I think the problem is something that we dont actually understand yet. Like there needs to be some kind of psychologist to study it to figure out what is going on.

When I am in the goggles, Its kind of cool, but Im completely disconnected from the real world.

Its not a group activity either, like board games connect you to other people. VR connects you to the matrix. When one person in a family puts on the goggles, everyone else just leaves the room. There is nothing to see or share. (if you have a TV on, maybe its interesting but you are still like watching a person move their head around and look at things that arent there like a person whose mentally ill, its a strange experience)

And the physical barrier is always there. You walk up to the zone you have defined in your real life room, which is probably a few dozen square feet. You can touch invisibility, some bizarre barrier exists to your hands but your eyes tell you the exact opposite - you see infinite space, but are trapped inside a tiny grid whose barriers appear when you walk too far. Your eyes and ears tell you theres a whole world, your hands and feet understand you are still in your living room or whatever.

So when I come out of VR i have this bizarre, uneasy, queasy, unpleasant, feeling, for which I have not the word to describe. It is not like waking up from a dream. It's like shifting uncomfortably from one reality to another, one you have been to by yourself, completely alone.

Incredible description and eerily similar to my own experiences.

Weight, they can make you sweaty, may feel uncomfortable in other ways, look dorky as hell. Probably do a bunch of bad eyestrain-related stuff that we haven't figured out yet (or some have but are keeping it quiet). Serious motion-sickness issues for a fraction of users that's too large to ignore, even with top-notch goggles.

When they're in the same size/weight/appearance ballpark as sunglasses, is when AR/VR glasses will take off. It'll be the next "smartphone revolution", no question about it. We'll wonder how we ever put up with being as tied-down as we are at a normal office workstation. The smartphone put the Internet everywhere, rather than in one place, AR/VR will put your computer everywhere. Until then... yeah, it's niche tech.

> AR/VR will put your computer everywhere.

Sounds like a nightmare. And I already have frequent nightmares about my phone. The one where I need to do something urgently and the phone just gets slower and slower. It's a modern rehash of the dream where you are trying to run from something but your legs just get heavier and heavier.

I don't love it either but it seems inevitable unless it turns out to be impossible to make AR/VR glasses that are svelte enough for people to actually wear in public, and I wouldn't bet against it—I expect most of us in 1995 didn't believe we'd have many-core computers with gigabytes of ram and disk and with near-zero-latency touchscreens and all-day+ (for typical use, at least) battery life in devices with about the same volume as a cigarette packet, just ~12 years later.

Otherwise, the future of at least "consumer" computing is surely computer-as-overlay/HUD-on-reality, very likely with a side of being able to toggle totally virtual environments on and off at will ("Siri, take me to my office") which is what I meant by the computer being everywhere, rather than just having Internet access everywhere. Unless we crack some kind of really good brain/computer interface before we solve the VR-goggles-suck problem, which I doubt, but who knows.

So the plural of anecdote isn't data, but I have a Quest 2 and the limiting factor on use for me is one of two things.

1. The battery runs out.

2. I get physically exhausted. Most of the VR stuff I do is fairly energetic so it's not the VR goggles that tire me out, it's the constant swinging of arms and jumping/crouching.

I've never had an issue with motion sickness and since I'm doing it in my home any worries about how dorky they look are silly. Comfort is mostly fine, although you do have to wash off the foam bits that touch your face regularly or they'll start to smell like old gym socks. Fogging of the lenses is also an annoying and regular issue that I've never fully solved, mostly just getting used to everything being soft looking. The final minor issue is that the lenses can get warm (like hardworking cell phone level warm) so if your room is already hot they would probably get fairly uncomfortable.

Thanks to the battery issue I've never used them for more than a couple of hours at a time however. I can't comment about the comfort after 12 hours. I imagine my arms would have fallen off long before I got to 12 hours of Dragon Fist, Ragnarock, or Beat Saber however.

To stay article relevant I will comment about Horizon Worlds: My overall impression after an hour of trying it out just to see was "What did they spend the billions of dollars on?" It's so corporate and empty and I have no idea where all of the money went. It looks like any old VR Chat clone, there are a handful of minigames, chatrooms, and "VR Experiences" which are just short looped videos. It's not like SecondLife where you could maybe build your own thing or might stumble upon some crazy weird thing at any point. It's just minimal effort everywhere you look. To hear that it is such a money pit makes me wonder if it's some kind of weird money laundering thing or if the developers are just watching YouTube all day for years?

There's a little bit of heaviness if they headset isn't balanced well, but that's easily fixed.

The more concerning thing is the motion sickness. Most people, at first, get nauseated after a short while, and if they don't stop using them for hours at that point, it gets worse and worse each time they use them.

However, if they stop and recover (at least a few hours, a day is better) when they first start to feel it, they'll gradually get more and more used to it.

There's also the inability to properly see things around you, like your coffee or your mouse. AR is a good fix for that, though, and Meta's new Pro glasses specifically don't have full wrap-around so that you can still see around you somewhat. It ruins immersion in games, but they aren't meant for games.

I'm a pretty big fan of VR from way back, and I've owned multiple different headsets now. I do think the "metaverse" is an eventuality, but it's not about meetings, it's about agency. Meta's current attempt at "the metaverse" is just a crappy attempt at doing better than Second Life, but without even the things that made Second Life as good as it was.

The agency to create things yourself and sell to others, and the ability to buy licensed in-universe items is pretty much essential to a functional metaverse, IMO. Meta may intend to get there eventually, but trying to sell it as "the metaverse" before that point is pointless and harmful to their goals. It's going to take a long time to get there, and I'm still hoping that a grassroots movement makes it happen first instead of a big corporation. Ready Player One was all about that scenario and what it would mean. You have to look past the cloying nostalgia to see it, of course. ;)

I use Ocullus quest 2 to play (and LOVE it!). Weight, head and neck strain / tightness are the first issue. Nausea is the follow up. Eye strain is the final. I never use it for more than 30min at the time.

I cannot imagine spending ANY work time in VR at this point in technology cycle, once you add resolution, accuracy, etc. I do not understand what problem it's solving - if you want to visually interact remotely, turn on your camera. If you don't, just talk and screenshare. I do not understand what virtual reality will add to my interactions and productivity.

As someone who has pretty heavily used a Rift 2 for 5+ years now, primarily its ergonomics and comfort.

More physical activities can result in the foam around the eye piece absorbing a goodly quantity of sweat (addressable e.g. with the plastic cover that comes with the Quest 2 or aftermarket alternatives) which just feels gross and can lead to more humidity being trapped within the headset, fogging the lenses, and so on.

The weight is a bit awkward, and different straps can help distribute it better and stay comfortable for longer. The ear phones can be uncomfortable after a time as well, pressing down on the ears as they do. If they were a cupping style like high end headphones, that would help a lot.

I do find that the tethered units like the Rift are more comfortable for longer than the self contained units like the Quest, since they offload processing, power, etc and the attendant weight, to the desktop machine.

Eye strain does add up eventually, and newer headsets have better screens but I wonder if this is just a truly insurmountable problem of mounting screens mere inches from your eyes.

For me personally, my eyes got very tired very fast, after an hour long session left me feeling as though I had been staring at a screen for 10 hours straight

I have a HTC vive original and I actually had a lot of fun with it, but I don’t use it anymore because it takes up a lot of space and the experience is still kind of clunky/low res.

For many people there is a physical discomfort side. From either the heavy device or motion sickness. I didn’t have much issue with this other than playing one time for most of the day and the weight on my face was a bit much.