I'm as hopeful for Oculus as I would assume most HN readers are, but one hurdle Jeff mentions is I think a bigger deal than most people assume. Namely:
> It's a big commitment to strap a giant, heavy device on your face with 3+ cables to your PC. You don't just casually fire up a VR experience.
This is the exact same problem that just killed 3D HDTV -- the "everyone has to put their special pair of glasses on now for this to work" problem. It turned out that most people just weren't willing to go that extra step of putting special glasses on to watch TV. And 3D glasses don't even have to be strapped to your head! They're feather-light and super-simple compared to something like the Rift. But they were still too much to win over a broad general audience.
(It could be argued that this is less of a problem for VR than it was for 3D, because TV content is more frequently consumed socially than computer/game console content is. But even if that's true, it seems like it puts an unnecessary cap on VR's ambitions; why wouldn't VR want to expand into the niche TV fills today?)
This is a big chasm for VR hardware, even very good VR hardware -- the more ceremony that is required to get from "hm, I'd like to have a VR experience now" to actually having the VR experience, the less likely it is that it will ever make the leap from early adopters to the general public. "Casually" is a good way to describe the way people interact with most media -- and that's only becoming more true as things like smartphones and tablets become prevalent. So anything that pushes back and tries to make that casual experience more formal is swimming against the tide.
While it's incidentally true that "you don't just casually fire up a VR experience", it glosses over the more salient fact that you don't have casual VR experiences, full stop. VR is, definitionally, an immersive, exclusionary activity that places you in a virtual world and prevents you from interacting with your surroundings. Criticizing an activity like that for not being casual enough to "fire up" is like speculating air travel won't catch on because airplane doors are too narrow.
The 3D movies and TV technology is a pointless gimmick anyway. What it does most of the time is give you a couple of planes or layers of "depth" in the picture.
Games are actually made out of 3D geometry that you can freely walk around in and look anywhere so the 3D effect is on a ridiculously different level.
As a child I was more than happy to spend ~10 minutes waiting for my ancient computer to boot up and load a game, and even now all the League of Legends players cope with absurd startup time. In contrast, it'll take less than a minute to put on some VR goggles.
The comparison with 3D TVs isn't so valid. In contrast to gaming, TVs are both casual and multi-user. Making sure everyone has the right glasses to watch 20 minutes of the Olympics (while conversing or eating or whatever) is much different than sitting down by yourself to do some proper gaming.
"This is the exact same problem that just killed 3D HDTV"
I beg to differ. "3D" failed in cinemas and there's no amount of commitment already given to that ensuring maximum enjoyment; travel, ticket prices, $10 popcorn, etc. I see the lack of compelling content, or at least a good enough reason to make said content 3D.
The same is not true of VR. Entirely new experiences are possible. I agree that it's an anti social technology but I see the solitary gamer or single individual getting a lot of value from this.
> It's a big commitment to strap a giant, heavy device on your face with 3+ cables to your PC. You don't just casually fire up a VR experience.
This is the exact same problem that just killed 3D HDTV -- the "everyone has to put their special pair of glasses on now for this to work" problem. It turned out that most people just weren't willing to go that extra step of putting special glasses on to watch TV. And 3D glasses don't even have to be strapped to your head! They're feather-light and super-simple compared to something like the Rift. But they were still too much to win over a broad general audience.
(It could be argued that this is less of a problem for VR than it was for 3D, because TV content is more frequently consumed socially than computer/game console content is. But even if that's true, it seems like it puts an unnecessary cap on VR's ambitions; why wouldn't VR want to expand into the niche TV fills today?)
This is a big chasm for VR hardware, even very good VR hardware -- the more ceremony that is required to get from "hm, I'd like to have a VR experience now" to actually having the VR experience, the less likely it is that it will ever make the leap from early adopters to the general public. "Casually" is a good way to describe the way people interact with most media -- and that's only becoming more true as things like smartphones and tablets become prevalent. So anything that pushes back and tries to make that casual experience more formal is swimming against the tide.