The „father” of the FPS genre, John Carmack is working at Oculus, and he believes that the developers should be harder on themselves.

In his interview with GamesIndustry, Carmack says that the devs of mobile VR experiences should up the ante to be on the same level as non-virtual reality applications and games.

„We are coasting on novelty, and the initial wonder of being something people have never seen before, but we need to start judging ourselves. Not on a curve, but in an absolute sense. Can you do something in VR that has the same value, or more value, than what these other [non-VR] things have done?”

Carmack also pointed out loading times as something that needs significant improvement. „In VR, initial startup time really is poisonous. An analogy I like to say is, imagine if your phone took 30 seconds to unlock every time you wanted to use it. You’d use it a lot less. There are apps that I wanted to play that I thought looked great, that I stopped playing because they had too long of a load time. I would say 20 seconds should be an absolute limit on load times, and even then I’m pushing people to get it much, much lower.”

Carmack’s words are harsh, but he has good points. In fact, these thoughts can be applied to all VR devices in general…

I will try to turn a bunch of my VR app quality comments into a blog post when I pull ahead of my workload a bit.

— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) October 8, 2016