Ask HN: Can you imagine using VR for things such as gaming?

[gloves]

Recently I've been seeing more and more about Virtual Reality in the press, and buzz on social media.

I can see applications in industry, such as controlling robots to do dangerous work etc. But can you see yourself using Virtual Reality sets for things such as gaming and entertainment - replacing current tech such as TV's and games consoles?

I imagine it could be quite cool, but I've heard a lot of arguments to the effect of 'you'd never know what else was going on in the room at the time'.

I ask hacker news because I think it would be an interesting debate, but I also think the demographic of the community is likely to be people who will be in the early uptakers of new tech...

[Rannath]

It'll be a little bit of time before we get the full immersive holodeck experience (we have the technology to approximate it, it's just damn expensive). Most VR will be sit-down with some controls for the time being. Not knowing what's going on around you is somewhat less important at that point. Of course we'd need to wire fire alarms and such into the system, but that's trivial. I could set that up in <1 hour with stuff I already have (motion sensor, fire alarm, wires & an arduino).

That all being said I can totally see it for some games. Flight/space Sims, anything first person really, it'll be great for social games, I can totally see something like second life (, except F2P,) popping up. MMOs might benifit, it'd need to be some action-oriented one though, not a click-and-wait setup like WoW.