I bought a Quest3 a month ago, my first VR. I got the prescription lenses. Spending so much I told myself I wouldn't be the guy who tried it and then just let it rest, I'll get my money's worth. For the first two weeks I used it daily exploring all the things. I 3D printed a nice wall mount for right next to my work spot.
And for the last two weeks it has been hanging there untouched. I think it's my tummy's fault. I had mild but definite nausea that improved but didn't go away. The prospect of even a little more of that is enough for my subconscious to overrule my intention to use it.
The review says that the Q3 gives 80% of the capability of the Apple. But it would be worth a lot to me if that final 20% is enough to convince my tummy.
Everyone reacts differently to VR sickness, but there are a few things you could try.
First of all, you should always stop the moment you feel any motion sickness. You more you try to power through, the worse it gets.
Don’t do anything with artificial locomotion. (Where your VR movement does not match up to your real life movement.) Many games have teleport options and snap turning instead of smooth. There are also some great roomscale games such as Superhot, elevent table tennis or Walkabout mini golf. You will eventually acclimate and be able to do smooth locomotion.
Some games have framerate options, put it to 90 or 120hz
Set up a fan and have it blow on you.
For me, I took about a month to acclimate, but after that can you play any kind of game and not get sick.
I have heard reports that Vision Pro also causes motion sickness for new VR users.
some people are just unlucky in this regard. from the very first day of VR, I never had any balance / stomach issues. nothing bothers me really. anecdotal but I also don't seem to lose myself in the feeling of "immersion". to me, I feel "immersed" but I am always aware of where I am really. people freaking out when they fall from a height in VR etc. is a very foreign feeling to me for this reason. When I fall of from a top of the building in VR, it is just kinda fun a few times, but I never feel like I am really falling, and I will certainly not freak out about it.
So maybe, just a speculation, people prone to being VR sick might also have potential to experience more / better immersion? I don't know. With how VR tricks my brain, I can't imagine why I'd get sick from what I experience, or how I would mistake what happens in VR to real life. It still is an amazing experience nonetheless - but after trying everything you need to create fun using it yourself because good content runs out fast. Developing experiences with it / tinkering with experimental stuff is where I'm at, or else it will collect dust. Without PCVR, I would not get any good use out of it for sure.
One thing you've really got to watch out for (and that Meta and assorted devs are just ignoring as a problem) is that it's easy to actually make VR nausea much worse and last longer by attempting to power through it; the only reliable way to get over it is lots of light exposure with very regular breaks (in other words, the good ol' Virtual Boy safety setting).
I think that's a big part of why Apple is doing their best to pretend that any VR experiences that also involve moving your viewpoint around don't exist. Static or 'grab and drag the world around' styles work much better for avoiding nausea in general.
I haven't tried the Q3 yet as I'm still pretty happy with my Q2. I just use it for FitXR and BeatSaber, about 40-60 minutes a day, and I've never experienced motion sickness. Do you have a lot of places to run around where you use it? I just never had the space to try that out (also why I can't play Thrill of the Fight). Also, both FitXR and BeatSaber are stationary games where the cues fly to you and the most motion is ducking or twisting under something. I'm hoping this is not a new issue with the Q3...I'm guessing its just me being addicted to Beat Saber.
A ProVision doesn't really satisfy my use case (like 70% of what I expect from the Quest 2), but I wonder how it compared display wise.
The upside of the Vision Pro for those who suffer from motion sickness is that Apple is focusing on experiences which keep the virtual viewpoint strictly attached to your physical head, unlike VR games where there usually has to be some kind of artificial locomotion to get around real life space constraints, or to move the player based on virtual outside forces (e.g. a vehicle they're piloting). The downside is that games are the main thing people have found VR to actually be good for, so Apple is kind of starting from scratch by rejecting that segment.
An addition to that: motion sickness is as easily caused with 3D movies with too much action and camera movements if in full immersion.
In that front, it seems like the Vision Pro has just no option for that and all the reviews point at a fairly low immersion, even for 3D movies.
For better or worse it really feels like a glorified TV/computer monitor on so many aspects.
(BTW limiting what to do with a Quest3 isn't difficult either. There's now a windowed mode with a prompt when an app wants to go immersive. Dismissing the prompt lets you stay in windowed mode as long as you want)
I had the original Oculus Rift (tethered to a PC), the Oculus Go, the Quest 2 (paid for by my former employer) and now the Quest 3 (employer discount, I work for Meta but on WhatsApp, not Quest), and it’s a huge improvement over the Quest Pro or Quest 2, which is why I got it.
My main use case is watching the 360º spherical panoramas I take with my Ricoh Theta Z1 camera, and possibly some light gaming, although Call of Duty Above and Beyond’s dogged insistence on realistic weapons handling is more of a drag than fun.
I’m still working on getting a WebXR-enabled photo gallery generator using Three.js to be able to share those immersive panoramas with friends & family.
I tried VR twice. And both times I felt disoriented after taking the thing off. And not just for a second, but for a good five minutes. As if my brain suddenly no longer trusted anything to be real anymore.
At some point we are going to realize the best Spatial Computing won’t talk specs, resolutions, feeling like you’re there - it’s just going to talk about the lifestyle Spatial Computing enables.
There won't be a spacial computing "lifestyle" until we have hardware that's far less intrusive, like something close to a regular pair of eyeglasses. Realistically that is probably decades away. Until then, AR/VR goggles will remain as special purpose peripherals that users don for short periods to accomplish specific tasks.
I really shouldn't be the one to doubt, considering the size we've seen computers go from and to. But is it even possible to fit all that in that size? Like as I understand optics limits a lot about how far the screen has to be, even with the use of lenses. And it wouldn't be fully passthrough if they use the Google glass like approach as I understand?
Well it's at least probably not impossible? I think they can avoid using a screen at all by instead using multiple low-power lasers embedded in the goggle frames to directly image on the wearer's retinas. Then the main lenses only have to act as selective shutters to block out parts of the real world. But as of today this concept is mostly science fiction; several major breakthroughs would be needed.
A century is... Quite a long time in technology terms, even more given the accelerating nature of technology. A century ago we barely had cars, 50 years ago we didn't have personal computers, 20 years ago personal computers were on a desk, nowadays it's in our pockets.
My guess would be anywhere between 20-50 years, a century just feels too long.
Except it is unclear how that lifestyle can be better than what we have now, and until we have technology that allows perfect pass-through in both directions (as if like glasses) - which may be physically impossible - there are drawbacks that make that lifestyle fundamentally worse than what we have now.
If anyone is interested in a past perspective on this, I'd read Hamlet on the Holodeck. Seminal work that really lays out what digital narrative is and wants to be.
That is what we all want, after all: a Holodeck. Real life without the danger or expense. It would be amazing, and I truly hope we get there, but pale imitations just don't work.
I'm a bit of a Luddite, but I'd definitely practice self-defense shooting and some motorcycle things I'm too scared to do on the road. Sims for both exist, but are expensive. Of course, it would instantly turn into a brothel, but I can dream.
I'm never going to buy or use such gimmickry. Even smartphone use, which is way more benign, has damaged our psyche enough with less intervention that all we need is this new thing in search of the new high. Go outside, hug a tree, lay in the grass - it's more realistic, no need to augment, and it's free!
>Go outside, hug a tree, lay in the grass - it's more realistic, no need to augment, and it's free!
I am generally annoyed by this common advice. Nature and trees don't mean the same thing to everyone. Nature is just boring to me TBH. When using VR (or tech in general) I am not looking to replicate or improve the feeling of being "outside". It is a different thing altogether.
Social platforms have discovered how to tap into addictive behaviors, but it doesn't come with the negative baggage of the typical addiction vectors. Regulation doesn't help evident by the war on drugs. To me the first step would be to publicly recognize/accept digital consumption as an addiction
> The ease with which one can become addicted to digital consumption is the problem, not the digital media itself.
It's not just "ease" though, it's that some of the smartest, highest paid people in the world get paid to specifically push the set of content that is the most addicting.
I find this no different from bigTobacco tweaking the product to be more addictive than just the nicotine in the plant. It took many decades before society got to a place where it was fed up enough to take action after however many deaths. I see no difference from any spike in suicide deaths caused by social platforms manipulation than bitTobacco's manipulation causing spikes in cancer.
It’s way more active than a game console. You stand, kneel, punch, swing your arms and break a sweat. It may not be a gym workout, but it’s not half bad if you were otherwise going to be on the couch.
Social experiences are person to person instead of broadcast. You talk with real embodied individuals instead of massive threads with thousands. It’s way more human than even a group chat. I can see it eventually surpassing FaceTime.
What struck me is the "pain in the ass" part. Normally, when interacting with hardware or software UI, where you look is relatively decoupled from where or when you press or click or tap. With the Vision Pro UI, you necessarily have to focus on the exact spot you want to actuate at the precise moment you pinch your fingers, for every single action. While seemingly intuitive at first glance, this kind of eye-hand synchronization is actually rather unnatural. I can imagine that it will remain tedious to some degree, and will prove to not be a very convenient interaction method in the long run.
If you've ever seen an "eye tracker challenge" video you'll know how difficult it is to completely control where you're looking, we are hard-wired to automatically glance at potential points of interest. Having to fight that lizard-brain response at all times doesn't sound fun.
Not ready to evolve into homo matrixens quite yet.
And to the people who are going to say, "then dont use it," I counteroffer the fact that--at least where I live--there is a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't aspect to phone use. You will be socially isolated if you don't conform, especially if you are a teenager. Tech evolves faster than our minds, morals and laws can handle. I dont think humanity is ready to jump into fully immersive screenlife quite yet, and I fear Apple makes things sexy enough to be the ones to kick us down that well.
Yeah, but I don't think anyone is going to be using these in public (and if they are, it will be super easy to punk them).
Now, I'm not stupid. The moment people saw AI generated art as art, something fundenmentally changed: no longer were these impregnable objects that infinitely aroused our aesthetic sensibilities containing something within them we might call "human." It was just machines, machines that could appear confusing and scary to us, in a way that has started to feel overwhelming.
The world is turning, but what will end first, the concept of humanity, or humanity itself?
I'm not sure they will be used in public; I'm just worried about the eventual "killer app" that has no one going out in public ever again. That's part of the problem, as I see it.
I think that's more of Meta's approach. Apple seems to be aiming for something a bit more like Dennou Coil, where the virtual coexists with real things rather than being an either/or.
And for the last two weeks it has been hanging there untouched. I think it's my tummy's fault. I had mild but definite nausea that improved but didn't go away. The prospect of even a little more of that is enough for my subconscious to overrule my intention to use it.
The review says that the Q3 gives 80% of the capability of the Apple. But it would be worth a lot to me if that final 20% is enough to convince my tummy.