> Not even once, at a shop or something?
No. There aren't any shops that sell that anywhere near where I live, to my
knowledge. Heck, I haven't even heard anyone in my local area talking about
it. I'm sure they do occasionally, but it clearly isn't that important to
them. The current gaming trend in my experience isn't VR, it's MOBAs.
> But you're still qualified to be an export on every aspect of it and it's
future?
No, but you don't need to be an expert to comment on the usefulness or
longevity of a novel technology.
> Snowden thinks developing libre VR is important for the free software
movement, and has presumably actually checked it out.
Why would you presume that? Ed Snowden has never presented himself as a
gamer, and VR is not widespread.
> You think it isn't, on the basis of... what? Having read some stuff and
dismissed it out of hand.
No, on the basis that the technology can't do anything useful better than
other input methods which are simpler and cheaper, at least nothing I can
think of.
If it involved directly sending signals to the brain so that you can actually
feel like it is real, that would be different, and dangerous. But right now,
VR is just attaching a headset with a screen in front of your eyes. A novel
concept for certain types of games, sure. Probably even very cool to
experience. But there is no basis for this to be a computing revolution
precedent.
You keep likening it to computers themselves, but computers have always been
used for practical work, and video games came long after. Even Spacewar,
sometimes argued to be the first video game, was only made to test the
hardware it ran on; the hardware was actually designed to do other things
which were more important.
The exact same thing happened with keyboards, mouses, and most recently,
smartphone touchscreens. Nobody wants to play games that require a
touchscreen rather than physical controls. But games started using touch
controls because there was a practical reason (substantially cutting costs
and reducing size) for phones to start only having touchscreens, and so
touchscreen games were born. A lot of people can't stand playing games on a
keyboard, but it's useful for real work, and so because it's readily
available, it's one of the most common ways people play games today, to the
point where we even have keyboards specifically made for gaming.
In any case, I am not adversarial to efforts toward making libre VR games.
Any new libre software is a contribution, even if it's for hardware that most
people don't have and never will have. I just don't think it's an essential
effort. Libre games in general are more important than specifically VR games.
> I'm forced to upgrade because of economies of scale.
And why would you want to buy a lower-capacity flash drive if a
higher-capacity flash drive has more storage space and is equal in every
other way? This is not like the CRT vs the LCD at all. One is a fundamental
change, the other is an incremental improvement.
