One really really really big thing I'd like to use the VR headset for is 3D home design & remodeling. Imagine having a 3D blueprint of your home...that you can walk around in. See how a new bathroom sink would look, what height it'd need to be, etc. Throw up different paint, wallpapers, and facades instantly.
Problem with all these "
I just bought an expensive headset to play with and am now looking for something to do with it" ideas is they bring you back down to Earth as to what's actually involved. Eg, if you want an accurate model of your house, you have to measure
everything. Not just the room, but radiators, individual window panes, light switches, etc, each of which has dimensions, "left edge starts x distance from reference wall", "bottom starts y height above floor", color, material, reflection, transparency, shape, etc. Most consumer Home Design stuff only has a small subset of available "off the shelf" furniture and setting up custom stuff is time-consuming even if you're proficient with CAD. Been there, done that last year when we extended the back of the house. You approach the task with enthusiasm then about 1/3rd of the way start thinking "
I've got better things to do with my time". Likewise, testing paint "digitally" is pointless as real paint on a real wall doesn't emit light itself plus lighting conditions vary from room to room anyway. Eg, in a darker room the trick is - you pick up one of those color charts, choose the color you want, then select the one that's 2 shades lighter. That's far more useful "paint buying advice" than ending up with your wife saying
"Hmm, that 'Lemon Spirit' looks far more greyish in real life than what your $600 headset showed me..."
Not trying to diss anyone's ideas but a lot of this "
once they get VR hardware right everything will be awesome" stuff falsely assumes all other software will magically become perfect. Back in reality, Home Design software is still unintuitive, and we still have games developers whose "bright ideas" include the dumbest wildly exaggerated head bob effect that already looks absurd enough even on a 2D display and will be as immersion breaking as you can get with a "penguin in a neck brace waddle" layered on top of normal movement whilst your head remains fairly stationary. Throw in random vigorous camera shake that often appears to have no relation to the movement of your head, "Glaucoma simulator" (Vignetting), "Migraine simulator" (Film Grain), "Myopia simulator" (Depth of Field), "sh*tty 1991 budget digital camera simulator" (Chromatic Aberration), all of which are based on some weird herd-mentality obsession with replicating a Hollywood movie camera that doesn't even exist in rendered games, and makes even less sense on a stereoscopic device whose entire purpose for existing is to replicate two eyes and not a movie camera...
^ It's stuff like that that needs a radical change in attitude by games devs if VR is to have decent games that actually "feel right" and not just the same few cr*ppy "tech demos". Whilst I generally believe in "give it time", quite honestly I have 1990's / early 2000's games that have more accurate very subtle head-bob (or even a slider) vs some 15 year newer comically bad "
giraffe with a gammy leg wearing a rigid surgical collar" cringe-worthy attempts. They still can't figure out the basics like there's 3 layers of compensation : neck muscles, eye muscles and visual cortex filtering that cause you to "notice" head bob much less than how games try and portay even in a flat out sprint, so trying to measure it by sticking a camera on a helmet and watching the "bounce" is pointless. Just like you don't "see" your own nose blocking out the lower corner of vision in each eye until someone points it out and you start actively looking for it. Or how spectacle wearers don't see the rims of their glasses after a while.
Assuming it doesn't flop / fizzle as badly as 3D TV, perfecting the VR hardware is only 1/3rd of the battle. The bigger issues are still the tech is more personally ergonomically variable (for a variety of reasons too long to post here) and the fact VR is still no magic panacea for games devs to finally "get" what they're trying to replicate after spending a decade shoving in some of the dumbest "unrealistic realism" FX imaginable.
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