Technology

I've tried it at a friend's house, quest 2, like the other guy, and I think an oculus at another friend's house, but a quest 2 more recently. It was probably due to game selection, but it was kind of underwhelming, personally. headset was also way too heavy for me.

I dunno, I was more impressed when I used a wii back in 2009 or whatever, when I was like 7. Partially because I was a kid, probably, partially because wii sports is based, but I also think there's something to be said of the natural symbiosis between motion controls, couch co-op, and a shared screen, even if there's a lot of inherent limitations to that approach in terms of game design. I might be falling behind all of that in terms of the internet being the new couch co-op, though.

I also think the lack of easy, built in locomotion is something that probably needs to be solved, because it seems like a pretty big limitation in terms of game design and immersion, and I also wanna bring up haptic feedback again because I like haptic feedback and find it useful but nobody else does and it has no support. I think it might help.

I also haven't really seen many devs taking advantage of the platform's actual like, capabilities. I've seen more devs try to recreate things as they exist in the real world almost 1 to 1, and almost constantly in first person, instead of devs that are like, okay, we have head tracking, we have active motion controls in both hands, we have 3D capable perspective, what can we do with all of that? I haven't seen many games that are playing with that in a more abstract way. Something like ping pong, for instance, would kind of make a lot of sense, when you look at it from the angle of, what are the specific capabilities are of the platform. You could make a lot of interesting perspective based puzzle games, like echochrome on the PSP, I think that would be worth pursuing.

As for future capabilites, I really have no idea. I think we've kind of achieved optimal pixel density for whatever screens we might employ, right, mostly as evidenced by the smartphone market (though we might see some innovations there, I really don't know). I think the main limitation now would probably be how optics are designed, which seems like kind of a harder problem to deal with. I'd like to see phased array optics with lasers and holograms and stuff become a thing, but that's still quite a ways off.

I've tried Quest 2 once at a friend's house. I thought it was pretty neat but nothing about the experience made me want to run out and buy one or even plan to buy one in the future. I believe that unless good VR headsets come down in price significantly (sub $100) they're never going to be more than a niche hobby.