Must disagree.
Been in a few VR developments in the past, VR is…
- Extremely hard to master
- Expensive to develop
- Very limited, thus will never be mainstream.
Starbreeze's VR endeavor was based on exactly the same three premises (easy, cheap, mass market), and they failed among many other game devs, once they realized the exact opposite.
This is probably a semantic issue.
VR is essentially just another screen output with motion control.
Unfortunately no. What you said is the implementation
in theory.
In practice, VR (and stereoscopic gaming in general) requires a totally different design, mindset, asset specification and production, etc, etc.
Three simple examples:
FPS is great for VR, yes?
NO. A bog-standard FPS game in VR will make you literally sick. You must totally re-design the movement in your game, because, paradoxically, fluid movement in VR will make you seasick in about 10 seconds. Now if you cannot move fluidly in an FPS game, you will develop something veeery different.
Realtime stereo 3D graphics is just two cameras, yes?
NO. Many of those clever tricks of today's realtime 3d games are useless in VR, because the clever tricks are based on this cheat: how to fool your eye in 2D to RESEMBLE a 3D look? Normal mapping, anyone?
Problem is, these tricks won't apply in 3D, because your brain immediately detect the cheat (something is supposed to be 3D but in fact is 2D), and immediately trigger a "something is not right"-discomfort feeling.
To counter this, you must develop totally different tricks, techniques, etc.
VR is photo-realistic, yes?
NO. VR is a curious beast. The headset's resolution is extremely low (perceptively, about 400x400 pixels - yes, you've read right. THAT LOW.)
To counter this, there is actually no fail-safe method right now: paradoxically, to create truly photo-realistic graphics in such low resolution, today's consumer video hardware is simply not enough. Hence, many VR developers are doing low-poly and/or stylized graphics instead.
Hope this small rant helps to understand what is the problem with VR.