Cyberspace: The Many Tribulations of Virtual Reality

During the last couple of console generations, it felt like we were on the cusp of emerging technologies transforming video games overnight. Motion controls, cloud computing, virtual reality, they were all meant to be a layer of chrome paint that would leave the medium unrecognisable and incomparable to what came before. In 2025, that techno-optimism feels like a faded dream. Many of us have become numb to the outlandish promises of Silicon Valley, but after the Oculus Rift first saw the light of day in 2016, the fervour over VR verged on the fanatical. It really was a mainstream belief that five minutes into the future, a helmet with two TVs in it would be your doorway to most, perhaps all, gaming environments. My experience was that any scepticism towards virtual reality's success was met with a "Have you seen it?". I think the question was meant to imply that the headsets were so transportive that they were destined to sell like hot cakes. However, anyone who's watched an episode of Dragon's Den knows that a charming product is no guarantee of a viable business. Virtual reality and the software orbiting it are proof of that.

There was an economic theory of how VR would conquer the world. When Oculus stepped onto the runway, VR games were humble in scope, and hardware was expensive, dissuading would-be adopters. But all was not lost. The hypothesis was that the early birds would show manufacturers that there was demand for the headsets. That demand would cause the helmets to be manufactured on a larger scale, driving down their price, encouraging more people to adopt them, causing them to be manufactured on a larger scale. 50 GOTO 10. Simultaneously, the growing install base for simulators would give developers a reason to invest more resources in their VR experiences. Those games would be fuller with more collagen in their cheeks, creating another incentive for customers to purchase VR, driving down its price, growing the install base, and you get the idea. With that, I'm pleased to announce that nine years after the Rift, VR games are still humble in scope, and the hardware is still expensive.

There is the consolation that the tech got bigger than we often acknowledge. Over 1 million PSVRs sold in its first eight months on shelves, and Meta shifted over 19 million Quest 2s during that machine's lifetime. That's nothing to sniff at, but it doesn't leave us living in the Ready Player One future. Well, maybe we live in the Ready Player One future, but without the VR rigs. Meta's VR division actually makes losses in the billions every quarter and has so far leaked more than $70bn in Zuck bucks, and that's the market leader we're talking about.^[2]^[3] Meanwhile, Sony's London-based VR studio pivoted away from VR before closing entirely.^[4] At one point in 2024, so many unsold PSVR 2s were piling up, Sony stopped producing them, and according to Android Central, they're slashing VR spending internally.

This is a blog to figure out how we arrived here, the likely causes for VR languishing, and some factors for it that are less likely but worth considering. Let's jack in.

Price and Performance

As it stands, the minimum buy-in for VR is probably $312, the price of the Meta Quest 3S and one month of PC Game Pass, but that kit comes with its limitations. A Quest 3 or 3S could play Hitman or No Man's Sky, but doesn't have enough get-up-and-go to run Half-Life: Alyx and is restricted to about one-fifth of the graphical lifting power of a base PS5.^[5] For less friction and more formidable processing, there is the PSVR 2. If you already own the PS5, you're paying $400 for the headset, almost the price of a second console. If you don't have Sony's latest power pod sitting under your TV, it and the headset will burn a $950 hole in your pocket, and these numbers assume you're buying the digital version of the PS5.^[6] Other popular SKUs have included the Vive XR Elite at $900 and the Valve Index package at $750. That was back when Valve was still stocking the Index kit. Those last two prices are also given without the cost of a beefy PC to back up your output device, and the cost-to-hardware-power ratio in VR is not generous.

GPU cycles often count for less in VR gaming than when playing on a TV or monitor. Our right eye and left eye see slightly different images of the world because of their offset positioning and angling. The disparity in their positions and angles allows us to detect depth.^[7] Therefore, in a headset, you either have one display and the visual input feels unnatural because it can't account for two different angles, or you have two screens, and therefore, two in-world cameras.^[7]^[8] Cameras in games aren't like cameras on a set. It's not that there is a physical environment inside the computer that you can place observation devices in; the environment doesn't exist independently of renderings of it. The rendering happens by taking a bunch of abstract values, like object coordinates, texture data, and shading parameters, and feeding them into a graphics engine to produce a 2D image.^[9] If you want to produce two of those 2D images (one for each eye), you need to double up on a lot of that value-crunching, and that creates more pressure on the graphics processor.^[8]

You also can't trade off many frames for better world geometry or shader action because when the framerate dips below about 120 FPS, some people experience motion sickness.^[10] This graphical hobbling throws a fire blanket over the VR market; most of the people willing to part with hundreds of dollars for video game peripherals do so expecting experiences as close to photorealism as possible. The audience meant to get the VR ball rolling is the hardcore hardware enthusiasts, but you're trying to sell the overclockers a graphically inferior experience to the one they'd get with a standard monitor. It's also arguable that high-end graphics are necessary for abundant success in video gaming. Unless you're Nintendo or you're targeting a younger market that has shown comfort with the rough-hewn visuals of a Minecraft, Roblox, or Fortnite, your audience is probably going to expect a light show. That younger crowd is also unlikely to drive purchases of exorbitantly expensive computer glasses. $900 would be a lot of pocket money.

Spending on VR was meant to beget spending on VR, but the theory also works in reverse. We can say that if headset prices are too high, then relatively few people will buy them, meaning only a modest number of units will be manufactured in the future, and big games won't get made for these platforms. That seems to be an extant block for the tech, and the original story about supply, demand, and prices working as a positive feedback loop is probably too simple anyway. It's easy to look at a chart of how many transistors can fit on a chip every couple of years and assume that you get double the computing bang for your buck after about half a decade, but look at what's happening with video game electronics and pricing in general.

Using the logic that proposed the cratering of VR prices, we could also tell the story that, as ownership of graphics cards, consoles, and video games increased, their prices should have fallen, but the opposite has happened. The exchange value of GPUs has fluctuated a lot over the last few years, but they're now selling for higher than their RRP. Meanwhile, console manufacturers are hiking the costs of both hardware and software. While VR viewfinders aren't subject to the exact same economic currents as these products, inflation in the realms of GPUs, consoles, and games is proof that more sales don't always mean cheaper goods. Moreover, if we're expecting VR's entry fee to fall precipitously, we're expecting it to act contrary to other commodities in the industry.

The Baffling Ordeal of Setup

Let's say you've swallowed your vinegar and actually bought the headset. Getting a helmet to play nice with your PC can be like trying to get your pet lion and zebra to make friends. In a sense, this is also an effect of a low install base. PCs love to cause trouble at the best of times, but we do have diverse electronics that see eye to eye a lot better than VR goggles and the average desktop. If companies put their minds to it, they could work out the kinks that plague the process of interfacing a headset with a PC. However, there's not as much reason for companies to debug headsets when they're selling them to a limited and tech-savvy audience.

Many VR games also require you to reorganise your space, or may ask for more room than you have in your home. I get the sense that a casual audience is sold on VR as being the chance to physically walk around in a virtual world. That demo with the plank on the ledge of the building goes down a storm. However, even playing a VR game sitting down can demand clearing a bubble around you, and standing play can require turning your bedroom or living room upside down for this one gadget. For some people, that's not an option, for others, it's rude of the device to demand that. While an issue like underwhelming graphical performance or poor compatibility could eventually be solved by technical upgrades, this space issue can't be.

The Problem with Peripherals

It's always been the case that optional peripherals for games and consoles don't get nearly as much support as core hardware and only drop so far in price. Flight sticks and fight sticks remain relatively money-hungry, while that whole pack of Rock Band instruments never dipped below about $170. The plastic instrument craze also only lasted about five years before burning out. On the Wii, software very rarely gave the time of day to supplemental controllers like the Balance Board and Wii Speak. It was the same for dance pads on previous consoles and for toys like the Zapper and R.O.B. on the NES.

Every console has a select market, but it's a much smaller subset of those customers that are going to buy a third-party accessory and software developers know that. This fate was directly addressed by Nintendo when they released the Wii. By making the motion controller the only controller that came boxed with the console, Nintendo knew it would always be supported. A Microsoft representative cited the same reasoning for their company's scrapped plan to bundle the Kinect with the Xbox One. As the VR headset is an optional peripheral at a much higher price tag than a Balance Board or Kinect, it has its work cut out for it.

The Sickness Brick

At a certain point, you have to acknowledge that the VR industry is trying to strap big plastic weights to peoples' faces. The whole time you're playing, you're holding up that box of parts with your head, and at length, that's a workout for your neck tendons. That weight may be a burden that is lifted from VR in due course. Once upon a time, televisions were massive cathode-ray tubes, heavy enough that you could throw one right through a window if you were making a sick music video. Later, the flat-screen was invented, and TVs became so cracker-thin they had me spreading butter on them. I don't see why the same thing can't happen for VR headsets, but for the time being, they're porky lads. That's a particularly pernicious problem for the standalone VR headset, which has to contain all the hardware in the eye house without channelling visions from another computer.

Not content to stop at muscle fatigue, VR can also be harsh on the eyes during longer play sessions. I'm not sure you'll be able to overcome this issue until we can swap in cybernetic peepers, Deus Ex-style. However, this is not too likely to be a deal breaker; plenty of deck-punchers overcome irritated eyes. They may draw the line at nausea, however. Placing a reticle in the centre of the screen has kept some people from going green around the gills, but there was an early idea that this pip would eliminate all feelings of sickness, which didn't pan out. A 2015 study by Purdue University found that placing a virtual nose in the player's line of sight held off nausea for only 94.2 additional seconds, even in a slow exploration-based game.

The cause of VR nausea is the same as that of other motion sickness. Our body has more than one means to check its orientation in space. There is what we see in front of us, there's the positioning of our body, but there is also our vestibular system. A labyrinth of chambers and canals, the vestibular system sits in your inner ear and contains fluids. These fluids stimulate hair-like cells and lumps of calcium carbonate, giving your body a way to detect which way up you are. If what you see and what your vestibular system detects come out of sync with each other, you will start to feel sick. On a ship in a churning current, your inner ear liquids may slosh up and down even while you are staring at an apparently stationary cabin, causing a mismatch between visual and vestibular feedback, resulting in sickness. However, that mismatch could also come about when locked in VR's embrace. Your eyes see a constantly shifting horizon even as your inner ear detects your head staying still.^[11]

The shared cause between VR sickness and sea sickness may have inspired the concept of "VR Legs". The body will sometimes tune out motion sickness if a person has been repeatedly subject to the stimulus that causes it.^[12] However, anecdotally, I've heard people say they didn't ever overcome simulation sickness and expecting the general public to work through the nausea is totally out of step with what they're willing to tolerate from their entertainment.

Thinking Like the Public

After the Rift came out, a lot of the conversations I had with people who were ride or die for VR were a lot like the conversations I had with people who were used to building their own PCs. Like Ian Banks' Culture, they had become so infused with their technology that they were often unable to imagine the perspective of someone looking in from the outside. I think that enthusiasm for VR is a wonderful thing, but you can't expect most potential audience members to think about a media technology the way an 18th-century sailor would think about taking to life at sea. If the next iPhone asked you to rearrange your living room, caused constant neck strain, and afflicted you with nausea for your first month of use, the press would be terrible, and no one would buy it. Accordingly, any argument for VR that starts with "Well, $700 is not that much money" or "You just have to not throw up for the first few weeks" is not facing the realities of how a general audience approaches games.

You Decide If They're Problems

I'm adamant that high prices and technical know-how are limiting factors when it comes to the adoption of VR. However, I also told you that there were a few other hiccups that could be making life harder for the tech, but that I was less certain about. Here's a quick look at some other potential flies in the ointment:

It might be that we lack a mature design language for VR games. Changing the perspective and controls of a game has always disrupted other aspects of play. The rise of virtual reality constitutes a seismic shift in our vantage points on in-game worlds, and in many cases, how we control avatars. Sometimes, VR games also make significant mechanical changes to try and minimise motion sickness, such as having you teleport from point to point instead of continuously move across a plane. It might take some time to research best practices in these areas. Until developers know more, the mechanics of VR games may lag behind their non-VR forebears, reducing the medium's popularity. But then, Half-Life: Alyx seems to have a pretty good handle on this stuff, so I don't know.
You can't see your controller/s while you're suited up. People who don't dedicate much time to games may need to look at their gamepad to plan their actions, much like those who can't touch-type must glance at their keyboard. The simple controllers of cyberspace may provide a workaround to this issue, but fewer input elements can mean sacrificing gameplay depth.
You can't dip in and out of "the zone" with VR. It's common for audiences to play games or watch films while pausing to look at their phone or keep an eye on their kids. I think that the blinders of VR, which force you to focus on one activity, are an advantage of the tech, but it may be that people are less interested in VR if they can't multitask while immersed.

Conclusion

I don't think that we can chalk a proof for near-term or even medium-term mass adoption of VR. There are a lot of barriers to it that might not be insurmountable, but certainly can't be snap-dismissed. It was easier to overlook the shortcomings when modern VR history had yet to be written, but there's no denying now that the tech is in a rut. That being said, I think people tend to place too much emphasis on the inventions of wholly new technologies and too little on their advancement.

The creation of surgery or the creation of writing were obviously monumentally important, but the surgeries and writing we have now are very different to those that existed when these concepts were first realised. Most technological advancement happens in the iteration, not the origination. It's going to be the same for VR. I also think we tend to underestimate how slowly that iteration happens. Flipping through a history book, decades go by in a flash, but living through history, waiting to see if technologies can achieve their full promise, time passes much more slowly. That may be why, for this current generation, the games industry has talked less about wholly new creations like motion controls and cloud gaming. It has refocused on the systems we already have, getting back to the fundamentals while the big picture stuff like VR works itself out. Thanks for reading.

Notes

All prices given in article are recommended retail prices unless otherwise stated.
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