Insurance claims up 31% thanks to the metaverse Despite Facebook – sorry, "Meta" – throwing its weight behind the "metaverse", figures from Brit insurance giant Aviva suggest a virtual-reality headset is far from a necessary purchase if you like having nice things. The insurer reckons home contents claims involving nerd goggles were up 31 per cent last year, commonly …
> without managing to roundhouse kick the light fixtures
This will only happen when they make so you don't actually need to move at all in the real world. (Remember, the baddie in "Ready Player One" played out of his comfy chair.)
By tapping the player's intention and translating it into in-game action you will be able to a) stuff more players into a given space (room), b) avoid the embarrassing moments of "what is he doing???", c) prevent people from breaking things or hurting themselves. The drawback is that in the real world people will progressively become even more uncoordinated, and probably eventually unlearn moving at all. Promising new business perspectives!
Yes, the problem with the existing kit seems to be people not reading the instructions first and/or the game not having a method of calibrating the playing area to the physical space. It's pretty clear from the linked video that few people have space in the home to use these devices as currently designed.
Maybe instead of bing completely immersive, they should be "underlaying" reality on the screen too, ie the headset has a camera on the front, or make the display translucent so people can see where they really are.
The Quest 2 requires you to define a playing area, and routinely bugs you to redefine it if it's unable to match the previously stored area to what it's now seeing. It then does a decent-enough job of letting you know during a session when you're getting too close to the edge of your area, and also now offers the ability to double-tap the side of the headset to immediately switch your view over to what the headset cameras are seeing, so you can reorient yourself with the real world.
Having been a bit skeptical over the state of VR headsets (particularly ones which encourage more of a free-roaming style of gameplay), I have to admit at being rather impressed by the Q2.
I can see THAT future, the player must connect to various tubes before playing (making sure not to mix up the two larger tubes) then never leaving their chair again. They'll bring The Blob to real life. And, rather than waste 500lbs of perfectly good protien, they'll recycle you into another load of player grub.
For those that choose to live like this, better thee than me.
It does make me wonder how much of my home insurance costs a re to subsidise stupid people who don't take care to avoid stupid, avoidable accidents. I fully understand and agree with insurance payments being a "social" thing to spread the costs and risks, but disagree on some of the included cover. I'm not sure someone causing damage when flailing around effectively blindfolded should be a claimable insurance "accident".
Although Ready Player One is fresh in the public imagination, the term "Metaverse" was originated by Neal Stephenson in the (arguably superior) novel Snow Crash. I'm sure most Reg readers are aware of this fact, but it seems to me like Neal isn't getting enough credit for coining the word.
Metaverse - Where even the most trivial undesirable crap is available for sale for an NFT
Metaverse - Where people accidentally break stuff whilst wearing Facebook's locked down VR headsets
... I am assuming Facebooks view of what the metaverse is is different from all the other scum?
Either way, both types break the environment so perhaps that is the connection?
I resent having what is presumably an inflated house insurance price because of all these idiots claiming for shit they accidentally broke. Not just via VR but any other kind of "oops I smashed the TV scrren" incident.
There should be much more rigorous "no claims bonus" system similar to motor insurance,
or better yet separate it off from "house and contents" and into an entirely separate "moron / butterfingers" policy
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