Call me when we have a fully functioning holodeck, until then VR is dead to me.

Then what they are doing is rendering VERY low res games, or there only doing a very narrow view.

Again there's three basic problems with VR.

One: is that you need a ridiculously high and Ridiculously stable frame rate to reduce fickler induced nausea and it has to be a STABLE frame rate at that. no 100+ FPS apart from when were throwing crap at you like gunfire and explosions rendered in insain detail because hey Graphics mater!) because shifts in rendering rates as small as 10% can induce nausea if your using a VR rig)

(Ironically) this also means no suddenly dropping into bullet time, even if you keep the same frame rate and resolution! Because that can also trigger nausea and

Two: no lag in the Frame rate for when the player reflexively looks away from the current focal point on the screen (for whatever reason),

Bascialy this means that you have to pre render EVERYTHING, even anything not within the players actual Direct view, even if you are only actually rendering a third of that many pixels, you have to have pre-rendered and ready to put on screen anything that the player might suddenly look at without any drop in Actual Frame rate.(thus the comment about the graphic processor rendering 2 screens in 2180 p or better, the actual screen size your using at that rendering is roughly 700 per)

3) Given the above, they are either rendering in 3D the kind of games that always has a fairly Very static pov, (for example a modified WoT type game) or they are showing are what are basically old games that can be safely rendered at a very high frame rate with there entire view(nothing at all wrong with that except that VR headset games will not be winning any "Uber High End Graphics" awards for a long time)(basically games that can be run on the WII or the Old Xbox) and have a very restricted view compared to what most of us think of with VR or Fairly limited games that accept the restrictions of running a VR game on a what is basically a Very overpriced low end system.

The VR training sets that the Hospital here uses have that kind of stable frame rate currently but they not trying to render a game, they get away with it by deliberately using a clearly restricted POV, restrict head movement and fairly low resolution images.

This. Seems like another gimmick people will enjoy for a few hours then get bored with it.

Why restrict FOV, narrow FOV combined with VR sounds bad and probably induce motion sickness as you have to move your head a lot to scan the environment.

Also you do not need to render much outside the screen if you use an high framerate, you are not able to rotate your head much in 0.01 second.

Still I agree that VR will require an powerful pc capable of running the same game well in 4K.

It's not quite as dire as all that.

1. Yes, you do need a high and stable framerate. The higher the better, but at least as high as the screen's refresh rate. This is 75 Hz in the DK2, but will be 90 as far as I know in both the Rift consumer version and the SteamVR Vive system. The DK2 can also be driven at 72 or 60 fps--it's not terrible, but not quite as smooth.

Slo-mo or bullet time is not a problem as long as you can still move your head around in real time. It's when you don't see instant response to your own movement that it's an issue. One of the games that Oculus has been demo'ing (SuperHot) is build around manipulating time.

2. Absolutely, you don't want temporary drops when you look around. This isn't really an issue for most game engines--all the geometry around you is typically held in memory, but the video card only pushes the pixels that appear on-screen for any given frame. What you don't want to do is pre-render anything. Rendering a frame is dependent on the viewpoint at that moment in time, so it is crucial that the time between starting a render and putting it on-screen is as short as possible (so you haven't moved too far from the point of view when the render started calculating).

3. Due to the performance demands, you won't be playing with the latest "Uber High End Graphics" in VR, as you say. That doesn't mean you can't have a decent experience on reasonable hardware. When I got my DK2 i was running a GTX660Ti with an ancient Q6700 CPU. I could still play most of the demo's that were available at the time. Half-Life 2 in VR mode was a rock-solid experience. It's not the latest modern AAA game, but it holds up well enough.

On my new system (GTX 980), I can play Alien: Isolation in VR quite nicely. It's a good-looking game, and makes for an impressive VR experience. Games with simpler graphics also provide compelling VR, and feel quite real without looking photo-realistic.

Yes, VR is still an enthusiast-level thing at this point, but Oculus' recommended hardware (GTX 970) is not out of reach for most PC gamers, and will provide a decent (if not top-end) VR experience for those who are interested.

HL2 was what gave Steam critical mass to become the juggernaut that it is today. Due to wariness of DRM, most people didn't get on-board with Steam until it was required for a game they wanted to play. For a lot of people, that game was HL2. Late-comers might have been driven to Steam by Steamworks games like FONV or Skyrim, but for a long time, HL2 was the only game that required Steam.

Once people had Steam (and once Valve had improved on the initial shortcomings), they started to appreciate the convenience and value, but I contend that digital distribution on PC would not exist as it is today without Valve using HL2 to push it into the market.

I believe that HL3 will be the killer-app for VR that helps propel it into the mainstream.

If that were true then there would be many, many times more users of things like Origin, or Uplay. If anything it was the additional services launched and tied directly to Steam that made it grow to ubiquity.

And I believe that the moon is made of cheese.

I remember way back when, there was some "gaming goggles" that were planned to be made for the 360 by a third party. They listed Oblivion as having full support for it. I read this in OXM years ago. They also had an ad in OXM showing two guys on a couch, with said goggles strapped to their eyes and with controllers in their hands, if that helps anybody on finding a name.

Well it failed obviously, never made it out of the gate, due to eye strain, nausea and other unpleasantness complaints from the focus groups. I guess Bethesda got burned by this relationship and thus would explain their attitudes towards VR.

VR is such a load of manure, none of the VR options that are coming have adjustments for those without 20/20 vision so If you wear glasses you'd better get lasik eye surgery or contacts, on top of being generally healthy and not suffering from vertigo, motion sickness, or epilepsy.

Yeah I was thinking that today, I wear glasses now for TV and shooting toasters. is the screen close enough so you actually need perfect vision or are you exaggerating?

some people might be legally blind with out special glasses so wearing vr without there glasses will be having a bad time for them.

People without foresight need to see results to believe, oculus needs big sales right of the gate and also needs compelling content specifically designed for VR.

There's some pretty amazing things you can do with VR that a monitor/TV just can't replicate. There's also some terrible demo's that would put people off VR if they tried it (75% of them right now) bearing in mind most of the experiences are just indies probably thrown together by one guy, but overall very promising. I think it's going to revolutionise everything.

Um... most of the VR headset developers are designing their headsets so you can wear your glasses while using the headset. So glasses wearers can enjoy VR too. You have such strong views on VR, surely you've been keeping up with the news?

Are there any up-coming commercial VR headsets that you can't use while wearing glasses? Most of the hands-on previews that I've read where it's even mentioned suggest the previewers found the headsets pretty comfortable with their regular glasses. Obviously it'll be better if you don't wear glasses, but there's a huge gulf between 'not quite ideal' and 'load of manure'.

Photosensitive epilepsy is probably a risk with a whole bunch of games, although the fact that in VR the image fills the field of view will significantly increase the risk. That will be one for sufferers and developers both to be aware of, and may make VR a bad idea for those people at risk. That doesn't, in itself, make VR 'a load of manure'.

And finally, yes, there are going to be some people who, due to high sensitivity to the disconnect between visual input and balance/proprioception input, are just going to find VR induces nausea - at least for Oculus-style seated VR use, although Vive-style free-movement headsets and games would go a long way to avoiding this in future. But there are people who, due to colour blindness, find certain computer games unplayable. And left-handed people who find that games won't allow re-mapping of controls, and become awkward to the point of being unplayable.

The point is, just because a luxury entertainment medium isn't accessible to a certain number of people, that doesn't make it 'a load of manure'. It just makes it 'not for everyone'. Hell, there are going to be far more people who just don't want to use VR because wearing a headset makes them look like a dork, than people who want to use VR but can't.

You can wear glasses with VR headsets, unless you have really big frames. Although the screen is physically close to your eyes, the optics place it at least at arm's length away for focussing purposes. In fact, if you wear glasses for gaming in front of a monitor, you need to wear your glasses while using a VR headset.

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The main thing is, the developers know that a lot of people they want to sell to wear glasses, so they're damn well doing their best to accommodate them. Still, it is almost certainly a good idea, if at all possible, to try a VR headset, see whether you can wear it comfortably over your glasses, see if you get nausea easily in VR... and then start to think about whether you're even interested in VR. Because it is going to be in 'early adopter' territory for a good few years to come. Not decades, but certainly 2 to 4 years.

The DK2 is a bit too rough for me, but when the CV1 releases I will definitely be trying it once people figure out a way to hack it into Fallout 4. I think VR can be great, as long as the resolution, and stutter with the DK2 is gone I think it can be an awesome experience for those who can afford it. Lots of potential for cool VR games, and VR injection software for non VR games next year. But hey, it aint for everyone.

This is a big change for the brain to figure out, so sometime all it takes to get used to is some time and patience with it.