VR hardware and software are in their infancy and you simply can’t have very crisp graphics at this stage
As an occasional video game developer, I’m going to strongly disagree with you there. To give a counter-example:
Walkabout Mini Golf is a VR game that runs on Oculus Quest, Rift, and Steam VR, made by this fairly small studio (and most of the people listed there didn’t even work on the game) [EDIT: I reached out to the studio on Twitter and it turns out the game was mainly developed by a single guy, Lucas Martell]. It looks like this:
I’ve played this game with a friend of mine (who shows up as a stylized floating head that looks pretty great), and it was crisp, clear, high frame-rate VR perfection. Even in multiplayer, everything works smoothly, and it serves as a really nice virtual social space.
Having limited graphics capabilities does not place a significant limiting bound on aesthetics. As another example, Anodyne 2: Return to Dust is a jaw-droppingly beautiful game (developed by only two people!) deliberately made with PS1-era graphics:
Simplicity does not necessitate ugliness.
Rather, he is surrounded by employees and journalists whose primary complaint is that Horizon Worlds is not sterile enough.
This may very well be true (despite my personal distaste for that line of thought), but even if it is, being inoffensive and “bland” doesn’t mean you have to look bad! Nintendo’s oeuvre, for instance, shows that being friendly for all ages doesn’t require sacrificing aesthetic beauty. Meanwhile, in screenshots online and in the “selfie” Zuckerberg posted, model sizes are wildly inconsistent (look at the trees—or is that supposed to be grass?—on the ground), the clothing of avatars are almost surrealistically bad (why is Mark’s top button so far off to the left?), the shading is worse than what I could make in half a day with Unity when I was 12, and overall everything manages to look more slapped together than this notorious disaster of an asset flip.
I can’t help but feel that on some level this must be intentional, or at least the result of some absolutely horrific mismanagement.
As an occasional video game developer, I’m going to strongly disagree with you there. To give a counter-example:
Walkabout Mini Golf is a VR game that runs on Oculus Quest, Rift, and Steam VR,
made by this fairly small studio(and most of the people listed there didn’t even work on the game)[EDIT: I reached out to the studio on Twitter and it turns out the game was mainly developed by a single guy, Lucas Martell]. It looks like this:I’ve played this game with a friend of mine (who shows up as a stylized floating head that looks pretty great), and it was crisp, clear, high frame-rate VR perfection. Even in multiplayer, everything works smoothly, and it serves as a really nice virtual social space.
Having limited graphics capabilities does not place a significant limiting bound on aesthetics. As another example, Anodyne 2: Return to Dust is a jaw-droppingly beautiful game (developed by only two people!) deliberately made with PS1-era graphics:
Simplicity does not necessitate ugliness.
This may very well be true (despite my personal distaste for that line of thought), but even if it is, being inoffensive and “bland” doesn’t mean you have to look bad! Nintendo’s oeuvre, for instance, shows that being friendly for all ages doesn’t require sacrificing aesthetic beauty. Meanwhile, in screenshots online and in the “selfie” Zuckerberg posted, model sizes are wildly inconsistent (look at the trees—or is that supposed to be grass?—on the ground), the clothing of avatars are almost surrealistically bad (why is Mark’s top button so far off to the left?), the shading is worse than what I could make in half a day with Unity when I was 12, and overall everything manages to look more slapped together than this notorious disaster of an asset flip.
I can’t help but feel that on some level this must be intentional, or at least the result of some absolutely horrific mismanagement.