I think a large part of the problem boils down to how a not-insignificant percentage people get motion-sick easily from conventional analog stick movement in VR, which is why you have things like comfort vignettes and teleportation all over the place.
I’m fortunate enough to be able to handle analog stick movement without comfort vignettes just fine, and thus get quite annoyed when games don’t support conventional movement at all, but @kunedon told me before that he felt ill just trying to demo a PSVR. That’s an even bigger barrier than spending $350+ on the VR hardware itself, on top of the modest expense for a PS4 or the considerable expense for a “VR-ready” PC with a GPU that doesn’t suck.
It’s why the Vive developers emphasized room-scale so much, never mind that even a roughly 8′x8′ play space gives you about one step away from center before you’re within arm’s reach of a boundary, and most people simply do not have 15′x15′ of uninterrupted space in their homes to dedicate to the closest thing current consumer technology has to a holodeck. Especially if you don’t live in the US or Australia; I always wondered how room-scale was going to take off in places like the UK and Japan.
Want to know why that’s such a problem? Go watch the launch trailer for GORN, it’s pretty appropriate given how many things people end up breaking in their rooms during all the virtual melee carnage.
Or try immediately diving into prone position on the floor, which is what many Onward players will do if it keeps them from getting shot. You’ll most likely end up very close to a boundary no matter which way you dive in such a confined space, and if you were already close to begin with, you might end up smacking yourself into a wall, desk, or something else.
Funnily enough, I mostly got into VR for seated simulations, which really don’t require that much modification for a good VR experience beyond making the menus work in VR. Stuff like Elite: Dangerous, DCS World, IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad/Moscow/Kuban, DiRT Rally, Project CARS, Enemy Starfighter House of the Dying Sun, now X: Rebirth...
The big thing here is that you’re no longer just looking at an image of a cockpit, you’re IN the cockpit, and you don’t have to deal with janky TrackIR issues every time one of the three LEDs or reflectors on your head clip leaves the camera FOV! There are no words to express just how much of a leap in immersiveness this is.
However, even the flight sim enthusiasts aren’t entirely won over, and this has everything to do with the limited resolution. Both the Rift and Vive are like taking a step back to 1280x720p HDTVs, and this makes visually spotting targets in the distance more difficult than it would be on a typical monitor, alongside requiring a bit of a lean-in to read cockpit instruments clearly.
Despite all this, I love my Rift and Touch setup. The potential is clearly there, but the software overall hasn’t quite caught up yet, unless you really like a specific subset of genres. However, if the hardware didn’t exist now, the software certainly wouldn’t. Gotta love these sorta catch-22 situations.
