VR locomotion solution is still years away, according to Oculus.

This is something that I've been saying for a while (although I'd been calling it the "traversal" problem), so the fact that this is true is not at all surprising to me. The fact that Oculus are speaking about it with such candour, however, is.

From Upload:

If there’s one problem we’re most desperate for VR to solve right now it’s locomotion. Finding a means of movement that keeps players comfortable but retains immersion is one of the biggest challenges the industry faces. In fact, Oculus thinks an “end all, be all” solution is still “years away”.

Executive Producer David Yee said as much to me in a recent interview at the company’s Media Days event in the UK. [...] Yee said that figuring out the perfect solution was still far off as “we don’t understand how the brain works in terms of what’s comfortable or how people are acclimatizing”, but added that “the industry will decided what that standard is” and not Oculus itself.

“If you think back 15 years ago, like first person shooters, those were uncomfortable for many people playing them even on the TV,” Yee said. “On a 2D set using a controller, people get motion sick because they weren’t used to maneuvering the world with their camera especially when we switched from keyboard and mouse to controller where the thumb stick is not as one to one as a mouse movement is.”

That comparison, Oculus hopes, will follow through to the stage where people did acclimatize to first-person games. “There are standards to be had but no one gets to decide those,” Yee said. “The market gets to decide those.”

The market will, naturally, decide a lot of things about the final shape of VR, and most of the solutions to VR's most pressing problems are still years away, at best. The real question is, will the market be willing to keep investing in VR companies that are now admitting that they expect to lose money for years, all to maybe watch some other company invent the real format-defining standards of the medium. Time will tell, by I somehow doubt it. 

Or, as Upload themselves put it, "Don’t hold your breath if you’re waiting for the magical solution to moving inside VR any time soon." Don't expect consumers to rush out and buy VR headsets anytime soon, either, because most of VR's issues, including the total lack of anything that would pass for an essential application, fall into this "years away, if ever" category.