Topic: Is virtual reality bad for Nintendo?

nintendo has seperated itself, in part by giving gamers new and innovative ways to control games. the n64 gave us the analog stick, the gamecube gave us two analog sticks, the wii gave us motion control, he wii u gave us a tablet controller. each time people criticized the controller,but each time nintendo proved to be right, and most times the industry eventually copied them. but this time everyone is diving into virtual reality,nintendo will not have that to seperate themselves. this could be a big problem for nintendo.

Nintendo not going with virtual reality? Oh boy....

The problem with virtual reality is its scope. It caters to anything with 1st-person in mind, but will likely cause problem with others like 3rd-person games. Even numerous 1st-person games have sequences that force the camera to move on its own.

Virtual Reality is a different beast than current games. I personally am not looking forward to Virtual Reality... maybe part of that comes from just watching Sword Art Online lol

Nope it is not bad for them

I feel Nintendo could pull it off just fine, but I agree with their apparent lack of jumping on the band wagon.

they know that AR is better than VR

I was bit surprised Nintendo didn't beat everyone to the punch when it came to VR. But to be completely honest with you, I don't think it matters. I personally don't have any interest in VR and I'm sure there are others like me out there too. VR only caters to a range of first person games and it's not like Nintendo has a wide arsenal of that in the first place.
I actually tip my hat to them now for not saying "me too" and announcing a VR set.

Virtual Boy at least demonstrated that Nintendo understood the appeal of such technology long before anyone else dared to do anything about it. So don't think the much later and improved oculus rift came as any surprise to them. VR in this decade won't affect Nintendo any bit. They themselves are after thier own new to market product with their QOLBox, which if successful will be a bigger money maker by virtue of the larger cash-sucking health products industry.

What worries me about VR in terms of Nintendo's future is that it's difficult to imagine where to go from there. One of the biggest drivers of innovation is the push towards realism, and when VR becomes mainstream, you can emulate pretty much anything in reality short of something that requires you to transfer your consciousness into a machine like in SAO. That's not to say that hardware innovation will not be possible anymore (there's probably always going to be some way to do that), but it will probably be much tougher to innovate the industry outside of new kinds of games and services.

I feel Virtual Reality headsets are just a fad. I feel like it's taking it too far when I have to wear a helmet for "enhanced game experience".

It's not bad for them. The fact that 3D TVs haven't caught on, is a pretty big sign that VR won't take off as fast or effective as people think it will. You don't have VR, without 3D, and 3D hasn't caught on.

EDIT: Also, 3DS is the currently the biggest platform for 3D content. That's big news for VR enthusiasts, given they can make the proper connections on what VR consists of(3D, obviously).

At this moment, I don't think VR is gonna be the next big thing in gaming. Call me a pessimist if you must

The problem with VR is that you need to convince people that they should spend a couple of hundred bucks on a display specifically for VR. A display that only one person can use at a time and is physically strapped to your head. A display that limits the detail it can display by requiring a consistently high framerate.

VR probably will become a mass market product. I don't think VR will become the only product. I also don't think it will matter much at all during this console generation. To conclude that Nintendo failed by not jumping on this now? Jumping the gun a bit

I think if it becomes a big enough of a deal Nintendo could easily jump in. VR is definitely best in first person but its not the only way to use it. People have used it for things like you looking over a the game kinda like a god, That could be good use of VR for things like Fire Emblem. 3rd person view still works for it, its just your viewpoint would be from behind and above a bit. A cool third person scenario could be the player controls the main character but they see everything through a cameraman kind of thing. I don't think the headsets are 3d screens, they just split whats on screen into left and right and line it up so each eye can only see one side. If the gamepad had a 1080P screen at least and bumped up motion tracking, the gamepad with a add on could be used as a VR helmet. All in all I feel VR will be big but I don't think it will replace all other gaming mediums.

That's how it works but that wouldn't work

I've been saying for a while now, that the Gamepad and 3DS are a form of VR. You don't necessarily need something strapped to your face for VR.

PS Camera and Kinect are a form of VR, as well. There was that stupid treadmill they were using to walk in game:
http://www.dvice.com/2013-9-25/virtualizer-vr-treadmill-gives...
There's a freaking camera right there to track movement.

@skywake What's it missing? I figure it doesn't have all the sensors. all together I don't know much about the internals of the helmet obviously haha

@astroshamu
The GamePad can do VR, as is. The only difference is that you're holding it with your hands, instead of having it strapped to your face.

Huh so what's stopping you from creating a mount and splitting up the screen to make it work like a helmet? It seems to work fine every way except for it not being HD. It's probably not as fine tuned of course but there's still options for add ons to mount on. I get what your saying though about the 3DS and gamepad and everything p because it does allow you to look around in the game and make your world virtual and whatnot. Just when you think VR you tend to think about a headset kind of thing

I'll explain myself, I'm not talking about the ability to mount it precisely although that in itself would be a challenge. I'm talking about the display itself.

For a start the main difficulty with VR is keeping the persistence very low. Persistence being the motion blur or the way that an image will stay on a screen after the image is no longer needed. To do this the VR guys use OLED screens and turn the screen off entirely between frames. The GamePad uses a fairly cheap LCD screen and the image is compressed before being sent to the display. Something which is fine for general gaming BUT it adds to the persistence. With a high persistence you'll get VR nausea.

The other problem is that when you put the display that close to your eye, have it fill your vision AND put a lens on it resolution matters. There's a reason why they use a 1080p screen and even with a 1080p screen the screen grid is still visible. By comparison the Wii U GamePad has a 480p screen and is again a wireless display. Even if you managed to hack a higher resolution screen to it you'd then also have to deal with more compression to fit into the bandwidth window. Something which would bump up the persistence.

See what I'm getting at? The tech that makes a good GamePad and the tech that makes a good VR headset are worlds apart.