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It's Becoming Increasingly Unlikely that We'll See a Major Shift To Virtual Reality Any Time Soon (theoutline.com) 298

Posted by msmash from the broader-view dept.
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.
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It's Becoming Increasingly Unlikely that We'll See a Major Shift To Virtual Reality Any Time Soon More

It's Becoming Increasingly Unlikely that We'll See a Major Shift To Virtual Reality Any Time Soon

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  • The reason is that it sucks. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 28, 2018 @03:46PM (#57550905)

    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.

    • 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

      • 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

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by mikael ( 484 )

        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.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by LesFerg ( 452838 )

      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

  • You mean... (Score:3)

    by mhkohne ( 3854 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @03:46PM (#57550909) Homepage

    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.

    • That's kind of the idea of Mixed Reality.

      https://www.recode.net/2015/7/... [recode.net]

    • 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)

      by avandesande ( 143899 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @04:44PM (#57551197) Journal
      Generally avoid things that make me throw up.

      • 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.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by lgw ( 121541 )

          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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by LesFerg ( 452838 )

      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.

    • 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)

    by gurps_npc ( 621217 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @03:46PM (#57550917) Homepage

    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.

    • 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.

    • 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.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • 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

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • 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.

      • 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.

    • I think we'd all like to be able to immerse ourselves in a computer generated reality

      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

  • A $600 piece of hardware that plays a handful of games is something you put in an arcade. People would start going back to arcades if they offered something they couldn't afford at home. I'd do this myself if I had the money for it, it's so obvious.

    • Public use VR (Score:4, Interesting)

      by BankRobberMBA ( 4918083 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @04:06PM (#57551019)

      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)

        by quantaman ( 517394 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @05:04PM (#57551295)

        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.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by LesFerg ( 452838 )

          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)

          by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @10:30PM (#57552685)

          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.

    • agreed there, that's also why arcades are dying/dead in america while they still are doing ok in japan. You look at japanese arcades and see dance dance revolution, boxing games with physical boxing gloves that you have to punch things, table flip games where you have a physical table to flip etc.. you look at an american arcade you see... 30 fighting games etc... American arcades seem to specialize in games that you can just swap out the board to turn into another game, which of course, is exactly what ho

      • Re:Nobody is using it correctly. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Aighearach ( 97333 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @05:02PM (#57551281)

        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)

    by AJWM ( 19027 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @04:05PM (#57551009) Homepage

    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.

    • 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.

  • ... 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)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @04:12PM (#57551049)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • The killer app is porn - but it's not ready (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Sarusa ( 104047 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @04:14PM (#57551059)

    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.

    • 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)

    by AJWM ( 19027 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @04:17PM (#57551069) Homepage

    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?

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • 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.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by caseih ( 160668 )

          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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Greyfox ( 87712 )
      I have a HTC Vive in my house. I've wanted VR since the '90's and the current generation is pretty awesome. You put the headset on and you're there. There are some games where it works really well and some games where it doesn't. I wish the current generation of headsets had made its way through a couple more iterations before it gave up. A solid wireless headset with a a bit wider FOV and a bit better resolution than the current Vive would have been really nice for the games that I have. A X-Wing game for
    • Personally never tried VR nor AR, doesn't appeal to me save for one use case I'd love to try: edit video in VR.

      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

      • 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.

        • Yeah, the idea is interesting but definately quite a while still before it becomes something to actually consider. Until they fix the resolution, FOV, and somehow make this into something you can work with for hours and hours, I'll stick with the current setup.

    • 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.

    • 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.

  • I spent yesterday at a Halloween Show performing a VR segment. I spent the weekend a few weeks back demoing various arts pieces. I've probably done nearly a couple of hundred VR demos in total. No technology in my lifetime (I'm late 40s) has elicited such a strong positive reaction across a broad demographic. People still find VR magical and wondrous. I don't care about sales numbers or hype cycles - I think VR is so obviously compelling that it will find it's place given time. It might not be mass market

  • 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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AJWM ( 19027 )

      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.

      • Of course. But that requires a large space to walk around in and all new media. Down the road, sure. As a launch minimum, my minimum is to significantly improve on the cost, flexibility, capability and convenience provided by fixed flat panel display technology.
  • Who wants a system where you have to hook up a load of bulky peripherals AND sit in isolation? Maybe Nintendo could make something of it but Sony and all the others have no clue

  • Paperless office (Score:4, Funny)

    by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @04:48PM (#57551213) Journal

    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)

    by swillden ( 191260 ) <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Sunday October 28, 2018 @04:51PM (#57551227) Journal

    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.

    • Same here. If I could edit video through an interface that spans my entire field of view, instead of a triple-monitor setup, I would probably jump on it. Definately would replace the background with something like a mountain scene or maybe edit by the lake today, switching to a starfield in the evening, ha!
  • I've tried the Oculus Rift, and had fun, but it's still rather novel.
    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)

    by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @04:58PM (#57551255)

    pretty sure that battlefield VR and related wil alsol be used by left-wing administrations and Congress's in the future

    • haven't since Carter. Clinton moved the Overton window hard right so he could soak up enough campaign cash to run and the country's left never really recovered. TV didn't help either. You had guys like Dukakis with good policy who were absolute goof balls in the flesh. TV showed the goofiness of the left and folks vote on their 'gut'.
  • Ace Combat 7, Battlefront VR Demo, Astrobot Rescue and Battlezone. Now why are these the best games? None of them require you to get off your ass to play them. The entire idea of VR as this magical land thing where gamers are going to be elite athletes is total bullshit. Most of the VR games being developed are either shovel-ware (99% of the crap out there) or unrealistic attempts at VR FPS. The killer genres for VR were always Space Flight and Flight sims. Helicopter sims in particular are a massively unde

  • VR is likely one of those ideas (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @05:04PM (#57551297) Homepage Journal

    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)

    by tonymercmobily ( 658708 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @05:24PM (#57551409) Homepage Journal

    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.

  • 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]

  • I have an Oculus I got as part of a startup that owed me money folding. It mostly sat there for the better part of a year. Then Beat Saber came out, and now I use it to take two-to-five-minutese exercise breaks while I work. It lost me some weight, so I'm happy with it.

  • 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)

    by vadim_t ( 324782 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @06:09PM (#57551641) Homepage

    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)

    by Pinky's Brain ( 1158667 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @08:37PM (#57552329)

    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.

  • What I think is the most exciting part of VR, is the VERY high specs needed for lifelike immersion. I have a VIVE PRO and a 1080ti video card, which (barely) meets this requirement- which VR people call "Presence" with a capital P. It's the point where your brain truly "Believes" you are in another world. If you haven't tried VR at that level, you haven't tried VR. With most "Pancake" (flat) PC games not needing the sort of CPU/GPU firepower, there's nothing pushing the limit. VR requires this limit, wh

  • 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.

  • I dare state that things have progressed as far as they can--by using off of the self cellphone displays.
    We need custom screens which are no larger than 25mm.

  • If I must wear any form of welding helmet (Score:3)

    by Oligonicella ( 659917 ) on Monday October 29, 2018 @02:25AM (#57553297)
    it ain't VR. This is why it's failing. Wearing a headpiece will never, ever feel like 'reality'. Peripheral vision is being badly dismissed as a necessity.

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