Is VR worth getting into now, or should we wait for holodecks?

I've got an Oculus Rift and tbh after the initial "zomg!!! you can move your hands!!! and look around!!!!" and immersiveness of it, the novelty wore off for me fairly quickly. Superhot and Beat Sabre and Lone Echo and Half Life:Alyx are great and all, but the uptick just isn't worth the extra effort in setting it up, not to mention standing up to play a video game is slightly more effort than I can be bothered with.

My advice is to definitely get a 2nd hand one, definitely play some games till you're bored, then definitely move on. Superhot alone was worth the price of admission for me, but its a nice gimmick to visit rather than a medium in which I want to live.

Also, VR p0rn turned out to be, um, anti-climactic.

beat saber is definitely not at the level of 'killer app' this tech needs to take off. nor is a sequel/spinoff of a game from 2004

"spinoff of a game from 2004" is a very ungenerous way of describing HL:A. It tightens up the mechanics that VR 3rd person shooters have been working on over the last 5+ yrs to basically the best you're gonna do with this type of game of this gen of VR. I'd accept that its not gonna entice anyone in who isn't into that kind of game. Beat Saber is a lot of fun but it does feel like a port from the wii.

ime the big usp of VR is the sense of space and scale that the immersion provides that simply is not replicated in 2D. Skyrim in VR was very frustrating to play but climbing up to Bleak Falls Barrow, and really being inside these enormous structures, was transformative. In which case, I'd say superhot is probably the peak, where the central mechanic forces you to interact with space, and therefor transports you to that space, in a way that, again, the 2D version simply can't replicate. Maybe that's not "killer app" enough, but I think it proves its worth.

I think the barriers to mass adoption are technical and physiological, rather than because there's not enough unique experiences.

Yep agreed. I absolutely love my PSVR and all my favourite games/experiences of this generation have been in VR, but I still hardly ever use it. It’s because there’s just too much friction in the setup process, I kind of need the house to myself to feel comfortable using it (partly because it feels rude to shut everyone else out, partly because it feels uncomfortable to be in there and not know what might be happening around you), and I need the energy to actually get up and unwrap the cables and put the thing on. I suspect that if I was single guy living alone it might get used a lot more regularly, but sadly VR just doesn’t fit into a normal domestic everyday shared living space very well. And that’s not going to change regardless of how much the tech improves.

People always rep Beat Saber but I didn't get much out of it. I'd rather play DDR.

Superhot is actually pretty fun but it still feels more like a proof of concept than it does a game.

HL:Alix looks great and I'd love to try it. Same with Moss and Astrobot and Pistol Whip.

I have a great time with Google's Tilt Brush app and it remains my favorite VR experience to date.

I *had*

my uniformity of experience with y'all (tilt brush and Superhot being the best things I've seen in VR and both feel like demos) suggests "wait for holodecks" is my chosen option.

I don’t know why it doesn’t get talked about more but Astro Bot Rescue Mission is the best actual game I’ve played in VR yet. I guess you need to like platformers and maybe most people don’t? But honestly it felt to me like the biggest revolutionary shift in its genre since Mario 64.

The hassle of having the damn thing on your head, not being able to grab yer coffee, itchy nose moment, and battery use (for Rift anyway), are just a few things that stop me from plugging mine in.

Here are some of the games I've played

HL Alyx is quite something to behold. I've been playing it slow because I don't want it to end. It's incredible really.

Google Earth VR also mind blowing.

Skyrim is okay. I like just sitting around the landscape. The first time you encounter the spiders is pretty frightening. Unless you like spiders I guess. Fallout 4 on the other hand is awful in vr.

Iron Wolf is a great submarine sim, now with destroyers too. It's better with other players though, trying to manage the sub by yourself is an effort (although you can get assists).

Abode 2, one of the many escape room games. This one is nicely done.

Catch & Release, a fishing game with cartoony graphics. Okay smacks the shit out of my controller batteries though.

Elite Dangerous, don't really like this game anyway but does look good in vr - for a short while anyway.

Garden of the Sea. Gardening vr, really like this one. You can also putt around in a small boat which I feel vr needs more of.

Kingspray grafitti, they've stopped updating this and the last update seems to have made it a bit laggy. Still not bad to use though, but not great.

The Lab, free tech demo from Valve. Has some Alyx moments in it.

No Man's Sky. Just yuck. Fuck this game vr or no.

Pierhead Arcade 2. play silly arcade games in vr. it's ooookay.

Scanner Sombre, nice chilled clever little game.

Zaccaria Pinball. Excellent old style pinball game, the tables are sometimes a bit unforgiving but I love this. Lots of options too. Just buy all the tables.

my wife for weeks has been researching ways for our family to stay sane during chicago winter quarantine times. my contribution has been to keep getting tempted to buy a VR setup. i'm not really interested in playing games but am intrigued by stuff like google earth in VR, where you can feel like you're traveling/leaving the house even though you're not. i'm guessing it's still not worth it for limited uses like that

annoying that google earth vr is only on oculus rift, not quest/quest 2, but i saw there's some ripoff version that is not a google product but uses google streetview for quest

I've had a Vive for just over two years. I upgraded from Vive wands to Index controllers last year.

The VR setup has been well worth the cost, considering I already had the computer hardware I needed to run it ($500 for the Vive kit, $40 for studio light stands to mount the lighthouses on so I could set up and break down at will, and $300 for the Index controllers a year later).

Here are some things that have made it more valuable to me than perhaps to others:

1) I already had a computer to run it, so entry cost was significantly lower.

2) I live alone in a 1br apartment, so I have total control over when and how I use it. I don't need to worry about knocking into others, or moving furniture to have the space to use room-scale VR.

3) At the end of the day, I'm a sucker for new tech and get a lot of joy out of dicking around with tech demos.

4) I have a couple of friends who also have VR, so we can play games together that you wouldn't want to enjoy with randos.

Half-Life: Alyx was a phenomenal experience, may be GOTY for me. I got a lot of play time out of Superhot, Rec Room, Alyx. I'm a big rhythm game nerd and I just do not care all that much for Beat Saber. Overall, I think a worthy grab if you have the time to put into it.

American Truck Simulator in VR is a pretty pleasant experience.

Not sure if any other Oculus users have had issues, but the latest Geforce driver update pretty much fucked my VR - plug it in and the pc locks up. Had to roll back to a previous driver.

I've only had my Quest 2 a few weeks, bought it when the Airlink update arrived, so I've never actually plugged it into my PC, I just use it wirelessly. That's still working fine though?

so i got this oil painting sim, and it's really neat

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1608400/Vermillion/