It's Becoming Increasingly Unlikely that We'll See a Major Shift To Virtual Reality Any Time Soon (theoutline.com) 298
An anonymous reader shares a report: VR was supposed to be a revolution, with companies like Oculus pioneering a whole new way for gamers and non-gamers alike to be immersed in digital environments -- but that excitement has markedly cooled. The media has gone through several cycles of fawning, optimistic prognostication, and... wishful thinking? -- but for all the hype we have very little consumer interest to show for it. Oculus sold off to Facebook and has become little more than a parlor trick Mark Zuckerberg shows off at every F8 event. As Ben Thompson recently noted, the bet on the company is an awkward fit for Facebook that strays from Zuckerberg's strengths in several ways.
Oculus founder Palmer Luckey is now tooling around on right wing defense projects, while co-founder Brendan Iribe has just left the company amid rumors of future headsets being shelved. Several prominent studios have shut down or ceased VR efforts, including Viacom and AltspaceVR, and Microsoft is a steadfast "no" when it comes to dipping its toes in the water via the Xbox. Sony has boasted about sales of the PSVR hitting 3 million in two years, but there are 82 million PS4 units in the hands of consumers (and keep in mind that Microsoft sold 35 million Kinects but still discontinued the product). With cumbersome hardware (which, let's be honest, looks really stupid to most people), absurd PC requirements, and nearly no AAA titles to lure the curious into the world of VR, it's becoming increasingly unlikely that we'll see a major shift to virtual reality any time soon.
Also worth noting: if you're looking to Magic Leap for a kind of bridge to the future with its AR efforts, don't get too wound up. Brian Merchant's excellent and detailed feature story for Gizmodo on the company's struggles to get around the same hardware, software, and consumer adoption issues that plague VR make it clear there is no easy answer in this space. In my opinion -- as someone who watched this new generation of virtual reality emerge from the earliest days, and was one of its biggest fans -- VR adoption will only happen when the barrier to entry is akin to slipping on a pair of sunglasses (and even then it's no sure thing). Most people don't want to wear a bulky headset, even in private, there's no must have "killer app" for VR, and no one has made a simple plug-and-play option that lets a novice user engage casually. Everyone I know who's tried a VR headset is blown away by the experience, but no one really wants to go deep on it except for what amounts to a rounding-error percentage of enthusiasts. Further reading: 'We Expected VR To Be Two To Three Times as Big', Says CCP Games CEO.
Oculus founder Palmer Luckey is now tooling around on right wing defense projects, while co-founder Brendan Iribe has just left the company amid rumors of future headsets being shelved. Several prominent studios have shut down or ceased VR efforts, including Viacom and AltspaceVR, and Microsoft is a steadfast "no" when it comes to dipping its toes in the water via the Xbox. Sony has boasted about sales of the PSVR hitting 3 million in two years, but there are 82 million PS4 units in the hands of consumers (and keep in mind that Microsoft sold 35 million Kinects but still discontinued the product). With cumbersome hardware (which, let's be honest, looks really stupid to most people), absurd PC requirements, and nearly no AAA titles to lure the curious into the world of VR, it's becoming increasingly unlikely that we'll see a major shift to virtual reality any time soon.
Also worth noting: if you're looking to Magic Leap for a kind of bridge to the future with its AR efforts, don't get too wound up. Brian Merchant's excellent and detailed feature story for Gizmodo on the company's struggles to get around the same hardware, software, and consumer adoption issues that plague VR make it clear there is no easy answer in this space. In my opinion -- as someone who watched this new generation of virtual reality emerge from the earliest days, and was one of its biggest fans -- VR adoption will only happen when the barrier to entry is akin to slipping on a pair of sunglasses (and even then it's no sure thing). Most people don't want to wear a bulky headset, even in private, there's no must have "killer app" for VR, and no one has made a simple plug-and-play option that lets a novice user engage casually. Everyone I know who's tried a VR headset is blown away by the experience, but no one really wants to go deep on it except for what amounts to a rounding-error percentage of enthusiasts. Further reading: 'We Expected VR To Be Two To Three Times as Big', Says CCP Games CEO.
The reason is that it sucks. (Score:4, Interesting)
I bought into the hype, having wanted to try VR since 1992 when I first saw it on TV as a small child, never having even tried it at any convention or anything like that since, and in 2016 (right?), when the HTC Vive came out, I went crazy and wasted a ton of money on it and a whole new crap consumer PC with a beefy graphics card... and it was all garbage. It's really too many things to even bother listing them, but it also didn't exactly help that all the *software* for it was worthless bullshit. Even the VR porn couldn't have been more obnoxiously shot/directed, and I watched a whole lot of that before finally giving up on it. Very disappointed.
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I bought into the hype, having wanted to try VR since 1992
In the mid 90s (95 or 96?) a VR arcade opened on Pier 39 in San Francisco. You paid, like $5, and got some bulky helmet with goggles and a gun. Then they turned it on, and you were attacked by dinosaurs, as well as the other players. Since computers were a zillion times slower than today, everything was just a mesh with no filled polygons, but it was still really cool. There was even a pterodactyl that grabbed you and soared into the air. When it dropped you, it took a second or two to realize you were
Tampa (Score:2)
My wife and I tried that game in a temporary arcade in a mall in Tampa in the mid 90s. I loved the immersion but the movement confused me so I didn't get as much out of it as I should have. I saw a lot of potential, but I wasn't surprised when it died.
I have been using the HTC Vive recently. I am amazed by the immersion. I am flying in Ultrawings, mostly. Sometimes in Lucid Trips. I also play Longbow in The Lab by Valve.
I am disappointed to see the field fading. I do believe it will come back again w
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That sounds like the early Virtuality headset systems. They worked off a four Amiga PC's, each pair implementing a graphics pipeline for one CRT in the headset. They had a simple platform game where you were on checkboard platforms with what I thought was a dragon/dinosaur and could shoot a weapon at it.
For VR to take off, it has to complete against all the other 3D project/contracts that are on the marketplace based on likely profit margins.
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Was it this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Yes, I think so. It came out in 1994, so the timeframe is right. The helmet looks the same, and the "Dactyl Nightmare" sounds exactly like the game I played all those years ago.
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I don't know about the porn but the 360 degree vids on YT that I have tried out in VR have been a mixture of good, ok and truly awful.
There are a series of these VR vids produced by a brand-name wearable camera company which chop around between different views and scenes every 5 to 10 seconds, which totally breaks any sense of immersion and makes the whole experience terrible. They may be great at manufacturing 360 degree cameras but show no understanding at all about editing and presenting what was captur
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I don't see why flight simulation is ideally suited to VR. You can do flight sims just fine on a (couple of) 2D screens and, if you want to get fancy, a mocked up control panel. I guess being able to change views just by moving your head is cool, but that's not taking advantage of what VR is capable of.
Now, simulating flying like Superman, yeah, that'd be cool.
And I agree about Zuck.
Re: The reason is that it sucks. (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason it's ideally suited is because it's a cockpit. VR works best when it simulates something akin to sitting on a couch with your hands on controllers that match those in the VR world.
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This is actually the real reason that VR is dying/failing. There's no recognition that VR needs to occur in a chair for most of us. There was this idea that people would make a VR room and walk around in it, and this was driven by the idiots at Oculus more than anyone, as a means to lock out competition. Well, it worked - the competition stayed outside and so did the customers.
Yet, there's absolutely NO way to "float" around a room-scale VR solution at all while seated. VR games lock you into a "step/jump"
Re: The reason is that it sucks. (Score:5, Interesting)
There was this idea that people would make a VR room and walk around in it, and this was driven by the idiots at Oculus more than anyone, as a means to lock out competition.
This is just straight-up not true. Oculus didn't even support room-scale VR at all for ~8 months after launch (and really never intended full room-scale VR, as shown by the fact that they still don't sell a setup with 3+ sensors you really need for decent room scale), it was Valve with the Vive that did that. Also that had nothing at all to do with locking out competition because that doesn't even make sense (how would room scale help lock out competition?)
Yet, there's absolutely NO way to "float" around a room-scale VR solution at all while seated.
Also not true. Many (most?) VR games support smooth locomotion and/or turning. I'm actually wondering if you've ever even played VR, because most of what you're saying is just, well, wrong.
The reason VR isn't "successful" is because it's just not ready for mass consumers yet. The hardware isn't there (low resolution, you need a very beefy computer to run even the current resolution), and the software honestly isn't fully there either. A fully consumer-ready VR probably needs to be lighter, wireless (or even self-contained), and have a much better display than is currently available. That'll happen, eventually, but probably not for another 5-10 years. VR is basically in the same place as early cell phones: really really cool technology with tons of potential, held back by hardware that while it works, just isn't really ready for widespread use. And that's fine: the technology is on the table, it's not going away, and it will only get better with time.
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Yes, I have a VR setup. It's hanging next to my "Beefed up" stock 15-year-old computer, that runs VR apps just fine... At least most of them. Anyone who games usually has such a "beefed up" computer already, unless they never made a gaming PC. Accusing me of not having played anything in VR just because I don't agree with your point of view is disingenuous though.
And Valve is just as bad as Oculus, though I couldn't tell you which one is worse.
Still, no such method to force VR to allow room scale concepts t
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I want VR but only will accept the style of VR that I want, fuck all the shit substitutes. I want VR glasses that I can stick in my shirt pocket and then pull out and hook up the the USB port of my smart phone and give me a virtual 125 inch screen, sans motion, fixed view far better from a nausea point of view especially on public transport where motions felt would be at extreme variance to the motion displayed on the glasses. Sure altered reality with display overlaying a real world view but that would req
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That is the problem. Users with a mega multi-monitor 4K displays would need the same resolution on their VR googles to be happy:
https://superuser.com/question... [superuser.com]
A quick image search would show many more examples. Then the headsets are still a bit heavy.
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That's the whole problem. Even flight simulation which would seem to be ideally suited for VR just sucks. The interfaces are crap.
DCS is pretty awesome in VR (though you have to go hunting for your mouse to flick all the switches not mapped to your HOTAS)
Issue is primarily the need for a gargantuan graphics card (Where the F**k is VRSLI) and the resolution (trying to keep eyes on the single pixel you are chasing)
And Zuck sucks. Fuck the Zuck.
Stick a fork in Oculus, it is done. Hoping the Pimax headsets live up to the hype
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Have an HTC Vive. The real problem with flight simulation and VR is the lack of resolution. I've got a program (can't remember what it's called offhand) that can let you use MS flight simulator in VR to pretty good effect. The problem is that most aircraft I can't read the instrument console right in front of me because the goggles don't have enough resolution. But the effect of flying an airplane in VR is pretty darn amazing, I must say. The addition of depth queues is really nice, as well as the immer
You mean... (Score:3)
That the underlying problems with VR can't be solved by turning up the resolution?
Sorry, folks this is hardly unexpected. The problem with VR the first time around wasn't the frame rate and what not, it's that the goggle cut you off from the real world. That's something that people, unsurprisingly, still aren't ready for.
Give it another 20 years and try again.
You mean...MR? (Score:2)
That's kind of the idea of Mixed Reality.
https://www.recode.net/2015/7/... [recode.net]
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it''s that the goggle cut you off from the real world.
Yep.
But ... google cardboard is very cool. "VR" works best in short 30-second blasts with no cables.
Re:You mean... (Score:4, Insightful)
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That's an issue in surprisingly few games, actually. I found that (virtual) lateral acceleration does it to me mostly, while being moved in the direction I'm facing is fairly comfortable.
Again, a learning process. Game developers have to find out what they can do to people and what they better shouldn't.
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For me it was an issue with most games. Just turning my head would do it, eventually. The nausea would slowly build up over 30 minutes, then stick with me for hours after I stopped. Motion I controlled with a controller, like a normal video game, didn't cause me issues. Very disappointing.
Very immersive, though. Seems the tech VR is missing is a great anti-nausea drug.
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The problem with VR the first time around wasn't the frame rate and what not, it's that the goggle cut you off from the real world.
From the real world? It cut me off from drinking beer while I play games. Thats far more serious. I'm not drinking beer thru a straw.
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The problem with being "cut off from reality" is that our input systems ARE still in reality. Finding your mouse is a true PITA when your VR helmet doesn't show it to you, and while the input devices you have are quite amazing already (seriously, it freaked me out when I saw my virtual hands for the first time holding those Vive controllers in the Raw Data game), the moment you have to use an input device that was made for you at least having a peripheral view of it (like mouse or keyboard) your immersion g
Reality vs desire (Score:3)
Here is what we want with VR/ Full sensory VR - most importantly touch. That is what we truly want to feel like we are in a reality, not watching a movie.
But all we get are head gear that makes us look stupid and gives us 5% more than an Imax movie does. Yeah, the 360 video is cool, but the sound is not any better and we don't get touch or even smell, let alone the minor senses (like heat).
The stuff we truly want for a good VD would require something more like a neural implant rather than a headphones + cell phone right next to your eyes.
Shakespearean reality. (Score:3)
There's two things we want. The artificial reality we can live in (escapism), and the modified life we can live with (augmented). Both will be handy in their own way, just like fast food and fine restaurants co-exist.
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I don't know if that's really a problem if your goal is to provide a good gaming experience. You do not have those effects in "normal" games either, I doubt they're that important in VR to create an enjoyable experience.
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It'll always be bulky
This, I doubt. Technology moves on. The cell phones of the 70s did not remain bulky. The hard drives of the 80s did not remain bulky. The TVs of the 90s did not remain bulky.
I think that VR was seen as the next iteration of technology, when it's more likely 2-3 iterations away.
The first needs to be lightweight, wearable screens. Google glass for the masses.
The second needs to be high resolution projection on those screens with some sensible and usable controls.
Maybe the third part is lightweight body sensor
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I'm not so sure about this. Certain physical limitations apply, of course, but that mostly means we have to look for ways around them. Like now that we're hitting the physical boundaries of how small and fast you can make processor cores, we start packing more of them into a processor.
I don't really think that we're already at the end. If everything fails, we just have to learn how to write optimized code again.
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I am just going to save my money and hold off on experiencing the current iteration of VR tech. I will re-evaluate the technology as soon as someone gets a Holodeck up and running.
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Speak for yourself. I've a hard enough time maintaining presence and immersion within the physically/chemically generated reality I was born into. Then again, I'm in my late 20s and had a screen in front of my face every day since I was about 6. Seeing as this story about screen time [slashdot.org] is still on the front page, I think we'd better deal with the long-term effects of the 1080p virtual reality we already have before strapping
Re:Because VR isn't VR (Score:4, Interesting)
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You judge the value of his opinion based on age alone and offer condescension, which leads me to think that at his age, he is already better than you.
Just think of how much better than you he will be in a decade.
Nobody is using it correctly. (Score:2)
Public use VR (Score:4, Interesting)
I volunteer at my local library and they have a Vive that anyone over 10 years old can just walk up and put on. They have a smallish selection of games and demos.
I often spend afternoons helping people put on the headset and try out the experience. They all agree that it is awesome. They all agree that they love it. Only the kids feel like it is sufficient reason to go to the library all by itself.
Usually it gets less than three hours a day usage. Sometimes less than one.
I agree that the lack of a killer app or AAA titles is hurting.
Re:Public use VR (Score:5, Interesting)
I volunteer at my local library and they have a Vive that anyone over 10 years old can just walk up and put on. They have a smallish selection of games and demos.
I often spend afternoons helping people put on the headset and try out the experience. They all agree that it is awesome. They all agree that they love it. Only the kids feel like it is sufficient reason to go to the library all by itself.
Usually it gets less than three hours a day usage. Sometimes less than one.
I agree that the lack of a killer app or AAA titles is hurting.
VR's problem isn't the lack of AAA titles. It's the lack of game ideas that would be fun enough to justify a AAA title.
It's a fundamentally different kind of gaming experience and no one really understands how to make a great game for it yet. Is it a walking simulator where you're in an alien environment? A strategy game were you float over the field of play? What are the controls like? What style of animation?
They need to explore the idea space until they find stuff a concept that works, and once that happens game studios will start turning those concepts into AAA games.
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I'm gonna enjoy the hell outta Borderlands 2 in VR, no matter how much they had to reduce the resolution to make it work.
It looks like I won't be using the Aim gun with it, just the Move controllers, but that will work fine for me.
The list of good PSVR games is growing at a steady rate, with a sprinkling of really great games mixed in there.
Re:Public use VR (Score:4, Interesting)
Finally someone gets it.
That's exactly the problem, people simply don't know (yet) how to put the technology they have available to good use. It's similar to what happened when movies started a century ago. When you look at some works of early cinema, you'll notice that they feel a lot like glorified theater production. Much of it looks like there's a stage and you're sitting in front of it, with the big difference to a normal theater being that the changes of backgrounds happens "instantly" instead of enforcing a pause where the stagehands put the new props on.
Only slowly movies started exploring what we now take as granted in cinema. Point of view shots, taken from the viewing angle of a protagonist. Dialogues happening so camera shots show the one talking only, with the camera in or near the position of the person being spoken to. Dynamic shots where the camera actually moves about in the scene. These are fairly new concepts that had to be developed. Citizen Kane isn't really that good a movie IMO, but it premiered a LOT of movie tricks that are common today but were groundbreaking when it came out.
When you look at VR games of today, you'll notice that they are essentially the same kind of games you play on a normal screen just "VR-ified". What's needed is to find out what possibilities VR offers to makers of games and then explore them.
This of course will take time and we'll see a few horrible flops in the process, much like we did when 3D and first-person views became a thing for the gaming industry. But we learned and now we've arrived at something where the "formula" is developed. That's still ahead of us for VR gaming.
Re:Public use VR (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a reason for the lack of AAA titles that goes beyond mere economics -- it's fucking IMPOSSIBLE to efficiently do VR development with current hardware and workflows. As the developer, you're CONSTANTLY putting the headset on... taking it off... putting it on... taking it off. And waiting... a lot. The integration of development tools into the headset environment itself is practically NONEXISTENT today. It's a definite, and very real handicap.
At least Rift has the advantage of using the same host PC to run the software that you're developing on, so the main limiting launch-to-view constraint is "how quickly can you put the headset on or remove it". With Android, VR development is downright excruciating... you can get piss-poor previews that are the equivalent of using the Android Emulator with the headset as a blurry remote display (with all timing completely shot to hell), or you can launch build+deploy and twiddle your thumbs for 30-70 seconds waiting for it to compile, upload, and launch.
What we REALLY need is a Rift-type display that can do the equivalent of overlay three virtual 27" monitors in an arc ~20" in front of you, with realtime camera-vision of the rest of the room, so you can develop without having to actually take the headset off (and sufficiently high resolution & optics so that you won't feel like someone who's legally-blind trying to sit at a desk and read those same three monitors in real life). Aside from improving game-development workflows, a capability like this would also give people who aren't even INTO gaming to invest in a headset, because it would let you have the equivalent of three large monitors in an arm's length arc around you in places where you CAN'T have three monitors (like on a plane, when traveling, etc).
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VR is good for few games, much better for virtual exploration.
Shooters might work in VR but fighting games would need full mocap on you and have to generate the frame rules in real time according to what you do and that would probably suck. But if you don't do that you are restricted to a movelist. That's fine for a controller but confusing and disconnected from what you are doing to get it to register the right input. I already tried mocap Tekken Tag and it's horrible. Sticking your left leg and arm out as far as they go to register a 1+3 throw input is dumb as hell.
What VR is ideal for is mysteries. With a fully explorable area, but limited controls, you could do a great detective game. And let's not forget mysteries are historically the best selling books of all time, far more than adventure and genre fiction.
Current games are tuned to current controls. That's no surprise. But VR won't succeed until it escapes that history, and focuses on new genres that are tuned to the high immersion/low control of VR. Heck, RPGs could be freaking amazing, just move away from
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Re:Nobody is using it correctly. (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason for that is prices. When the US arcades were still popular, and tried out some of those games, they made them 4 to 8 times more expensive than the regular games, and so nobody played them. Then when arcade popularity went down, the owners usually blamed any gruffy-looking teenagers hanging around for having destroyed society with their evil young-people politics.
In Japan business people are expected to know about money. In the US, only larger businesses are run that way; small business, like arcades, the business culture is anti-intellectual which can't help but also be accidentally anti-business.
Key problems (Score:4, Insightful)
There are a couple. The obvious key problem with Oculus is Facebook and Zuck. Most people I know who own VR rigs go with Vive.
On the hardware side, it didn't help that cryptocurrency miners sucked the air out of the high-end graphic card market (and ballooned the prices) just around the same time that HTC, Oculus, etc were introducing their gear. If you bought VR gear, good luck finding a card to run it on at less than some multiple of what you paid for the headset. (That has changed in recent months, thankfully.)
Some of the problems others have mentioned above are there too, but are already being worked on or have solutions.
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It's quite possible to run VR programs on last-gen graphics cards (nVidia 970 and 980 series are absolutely good enough). I know because I use them.
The reality is... (Score:2)
... VR's killer app has not been realized by these big companies, they are obsessed with creating AAA experiences instead of focusing on making cheap low fidelity augmented reality type glasses which are MUCH CHEAPER to produce and have a wider range of applications. If I was involved at occulus or valve I would slap the management (gabe at valve) upside the head to get them to see - the killer app for VR is to get people outside and moving instead of sitting down in front of a screen, aka use the headset
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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The killer app is porn - but it's not ready (Score:4, Insightful)
There is a killer app - it's porn. But the current experience is like two virgins fumbling in the back of a cramped car and nobody can figure out how to get the bra off and you can't really see anything well. It looks meh, controls suck, and for filmed stuff camera problems make it look like people are about to rip their skins off and expose their lizard forms near the edges of the screen. Just not worth it in the current form.
Re:The killer app is porn - but it's not ready (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree. But porn has had about a century to refine the art. VR porn is radically different from traditional porn, and still different even from POV traditional porn.
Porn isn't easy to do well, as we all know. You need it lit right, you need to get the angles right, you need uncomfortable, weird-ass positions to let the viewer see the good stuff happening, etc.
VR porn has to work through all of these issues just like regular porn did. I'm not a fan of a lot of POV porn because they aren't looking at what I'd be looking at, the lighting is often awful, and it's a little motion-sickness inducing because that's a lot of motion my eyes are seeing that I'm not doing. VR porn hasn't solved any of these issues, as far as I'm aware, and has made some of them worse.
VR porn needs time. It needs that one great director who gets it, and is able to make a leap forward in the art. Once we get a couple of those, VR porn is going to take off.
Have commenters actually used it? (Score:3)
Reading the above comments from some of the naysayers, I get the distinct impression that they have never used it for more than a couple of minutes, or have only played with Google Cardboard.
Games? A small part of the use cases, but there are some great ones out there. Mostly I get this secondhand from my coworkers who are gamers (I'm not) and have VR setups, but I have played with the Spiderman demo. Pretty cool.
But it's fantastic for modeling. Face it, most 3D modeling tools suck, because a mouse is not a 3D interface. When you can shape your model like it was clay, or build it around you with broad sweeps (like with Tilt Brush), it's freakin' awesome.
HTC (and some 3rd parties) already have wireless headsets and adapters, so the tripping over the cable issue is gone.
With the next gen cards from NVidia, expect to see higher-rez goggles soon.
I would love to see better hand interfaces. The controllers are pretty good, but the finger motions are very limited. How about a glove interface, and show me my virtual hands?
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The naysayers, myself included, are of the opinion that in terms of a general use device, it's just not compelling, it's not what we're asking for (which is impossible at this time), and "3D", which is what this is
VR is about presence not 3D.
If you close one eye and look around you in real life the world doesn't look much different. You can still judge sizes and distances using various visual cues other than stereo parallax.
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My brother has never had depth perception (the same issue that they think Da Vinci had). Yet he finds the HTC Vive very useful for visualizing architecture and designing houses and renovations. Just being able to move your head around and see different perspectives is very useful, even without depth perception. Being able to see recreations of ancient buildings and walk around them is also very interesting and educational side. I think this potential is far more interesting than gaming.
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My 3 monitor setup is great, but if I could use any space around me to place clips on, organize my footage say on a big board on one wall, have my main program preview placed somewhere, timeline underneath it and *gasp* the timeline extending well beyond the range of a computer screen, with a secondary "utility" timeline nearby, just for a few examples, would make editing so much more efficient a
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These upcoming higher resolution / wider FOV HMDs (StarVR, Pimax, XTAL) are pretty exciting but I don't think they are comfortable enough to wear them 8 hours day in and day out just yet.
I think it'll be gen 3 or 4 once they can really start to focus on size reduction and ergonomics necessary for replacing your monitor with an HMD.
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The problem with VR is not that it's not useful or interesting. It's that you need expensive peripherals with an expensive PC to do it well. And it's not really worth doing at low resolutions, either. Low poly counts might be acceptable, or for actual work low frame rates, and even fairly bulky equipment, but most people are not excited to spend a lot of money on a toy.
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Reading the above comments from some of the naysayers, I get the distinct impression that they have never used it for more than a couple of minutes, or have only played with Google Cardboard.
Used both a Rift and Vive for many hours and was unimpressed by both even with the "experiences" people claimed were mind-blowing. If you want to prove the naysayers wrong, VR headsets are going to have to show sales levels growing by at least a magnitude before it can be taken seriously as anything but niche. When all VR headsets combined can barely show a million or so sales a year there's no reason to believe in the fangirl hype.
And yet... (Score:2)
still short on resolution (Score:2)
I've never felt that gaming is the right app for this, probably because I don't game but have wanted AR since first experiencing crude forms of it in the 90s when it was used to tremendously cut costs in aircraft wiring bundle production. I much prefer apps that offer real-life advantages.
But AR devices are still short on FOV, resolution, and brightness.
If AR could give me a full FOV with as many virtual displays as I want wherever I place them around the room and in whatever shapes I choose with no apparen
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I'd love it for watching movies with virtual screens as large as I want too.
I don't get this. It's still going to be a movie -- fixed POV, passive.
I want to be able to (virtually) walk into the scene, look around at what the actors can see, look at what's on the other side of the (virtual) camera. What's behind that tree? On the other side of that hill?
Somebody needs to port Colossal Cave or Zork to VR (if they haven't already). Or Myst.
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It's not convenient (Score:2)
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When you play a multiplayer game in VR it rarely feels like you're sitting in isolation. Even the most primitive of avatars [youtube.com] animated and voiced by a real live human is incredibly authentic in VR.
Paperless office (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, and I remember when computers were going to usher in the "Age of The Paperless Office"....the result was that paper usage went up about 500% because suddenly anyone and everyone could print whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted...and boy, did they ever.
Canon, Xerox, and Boise Cascade pretty much defoliated the Amazon rainforest to keep up with demand for that sweet, sweet paper.
My VR killer app (Score:5, Interesting)
The place I think I'd use VR is in the office. I currently have three largish monitors, a desktop environment with virtual desktops and layered windows... and I still don't have enough screen real estate. A VR headset with sufficiently-good movement tracking and resolution opens up the possibility of sitting in the center of most of a virtual sphere of high-resolution monitors -- ideally with some AR so that the monitors appear to be floating in my office, so I can see my office walls, my desk, keyboard, the cup of tea on the desk, etc., and interact with all of the physical stuff naturally while being able to see my virtual displays. The headset would also have to be light and comfortable enough for all-day wear. Bonus points if I can replace my office walls with a beach scene, etc., while still being able to see and use my desk.
I have done no investigation to see how far we are from making that possible. I suspect we're not there yet, even without the AR requirements.
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Still too early (Score:2)
The reality is that the tech is still way too expensive for any decent market penetration. The software makers need more time to get a handle on how to make the new capabilities fun and desirable rather than just ringing the "new thing" bell, and for the most part, they aren't going to do a lot of development until there's a larger installed base.
It's fine for people with lots of spare cash, but for the majority of the market, it's still y
"right wing" defense projects - LOLZ (Score:4, Insightful)
pretty sure that battlefield VR and related wil alsol be used by left-wing administrations and Congress's in the future
We don't have left wing administrations (Score:2)
Best VR Applications (Score:2)
VR is likely one of those ideas (Score:5, Insightful)
that need a bunch of other things in place to become available before they really are successful.
The iPHone wasn't the first smartphone; as a developer I used a number of early [amazon.com] attempts at "converged" phones. The first was probably the IBM Simon [wikipedia.org] A massive 18 ounce brick of a phone with a monochrome display and a one hour battery life. These early converged phones were tour-de-forces of the day's technology, but they were still too big, too slow, too crude, and too battery-hungry to be anything more than curiosities.
What Steven Jobs did with the iPhone was catch the wave at exactly the right moment, when screens and processors and batteries and networks and UIs all got good good enough, cheap enough to make a blockbuster product possible. Other people were close -- Palm's Treo devices were pretty good, but ever-so-slightly clunky due to their legacy tech. Jobs had the advantage of a clean sheet.
It's not vision that's lacking in most failed attempts to get a new concept off the ground, it's timing.
I ACTUALLY own a Vive and an Oculus. VR is AWESOME (Score:3, Interesting)
I hwo a Vive and an Oculus. I prefer the Vive, but each one has its pros and cons.
I read comments here, and I have this huge feeling that very few of them own a headset.
I am NOT an avid gamer -- in fact, I don't play games at all. However, I do love VR and play with it as much as I can.
If you don't know what RecRoom is (and you probably don't), then of course you are going to say that there is no killer app.
if you haven't played the laser games, or the quests, or one of the many custom rooms, of course you will say it's boring.
Honestly, if you spend more than 20 minutes in RecRoom, play a laser game, a quest, or maybe Royale, you will realise that all of this bullshit about small screens, etc. just melts away -- you are too busy playing and enjoying yourself.
My ideal headset is super light, has a total field of vision, it doesn't need sensors (inside-out tracking) and has glove-like controllers. This will happen in time -- in fact, all of this is already happening. In the meantime, it's still FUN.
If you actually tried, you'd know what I am talking about.
Shitposting is powerful and meme magic real (Score:2, Informative)
Recall that the founders of this industry are mostly scam-artist assholes of the highest caliber. Palmer Luckey in particular is famous for his "shitposting is powerful and meme magic is real" mission-accomplished moment after secretly funding Trump's internet disinformation campaign. Small wonder he's now trolling around US military circles; they're renowned for being enormous slush-funds with no accountability and often actively damaging to public interests. Caveat emptor.
https://www.theguardian.com/techn [theguardian.com]
Decent exercise (Score:2)
This has failed before (Score:2)
And basically in the same way as it does now, with a several-year hype by the clueless, and then failing when no reasonable hardware and software has materialized. Same thing this time, and possible next time in 15-20 years.
VR is a technically challenging problem (Score:4, Insightful)
No big deal, there's room to grow. Back in the 90s, when the first 3D games were appearing, people also dreamed up a bunch of stuff quite prematurely. But I'm quite sure that by now we've surpassed those expectations by far, it just took a bit longer than some expected.
So I've got a CV1. Here are the issues so far:
The resolution is too low. It works for gaming, but barely so. You won't really want to even browse the web on this if you can avoid it. So that currently puts a limit on using it for any kind of non-gaming use. This is a technologically solvable problem, but it will take time.
Dual 4K displays at 90fps would be cool, if there was hardware to support such a thing. USB C + Thunderbolt 3 does two 4K displays, at 60 FPS. Almost there, but not quite yet.
Cables are limiting. While the resolution is not huge, it's big enough to be challenging even over wires. Doing it over some kind of wireless is even more of a challenge.
Control is limited. The controllers are nice, but they're nowhere near as good as my hands.
Current tech just happens to exist at the edge of reasonably available technical capacity -- while they could do dual 4K displays right now if they wanted, only really, really hardcore adherents would pay what it takes to provide that. So it'll have to wait until today's bleeding edge becomes the next normal.
Fortunately, it's nothing tech and money can't fix. The basics are already there, now all that's left is to refine existing tech and make it better. Doing last year's hardware 20% better is what's the industry has been doing all along.
The Oculus Quest seems like a promising development -- no wires, which should make it a lot easier to use in some kinds of setups, though it will have to sacrifice 3D processing power to do so. I think at the very least it'll be a good test of how big of a deal a wire is.
VR control is complete garbage (Score:4, Interesting)
As Carmack said :
"Stick yaw control is such VR poison that removing it may be the right move -- swivel chair/stand or don't play."
Shame he couldn't convince his employer to ship with a ceiling mount HDMI+USB slip ring so you could actually fucking do that.
The swivel chair should have been part of the default control scheme for VR ... so it wasn't just a couple of genetic mutant who could enjoy free motion inside the 3D world. Sure that would have been a lot more niche and unappealing to the couch users Facebook wanted to woo, but at least it wouldn't have been complete garbage.
....and 640k is enough for anybody (Score:2)
VR for monkeys (Score:2)
It's probably a good thing that it sucks. We're bad enough with our phone addictions. Imagine how the world will be when VR is as good as Hollywood has portrayed it numerous times. We'd never wanna leave.
Headsets are Still Too Bulky (Score:2)
We need custom screens which are no larger than 25mm.
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If I must wear any form of welding helmet (Score:3)
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Duh. Anyone sane person was saying this for years. Only the extreme fangirls couldn't see the writing on the wall from the poor sales figures. No one wants VR because all the headsets suck, the content for them suck and the only ones that suck less are way too fucking expensive.
I do think that the technology has a bit more growing to do, but I, personally, don't think that it's that far off. As for the expense, it's like a high end TV, yes it's out of reach today, but give it a 5 to 10 years and the cost will come down.
There are four things that need to happen: 1. Headsets need to become lighter and wireless, while maintaining high resolution video. 2. Touch gloves need to be included. Other senses such as smell and hot/cold can come later. They likely will require a special
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Such a system would be cool, but impractical. It would be huge - only the obscenely rich would be able to afford a whole room devoted to VR and a treadmill system. That gives it a very niche appeal. You might see them in some future version of the arcade or laser tag arena, but it's no good for the home games.
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Such a system would be cool, but impractical. It would be huge - only the obscenely rich would be able to afford a whole room devoted to VR and a treadmill system. That gives it a very niche appeal. You might see them in some future version of the arcade or laser tag arena, but it's no good for the home games.
You're thinking much larger than I was. I was thinking something that is more like 9ft by 9ft, something that would fit in a room where most people put their exercise equipment. Plus, the treadmill shouldn't cost any more than exercise equipment does today.
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I do think that the technology has a bit more growing to do, but I, personally, don't think that it's that far off.
So says VR fangirls for years on end. It's always been just "a few years off."
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As long as we see (and treat) VR as some sort of extension to what computers are doing now, this is probably going to remain true. Why bother with VR when you can get almost the same experience from a computer setup that's much cheaper and requires a lot less room?
The problem is not technology. The technology is more or less there. The problem is application.
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Except that the iPod was selling 10s of millions a quarter at this point in its lifecycle. VR headsets sell combined a couple million a year. Hardly comparable.
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We need 8k per eye,
More like 32k per eye minimum.
and graphics cards need to be at least 4-8x if not 16x as fast for that to be viable
Current gen is overkill.
and given the end of moore's law this seems unlikely. Not to mention we also need a wireless solution that can transmit 8k+ per eye in real time, plus enough processing power for head tracking, etc. etc. Unless computers get several orders of magnitude better it seems unlikely that VR will take off any time soon.
Human eyes can only see 1 megapixel with any detail. Total bandwidth of optic nerve weighs in at a whopping 10mbit/s. That's 100 times wired Ethernet, at least 10 times typical 5ghz wireless and 1800 times HDMI 2.0.
The rest is waste. Obviously the necessary and only credible path forward is in improving display systems to be less wasteful.
For massively parallel, Moore's has long way to go (Score:3)
The end of moore's law is the problem. ... We need 8k per eye, and graphics cards need to be at least 4-8x if not 16x as fast for that to be viable, and given the end of moore's law this seems unlikely.
Like the multi-decade running gag "Imminent death of the Internet" predicted, film at 11:00", the end of Moore's Law has been long predicted and slow in coming.
Lately we're starting to hit a wall on the "just make the features smaller and being closer together makes things run faster" approach: As features n
fov (Score:2)
the problem is the fov (field of view).
you can't see the pixels of 4k monitor *several feets away*.
but you could definitely see them if the monitor is a few inches away from your nose and wrap around your whole head (well at least spread around everywhere your eyes can look at), which is what the current generation of vr is attempting to do (as opposed to older gen that only simulated a somewhat largish screen in front of view and nothing around)
but all this extra screen/fov estate cones at a cost (either r
Re:VR is nauseating (Score:4, Interesting)
Massive progress has been made on the motion sickness front since the release of Rift/Vive. If you avoid artificial locomotion (moving the camera in conflict with the players movements) altogether very few (probably less than 1%) people find themselves getting sick on current PCVR HMDs.
The ultimate solution for VR movement might require vestibular stimulation technology but they have been able to drastically reduce the number of people impacted with some clever tricks. In early VR games I personally would get sick in minutes when using a joystick to move around a virtual environment but as they've refined the techniques I can play for hours without issue.
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The jury is out on "most people still get sick" as there are no real comprehensive studies yet... Also, not everybody gets sick for the same reasons as there are many of factors that can contribute to VR sickness.
Motion to photon is the time it takes to move in the real world and have it show up on the screen. If it's too large you generally get sick.... The wise John Carmack [pcgamesn.com] has stated he believes 20ms is the critical threshold for motion to photon latency. Stay under 20ms and avoid artificial locomotion a
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I think VR games simply have not found its place yet. What we get as VR games today are essentially the same games we had before, just with the screen replaced by a headset and the stick to turn the head replaced with the turning of the head.