4 ms·
Complaints about journalistic standards failing in VR are just Luddism. Complaints that Google Cardboard is terribly inferior VR, on the other hand, are totall
by ryandamm 11y ago
Complaints about journalistic standards failing in VR are just Luddism.
Complaints that Google Cardboard is terribly inferior VR, on the other hand, are totally accurate. A point of view that was sadly missing from the short piece. I'm working in VR, and have terribly mixed feelings about Cardboard. On the one hand, it's great that it's pushing VR to the masses, quickly. I understand the Cardboard app had one million downloads before the Times shipped their 'headsets.' That dwarfs all the Oculus DK2s by a factor of at least 10.
On the other hand, Cardboard is terrible. It has a narrow field of view, huge chromatic aberrations, and latency that will make some users sick. (Gear VR has much lower latency, thanks to kilohertz-class MEMS sensors and some solid engineering... nevermind it only has to run on a single piece of hardware.)
So yeah... part of me wishes Cardboard just didn't exist, and part of me wishes it were just substantially better. Because a bad introduction to VR is worse than a late introduction to VR. It's not like the VR hype cycle is lacking for opinions anyway; this is a sector that could probably use fewer semi-informed opinions.
(So to be clear: if you've tried Google Cardboard and nothing else, you haven't really experienced 2015 VR. That's my position and I'm sticking to it.)
- grahamburger 11y agoHere's the thing that I don't get about the demos I've tried for both cardboard and Gear VR. Why is it so common to have media that isn't stereoscopic? I was at a trade show a few weeks ago with a gear VR demo that was just a video that I could look around in, but it was flat. Lots of the live-action stuff for cardboard, like the Conan stuff, is the same way. It's .. underwhelming, to say the least. I get that it's hard to to 360 videos that are also stereoscopic, but it seems like a disservice to the medium to push content with such a lack of depth. Is that something that will be overcome soon? Or have I just been unlucky in the content I've seen? Sorry if this is OT.
- AJ007 11y agoWhere the devices mis-configured? That definitely doesn't make sense, there is 360 stereoscopic video.
- RobotCaleb 11y agoHow do you capture 360x180 stereoscopic video?
- grahamburger 11y agoI don't think the devices were misconfigured. I've never seen recorded-video content that is both stereoscopic and 360 view (meaning that you're able to look around in the scene.) If you know of any that does both I'd love to check it out!
- RobotCaleb 11y agoI'm not sure how you'd capture such.
- sopooneo 11y agoFor anyone who knows about this stuff, does the video from the Times align properly when you tilt your head, rather than just look around or up/down? If so, it seems that might make the underlying tech to capture 3D stereoscopic video much harder.
- ryandamm 11y agoNo, stereo video content does not currently support that, unless it's animated in a game engine. Which is very rare.
- ryandamm 11y agoBecause stereo 360 is optically very difficult, and there aren't many rigs that do a good job of it. It's a hard problem, honestly, though people are working on it (including me, frankly).