VR headsets and setups: just the tip, or the whole nine yards?

[Veho]

First off, a definition. What I consider to be a "VR headset" are the screen goggles (the TV-glued-to-your-face), with head tracking and spatial orientation that reflect in the game.

We've had video goggles for decades, and as people love to point out, they are nothing more than a TV strapped to your face, there really is no point. They do nothing for you except let you watch porn without anyone else peeking in at your screen.

What makes goggles "VR" is the head tracking aspect, that translates your head movement into camera controls in-game, letting you look around by, well, looking around.
An equivalent to having your entire room wallpapered in monitors, to get a 360 degree surround. Or 360x360 in spherical coordinates? Or is it just 360x180 since you get duplicates when both coordinates can go from -180 to 180?

But I am rambling.

A lot, if not most, if not all, of today's VR setups (and the games developed for it) are these large and complex setups that consist of the headset, several controllers, a dozen cameras and sensors to track your movement, and a hangar-sized space to let you move around without hitting walls and furniture.

Granted, you can't really move that far because there's half a dozen cables running from you to the PC/console running the game.
Basically, the thing that a setup intended to increase immersion does best is let you smack into a wall or yank your tether and break the immersion.
On the other hand, a lot of VR setup developers are trying to make their solutions standalone, so you aren't chained to your PC/console, you can lug the proprietary hardware around on your back.
Either way the setup is large and prohibitively expensive.
All of this is fragmenting the market, fragmenting the userbase, scaring away the developers, and keeping everyone but the most vehement early adopters away.

But I am ranting.

Back when the Oculus Rift was announced/in the works, there weren't any VR demos or controllers around, and the team demoed their devices through mods of existing games, that were usually just the game, played as it was normally played, but with the addition of another set of camera controls, slaved to your head movement. You would sit in a chair, as you normally would, and play the game, as you normally would, and the only difference was that when you turned your head, you saw what was in that direction in game, and not the wall, the bookshelf, or the next sweaty nerd waiting their turn. Sure, there was talk about how this would finally make full VR feasible, eventually, but really this is what it was.

And this is what sparked all the initial enthusiasm and support for the project, and what started all the other VR projects (that would eventually surpass the Oculus but that's another story). Well, this and the fact that when you turned the image didn't take five seconds to react, compared to previous attempts.

See, what I believe is that a lot of people, me included, would like to try this aspect of VR, but really really don't need all the other trappings. People who want to dip a toe (or shove the head) without jumping all the way in.
I for one don't feel like getting up and prancing around, and even if I did I wouldn't have the space.
And even then, the motion control technology, both hardware and software, just isn't there yet.
And on the chair-sitty, toe-dippy end, there is a ton of games where the headset can enhance immersion, but the rest of the setup is completely pointless: driving games, flying games, a whole bunch of simulators, but also to some extent action adventure games (having a better depth perception would really help making that stupid jump to that stupid ledge), shooters, anything in a 3D world looks a tiny bit better and more immersive when it's more responsive.

And there are some games that allow this, but not that many, and there are some headsets available on their own, but really really not that many.

And unfortunately the manufacturers, the developers, and the general public take the all or nothing approach: either go the whole hog, buy the whole thing, and play the handful VR games in your dedicated gaming hangar, or not at all. No middle ground.

So my question to you is: do you think a VR headset is (or should be) a standalone device, or do you thing it's an integral and indivisible part of the whole VR getup?

Discuss.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

I personally prefer to play games sitting down and I don't feel safe walking around in my small apartment completely blind due to the VR headset. I would probably mostly stick to VR experiences you can play sitting down, or standing in one spot.

The reason VR headsets are almost always bundled with motion controllers is so that devs can safely develop games for said controllers, knowing that there is a large enough user base that owns them. If you had to buy a VR headset, and you had to buy a controller on top of that, and there were different controllers by different companies that weren't cross compatible in software, it would fragment the user base too much, and you wouldn't have these experiences that utilize everything VR has to offer, and that would be a huge shame. And I think those experiences are an important part of VR.

I definitely think there is a place for VR support in more traditional games though and I would like to see more traditional games support it out of the box and not need to rely on 3rd party software that forces VR support in games that aren't designed for it, with varying degrees of success.
I think with time, once VR headsets and the hardware to drive them becomes cheap enough that it's viable as a mainstream consumer technology, the increased sales of VR headsets will push developers to start building in support for VR headsets to traditional games more and more. If it ever truly goes mainstream, you might even see VR support included in almost every new game when it makes any sense for the type of game.
Right now, it doesn't seem like the big developers think it's worth their time adding in VR support because it's still such a small market and that's why it's still mostly made-for-VR experiences and little indie games you see released for it.

Bottom line is, I'm fine with them bundling the controllers. It makes sense as they utlize the same technology that's already there for head tracking to begin with, and you absolutely need head tracking for good VR. The controllers don't add that much extra cost to the already expensive VR headsets. Back in the dark days you had to buy a Razer Hydra separately, and very few games supported it, so you got your traditional controller games with head tracking, but at the cost of only getting a few of these made-for-VR experiences with immersive motion controls, because there was no universal made-for-VR control system. I don't want to go back to those days.

You may be in luck though. The Oculus Quest now has hand tracking (no controllers needed)
It's still early stages and the technology is clearly not ready to replace motion controllers yet, but not long ago people were saying the same about inside out tracking vs outside in. Tracking technology is improving at a rapid pace and I don't doubt that in a couple of years time, we might not even need controllers for VR.