing a game sounds rude, unless they are into it. But even then, it would be more polite to let the guests play and the host watch.
Sharing a flat with a roommate and playing a game while they do their own thing in the same room is certainly not rude.
> I think that’s mostly because you are doing something physical (interesting) but nobody else is allowed to participate. Which can feel kinda rude.
That's a good point but it's just a limitation with current-gen tech. There's already headsets that can 'see' other players and incorporate them into the experience. Like the HTC Vive Focus 3. This is why those are used a lot for interactive experiences at trade shows etc. They are much more suitable than an Oculus Quest.
Sharing on an external screen (on a quest you can easily stream the output to any chromecast) is something I also do when I'm giving demonstrations.
I concur. My experience with VR dropped off as soon as my partner moved in. It was my digital tether to another world and it just doesn't feel right to do if you not alone, since for me (exclusively playing VRChat), you're socializing with a bunch of people in an open room and it just doesn't feel right with others around.
I've only had a tiny exposure to VR and it was all very nice, but disorientating and I had to be stood up whilst playing. I guess the disorientation is something you get used to, but if I want to relax and play a game, I want to be sat down which would also help with not having the usual balance cues due to the headset blocking sight.
Convenience is where the Steam Deck wins - the ability to hit the power button to put it to sleep almost instantly in the middle of a game and to then just pick it up later and carry on is really nice. I had stopped playing computer games as I found it difficult to allocate time to go and play on a PC, but am now getting back into playing games as I can just pick up the Deck, and be continuing a game within seconds. I guess it's a similar phenomenon as casual phone games, but applied to Steam games.
For VR to truly take off, I reckon it'll need the headset to shrink to being like a pair of glasses and the immersion will likely suffer, but the convenience factor is what'll win. In some ways I see it as being akin to 3D films - people would rather just watch a 2D film without needing special glasses as it's more convenient, though to be fair, 3D adds very little to the film watching experience in my opinion (story and acting performances are what makes a great film, not 3D CGI effects).
I liked the Quest Pro idea of having a solid gap between the screen and your face that you can see through, so you get to have some connection to reality. I bet it helps with motion sickness and cooling, as well as making it less disorienting to put on. Generally I think HMDs are great, but VR is only going to work for very specific game genres.
Seriously. I have a Quest 2, sidequest and all, and the selection of actually good stuff is incredibly minimal.
I have a big picture theory about all of this; the experience of "computer entertainment" is FAR MORE STRONGLY rooted in "other humans" than many geeks would believe, and VR (oddly) hasn't really done much significant at all in that space.
For me and the family and people I know, first the Wii, and later the Steam Deck (esp with Jackbox games, that brings MY parents into the fold, and I'm in my 40s) has been SIGNIFICANTLY more impactful than an individual putting on a headset.
I like VR a lot, but pretty much all my gaming time these days is to connect with friends. Most don't have VR and of the few who do we've tried to game together and the networking was so clunky that it was more frustrating than fun. The solo experiences can be really neat but I already live alone so if my choices are the more isolating activity or the activity I'll do with friends, I'm choosing the second every time. In practice this means good old PC fps games.
Oh yeah good point, I exclusively play single player games because I don't like multiplayer at all. I used to do some call of duty but the screaming kids annoyed me too much.
Oh yeah I do have a PC so my catalogue is a lot larger. I do play a lot of sims also (I used to pilot real planes also).
But the solitude of the current generation is just because most headsets can only support one player in the experience. Vive Focus 3 can do this pretty well already, I've done interactive experiences with many other people in the same space.
> I don't really understand why it's not taking off in the mainstream.
"Non-VR games, books, movies, music already get people deeply immersed without putting their head into a bucket" (Jonathan Blow in a recent stream). To me that pretty much sums it up. Your mileage may vary, but I don't think most people are actually waiting for that type of experience.
This point of view kind of assumes that all immersion is the same and so why bother adding this bizarre contraption to your face. But then why bother buying a TV and build your living room seating around it if you could just sit and read a book ? As more 3D 6DOF experiences are made possible and built there will be more usefulness in the extra immersion levels you get from putting your head into that bucket. Besides it should be more important what is going on inside your head than what is on it.
With a TV you can still grab the pop-corn bowl or talk to people around you. I think the immersion will make sense for people living on their own but even then it's too much immersion imo, so remains to be seen if Apple's version by allowing you to still interact with your environment will at least make the pop-corn bowl conundrum moot for these people. I can't see wearing this at all in a family/group environment (even the apple TV one).
It's amazing for about 15 minutes, then you start to feel the motion sickness, or the sweat starts to build up around the warm headset.
It's just not comfortable enough for prolonged use. As well as those issues, there's the discomfort of being so isolated from the world, especially if in a home/office with other people around. And other (more solveable) issues, such as text legibility.
The motion sickness really depends on the refresh rate (so currently on the price). Very much like with phones, the faster the display gets the fewer people will experience issues.
Games like I Expect You To Die expect the player to sit (as the game character does) with only camera movement coinciding exactly with the movement of player's head -- do not cause motion sickness (unless we go into low FPS as you say).
Games like Echo Arena where the entire time you are flying around (you see the environment moving around you) with no accompanying inner-ear sensation of movement, can cause instant motion sickness in some.
I get where you're coming from but "not a single game" is far from true. There's lots of games made strictly for VR, including great hits like BeatSaber.
Sure, but there's essentially nothing new or interesting about BeatSaber. It's the new DDR.
If anything, what's telling is that it's the only VR game I see getting significant traction*, which implies that VR might be a one off the way DDR was.
Anectodallish source, I teach at college where we have a public free "cool tech hub" with a bunch of VR headsets with a bunch of games that anyone can use. I'd say about 95% of the time anyone is doing vr, it's BeatSaber.
>I'd say about 95% of the time anyone is doing vr, it's BeatSaber.
This has more to do with Beat Saber being really fun, and well, CASUAL. The majority of people who play any kind of "video game" play candy crush remember.
Nobody is going to do a run through of HL:A or a flight or driving simulator in that kind of public "tech hub".
BeatSaber is Unity, Unity has GC (garbage collection = stutters) and even if they worked around it for such a simple game it doesn't matter.
On the other hand if you want a action MMO (something we never succeeded in doing yet, Planetside 2 was a latency fest) you need to go vanilla C/C++.
Engines make games economical (in zero interest rate times) but the value of the games is lower because nothing is invented, they are just copying the wheel.
I never buy Unity/Unreal games or non-multiplayer games.
> I never buy Unity/Unreal games or non-multiplayer games.
Well, of course that's a valid approach, but you do realize that most people playing games don't really care which engine something is developed in?
Even if this personal requirement of yours is true or not, "Not a single game is custom made for VR" couldn't be further from the truth, and the mainstream does not have anything close to those requirements. They simple buy and play games that look fun, regardless of engine.
> Engines make games economical (in zero interest rate times) but the value of the games is lower because nothing is invented, they are just copying the wheel.
Thats... a weird take.
lots of applications share 80% of their functionality and thus makes sense for there to be a shared codebase that engineers can start from to build their projects. thats the entire point of frameworks like ruby on rails or Django in web development. if you wanna go lower down, most people are using a library to interact with the gpu. either opengl or vulkan or metal.
Would you go as far as to say you won't play a game that wasn't built from scratch all the way to the metal?
I don't know if you have followed the numbers, but Steam is a massacre right now.
So many low quality Unity/Unreal copies that ruins peoples lives making them indebted because they think they will make it as indie by just pasting new content into the same engine.
Content is becoming over saturated. Yet another look/sound/storyline that nobody cares about. What we need is new engines.
Unity is pure madness, so bloated not even the Unity devs. know how to progress.
> So many crap Unity/Unreal copies that ruins peoples lives making them indebted for life because they think they will make it as indie.
Thats because people are making crappy games. all unity and unreal did was lower the bar to making a game.
At the end of the day, its about the quality of the game + how well you market it. Sure there are a lot of shit games made in Unity. but you also get gems like cities skylines and cuphead too. The difference is the quality and attention put into making a GOOD Game. good games take worse. a platforn like unity makes creating a good game for a dev from impossible to possible.
> are just a copies, they don't reinvent anything fundamental.
if by copies, you mean they fit in a genere? The engines are constrained by the heardware. what we really need is new paradigms for how we interact with computers before engines are going to start giving us new novel ways of doing things. at the end of the day, all an engine is giving you is a fast and performant way to draw to the screen and send audio to the speakers based on whats coming in from the input.
Motion sickness depends heavily on both the person and how each app handles motion as well. I can get motion sick depending on the app, while my dad gets motion sick if anything is even slightly off.
Still quite niche, not a lot of good marketing around them other than you look goofy when you use them, they make you sici/nauseous, you need a lot of space, you need a powerful pc, relatively unknown which apps/games run in VR etc
Every point shrinks the target market
Now we have apple with their exclusive vr headset and this will alienate more people until the market stabilizes - maybe like what happened with touch screen phones in the 10s
So I'm trying to get into VR, but I'm not even sure where to start. Any forum posts regarding what direction to go for headsets and what-not always boil down to fanboy posts shilling for their favorite thing.
So I'll try here - I have an extremely high end gaming PC and am looking for VR options to tag along with it. What suggestions for systems/games do you have?
I'd probably wait for the Meta Quest 3 to come out to use with your PC since it'll probably be the best bang for your buck. If you want an alternative to Meta or something more futuristic then the Big Screen Beyond is looking very interesting. You'll have to buy tracking base stations and controllers separately with the Big Screen Beyond so it'll be considerably more expensive. I'd also wait for some reviews although preliminary first impressions on YouTube are promising.
For PCVR, the wireless experience with Quest is fantastic and an extremely good value, provided you're not boycotting Meta and the wireless works perfectly.
If it doesn't (for example for me, there's interference from neighbors sometimes and the signal will drop) then it's infuriating. Then you need to look into a wired option. Quest can do wired but it doesn't do it as well as others (because it's USB and the signal is compressed).
Still, my recommendation to people looking to dip their toes into VR is to get the Quest, because it's very good and it's an unbeatable value. If nothing else, it will give you an excellent reference point to compare the other headers.
There's a Quest 3 coming out soonish, you'll probably want to wait for that.
What is your budget and desired ecosystem?
The Valve Index is (imo) the highest quality VR headset right now in terms of fidelity and comfort and tracking, but is also one of the most expensive and hardest to set up.
The Quest 2 on the other hand is exceedingly affordable, is portable, and can be run standalone, all of which are very very cool. But then you take the Meta plunge.
Yeah that’s a really weird price range. I’d say go up and buy an Index if possible, or go down and buy a Quest with a fake facebook account.
The pimax is an option but it’s above that range.
Getting closer. Get really thrifty with a computer build (Buy a used 3600 processor for cheap and an old GPU, like a 5700xt or equivalent), buy a brand new Index, and enjoy.
If budget isn't an issue, get an Index. I personally prefer the Vive hands and lighthouses from 2016 and the Index headset from 2021, but if you're starting from scratch, you might as well just get the Index and go from there.
A full Vive set would also be fine for starting, but's aging (7 years old now), and you may appreciate the fidelity the Index has.
I have a Valve Index, a big enough room, and everything set up ready to go. Still, I hardly ever use it.
My problem is simply that most VR games are too janky to control. Half Life: Alyx and Boneworks stood out as they were acceptable -- but beyond that, it's very hard for me to enjoy VR games.
This is the key problem for a lot of gamers. The cost issue puts more casual users off, but avid gamers are used to dropping $$$ for their hobby every upgrade cycle so as the hardware prices continue to slip downwards that is less and less their main concern. Having a private bit of space big enough and clear enough is not as those singing the virtues of VR seem to think.
> most VR games are too janky
Of course, the amount of good content that truly takes advantage of the kit is a concern when spending the $$$ even with the kit being much cheaper now than a few years ago. There might be other things that a given person can invest that resource on which will increase their enjoyment much more overall (better screens, a really comfy chair, actual games, …).
I liked my Quest 2 a lot for about two weeks until the novelty totally wore off. I just don’t want immersive gaming experiences. My Switch satisfies my occasional gaming itch, and is easy to just pick up and play for 15 minutes without taking myself out of the world.
I had a rented Oculus Quest 2 headset, and it completely put me off ever buying one. It was actually quite fun for a party where everyone was trying out, but:
- it got very uncomfortable very fast - everyone who tried it was drenched in face sweat after ~10 minutes, not a pleasant sensation
- the games are very un-interactive compared to traditional games. Even moving about is usually very limited, it felt like playing Myst or Zork again
- when a game did offer smooth movement, the movement without moving was extremely disorienting, and would have easily caused motion sickness if I hadn't stopped immediately
Overall, the fun of looking around a VR space is completely overshadowed by the extreme limitations in control and motion and comfort. I'm much more immersed playing a PC RPG than than a VR game, and I see nothing about any upcoming headset (including Apple's) that seems to have a change to fix this. I'm not even sure it is in principle fixable, given the optical (need something to block out light to show true blacks) and geometric (need room to actually move) limitations. Probably only some kid of direct brain-computer interface could bridge these gaps.
A good game is quite immersive without needing any cumbersome goggles. I can't imagine a bad one being immersive with any sort of goggles.
To be fair, I think the same thing about fancy graphics as well; but people seem to love fancy graphics with 4k resolution and ray tracing or whatever the newest gimmick is.
In my opinion, the only significant effect of any graphics fancier than ps3 era is just increased costs, less finished/polished games, and the necessity to appeal to a wider audience.
I think about the same thing about the whole VR thing. If it becomes mainstream, I think there would be hardly any games that take advantage of it; and most of the games would just focus on the spectacle, which gets old extremely quickly.
IMHO the entry to VR is for most people to cumbersome.
- you should try it first to check how bad your motion sickness gets when playing. If you have it bad, all your bought VR equipment is unusable.
- you need specific hardware for it which (mostly) only works for gaming (and maybe porn). Putting 400+ bucks into the hardware for that sole purpose is to much for most people.
- you need a dedicated place for it. You can play it sitting down, but that's not even half the fun of VR.
I have a VR headset myself and really like it, but even for me it's a hustle to free up the space and set everything up for a session. I rather pick up my steamdeck and play wherever I might be.
Quests are a facebook data mining spyware machine, do you think they subsidize the low cost for fun? Why anyone would buy it, besides blatant ignorance, is a really good question. My opinion of Carmack has really cratered since he's been working at Oculus and peddling their anti-consumer adware crap.
Besides even the very top end headsets are still pretty early in terms of tech. Extremely narrow tunnel vision FoV that doesn't even come anywhere close to the 210 degrees required for full human vision, pixels visible on most and if they aren't you'll need an incredibly expensive rig to run those crazy resolutions at 90 fps. Games are also really pricey for what you get since they're targeting a niche market which by definition has to be loaded to be able to afford the setup anyway and has a sunk cost to justify. It's the console experience on PC. Plus you need to mount the trackers and find a way to manage that big fat cable for the headset, it's just piles and piles of expensive hassle for what's mostly still a gimmick.
I'm pretty sure it'll be pretty good a few generations of headsets in the future though, especially once on-the-level PC performance becomes more affordable and the game UX best practices improve. I'm glad the VR games industry is at least moving away from the dumb mandatory teleporting thing and letting people walk around normally now.
Ok, I wasn't making an argument for the Quest. I was making an argument against the idea that you need a $1500+ PC for VR, that's it. I don't have or want a Quest.
$300 is still a lot of money for many people for a single purpose device.
The most popular games consoles are the phones everyone has already, because they do other things, the game playing is effectively free. Not to mention that the games themselves have an upfront cost of $0 as well.
The Quest 2 standalone route and the PS5VR route are both extremely limited options for "VR gaming", and that's saying something with how meager the PC VR video game scene is.
Depends though. I want my $1500 setup for things other than VR, like 4K gaming. I bought the Index on pre-order because I was already using and abusing my Vive daily. I ended up only using the headset.
It’s not a poor substitute - in a lot of ways it’s one of the best VR headsets you can get. Once you go wireless there’s no going back, and there are plenty of standalone games that don’t need great graphics to be fun.
I also don’t understand people’s aversion to Meta over Google, Amazon, etc. but that’s a personal choice.
> I also don’t understand people’s aversion to Meta over Google, Amazon, etc.
Objecting to Meta specifically here is a response to VR suggestions. The other two companies are irrelevant in this conversation because neither has a VR headset available for use (that I know of). It doesn't help that the Oculus Quest is the cheapest VR option out there, so it gets suggested every time the topic comes up, so those of us who prefer to avoid the three companies you mentioned tend to have a quick response ready.
What makes you say that? Whether or not I buy one has no bearing over how much computational power a device has: which is what makes it a poor substitute.
Are you arguing that standalone headsets are not poor substitutes? For that to be the case they would have to do things like be able to play Half Life Alyx at acceptable visual fidelity.
I'm arguing that you've made a pointless contribution by commenting on something you won't have in your home on principle; it speaks to a lack of experience and/or an evangelistic dismissal that disqualifies you from a reasonably impartial assessment. That you are also technically wrong is secondary.
Yes or no: can a standalone headset play games like a PC-connected headset can? If yes, it is not a poor substitute. If no, then it is a poor substitute. This is the dichotomy I established with my comment.
I love my quest but I don't have the space in my house to safely play the more energetic games and it can't be used outside. I would love to see a headset that can cope with being used in the sun.
> I would love to see a headset that can cope with being used in the sun.
The biggest problem is the lenses work perfectly in reverse, transforming the parallel rays of light from the sun into a single spot on the LCD screen, literally burning it.
Until we get a different display technology, outside usage is probably going to remain extremely limited.
I've personally been hesitant about VR for a few reasons. As someone with glasses, I'm not comfortable with purchasing something that won't easily accommodate without requiring that I continue to pay a premium for prescription insets. It's a deal breaker, honestly.
But then there's the price to value ratio. There doesn't seem to be anything that is a must-play killer app, and while the catalog seems to have some gems it still leaves me with the impression I might drop a few hundred dollars for a couple hours of entertainment. VR seems like a radical change in design philosophy from the last 30-40 years of game development, and devs are still working out the specific language and techniques that are pertinent to it as a medium
While the Quest 2 is the cheapest on on the market, I'll be damned if I'm giving money to Meta and from there headsets start to ramp up drastically in price, and still have inconveniences like needing to be tethered to a PC
Really it isn't any one thing that's an issue so much as a bunch of smaller issues that make it seem like it's just not worth at the moment unless you got to drop on an item that's still at the niche phase. This will all probably improve over time though, and more people might start adopting
As someone with glasses: I have tried both insets and larger headsets that can fit glasses. The insets are absolutely the way to go. Just think of them as part of the headset's price.
You're right that VR is currently relatively expensive in terms of "entertainment per dollar" compared to other activities. If you still find enjoyment in non-VR video games for example, there's nothing wrong with continuing to doing what you like.
It's just too messy with the cable twisting around, all the room space you need etc. I have a 1st generation Vive where one of the cables keeps falling out of its socket. It's all just such a bother and I keep getting motion sick. Not getting another headset until it's cable free, and I don't want an Oculus b/c of FB affiliation.
To me this looks way more immersive than any VR shooter game. You can really move around and do things that you can't do irl. Even if your controls allow that in VR, it's going to feel wrong. It's going to make you think about the screen on your face. Yeah yeah you have the cool VR moments where you duck in and out of cover. Those are cool and immersive because you genuinely don't need to do anything you can't do irl. But they get boring eventually.
As I made an existence statement, you can look up any female streamer/vtuber and hear them say they can't play an FPS today because they ran out of dramamine.
Most Games have comfort settings Like Teleportation, Fading etc.
My wife gets motion sick pretty fast with VR, but reading a book while driving is no issue. It's rather strange to me
Current devices look too inconvenient to use IMHO. I expect to be sweating due to the headset, and to be exhausted after use. I just checked, the pico 4 seems to be around 450€ in Germany. For something that doesn’t seem to be convenient or comfortable, that’s way to much. I already have a nice setup to play games or consume content I enjoy, and don’t really see how a VR would fit into this. I expect to use it a few times and have some fun, then forget about it.
As someone who spends a good amount of time on iracing, what annoys me most about VR not taking off more is the lack of improvements in VR headsets. We just get more high-end stuff like the Varjo Aero, Bigscreen Beyond or Pimax Crystal, but since the release of the HP Reverb G2 there haven't been any sensibly priced options anymore.
And things like the Quest or Pico are just pretty rubbish for PCVR (compression, dealing with flimsy USB C connectors, Oculus software etc.).
I want to be invested in a game, not immersed. Gloom Spawn are terrifying enough without feeling like I'm actually being hunted. And I don't think I would virtually shit bricks if I did, so I'd have to take off a headset to attend to that fun little mess.
It causes nausea for a lot of people. Plus alot of people don't want to move around after work.
I think a vr headset that puts people in the world but still lets them play with controller like settings would increase adoption a bit, however the nausea part is a big deal.
VR is very popular in sim-racing and other cockpit games but outside of that it's just a gimmick IMO. Games like Beatsaber is where it shines but it's a lot of money for such casual games.
I tried it once, it was some kind of skiing game. When I had a big jump I immediately felt nauseous because I expected to feel like my body is in free fall, but I didn't, so it felt weird
- Motion sickness, or the fear of it. Not from looking around but from "walking" around. And the number of games which are "mainstream appalling", benefit a lot from VR and don't contain walking around are limited. Just to put it into context people getting motion sickness when stopping "walking on a treadmill while watching TV" is non negligible while at the same time people which don't have that issue often never even heard of it/considered it a thing. (Simply because in our mostly non VR world it's a non-topic.) Through at the same time it's not uncommon for people which do have motion sickness while gaming issues to still be able to use VR.
- Too little occasions to properly relaxed, and longer term (more then just 5min) try it out for yourself without buying it. For many people it looks like VR is very little value added for them (because many people don't do supper immersive gaming, but instead just want to relax a bit after work or similar)
- (potentially wrong) believe that "cheaper" VR headsets are crap
- space, it's easy to underestimate how many people live in small apartments where getting a big enough free space to not hit anything isn't easy, or if it's often in a shared space where people might find it's usage for VR annoying
- price 1, e.g. the pico 4 still cost 400€ where i live for many people this is not an amount of many they would spend just to try something out (and for many it's also not much at all)
- price 2, 400€ for something people often see as an additional investment just/exclusive for gaming, while e.g. a laptop/tablet is also seen as usable for office, and while traveling and for watching movies (with others) etc. And while some of this are misconceptions, they still are there. And if you buy something "just for gaming" and can decide between a pico 4 and a switch or playstation bundle with a grate game in it it's clear what many people will choose
- no killer use case, like VR exclusive games everyone wants to play or similar. It's a bit of an hen/egg problem. Without wide usage there is too much commercial risk for creating such a thing but without it it's harder to get wide usage. There are some thing which get close to such a thing tho, like beat saber .
- glasses/bad eyes, some people simply can't wear contact lenses and while they did add some features to some headsets to "compensate bad eyes" they have sever limitations (bad eyesight isn't as simple as you focus point being a bit off, you also can e.g. have rotations, twists or folds, and getting that just slightly wrong can be a very exhausting or even headache inducing experience for the users)
Anyway I think the main problem is "perception" in many different ways as well as eco system wrt. non game use cases.
Which is also why I think Apple did what it did, at some point you need to start if you want to succeed in a emergend field even if you loose money. The problem is you don't know when the VR field will explode and entering it too early can be too costly.
My guess is for VR to take off we need an reasonable priced headset+equipment set which you practically can use by itself as a laptop replacement for non gaming tasks and "simple/short" games.
Means:
- portable/compact enough
- usable in public (but doesn't need as fancy features as what apple did)
- ~4+h battery live for office tasks, 8h would be better
- comfortable usable when having a power supply (like similar to one from a laptop) connected
- with not too long brakes usable for 8-10h
- usable by most people, at least for office task and some simple games
- full laptop functionality, e.g. browsing or playing non VR games like idk. minesweeper
- reasonable affordable base models (as full laptop replacement that would be ~800€) and nice still reasonable priced "good" (not highest end) models (~<1500€)
- support for external displays to make it usable for presentations
- fast text input, somehow without hurting portability
Most of this is sound like something which could be archived in coming years depending on technical advancement.
Some main issues which aren't can't be solved by innovations in other sectors (e.g better batteries):
- as it's not conveniently flat and square like a laptop convenient daily travel portability is harder to archive, including the fast text input without carrying a nearly laptop sized keyboard with you
- hair + headset, people care about their hair not getting messed up
- usability for everyone, even if your head is large or small or you have some neck issues, or eye issues, or motion sickness etc. personalized devices help, but drive the price up and prevent sharing
Not that I really care, there's enough usecases where it adds value (eg simming) to support a cottage industry. And I'm not a trend follower anyway, I like to make my own choices. Most of the things I'm really into are very niche.
But it would be nice to see a bit more content for it.