10 years ago this week the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive started arriving to PC buyers.
On March 28, 2016, the Rift started arriving with a gamepad in the box and on April 5 the SteamVR-powered Vive rolled out with full room-scale support and tracked controllers for direct hand interactions.
10 years later, more than four percent of SteamVR’s user base still play with the original Vive and Rift. You can characterize this percentage a lot of different ways, but to me it highlights the staying power of these original headsets when the guiding principles were to enable free exploration of VR for extended periods. These headsets haven’t been sold for many years and are still connected more than the Bigscreen Beyond. Together, they have more than double the use of Microsoft’s scattershot (and end of life’d) Windows Mixed Reality products.
Facebook and then Meta got a lot of things right in this decade — after all the Steam Frame’s controllers look a lot more like the Rift’s Touch controllers than they do the Vive wands — but Facebook’s purchase of Oculus gave new marching orders from Mark Zuckerberg to tens of thousands of employees every few months and they always tried to nudge people into staying inside their boundaries rather than exploring freely like these original headsets.
Rather than focusing on how malformed the VR market became over this decade as Mark Zuckerberg’s ideas took the focused idea of Oculus VR and turned it into Horizon Worlds on the underpowered Meta Quest, with a software link to good PC VR, I want to point you to a north star that’s guided many over this decade.
Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades, H3VR, is the creative playground of Anton Hand and his friends at RUST LTD. Never put on sale below its $19.99 price on April 5, 2016, the project has been reviewed more than 20,000 times in 10 years and remains rated overwhelmingly positive while still in early access.
On update 120 now and nearing 1.0 release, Hand amassed 110,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel with regular development logs breaking down his ideas. I encourage any young artists or developers exploring immersive creation out there to visit his channel and see the regularity of his updates and the progress he’s made grasping at the joy of deep physical interactions handling simulated mechanical objects.
As you scroll back across more than 500 videos to the beginning, you can start to understand that nothing Zuckerberg and his middle managers brought to VR did anything for Hand except deliver him buyers who had to dig through multiple layers of Meta platform to find his work.
“H3VR is one-of-one. A singular concept led by one of the most dedicated and passionate developers working today,” Creature head Doug North Cook told Good VR. “Anton is proof that if you are passionate, generous, committed, and the best at what you do, there is a path to take. It is no easy path but I can’t imagine taking any other.”
Wonderful