Tech Brew Ride Home - (Bonus) The State Of VR Right Now

Episode Date: February 20, 2021

As mentioned, for my birthday this year I got my first VR rig, an Occulus Quest 2 because if an Apple AR/VR thingy is coming, if Facebook continues to invest in VR, then I figured it was time to, you know, not be functionally inexperienced with the space. I have a little bit of crypto to understand the space. Looking to get my hands on some NFTs to understand the space. I’ve got an onlyfans account to understand the dynamics of what works in the creator economy. And that’s the only reason, I swear. Anyway, in this episode we’re going to talk about some of the things I’ve learned and to do so, we’re going to talk to two folks. First, some of you might know Kyle Hilliard, he was for a long time the host of our Gaming Ride Home podcast, before the pandemic put paid to that show. He’s a veteran games journalist, and actually, you can still hear Kyle talk gaming on the MinnMax podcast. Link in the show notes. Kyle helps me understand the state of the industry from a developer and corporate and startup perspective. And also, we’re going to talk to Seth Rininger (@Sethmr1989) who is a kind-hearted listener to this show who, when I put out the word for someone to help me get onboarded with Oculus platform, kindly answered the call and helped guide me through getting my VR legs under me. My discussion with Seth is designed to give you an idea of where VR is at right now, in case you’re looking to give it a go yourself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the Techmeme Right Home. I'm Brian McCullough. All righty, as mentioned, for my birthday this year, I got my first VR rig and Oculus Quest 2 because I figured if the Apple AR VR thingy is coming, if Facebook continues to invest heavily in VR,

then I figured it was time to, you know, maybe be not functionally inexperienced with this space. And that's already borne fruit with all of the headlines in the ARVR. stuff that we've had already just this year. I have a little bit of crypto to understand that space. I'm looking to get my hands on some NFTs to understand that as well. I've got an only fans account to understand the dynamics of what works in the creator economy. And that's the only reason I have an only fan's account, I swear. Anyway, this is just an episode of me doing research and you listening in. We're going to talk about some of the things that I've learned about VR and to do so. We're going to talk to two folks. First, some of you might know Kyle Hilliard, because he was

the host of our gaming ride home podcast before the pandemic put paid to that show. He's a veteran games journalist, and actually, you can still hear Kyle talk about gaming on the MinMax podcast. There's a link to that in the show notes. Kyle helps me understand the state of the industry from a developer and corporate and startup perspective. And also we're going to talk to Seth Rininger, who is a kind of hearted listener to this podcast, who when I put out the word for someone to help me get onboarded with the Oculus Platform, kindly answered the call and helped guide me through getting my VR legs under me. My discussion with Seth is designed to give you an idea of where VR is at at this moment. So if you were looking to give it a go yourself, you'll know the

lay of the land better than I did. Please enjoy. To me on email that, so you have a rift to yourself Yes, I have Well, I have a Quest 2 Oh, Quest I'm sorry. See, this is, okay. I have an Oculus Quest 2. That's the device I have, right?

I don't know why you're confused about this. There's only like five different skews. But no, I have a Quest 2, which I upgraded from a Quest 1. And then that's an upgrade from an original Oculus Rift. Okay, so let me, all right. So you've had all three? Yeah, I didn't have a Rift S. That's the one I skipped.

Okay. Let me ask you this then. I understand that what we've done in these generations is we've moved away from having to be tethered to an actual gaming rig. And so the Quest 2 is the first one that's completely standalone or where they were moving to this halfway? Well, there was the original Oculus Quest. The Quest 1 was wireless, which was that to me, like, as much as I sort of appreciated VR and played it and was it interested in it and enjoyed it, to me, that's the line to cross Quest one when you get rid of the cable. Gotcha. Things really were like, okay, now I feel like I can recommend this to everyone

and not just sort of people who are, you know, techno files who are just interested in new technology, you know? See, ultimately the question in doing these episodes is, am I at that point? Could I recommend this to anyone yet? But let me just ask you real quick. Yeah. From one to two, what was the graphics?

Was there like a significant boost up in terms of like graphics and things like that? No. The big, I mean, honestly, no, not really. It's a lighter headset. It looks nicer. And then the screen resolution is better. And the frame rate's a little better. Here's the place where I noticed it.

So I played Half-Life Alex last year, which was like, you know, Valve made the game. It's really meant for like a really good PC rig. You have like the Valve index, which is like the high end VR headset. But you can play it with a quest by plugging in your quest and doing Oculus. link, which lets you play those types of games, right? So I played Half-Life Alex on my Quest 1

connected to my PC, and it was fine. It was good. I had to upgrade my graphics card, but it was good overall. And then the big thing I noticed going from Quest 2 and revisiting that game was it's just generally smoother. The frame rate's a little better. It's a little sharper, but it's not

it's not like a, it wasn't like a console upgrade. It's not going, it's not like going from PS3 to PS4. You know, it's more like going to like... It's not generational, yeah. Okay. Not really. I mean, I guess Oculus could make an argument that it is.

And if you're going to get a quest, get Quest two. Don't go back and get a Quest one. But it's not a huge upgrade. I want to get into all of the development community and what the gaming community thinks of VR. But real quick, first, my only previous experience with VR was like, you know, at conferences or like in a warehouse. somewhere in Brooklyn at a tech meetup, someone would have it,

and I'd go in and see the painting, someone doing painting and stuff like that. So it's essentially the visual quality is the same as what I've always seen, if the last time I had an experience with it was four or five years ago. Is there, like if I got the full-on Oculus now, is that a generation beyond in terms of the quality of the graphics than what I'm getting on Mike, too? You know, that's a good question. There's like the Oculus Rift S and the Quest 2,

or like they're two. Those are the two choices you have, right? And, you know, I don't know. Honestly, like, I think, I think, I don't think it would be so significant. I don't think you would be blown away by the Rift S necessarily. Now, the thing about Rift S is like it runs more complicated games. There are some games that you can only play on Rift that are a lot more in-depth

and visually interesting and have more detail. But for me, and maybe this isn't the question you're asking, but for me, I will lose the cable to have a better video game experience than to have better visuals. You know what? The question I was asking is, and we'll get into this too, probably, the thing that I have been most wowed by is just going on YouTube and like, oh, let me see what Petra looks like and going to one of those videos,

those 360 videos of like the Great Pyramids, Petra or Angel Falls or something like that. And I'm like, wow, this is amazing. I want, but surely there's, if I, somewhere out there, there's at least 1080p video, which I'm not getting or like, that's obviously the next step, right? If we can get like 4K in a VR situation. Yeah. And I mean, I think Valve and Oculus are kind of poking at that with Index and Rift.

What's Index? What's index? Index is Valve's proprietary headset. That's like if, that's Valve's headset. It's $1,000. It's like, and it's like probably the best way to play Half Life Alex, which is probably the best VR game. I like Beat Sabre more, but they're very different. In terms of like showing off what VR can be in the future, Half Life Alex is kind of like the top of the hill.

You know what I mean? And yeah, so the index, that's where you're getting into like 1080P, maybe even 4K. I don't know the details off the top of my head, but that's the best VR headset you can buy right now. It's the Valve Index. Okay, so then what store has the most on offer? I'm assuming it's the Oculus Store or in terms of not just, and I'm not even talking about just games or the best games, but the most, because let me let me tip my hand a little bit here.

I'm simultaneously impressed with the amount of stuff available to me in the Quest Store or the Oculus Store. I'm getting all of these names horribly wrong, but in the Oculus store, I'm simultaneously impressed and not impressed. So there's more titles maybe than I thought, but the variety of titles aren't there? So do I have access to the widest variety on the platform that I'm on?

Yes. So here's the deal. So Oculus Rift probably has the Fuller store, right? The Oculus store is probably fuller because there are games that are exclusive to Oculus. on Steam the majority of those titles are also available on Steam and maybe a handful of like Steam exclusive things and you can use your Quest too

to play those Steam VR games Oh okay Yeah like you just have to plug your quest Get a nice long USBC cable Like I think I have a 6 foot one You plug in your quest into your PC And then you can play Using Oculus Link you can play

Steam games That's how I play Half Life Alex I keep talking about Half-Life Alex. But it's one of those things that's needlessly complicated. It's a lot of troubleshooting. And it's also troubleshooting where you're wearing a visor. So it's very headache-inducing. Yeah, yeah.

But it works. It does work. You can play like top-of-the-line, Steam, and Oculus VR games with your quest plugged in. Well, the real problem is there's not a PC in this house. So that would be a whole other investment for me. Okay. So that does get into the meat of what I want to know. about. I've done some stories just last week about, I think, like, Beat Sabre announced that they had

moved maybe 5 million, sold maybe 5 million copies. And I think, although I lost the story that the rumor is, is that the Quest 2 has sold a million units. So what is the gaming industry, and by that I mostly mean developers? What does the industry think about developing and just the market is it clearly it's a sliver compared to other things but do they think like it's maybe on the cusp of being something that is interesting yeah so i don't i don't have numbers obviously but like so to get into my background just in case your listeners don't really know me like i i wrote for game informer magazine for eight years i was there for a long time and so i was we had like right when when the oculus rift came out like we had an issue that was like the vr issue right and we

I remember getting test kits into the office and like playing early games and stuff like that. And at that time, we kind of went in with the mindset of like, okay, well, this is like a new, there'll be Xbox, they'll be Nintendo, and they'll be Oculus. You know what I mean? That's kind of how we felt about it. Like it would just be this other competitive corner of video gaming. And now all this time later, which is what we're going to maybe like four or five, six years later, I feel like it has found its spot.

And like you said, like, Beat Sabre, which is it fantastic. I almost literally played every day. I love Beat Saber. Has sold gangbusters. There's like, I think Facebook released a blog that said something like five other VR titles that had sold a million copies, which was cool. And so where we're at now is it's interesting because it's not what I thought it would be, where it would be like just as competitive as like the switch.

You know what I mean? It would just be another platform that, you know, hardcore gamers like me would have in their home. But it's increasingly kind of become this like weird separate thing that even non-gamers are kind of getting into. Like I've, I'm like I've heard of people and have met people who aren't really big video gamers, but they do have a headset and they like VR because it does have kind of like what you were talking about earlier. It has practical applications beyond video games. You know, you can kind of go around the world and see things.

I use it to work out. Like that's my main exercise purpose lately is, I try to play Oculus, like, you know, at least once a day for 30 minutes and play exercise games and beat saver because they're very movement-centered. So it's closer to like the mobile market, I feel like, where there's a lot of disparate things floating around that are trying to find their niche as opposed to like someone like me who's like I have an Xbox series S. X. I have a PlayStation 5 and I got my Oculus ripped. Like that's not super common. It's almost treated as like, you know, gamers like it. It's more than a video game machine.

It's like 90% of video game machine, but that 10% is really lifting it up and people are finding it that way. Well, so this gets into my sort of disappointment with what is out there. Obviously, this would have been one of the times where VR should have had its breakthrough moment, like a lot of things, including video conferencing, have had the pandemic times. Now, there are apps on there from companies that are clearly, it even says, It's like, we'll use this to do remote work with your teams, and you can all meet in a space and whiteboard together and, you know,

even sketch things and in a 3D environment, especially for, I don't know, architects and things like that, I can see that. But none of it's very good that I've sampled. And like, I would think there'd be more of that. There's also, there's also a handful of things that are like, well, watch a movie with your friends and you go into a virtual sort of movie theater. And by the way, all of the, like, Netflix and Prime Video, they all have apps that essentially you can watch anything you want on a virtual big screen, which is very nice for lying down in bed and stuff. But I'm wondering if they missed a trick, like, there is nothing that was like a breakthrough during pandemic times for just, you know, being virtually with other people. Yeah. Right when the pandemic started, I remember, I think it was Funimation, was selling tickets to go watch Akira.

with an audience in Oculus. And I love Akira. That's one of my favorite movies. And I like VR, but even I was like, I look at that and I'm like, I don't wanna do that. Like the resolution on the headset just isn't there. Like it's basically like shoving a, you know, like a switch. Well, let me take it back.

It's better than a switch screen. It's like, it's a higher resolution than a switch screen. But like, it just can't look as good as your desktop for work or your 4K TV. in your living room. It's just, it's like you have to accept that limitation in order to participate. Like I saw this, which I had never seen until today, maybe because you were emailing me about VR. Google is like, oh, let's send this guy some VR ads and stuff. But it was like, it was like, yeah, what will, like, let's, let's have a workspace. You can have as many monitors

as you want and you can have a virtual keyboard. Obviously, you'll still be typing, but there'll be a virtual keyboard. And it's like, that's a really interesting idea. But I'm not going to take that resolution downgrade and visuals, I'm not going to be able to see that virtual computer monitor as well as I can if I'm just looking at my standard computer monitor, and it's not worth that dive and quality, you know? I think that's the main thing holding it back from being like a practical workstation thing. It's just, it doesn't look as good. It's just going to look blurry no matter well. Also, I think like, again, you have to, you can only exist in an avatar like thing. So until that you can upload a picture of yourself and they do some sort of machine learning stuff to like make your algorithm and then your lips move and like your make facial expressions like then it's still you feel like you're in second life 20 years ago all over again.

Okay. But you touch on something. I have a list here of some of my takeaways. This is my key number one takeaway. And this is why I'm kind of disappointed. obviously we're talking about how the resolution is still limited, and it's early days, so this is a generational thing. Five years from now, we'll be talking completely differently about the quality of the video and the graphics and everything. But what strikes me is right now, it's good enough if developers accepted the limitations in the sense that, have you experienced that

Frozen 2 thing that's on the Oculus store? Yeah, I didn't like it. Okay, okay. That to me was the most impressive thing because it occurred, because it felt completely immersive. It felt like I was in the scene with the characters. So my takeaway was, okay, right now, the equivalent of, say, Pixar animation can be done and it's good enough.

Or, like, Breath of the Wild. I know that there is a VR version of Breath of the Wild through the Switch and things like that. But that level of graphics is completely immersive right now. So like... Yeah, Quest is totally capable of that. Yeah, a quest is more powerful than a Switch, for sure. So I, like, I'm like, so accept those limitations of like, well, we'll just design a world like like Breath of the Wild quality or Pixar quality and just run with that.

And so there's not enough that is doing that, in my opinion. Yeah. No, I... It's funny. just a quick aside for that frozen thing I'm like a I love animation and like Disney animation Pixar animation and and just like and so I was like oh man I can't wait to see what Disney does with virtual reality yeah yeah I was very underwhelmed by but I I understand why you say that I understand because it's not it's not

the wow it's not the full artistry that Disney animation is capable of but what I my point is is that it was enough it's that it's that old concept of good enough is good enough for certain technologies. And so, again, it's like, shit, do a South Park level quality of animation. And if you do it the right way, that still could be immersive for me. Yeah. I mean, working

within your limitations, speaking of Pixar, is like something that's important with new technology. Like, the reason Pixar made Toy Story, among a million other reasons, was that the technology that they were working on and sort of figuring out could animate plastic really well, right?

It could sort of do that sheen plastic really well, which is kind of why... Could do the hair. Right, yeah. Yeah. So, like, well, let's do a movie about toys. And, like, there are games that work within the boundaries of the limitations of Oculus really well. I think the best example is Beat Sabre. Like, because it's, it doesn't, it's not like this visual powerhouse.

It's all about listening to the music and just being on this track where things are flying at your face. And it's really engaging and awesome. And it's like, and that's, and you're right. Like, that's what people need to do. There are people who are overreaching on Quest, which leads to a lot of games that, like, have stuttering frame rates, which you can't do in VR. Like, you're just going to get sick if you have stuttering frame rates. For sure.

And my criticism would be, and I know why they're doing this, because the Holy Grail in a lot of people's minds is if you could do a first-person shooter with perfect fidelity. So, like, you feel like you're in the room. Like, so there's a lot of people trying to do that. But then the limitations really become stark for the reasons that you're saying because then it has to be these polygonal sort of things. It makes sort of, you know, Wolfenstein 3D sort of style. But yeah. So right, I'm like, okay, we're not there.

Don't try to do a first person shooter right now. Don't try to make it, you know, call of duty. I will pause you there. Okay. Unless you're valve and you release Half Life Alex, because that works, you know. Got it's like, but you got to have a killer PC to have it work well. you know. Yeah.

Who, God knows how much that game cost. They've probably been working on forever. So let me ask you that in terms of just like the, is it like a 10x amount of like development and or like memory and storage? Like if you're doing a half-life versus like a call of duty, to do a 3D environment, is it significantly more? Like is a file size 30 gigabytes? versus 5 gigabyte.

You know what I'm saying? Yeah, that's a good question. You know, actually I believe, and I'm not like, fully technically proficient in this regard, I'm certain, well, it's funny. I have a disclaimer. Then I'm like, I'm certain. I'm fairly certain that, like, Oculus,

like Half-Life Alex, I think, is a lot smaller file size than the most recent Call of Duty because they don't have to do 4K textures. 4K textures is what kills video game file sizes. And, I mean, Half-Life Alex doesn't run in 4K. It looks great, but it doesn't need those textures. That's a lot of like 3D objects that you can manipulate in an environment.

It looks very realistic. Brian, if you haven't looked up anything about Half-Life Alex, just Google like, you know, gameplay and see it because it's really, it's very impressive. I will do that. Maybe I will find it on the YouTube VR channel because then it could at least simulate that a little bit for me. Oh yeah, I'd never considered that. That's an interesting idea. Yeah. Well, something for us to do as soon as we got out here to test that up.

Yeah, like I said, I have a decent gaming rig, so I was going to play it. But yeah, for someone who just is interested, like casually, like you who has a quest, like just to see what it would feel like. What it would feel like. Yeah. There's probably a good video for that, I'm sure, yeah. Okay, a few more things. I was impressed with, and there were not a lot more than I thought there would. Like, meditation apps are so huge right now in terms of, like,

you know, the development space and there's a million apps that have like billion dollar valuations now in the meditation space. And the handful of my experiences in terms of the meditation apps in VR, I was like, holy shit, this stuff is really compelling because like, you know, the things where it's like they start you off to, you know, sink your breath, get your breath down. And so you breathe in and the lights come into your chest. It feels like these, you know, these sparkling stars. And then you breathe out. And it's like the steam coming out of but like the immersiveness of what was capable in VR, and maybe you don't have an answer to this.

This is me just shouting into the void developers. Go further in the meditation space. But like, yeah, that mindfulness, just like calming, relaxing stuff. Oh, my God. Or just, you know, smoke a bowl and get high stuff. There should be way more of that on there. Yeah, I mean, it's, yeah, it's there. But you would think it would be like, yeah, huge.

I mean, I, the workout stuff is what I'm saying. seeing a lot of. Like, there's, it's put, because I'm using a lot and it's pushing me toward them. It might just be, you know, the algorithm. What's your favorite? What's your favorite workout out? Um, so the one that I'm using on Oculus Quest is a, is a free one. It's, uh, it's just fit XR. And what it does is it just gives you a handful of like, you want to play this boxing mini game where you have to basically swat away at things as they come at you and we'll put it

to music for 10 or 15 minutes. We can make it intense. You can, you know, do a bunch of crouching if you want. Like, that's, that's what I've been enjoying. And then there's, There's also another great game that you should check out, Brian on Quest called Pistol Whip, is another really, it's a really good game, but it's also a good one for like getting you to move around and have to crouch a lot and stuff like that. So I kind of, I play that and Beat Sabre is the third one, which I try to play on the harder difficulties to try to really, you know, get my heart pumping. The thing I've been experimenting with is I convinced a friend of mine to get one. And so, like, you know, playing the virtual ping pong and like that, what do you call it? You have the body suit where you jump off a mountainside and then you're racing each other down the mountain in those wingsuits and things like that. Well, boy, that 100% will get you the nausea and headache. Yeah, that's gotten a lot better.

Like, Quest 2, I feel like has gotten to a place where it's a lot more comfortable. I mean, like I said, I remember bringing home an Oculus Rift debug kit and playing like just like the earliest iteration of like a VR roller coaster and just being like, this is really cool. I can do this for three minutes max. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, the kids, the kids love the roller coaster one on there too, which which brings me to another one, which is there should be more building stuff. Like, like there should there should be the equivalent of Roblox. there should be a, there should be a Lego, whatever. Because, like, for example, the thing that the kids use a lot is Angry Birds,

which, of course, there's an Angry Birds version on there where you can, like, sit there and shoot the slingshot yourself with your two hands. But what they like to do is build the levels because it puts a table right in front of them. They've got the pallet of blocks and things like that. And there's another one I just downloaded this weekend that you can sort of make these sort of like Rube Goldberg machine. So you've got a bunch of tools in a room and you make the ball come down the channel and then knock down, you know,

dominoes and things like that. But that immersive building stuff, because, you know, I've got a six-year-old right now that is finally discovered Minecraft and is nothing but Minecraft. And like, so there should be more virtual building stuff. And I'm kind of surprised that there's not. Yeah, because, I mean,

one of the most fun things to do in VR is, it sounds silly when you say it out loud, but like, honest to God, one of the most fun things to do is VR is to pick up an object and look at it. Like, it's like, one of the most tactile things. It's like one of the first sort of like moments of like, oh,

this is interesting. This is different than your standard video game. It's just picking up a block and rotating it in your hand and looking at it and then putting it down. And yeah, it is, it is surprising that someone hasn't found a really fun way to gamify that, you know, in VR.

Like, I like that Angry Birds is VR game is super fun. You know, it's just like, just turns out it's fun to throw rocks at structures and watch them fall down. Like, you know, and in VR,

it works well. My one more, this is a personal one, and maybe this exists, and I'm unaware of it, but this is dumb. But when you log in like that home screen or whatever, and you can pick like a virtual environment to be in, and I love the one where you're like in a cyberpunk city or something like that, looking out the window. And it's like, I could hang out there if I could do things like, okay, can I sink a Spotify playlist into this?

Because you can walk around the room, right? you could sit down at what I would love is to be able to sync a playlist to it and then maybe bring up an e-book that I can just scroll in front of my face in some cool virtual environment and give me you know 200 to choose from I want to be at the top of a mountain or something like that like yeah I especially again this is a pandemic thing like if I could just have a chill place to hang out in and read a book for a half an hour like I love to do that like where is that on there? Yeah, that's it. You know, it's funny. I think there's a hesitancy to create experiences that require you to be there for like really extended periods of time. Like I think even my favorite games are ones that you play for like at most like an hour. And then you're and then you kind of hit your limit. At least I hit my limit. So yeah, I don't know. I guess because like that's an interesting idea of just like, can you please give me more just hang out spaces? They exist, but they're really limited. And yeah, I wonder if it's just a hesitancy on Oculus's part to be like, we're not sure if it's good for humans to be in here for four hours, you know? If you, you know, look, if, especially for parents, if you could have a place where you could go for 15 minutes and check out of your world, especially in a pandemic environment.

And I don't know, scroll through Instagram. Instagram should have an app where you can just scroll through your feed in various environments. And you can play chill music in the background and you can just sit in an easy chair and do that for 15 minutes. There was, I'm less invested in PlayStation VR. There are some really great PSVR games like Astrobot and stuff. But I do remember there was, I was just looking through its free store. And they did have something, which I don't know if it's on Quest, but basically it was like you would sit on a beach. And it would be real 360 degree camera footage of like various beaches across the world.

I remember sitting on a beach in Japan. And I'm an iPhone guy, but if you had an Android phone, you could sync it with your account. And then it would show you your clock and like your text messages would be superimposed on the beach. And that would, that was one that's like expressing what you're interested in where it's. Yeah, because see the outside world into this hangout zone that you've figured out, you know. Right, right. And interestingly enough, maybe why I was primed to want that is because all of the AR stuff that I saw at CES last year that I was able to demo. It was doing things like that. Like, you'd put on the AR glasses and you can have your TV

running over here so you can be watching the game or something. And over here, set it up so that your Instagram feed is scrolling, right? And that was sort of the concept. It's like you could be chilling and living your normal life and still be in the same room as other people, so being able to interact. But in your field of view, here's something that you want to be watching and here's checking the Insta and all that stuff. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah. So that, that seems to be the direction that AR was going into, and so I'm wondering why it's missing in VR. Yeah, I don't know.

So final question, because this leads us to the rumors about the Apple VR thing, you know, still heavy in the rumor section right now, but rumor currently right now is that they're going to come in way at the high end, like a $3,000 machine with the understanding that this is probably one of those things that if they do it, they want to have learnings for a few years with the ultimate goal. They want the eyeglasses, the lowercase eyeglasses that they'll have someday. They're visualizing that as the maybe iPhone replacement 10 years from now, right? The thing that everyone will own and will use constantly.

So maybe coming in at the high end is just to learn the form factor, learn the technology and these sorts of things. But what are your thoughts about coming in as at a three, thousand dollar price point. I won't be buying it. I don't think so. I mean, but I get it. It's smart. Those early adopters.

It's such a weird system that we keep buying into that works really well. And I'm guilty of it too is that early adopters pay premium price for the broken version of stuff so that they can give feedback to get it fixed to be cheaper for the secondary consumers later. And it's like it works and it's going to work here. probably and I mean that's what I think they're trying to do right is like get the sort of tech obsessed early adopter people to try it out and give them feedback on it and see if it's something worth pursuing or if it's dead there at that you know that early stage um I like Apple hardware I'm talking to you on a MacBook pro and you know with my iPhone I think I want to try that headset

on my face I bet it will be very comfortable but I mean I'm a video game first kind of guy and I don't foresee Apple having any video games that would outdo what Oculus is already invested into VR there's no indication that we've seen that Apple can create a decent gaming ecosystem and then and then here's my Apple Arcade is solid I like there's a lot of good stuff on Apple Arcade but it's all third party developers that are signing contracts

you know which all those games come out on other platforms and that's where I've played them. I just wait him out, you know. Well, the other thing that I'm thinking is, and this gets back to what we said at the very beginning, which is, would I recommend this? You know, there was a time when I was like, well, my mom will never want an iPhone, right? So you never want to say, oh, this is never for normal people, but would I recommend this yet for normal people? I don't think I would because there's not enough there yet I can see, unlike you, that a month from now, I will have realized that it's been sitting collecting dust for a month. I don't see anything compelling enough for me to do it. Although Settlers at Catan just came out or something, I want to try that.

Yeah. Missed, I was just going to say missed. That's so wild. Well, and that's an example of what I was talking about. That's nostalgia, though. But that's an example of those graphics work for this device, right? But anyway, so my point being, at a third, $3,000 price point, something that is still sort of a luxury, but not a compelling device, there's no way you'll get traction at $3,000, you know. And maybe they don't want to, right? Maybe that's not their goal, but I agree with you for sure. Kyle, thank you.

Thank you for taking the time to sit down and do this. I know that there are people that are listening that were huge fans of the Gaming Rite home, and we miss it. and we miss you and maybe someday in some future, we can bring that back. Yeah, thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah, I miss it too. I enjoyed doing it.

And I'm always happy to hear when people will pop in and say hello. I still have control of that Twitter account. Is that okay, Brian? I still go and like tweets sometimes. Yeah, yeah, go ahead and do that. And plug the podcast that you're still doing that you were doing before you started that even. Oh, yeah. So if you want to hear me talk about video games, I'm over at MinMax,

which is two ends like Minnesota, M-I-N-N-M-A-X, where a Patreon YouTube channel, weekly podcast, all kinds of fun stuff. So, yeah, check me out there. And then also now my day job is I work for Game Mill Entertainment. And we, you know, we publish games like the Cobra Kai video game and Nickelodeon cart racers too. Awesome.

So, you know, if you buy those games, that supports me financially. So there you go. Wait, Brian, before we, before we end up, have you played Beat Sabre? I didn't get a sense of people. Yes, I have. I'm not necessarily impressed. But maybe that's because I don't want to exercise.

Maybe I need to get motivated. It's not an exercise game. It's a music game. If you played it, then you know what it is. I've played it, but you know what it feels like to me? It's like, I used to do this and it was called garage band. Like, I don't know if that's getting too analytical about it. I understand it it's the same sort of thing, whereas as opposed to, well, I've got to hit

the buttons when they come down, Tetris style. Now I've just got to swing these joysticks. To me, it feels exactly like playing Garageband because all you're doing. When you say, do you mean rock band? Rock band. Sorry, Rock band. Okay, just want to make sure that I was like, because Garageband is creation software. Garage band, right.

Garage band is what I'm going to put this podcast again. Rock band is what I do. It is that genre, 100%. Yeah. Where it's just get the rhythm down and play to the rhythm and that's what it is. And so, I don't know, maybe rock band was. fun to play with a bunch of people, but I don't think I would ever once played rock band by myself. Got.

Okay. See, I was the kind of guy that enjoyed rock band on my own. Interesting. High scores and really investing in the music from like a gameplay perspective. So that's why Beat Sabre really clicks with me is it's like lets you really focus on the music and swing your arms around and have lightsaber. Like a madman. Yeah. So listen, don't let me shitting on it discourage people because everyone is pretty universal on saying BeatSaber is the best, at least right now.

so yeah i mean like that's the thing like recommendation to people it's like try beat saber and if if you're not if that's like not fun for you then like then maybe wait a couple more years before you revisit vr but if you play then you're like this is cool like there's stuff there that you'll like beyond that you know all right that was kyle now on to set don't forget give set a follow on twitter there's a link to his handle in the show notes uh give me your your your vr or gaming bonifides and let me know your experience with VR up until this point. All right. I've been a PC gamer for a long time.

I really, really enjoy a lot of different games. I've been a little bit more on the competitive side. Never really delved into first-person shooters that much, just to give my own background there. But when I brought back to VR, I wanted to see what I would like. And I initially, you can look anywhere and see something about Beat Sabre. I played a little bit of dance dance revolution games like that back in the day

guitar hero yada yada so I decided to hop into that absolutely fell in love with it it's probably my favorite version of one of those games I mean the idea of just having beat sabers that you're flinging around and everything and I get a great exercise with it every single day let me this is the first one let me interrupt you right there so I have played it maybe for 30 minutes

are you able to is it one of those ones where you can in-app buy different music? What's the limitations in terms of the different songs and stuff that you can play to? Okay, so they release their own music packs, and you can buy any of those. I'm pretty sure you can download custom music packs that other people make, though. I haven't delved into that experience to try it myself. I've only ordered all the ones that they offer. But the downside to the way they've got it set up is there's two different stores.

You've got the Rift store and then you've got the Quest store. And literally you have to buy every single music pack and the game itself on the store of your choice. So that means that if you buy it on the Quest store, you don't have it on the Rift store. And then if you want to play, say you want to connect it to your computer and get 90 frames per second, I'm pretty sure there's no way to get 90 frames per second unless you're connected to the computer. and then so you would actually have to have the Rift version of that game. To me, what makes the Quest such an amazing console at this point is that it's standalone and the Quest 2, it finally hit a threshold where I think there can be a lot of really good content

on it at a decent resolution and frame rate. Well, yeah, let me interrupt you again. So you were the one that even turned me on to the fact that although it came with a USB connection, So I can, if I have a decently powered PC, I can go get these better apps. Like, you know, I looked at the store. There's, you know, there are certain games that are only available if you go to the full Oculus store. But aside from frame rate, is there, do I also get better resolution? Like, can you get like 4K stuff?

Or is it just the frame rate and the more complicated games if you step up to that next level? I'm not exactly sure of the exact lines on everything. I'm sure that the Quest 2 is capable of more than I thought it would be standalone, and it's going to only get better from version to version. So I'm sure any game that there's a restriction on now, five years from now, that'll be blown out of the water. But as of now, when you connect the difference in the fidelity of games that are available, once you're connected are pretty massive.

It's like, say I go into Beat Sabre, it sends you into this universe and it looks great, but all of these, the fidelity is created using a type of graphical engine, I believe, that allows you to do so at a much, it's simple objects,

even though... It's more polygony or something. Yeah, exactly, yeah, something like that. But then when you, jump into the full games. These are built in unity. They're huge, bulky games that the storage alone would be a lot of what's on your device, even if you got the 256 gigabyte version.

Right. And then on top of that, there's just a lot of processing power that the computer can do for you. The, yeah, so the, do you know in terms of, is this your first generation that you've had, or have you had like the Oculus whatever before? I've done a lot of research between the various versions, and I was considering getting a Valve index before I got the Quest 2. Gotcha. But I have not tried any of the other ones now. Okay.

So I just, and you don't have to know the answer to this, but just to get a sense of, do we feel like we're on a generational thing where it's like, okay, we've just with this generation gotten good enough that you can recommend it to most people. But if you're on the fence, if you wait five years, then it'll be the equivalent of, you're, of, I don't know, the jump from PS2 to PS3 or something like that, you know what I'm saying? I mean, if you wait five years, I think it's going to be a pretty developed market at that point. I think there's a lot of developers getting in now that they can see the stores grown so much. There were more Oculus Quest 2 sold than I think like the rest of the VR market combined or something. It just, it really is blown things out of proportion. The only scary thing here is Facebook has their whole, you have to connect with a Facebook,

account thing going on and then so we want good competition in the market. So can I go to other stores using this thing? Like could I go to Valve if I connected to a PC and use the Valve store? Yeah, I'm doing it right now.

You can connect once you connect to your PC, you just get Steam VR and then through Steam VR you can access everything that's over there. What about things like PlayStation or is it all sort of platformed and off limits for that sort of stuff? Yeah, that's mostly exclusive.

But you'd be kind of surprised what you could find on the Oculus store. I'm not sure how it's all split up right now because it's evolving really, really fast with the new platforms and everything. But on the Oculus, some games you can find if you search for them, but they will never come up in any kind of browsing or anything like that. So you have to specifically know the name to find them. and that I think the how that happens is becoming a little bit more defined moving forward. I was just listening to something about it, but I can't remember the details now. It might have been, it might have been me because I think I did a story about that recently. Oh, maybe that was it.

So, okay, that's number one. I need you to send me a list of those things that I need to know to type in to find. Because, yeah, I'm sort of impressed with the amount of stuff that's available. I'm sort of impressed and not impressed. at the same time. There's more variety of things available, but then the things that I'm interested in, like, there's not enough.

Have you noticed, so you've had it for what, it's only been out for what, six months now or something like that? Have you noticed it evolving quickly? Like, there's games coming on a regular clip to the store? I think it is evolving somewhat quickly. You pretty much know what you're getting from

Facebook's direction, and they're creating a lot of the more premium content that I'm enjoying. But there's a lot of stuff, in the Valve's world as well. Like I was just watching something with a whole bunch of new games coming out.

A lot of interesting type ideas that we could potentially want to go into. The first person shooter market seems like there's a lot of different stuff coming out. Half-life was really big. But out of those,

it's hard for me to get into a lot of them. Super Hot was the one that just caught me completely off guard and I really enjoyed it. Because you can move as slowly as you want to when time moves at the same paces. Right, that's the one where time speeds up or slows down depending on your movement.

It's sort of like a tenant style game or something. You end up dodging bullets very like literally and it's awesome. You just stand there and you're looking at it and you're like, it's right in front of my face. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you quickly move. Zoom goes fast. Right. Or like you're in a bar setting and two guys are coming at you with broken off bottles and you've got to like fight them. Like yeah, yeah. Let me ask you this. Again, I've had it for what, two weeks now? The first week that I had it, they didn't ask me to try the hand tracking thing

where you can point with your, you can put the controllers down and point with your hands. Did they just introduce that, or is that just something that they didn't show me right away? I don't know. I literally just got the notification to try that out myself. Okay, interesting. A couple days ago.

Yeah, right. I personally hadn't tried it out much. My mom a few months ago came over to my house, and I showed her the first game for me to show her was called Wolfe's in the Walls. It's like kind of an interactive movie type thing, really simplistic. Oftentimes all the graphics around you are just black, but then you see like a single character that's talking to you. Really innocent, childy game, but they did such a good job fine-tuning it

that I'd really recommend it. It's like eight bucks in the store. But I showed that to my mom, and she fell in love with the system so much that she had to buy one. And now they're trying out everything. And she was immediately, oh, have you tried it with just your hands? I played this game with it and this game with it. So there's definitely some games that are created just specifically with that in mind.

And I'm hoping as time moves forward, it becomes more like that, because any interactions that can be done with just your hands that feel very fluid will bring the platform to life all the more. The controllers can be the clunkyest part. Well, actually, at least right now, I prefer you. using the controllers because I can't get the hands to work quite as well. I want to save some of your recommendations of things to download to the end, but just two things, again, you being my sort of guide into this world. I had heard all of these years about the nausea that you can do it, that it induces,

and I did it for two hours straight this past weekend, and I was doing that game where you put on one of those flying squirrel suits or whatever, where you jump off a cliff and glide down a mountain or whatever, and you're racing other people. And like after doing that for 45 minutes, I was completely disassociative. I was like, I felt like I wasn't in the real world anymore. I had nausea for about six hours.

Is there any trick that you've acquired? Is there any way to reduce that, or that's just what you get? So for me personally, I definitely get some of that. When I first got the platform, I was trying everything out. And it really depends on the game, I think. I think as the technology gets better, that's going to reduce, I heard the frame rate can definitely make a huge difference on your sickness feeling. But if you're playing games where you're flying around like that,

I think it's kind of inevitable. And when I first got it, I got so bad. Like you said, I was questioning the simulation theory to a greater extent, just based on the feelings of I was in this other thing. There were two things. I had straight up nausea for a good six hours. afterwards, like, you know, kind of didn't want to eat. But it was, I remember, like, walking downstairs and, you know, my kids are in the living room. And it was like, it was like

that. It was like, I'm not here. I'm, like, I don't feel like I'm present in this room. So, like, yeah, it was a weird sort of like, I got, I got too high sort of thing. But the, the other thing that I've experienced is, you know, look, I, other headsets that I have tried on, maybe four or five years ago were straight up heavy shitty experiences. This is, I'm sure state of the art in terms of this is as light as you're going to get right now. It's not an uncomfortable thing to use, but it is, again, after using it for two hours this weekend, the, my, it's like, if you want to, like, work up the muscles in your eyebrows, I realized, like, I had fatigue right here, like, right above my eyebrows. And it was just, I realized from, like, essentially, you

like my to hold the thing in place right oh that I never experienced okay the elite uh oh okay right off the bat it makes all the difference really yeah let me just grab it right here so you can see so um it would the elite head strap it it has this little turning thing here and you can get really really on your head with it And it doesn't come back at all. I need that just for being able to put it on the kids' head to be. Because you should see all these videos of my kids. They're using the controller with one hand and they're holding it with the other hand,

which maybe they still need to because, I mean, they're four and six. So I don't know. Yeah. For various people, it also is going to make all the difference because you don't have to resize it in some annoying way. Exactly. Yeah. They sell a lot of third-party ones online as well. I haven't talked to my mom.

She bought one of them. I don't know how well it worked. I just know that I like this one a lot. It's comfortable, but it's already my second one, and the device is pretty new. I dropped it one time, and it cracked on both sides, and then a couple days later, completely snapped in half. They replaced it for free, but I don't know if it's got some kind of just weakness there. I mean, I did drop it, but the rest of the device is perfectly fine. Well, that's what's going to happen to mind.

The kids are going to drop it at some point. Yeah, you turned me on to the fact that you can. mirror to your smartphone, which has helped me. Because I realized, you know, again, a four and a six-year-old, it's a lot of like, Papa, how do I get back to this screen and that screen? But when it's on the TV, I can do it because I can see what they're doing. But I realized, I was like, well, guys, I can't help you because I can't see what you're seeing.

And so that was, that was amazing. Is there anything else like that that I'm not aware of, like the, um, well, I mean, you can connect some stuff up with your computer. So once it is connected to the computer, you can. and full screen it there. And I think if you were actually going for like the seeing everything as live as possible, that's really the only way to do it because doing it through the Oculus app already has a delay. Then any kind of streaming past that just blows it through the roof.

It's the only way I've really tried it this far because every time I want to show someone else, it's like it's got to be on my TV in the living room and that's the Apple TV. But it kind of sucks. I wish Oculus would come out with an app for that. along with the Spotify needs to better their app so I can see video in there. Okay, wait, there is a Spotify app?

For the Apple TV, there is... Oh, oh. Oh, oh. Yeah. No, for the Oculus. Oh, no, no, I was talking about Apple TV. Oh, okay. Similar annoyance that would both Spotify and the Oculus app. They need to get their video stuff with the Apple TV on point.

Yeah, well, see, that's what I'm saying. I want to Spotify one. I want to be able to do playlist to upload into Beat Saber. I want to, there's lots of, there's lots of wish list checkbox items that I want. All right. So to wrap it up, like just if you, off the top of your head, like, rattle off some things that you think I should try.

And some of them maybe I've already tried, but tell me what you love. All right. Well, I told you the original three already, Beat Sabre, Super Hot, and 11 table tennis. Oh, also the table tennis. I didn't show you that. Oh, okay. So wait. Is that the one that I have?

I got a ping pong one, but I don't remember. Yeah. I bought this one off of Etsy. Someone literally 3D printed it, which, considering I design and print stuff off a little bit here and there, it's really got me wanting a 3D printer now. So I can start finding alternative ways of making some money. But yeah, just put it on like that.

And it's legit. The only thing that makes this not like real ping pong is that, when you're playing, it's a little top heavy, which you're only going to really care about it top level. I was one of the better players in my college, so I got pretty picky with this. Hey, hey, humble brag there, buddy. But yeah, this is amazing how good it is.

You won't believe how good the ping pong is until you play that game. It's just phenomenal. In terms of, I only, you know what, I need to get your user idea or whatever, because, yes, the one friend that I have on there, so far the best multiplayer experience that I've had is the ping pong stuff, is the table tennis, I should say. Yeah, and there's lots of other multiplayer type stuff you can do on there. I haven't messed around as much of it. People love VR chat, but it's nerdy as anything. People love a whole lot of these different things. I think a lot of them are developing, and once we get some more solid platforms that allow people to congregate with more like-minded people rather than just a random. group of people where everyone says whatever, we'll get a lot more

really cool social experiences on there. But I know you asked about all the games. The other ones, I played a little bit of poker stars. If you like poker, go gamble with some fake money. It's pretty realistic, a little bit more childish than going to go to an actual casino. Is that multiplayer two?

Yeah, yeah. That's all it really is. They've got some little slot machines and stuff in there, but I don't know why you'd waste your time on them. with fake money. Then, let's see, I played a, what was it, the VR game, Orbis VR, is it? For a while. And that was the first, like, online multiplayer MMO, VR game.

They were bragging about it. And I really always wanted to hop into that atmosphere and try it out. The thing is, at the end of the day, for a PC game, making the transition isn't going to be this year to where you're playing your main games that you love on PC all of a sudden over here in the VR world. And I think that's the reason we're not seeing like World of Warcraft VR and all of those just because of how much it's a completely different experience and your controls don't give you the same degree of control as just a mouse and keyboard do right now. As time continues and as they get better with it, you'll get there. but it's just not there. Is there a Minecraft VR?

Yes. In order to do Minecraft VR, I believe you have to buy the game through the Microsoft store. And then I'm not sure if it costs money or not, but you have to get the game through the Oculus store then. And then they work together. And so you could technically like take over the controls on your PC,

but you'd probably get who's ever playing real sick if you did that. Well, but I would also need a PC. I'd need to hook that up to a PC. to do that, I'm guessing. Yes. Yeah, okay. So that's kind of out unless I'm going to plunk down

some money on a PC. I just built a gaming PC this year. I put about two grand into it, but you could get one for half that price that runs anything besides like the top level games. But if you went all out and got a graphics card of this year, I think that's the only way you'd be able to like max out the frames per second. Like if you were to watch just straight video content on there,

the device is pretty hard to max out with a good gaming PC nowadays still it can handle a lot with the connection but the uh so bottom line the one game that you would have anyone try i'm assuming is um beat saber yeah yeah i play that uh half hour to an hour every single morning i'm uh expert plus beaten all the songs in the game outside of the like the default ones they give you on the final page. Those songs are all crazy. Even on extreme, they're nowhere near as a regular expert. They're nowhere near. Most songs on expert plus is on the ease of difficulty. It's crazy how hard they make that in comparison. But yeah, it's fun. I feel like it's counteracts. A lot of my exercising I do in the evening. It gets me nice and stretched out in the morning and I feel

good. Well, you're the second person today that told me that Beat Sabre has become their actual workout routine. But, all right. So, Seth, number one, thank you for being a listener. Number two, thanks for answering my bat signal when I got the device to leave me through that. And number three, thanks for coming on to tell everybody about it. For sure. I really enjoyed it. anyone that wants to contact me, I guess they can do so through... If you want to plug anything, tell us about you, tell us about you, tell us whatever, your socials, whatever you want. All right, my Twitter is Seth, MR in 1989, and I post a lot of random everything, tech, politics, yada, and then I... I, yeah, that's pretty much it.

I'm a mobile developer at the lead mobile developer at Vemvest. It's a startup company in Sarasota, Florida, and it allows you to invest, save, and give all in the same place, and been there for a few years now. I really enjoy it. Well, see, I don't know if you heard me, heard today's episode yet, but I kind of shed on Southwest Florida. Because I grew up in Fort Myers.

I don't know if you knew that, but, which is just about an hour. south of Sarasota. Yeah, I almost tried to meet up with you one time when you said you were down there, but I ended up being busy. Yeah, you were like offering to meet up with people. But yeah, I don't know why I didn't. I guess I wasn't as big of a fan as I am now, maybe.

I don't know. Well, so ignore what I said on today's episode that there's not a tech scene in southwest Florida because Seth is proof that there is a tech scene or at least a gaming development scene. Okay. I live in North Carolina now, but I still work for the same company. Oh, okay. All right, all right.