You don't like the 2D cockpits, you don't want VR because you "look like an idiot" and you wouldn't want to buy a 3D monitor. I am assuming you don't think you look like an idiot wearing 3D Glasses. You're not going to be pleased soon either way.
Personally, I don't really look at the cockpit when I am racing. I'm sat on a desk chair, playing virtual racing with a toy steering wheel. I don't think a VR headset is going to alter someone else's opinion of the aesthetics of that. Perhaps you need a sense of humour about yourself.
Besides, that's not really looking like an idiot. How you look like an idiot is to use either youth or autism as a condescending insult.
You are labouring under the misapprehension that anyone who doesn't agree with you must be stupid and not understand what you are saying. I understand perfectly, you need to take the rod out of your backside. I was making comment in jest and you want to start a full on debate about it, demonstrating your bigotry. If people put headphones on when you're around, it's because they are tired of listening to your whining.
Dave, have you tried a VR headset yet? It's pretty good!
Yes, expensive at the moment, the Rift FOV is too narrow at around 90 degrees and the Oculus software is really awful, intrusive and full of bugs. The Vive has a whirring lighthouse system for positional tracking (though they are fairly quiet).
I can think of a more ideal headset with Rift style camera-based positional tracking, non-facebook software, Vive field of view (but preferably wider and with screens mounted horizontally), slightly higher resolution and lighter.
Some of this is coming. For many people it's best to wait for some of the necessary improvements. But it really is something to feel like you are in the car driving around, looking left and right at seemingly real sized cars next to you!
No-one in my family thinks I look stupid, they just want to have a go! There's a strange thing where you can be in the two realities at the same time. Driving around in the virtual world, but also able to talk to the person who just entered the room behind you.
Wrong. It does isolate your vision, yes, as that is the whole point, you have to be inside the virtual world. It doesn't have to isolate your hearing, you just use speakers or headphones, whatever you usually do in a sim.
It doesn't lead to broken relationships, you are getting a bit silly now. Obviously going for a half hour / one hour drive on your sim rig, doesn't harm your relationship in a different way if you have a headset on or a large monitor. It's just more fun in the headset because it's like you are really in the car. great fun and something that will no way fade away. It doesn't suffer from all the drawbacks of 3D TV, it's really not related to that.
VR is great for simulators, of course, because you are seated. For example when you used ETS to practice reversing. That experience could be seriously realistic if you had a headset on, because you could turn your head and look around just as in real life.
Obviously, you aren't ready for VR. It's not ready or good enough for most people. But it's not sensible to keep telling people it's stupid, specially if you haven't even tried it. It's actually quite amazing and has a definite place in the world, including in sim racing.
Gotta love it when Dave is making a fool out of himself again. But it must be that we're kids and don't know what we're talking about...
Anyway, I'd love to try out VR sometime. And I think it's pretty clear that the VR update has done good things for LFS with all the new users and news coverage.
The price to get my rig ready and buy a VR kit is a little too steep for now I think. Especially because VR is still not really there yet.
Isolation is good when racing, surely? There's plenty of time for family interaction when I'm not racing, in the same way as I wait until their favourite TV program has finished before I try to have a deep conversation with them.
Many of my on-track failures have come from interaction with meatspace. I don't have VR (just headphones at max volume) and I'm totally 'dialed-in' when racing, anything less usually means a crash.
--
OT:
I find it odd enough that most other people choose to race from the back seat with weird elongated arms (ie, FOV 90), but from follow? That must've taken some getting used to
How many times have you bought anything and had it upgraded without paying for it. Shure there things like phones and windows that gets updates but thats usaly to fix bugs and stuff like that. Why would the creators of this game want to update the graphics just to keep you playing it if you have already paid for and it was back in 2009? If its updated then they need to be paid for their time and I would not be able to by it because it probably would not run on my pc.