Having experienced both 6DOF and 3DOF on my Quest 3, I can confidently say that 6DOF is leagues ahead even if you are sitting in a chair. Unless you are watching a 180° stereoscopic video, you'll want to look around to get the full experience, and even the small translation movements that result when you turn around can make the experience nauseating.

Besides, VR is already cheap. A new Quest 3S is just $300 and can do pretty much all of what the $3500 Vision Pro can do (just worse); if you just want VR games you can get used 6DOF-capable PCVR or PSVR headsets on eBay for closer to $100.

Also have to hard disagree. I remember going from the Oculus DevKit2 to the Vive, seeing the change in people we'd invite over for "I'm done trying to convince you with words just Come over and try out VR" evenings.

6DOF, even when sitting, is a significant difference. Your brain immediately feels far more at home with good 6DOF.

Fun fact : one week I spent about 5-6 hours every evening playing Elite Dangerous in VR. Mining asteroids while listening to lofi cyberpunk and pretending that mining was my whole life, it was great. Until my partner would bop me on the back of the head ^_^

I very much disagree, your view in vr tracking your head as it does small movements in xyz significantly increases immersion, and more importantly, significantly decreases motion sickness and fatigue.

6DOf not only necessary for room scale. Lack of parallax of 3DOF a common cause of discomfort for many. I’ve been in the space for a decade and given hundreds of demos to people.

I have absolutely zero interest in 6dof gaming. On the other hand, I dreamt of 3dof gaming since the 90s.

Once the technology started emerging, I was so exited about the potential. A few games gained support for shutter glasses etc, but 6dof was hyped up so much that everyone jumped on that train instead.

3DoF without tracked controllers is not VR IMO, it's just a head mounted display. It's not sufficient for any VR use case other than like watching a movie. You won't be able to play any modern VR games. Maybe you'd be able to play old Google Cardboard or Oculus Gear games since those were made with no controllers in mind.

They also said their mission is for creators. Seems to me 3D is fine for that

Close one eye and those sound like TV use cases.

The problem with accelerometers and gyros is they drift badly if you try to derive absolute positioning from them alone. They need to be fused with some other form of tracking to anchor them in absolute space, which in the case of the Quest and Vision Pro is done with multiple outward-facing cameras fed into a SLAM algorithm.

Maybe Cardboard could have attempted to use the phones camera for SLAM, but a single lens would only have got them so far. Dedicated VR headsets have at least four cameras pointing in different directions, which are sometimes augmented by IR projectors and/or LiDAR.

Dead reckoning using MEMS IMUs accumulates error way too fast.

See "Pure IMU-based Positional Tracking is a No-go"[1], a position from an IMU starts to drift in a fraction of a second and than shoots off into infinity. Without an absolute reference there is nothing you can do to stop it and the errors will accumulate. It's not just a little bad, it's completely unusable.

A further complication is that the IMUs you find in phones, especially back when all this was new, weren't very good. So even a plain 3DoF experience would suffer from slow response and yaw-drift from lack of magnetometer, which is why GearVR had an extra IMU in the headset and why Daydream required new certified phones with better IMUs.

3DoF can still be good enough for VR180/360 movies, which don't allow movement to begin with. But as far as gaming is concerned, you really do need 6DoF, as even a bit of leaning forward in a chair will make it instantly obvious that the headset motion and the headset visuals are out of sync.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q_8d0E3tDk

especially given the camera, it seems like you could do some kind of motion tracking. I guess a Quest has 4 cameras for motion tracking so 1 isn't enough. Though maybe putting a 180degree wide angle lens over it would let it do the work for 4?

You don't need (or want) proper VR for flying an FPV drone; it's just a head-mounted display.

Even if you don't, as any DIY project, it is still going to cost you more money than the part list would suggest. Mostly because of tooling.

For 3D printing stuff, you obviously need a 3D printer, these aren't free, the maintenance isn't free, the space where you are going to put it isn't free. There are also the basic tools: screwdrivers, wrenches, pliers, drill, soldering iron, etc... Also missing are consumables like glue, solder, grease, cleaning agents, etc... and also electricity and gas for shopping. You are also generally expected to have a proper computer.

Sometimes jellybean parts like screws, wires, resistors, etc... are priced, but it is often not the case, as it is difficult to price 2 screws when you can't buy less than 100.

Not the case here but the worst is when a part list include significant parts you are supposed to be salvaged from something you already have. No, I don't have the right broken appliance in my garage and no one has conveniently dropped one in the closest dumpster. So please price it as if I had to buy it.

Of course, someone who is into building stuff most likely have a lot of that already, or maybe is part of a makerspace, but it is unfair to compare what represents a significant investment in time and money to just buying a complete product on Amazon with free shipping and a warranty.

Warranty is another thing to consider, because when something goes wrong with an off the shelf product, if you bought it through a reputable seller (Amazon qualifies), you can normally return it free of charge. If you screw up on your DIY build, which is very common (failed print, bad cut, magic smoke, lose small parts, ...), you get to fix it on your own, savvy people buy spares for that reason, again, not priced in.

All of our time has a value.

Yes

Everyone who is capable of building this thing has the option to take on paid extra work doing /something/, even if it's tutoring rich college brats in calculus at $50/hr.

Calling a person "computer/internet/phone native" is perhaps the worst thing ever said. I think "addicted computers/the internet/phones" would be a more apt phrasing.

Sure thing grandpa!

She grew up with VR, and is comfortable moving around in VR gear. Most people in later life cannot do that.

Bigscreen is very customized. They have different models for different interpupil distance. The face insert is custom made. Custom corrective lenses can be made and installed. Not even close to one-size-fits-all. This is all good but hard to market.

"We'll discuss content generation in part three."

https://xkcd.com/741/

Sounds dystopic to me. I don’t always look at the display when typing. Having no way to look away is visual prison to me.

Has been possible for years.

Can you use any device these days without creating an online account?

Yes, you use a meta account that has no ties to Facebook. Mine is under an alias with absolutely no connection to any social feeds or network.

Unless you count Meta Horizon Worlds which is kind of a joke.

The name is Relativty, which is one 'i' off from the normal spelling of relativity.

No, it will just get auto-corrected. Removing a letter from a word as a brand name is dumb; it is no different than parents naming their kid a normal name with stupid spelling and thinking they are original/creative.