Have you heard of Oculus Go?
It’s a new piece of tech by the creators of the Oculus Rift that allows you to run VR without any cables.
From doing a quick search online, I’ve seen that Roblox doesn’t support the Oculus Go yet, which may be a goal that could be set for the future.
This whole idea could take a while to build upon, but as Roblox continues to support the Oculus Rift, it would make sense to support a future model of the same brand. I’m currently unaware of how games will be made to support the Rift but I’d assume it would be the same as before, but packaged into the headset or similar.
The whole idea of VR without cords, is extraordinary in itself, and limiting Roblox to VR with cables will pause potential.
VR on Roblox isn’t really practical at this point. Specifically for the Oculus Go and Samsung GearVR, dedicated apps need to be created from scratch instead of implementing something like SteamVR/OpenVR on an existing platform. VR also isn’t popular on the platform, even with Microsoft Mixed Reality headsets as low as $200 on Amazon.
Was going to suggest this a couple of weeks ago – there is (almost literally) no good VR content for Oculus Go, & building applications for it is extremely painful if you’re accustomed to the rapid prototyping that Roblox or web development allow.
There’s currently not a big audience for VR (no attractions currently worth the expense), but a handful of viral games can def. push Oculus Go into visibility, particularly because it’s so relatively inexpensive. With Roblox being such a fast platform to develop on, new concepts for groundbreaking VR content could be iterated on much faster.
In short — what Roblox might be uniquely positioned to fix about VR:
Developer accessibility: Unreal Engine & Unity have extremely slow compilation times, and the IDEs involved are extremely cluttered, performance-intensive, and require tons of set-up – this means incredibly slow prototyping, and a lot of frustration for devs who can spend their time elsewhere.
→ Developing on the Roblox platform is the exact opposite of this experience, esp. with increasingly great dev tooling (e.g. TypeScript for Roblox, Rojo, Roact, etc.)
→ This unparalleled advantage would make it the perfect breeding ground for quickly iterating on new, potentially groundbreaking concepts for VR content
Nobody to play with: Most Oculus Go experiences are solo, & it gets boring very (very) fast, which shrinks the audience to hardcore gamers very early on in the funnel.
→ Roblox games, on the other hand, are by default extremely social gaming experiences, and can cater to a much, much broader audience.
Lackluster content discovery: If there is any great content worth trying on the Oculus Store:
1) It’s hard to find,
2) It takes a considerable amount of time to install,
3) It’s usually not free to try, and
4) If it is free & dependent on micropayments, you’ll usually get bored & drop out before spending money.
→ Browsing through Roblox games is a relatively low-risk, frictionless experience, and there is a large existing catalog of attractive games with active developers that can be pushed into implementing experimental compatibility for VR.
→ Best practices spread like wildfire across Roblox (and can be artificially spread if this isn’t the case), & the low cost to trying ideas on Roblox may inspire many new iterations on innovative ideas for attractive VR experiences
If someone at Roblox hacked together a quick, extremely stripped-down, barely-functional, outdated developer build of the client for Oculus Go, we could prob. build several game prototypes to try & produce a handful of replayable, long-term-valuable VR experiences worthy of people blowing the initial $180 for the device.
A major difference between this headset compared to others is that this headset is cordless allowing portability.
Development of the application could take a while, however I see no reason not to set a long term goal to achieve this feature.As GigsD4X stated, Roblox would be crucial to bridging the gap of development tools useful for VR compared to other utilities.
There is also a big road-blocker for a lot of us is that we do not buy VR items because of the pre-requirements such as high-spec computers and VR tracking cameras set up around the place as well as the cords. The previous state of VR prevented a lot of people from considering the item, however, with cordless functionality, this whole problem is gone and a new opportunity is open.
If someone at Roblox hacked together a quick, extremely stripped-down, barely-functional, outdated developer build of the client for Oculus Go, we could prob. build several game prototypes to try & produce a handful of replayable, long-term-valuable VR experiences worthy of people blowing the initial $180 for the device.