10-20-2016 11:43 AM
10-20-2016 11:48 AM
10-20-2016 04:24 PM
10-20-2016 05:15 PM
10-21-2016 12:33 PM
10-23-2016 12:09 PM
10-25-2016 12:39 PM
The Oculus Store is bad for VR adoption
and it’s only going to get worse.
I think PC VR is
going to be in a bad place next year as PSVR gets more of the strong
exclusives and leaves the Rift & Vive fighting over scraps. Maybe one or both sides have secret weapons
in the works (although, I seriously hope it’s not just chat rooms) but I think the
storefront is going to drag the Rift down more than Oculus thinks.
Steam has a terrible
UI, but it has the saving grace that somehow everyone going up against it
manages to make something even worse.
The Oculus Store isn’t even one of the better attempts. With maybe one or two dozen titles on display
it might manage to get the job done, but it’s rapidly getting unwieldy. New releases easily get lost – I feel like
Oculus doesn’t even try to get free content into people’s hands – there are no
categories or tags, there’s no return policy, you can’t choose which drive to
install to, there’s no review functionality (Oculus seems happy to offload this
onto these message boards, which is absurd), there’s no interaction with people
on your friends list, there’s no gifting, achievements have text going out of
bounds even though there’s one resolution, etc.
It’s an experience that looks like it was designed to run on a
console. So none of that is good. How does Oculus imagine this is going to work
if it ever takes off and people have libraries with a thousand titles like
people do on Steam?
But that’s peripheral
to the fact that mandatory startup into the storefront is bad. The first thing that happens when you get
past the start screen is someone’s trying to sell you something. That’s not a good look for VR, especially
when it’s worse than Steam and the big titles are running to PSVR. People don’t generally boot their computers
directly into Steam – Oculus shouldn’t be thinking about making Home into Steam,
it should be Windows. When I boot up
Windows, it goes into an environment that I set up, from the background to the
desktop icons, Start Menu and taskbar shortcuts, tray icons, mouse sensitivity,
sound levels, custom sounds, and so on. Oculus
should be thinking about accessing that kind of customization to get people
invested in their VR environment, so people don’t associate VR with a
storefront.
Look at how we
demo the Rift to people. We navigate to
the library, then to the Introduction to Virtual Reality or the Dreamdeck or
whatever, and then help someone put on the Rift and then tell them to start the
program, or we awkwardly start it for them while they’re moving the view
around. It would be a lot more effective
if these shortcuts were a spinning globe or hologram or something that we could
tell people, “Find the globe and press the button,” or “go through the glowing
door” (side note: I really hope Oculus doesn’t listen to the people telling them
the gamepad doesn’t suck out loud for VR, because it really kind of does. Touch needed to ship months ago). Regular users should have the option to have
a model Sidewinder on their desk that boots into Elite, or a little mountain
goat, etc. The fact that achievements
didn’t release as virtual trophies in a trophy case doesn’t speak well to
Oculus’ vision and imagination for VR.
You want people to
put on the headset and feel like they’re booting up an OS and actually switching
to VR, not just loading up a Steam also-ran.
Put them in a room where there’s lots
of object interaction and it feels natural, and give people lots of options to set
it up just the way they like – not just being able to add furniture and
doodads, but how the system interacts with the user. New releases might show up in an inbox tray, come
in through a mail slot by the door, or on a Steam style splash page on the virtual
computer screen. Pushing an inflexible,
canned interface on people is playing the console game that I think Oculus can
only lose. Give the audience options to
explore, let it mature and step back to see what Oculus can do to enhance that
experience instead of trying to dictate one narrow vision.
For a long time I’ve
been amazed at Apple’s success, because it seems like their products are only
good because everyone else is determined to suck. I always felt that anyone could have scooped
the iPod or the iPhone, but all the competition was committed
to some terrible design or the other until Apple swooped in with a product that people actually want to use. Don’t be those guys! Just throw the whole thing out and brainstorm
on a blank slate – who does Oculus want to sell VR to, what are those people
expecting out of it, and what should Oculus be offering them? If the whole endgame was just a gaming
machine and media center, then Oculus should probably have just gone to Sony to
begin with.
10-25-2016 03:19 PM
10-25-2016 04:16 PM
JED44 said:
You know what I always wondered? Why isn't there a VR aspect to these forums? Or a vr version of them anyways. Like alt space that you can access within home.
10-25-2016 05:30 PM
kzintzi said:
JED44 said:
You know what I always wondered? Why isn't there a VR aspect to these forums? Or a vr version of them anyways. Like alt space that you can access within home.
aren't we getting a VR browser soon? :smile: