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In all of my experiencing of the new VR products, I am firmly in the position that it's not ready for public consumption yet and won't be for quite some time. T

In all of my experiencing of the new VR products, I am firmly in the position that it's not ready for public consumption yet and won't be for quite some time. The only real reason it's being pushed hard is because people have a fear of missing out. Meanwhile, if I were a company I'd be focusing on AR, because at least there you can push for enterprise customers which won't need the full immersion yet that a general consumer will clamor for. (I also think AR has a much brighter future) I expect a lot of VR units are shown off to friends and thrown into the closet or put on a shelf to collect dust. It's something you show off, but not something you'll (at least 98% of people) use.

burkaman 10y ago
I think it's clearly not ready for anything like the adoption levels of consoles, but people who own VR products definitely use them. It's too expensive, too low resolution, and too clunky to conquer the world yet, but it's an excellent first generation. What you're describing sounds more like AR to me. Everyone I know who bought Google Glass showed it off to their friends and then never used it again. I know AR has obviously improved since then, but VR seems to be the more proven technology.
- AJ007 10y ago
  The interesting thing is consoles aren't even the "big" market for games, mobile is. VR could hop past the console market size pretty quickly - though I suspect general media consumption may surpass the game use. (Gaming may win from a $ standpoint.) Magic Leap is certainly promising, and a more plausible iteration of mass AR than Google Glass. The final form factor on that isn't clear. I had the Dk1 and Dk2, and they both ended up in the closet largely because I don't have time for the game stuff. The Dk1 was especially hard to use and if you didn't get motion sickness you were really super human. The right questions to ask about VR aren't what the current or next gen can and can't do, or that if it's prices too high (seriously, the iPhone6 was like what $2 million of processing power in 1995? Not to mention things that were impossible.) The right question is do consumers want fully immersive media with sensory depravation to the outside world, or do they want some sort of Heads up display? Secondly, some motion sickness issues in VR may not be solvable, like what happens when you are riding in a moving car?
  - burkaman 10y ago
    Well I would call DK1 and 2 more of the 0th generation. The Vive is good enough for regular use, and from what I hear the released Rift is too. Motion sickness I think will become less of a problem as developers get better, and people just get used to VR. You don't have to be superhuman to have no problem with the current headsets. And yes, for entertainment, people want fully immersive media. Not for all applications, but it has high appeal for games and other pure entertainment. > I don't have time for the game stuff. Well, ok. I guess an xbox would end up in your closet too, then.
- partiallypro 10y ago
  I wouldn't consider Google Glass to be real "AR", but just a small HUD, it doesn't really map your environment. I'd consider Hololens true AR, it too has a long way to go, but as I said businesses can fill the void between now and then...with VR, what use does it have in business? I would argue very little to none.
  - burkaman 10y ago
    I don't know how successful VR will be in business, but I think that's sort of tangential to this discussion. I am convinced it will be very successful as an entertainment product. Some companies have been experimenting with VR apartment tours, room planning, architecture demos, etc. Not sure how successful those will be. I agree that Hololens is closer to "true" AR. That's why I said VR is more ready for public consumption, because you can go out and by a Vive right now, and it works great. Hololens isn't out and might not be out for a while, and it's not clear how well it actually works right now.
    - ewzimm 10y ago
      You can actually buy a working HoloLens right now! Limited release though. https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-hololens https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-hololens
sergiosgc 10y ago
I've had my Vive for a bit over a month now. It's definitely past the point of "showing off to friends" and by now I'm pretty sure VR will forever be a feature of any gaming rig I own. I've clocked about 20hrs in Elite:Dangerous, which is a bit above my monthly average, even after having the Vive setup at my company for a week so my coworkers could try it out. Playing games like Elite without VR is now a very real downgrade. It has all the defects you could expect from a first gen device. It is also way past the point of fancy gimmick and well into routine usage hardware territory.
- Vexs 10y ago
  I played with a friends one over a couple days, and it's at the top of my must-buy list right now- I rigged up my own cardboard setup, but it's still not the real thing. Mass VR is literally right around the corner, and some of the best evidence to that is how many games are supporting it (fallout 4! WHEE) and that the newest vcards are designed for it.
- sleepybrett 10y ago
  I will say as a vive/rift owner (i was a kickstarter backer and got a rift for free, but the vive is where my heart is) Elite Dangerous is crazy cool, but only about 20% cooler than just using something like trackir with it.
intrasight 10y ago
As was the case with early personal computers - until some "killer apps" arrived. For businesses, the killer app was Lotus 1-2-3 and/or WordPerfect. Rest assured that some clever young things are actively working on the killer apps for VR headsets. I assume there will be at least one, and I assume that it won't be a FPS game.
- sergiosgc 10y ago
  I see two avenues for great VR games: 1) Cockpit based games. Flying a plane, or spaceship, in VR is immensely better than on a screen. I get nauseous in car racing games but, my friends who do not, rate them as best simulated driving experience ever. 2) Room scale games. Here, I have no idea wich ones. It is a complete green field in terms of gaming. There are some great concepts, like Fantastic Contraption or the "space invaders"-like game in The Lab (with hilarious results for non-playing spectators), but all in all, it's something that is not explored yet and shows fantastic promise.
  - intrasight 10y ago
    I totally agree about "room scale games". Has add-on benefits of getting out of the house and getting some exercise. Here's my idea (shh - don't tell anyone). Buy an abandoned roller skating rink and transform it into a VR game space. Of course this assume that some other entity will create one or more compelling games to be played in your space.
    - malnourish 10y ago
      I've always (wishfully) thought that VR will revitalize the arcade. VR (or AR) laser tag would be an extremely compelling experience.
      - komali2 10y ago
        It's already being worked on: http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/enter-the-void-the-worlds-first-virtual-reality-theme-park http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/enter-the-void-the-w...
flatline 10y ago
VR fundamentally conflicts with how the eyes focus, and it will never be solved with the current technology. For some people it's not a big problem, but a sizeable portion of the population will be unable to use VR at all or for any extended period without ending up with eye strain, headaches, nausea, and/or a general sense of malaise. It will always be something of a niche technology IMO - very cool, but of limited use. It's the same basic problem that 3D films have. There's a reason that films are still shown in 2D. I have only ever watched one film in 3D and it was overall an unpleasant experience that I don't care to repeat. Application developers could work to mitigate the worst of the effects on the eyes, and that's something that would help adoption. That has, however, not happened with films and I doubt it will with games - everyone seems to want to give people as great a sense of depth as possible, which simply doesn't work at all for many people. AR largely eliminates these problems, and I'm inclined to agree there is more overall promise there.
- abelhabel 10y ago
  In addition to this I think an inherent problem with occulus rift and similar technology is that as humans in the real world our vision is connected with our body. When we move our head, focus and so on we also use the rest of our body. A visual experience is not just visual but a full sensory experience with visual focus. Occulus rift, then, for example, only works with your eyes and so gives you a disconnected experience. The VR technology tries to eliminate any real world point of reference which makes us use reference points inside the VR which, I believe, is one reason the experience for us gets disconnected. The most common symptom of this is that you get nauseous. My guess is that the (sensory) disconnected experience makes us lose balance. What would solve this problem, I think, is to make the VR work with the whole body. So wearing a suit with goggles and standing on a plate that moves as you move which gets translated to in-game movement.
  - augustt 10y ago
    Vive has partially solved this problem with room scale - moving your goggles also moves your perspective in game.
  - 10y ago
loudmax 10y ago
John Carmack had an interesting take on AR. His feeling is that AR is a more difficult problem to solve, and for artificial objects to blend nicely with reality you'll probably need to redraw the entire field of vision anyway. By this reasoning, VR is a necessary first step along the way to the development of AR.
marricks 10y ago
It's weird your comment is so far up and you haven't given any reasons as to why VR is not ready for mainstream. You have a reason for why it's being pushed, but not a reason for why it won't take. Steam sale numbers show tens of thousands of games are being bought by Vive owners, which is a pretty high percentage of the ~90k Vive units out there. Some games are as high as 50k / ~90k units. People are continuing to buy games and play them.* Where's your reasons for why it's not ready, and numbers to support they will just sit on the shelf? Other metrics seem to point otherwise. * Best indication we have for Vive sales numbers is bundled game ownership, SteamSpy shows that Job Simulator has ~65K owners, Fantastic Contraption has ~85K owners, and Tilt Brush has ~90K owners. Two most popular non-bundled HTC Vive games, Audioshield and Space Pirate Trainer, both have a SteamSpy ownership of ~50K.
- nostrademons 10y ago
  It's kinda ironic that the Apple Watch can sell 12 million units and be deemed a failure, yet the HTC Vive can sell 90 thousand units and be deemed the next big thing...
  - marricks 10y ago
    That's a big apples to oranges comparison, but breaking it down anyways... for an apple watch all you need is a smartphone which the majority of people have. For one of these VR HMDs you need a 300 dollar graphics card and a capable computer, which is a much smaller market segment for a device which has only been out a handful of months. So, how will this change? Well GPU's are getting increasingly powerful, Nvidia will likely debut a GPU that is powerful enough for a Rift/Vive on a laptop this year, and AMD will release a graphics card powerful enough for VR on desktop at a price point less than 200 bucks.
- pyrophane 10y ago
  I own a Vive and love it, but I'll give a few reasons why VR may not quite be ready yet: - The resolution needs to be higher. It is very difficult to read anything but oversized text at a hand's distance. While the low resolution doesn't kill the immersive effect of VR, it is very noticeable. - The clear viewing angle through the headset is small. You can't look too far off of center screen before everything becomes blurry. - They haven't found a decent solution to the problem of moving around in a VR world. Right now the best answer is teleportation, but that is an awkward solution that pointedly breaks immersion. We'll see how well that can work in a large open-world game when Fallout 4 VR comes out. - The catalog has very few complete games at this point. Almost all of what is available is very early access or "discrete experiences" that don't last very long. So, for the most part the Vive has convinced me of VR. Having played with it I am not sure I would enjoy a first-person gaming experience outside of VR now. Still, it is at the early-adopter stage. Better graphics hardware needs to be cheaper, and a couple of generations of headsets will likely see a drastic improvement in the quality of the experience.
gambiting 10y ago
VR is already being used in enterprise. I know of at least one company that is designing VR software(using common headsets like the Vive) for a major restaurant chain, where the managers will be able to arrange everything in 3D before the restaurant is even built.
- ghostly_s 10y ago
  We are, of course, already arranging everything in 3D before a restaurant is even built. That's what architecture is. But being able to actually understand the spatial feel of a space is an absolute game-changer, both for the design process and especially for communicating design decisions to clients. VR is unquestionably going to be ubiquitous in the architecture industry before the year is out.
- asenna 10y ago
  That sounds awesome. Could you let me know the name of that company?
GabeN 10y ago
There is tremendous potential for this technology far beyond entertainment. It allows the user to perceive themselves to be in another place with minimal need for imagination, abstraction or suspension of disbelief. Those qualities all lend themselves quite well to entertainment, but they also enable many uses as a tool, such as for industry or education. Zuckerberg is counting on this, though I suspect he is thinking along the lines of the social implications (a family on different continents could sit down and have dinner together, or you could play a card game with your grandmother from 1,000 miles away). VR enables the use of human-operated tools and machines in places we cannot physically be with a minimum of interface limitations. Consider robotic surgery; the current Da Vinci machine uses a 3D view-port at a large station with three small loops to detect the movement of three fingers on each hand. The upshot is that a surgeon can now see a 3D view inside an abdomen and manipulate surgical tools with almost the full amount of dexterity of a human hand. This differs notably from older surgery methods in that only very small incisions are made to access the abdomen rather than a single very large one, greatly reducing the pain, scarring, and risks of the recovery process (though of course laparoscopy also offers similar benefits, save for the tools' degrees of freedom). VR is close to replicating this with much less expensive technology in essentially any environment you could choose, provided latency is kept low. Soon a surgeon could be in a separate, non-sterile room with a VR headset on and manual controls to enable full hand and wrist movement, and software can intervene with safety measures to prevent sudden unintended movements or accidental damage to important structures like blood vessels or nerves. The scale can be altered so that the body is perceived to be the size of a room and tools can be manipulated on a finer scale than the human hand is capable of (think of performing surgery inside a blood vessel as if you were there, rather than manipulating primitive instruments at the end of a single camera on a catheter as they do now). We could teach physics in a digital space where you can alter physical constants to gain an intuitive sense of their consequences. We could teach geography as if we were flying over any place on earth. We could reconstruct New York City circa 1900 and walk its streets. Walk the ocean floor and collect samples for scientific study. Defuse a bomb from a mile away as if we were standing in front of it. Clean a nuclear waste zone with no radiation risk. See the full scale of the earth as viewed from the ISS or the moon. Conduct rescue efforts in burning or damaged buildings with no risk to the rescue crew. A lot of these things are already possible, but VR dramatically reduces the level of training needed to adapt to unintuitive user interfaces. And there will be many applications no one has thought of yet. A few days ago I saw a video on YouTube where a Disney artist talked about how Tilt Brush fundamentally alters drawing in a way that has never been possible before. Sculpture is about subtracting or manipulating something already existing to create art, whereas painting generates something wholly new but only in two dimensions. With Tilt Brush be recreated Ariel and met her as he sees her in his mind for the first time - a three dimensional entity taken directly from his mind with none of the limitations of sculpture and all the freedom of painting. As with most technologies, entertainment will probably drive the initial development of the technology. And I do expect it to be successful - I've demoed the Vive and it does not feel like a flash in the pan the way previous attempts at VR have (here's looking at you, VirtualBoy). The software will need to be there to drive the market, and growth will be slow in the beginning due to cost considerations. But people also said home video with the VCR was a flash in the pan and it was too expensive to ever be successful, people would always rather go to the movies instead. VR represents at least as much of a shift in culture and technology as home video did, probably much, much more. I'm looking forward to watching it happen.
drzaiusapelord 10y ago
> I am firmly in the position that it's not ready for public consumption yet and won't be for quite some time. Perhaps right now, but come October the PSVR will be out. Its half the price of the Vive and works with your existing PS4. The reviews for the games have been mostly positive and the graphics in them are incredible compared to the shovelware both the Vive and the Rift suffer from. The move controllers seem to have better back-end processing and will probably never match the smoothness and fidelity of Vive tracking, but I imagine it will be good enough. Sony's 60 to 120fps re-projection seems to be working well too. I'm very impressed at what Sony is attempting to pull off here. VR with maybe 1/3rd the GPU/CPU heft of an average gaming PC is quite the technical hurdle for Sony's engineers. I think PSVR is going to change everything in terms of VR adoption and how the public sees VR. >I expect a lot of VR units are shown off to friends and thrown into the closet or put on a shelf to collect dust. I use mine multiple times a week. Its very exciting to see what the new VR game of the week/month is and try it out. Right now, all the Vive owners I know are enjoying Battle Dome, which is a laser tage/Splatoon style game. Its early access and ugly as sin, but a lot of fun. Or if not that PoolNationVR, which is much more polished. I've also enjoyed spending some time in AltspaceVR. As far as I'm concerned its the metaverse jr. I am looking forward to what the guys at High Fidelity are doing (which is pretty much Second Life in VR), but I think the more managed, simplistic, and curated AltspaceVR approach will win in the long run.

burkaman 10y ago

I think it's clearly not ready for anything like the adoption levels of consoles, but people who own VR products definitely use them. It's too expensive, too low resolution, and too clunky to conquer the world yet, but it's an excellent first generation. What you're describing sounds more like AR to me. Everyone I know who bought Google Glass showed it off to their friends and then never used it again. I know AR has obviously improved since then, but VR seems to be the more proven technology.

AJ007 10y ago
The interesting thing is consoles aren't even the "big" market for games, mobile is. VR could hop past the console market size pretty quickly - though I suspect general media consumption may surpass the game use. (Gaming may win from a $ standpoint.) Magic Leap is certainly promising, and a more plausible iteration of mass AR than Google Glass. The final form factor on that isn't clear. I had the Dk1 and Dk2, and they both ended up in the closet largely because I don't have time for the game stuff. The Dk1 was especially hard to use and if you didn't get motion sickness you were really super human. The right questions to ask about VR aren't what the current or next gen can and can't do, or that if it's prices too high (seriously, the iPhone6 was like what $2 million of processing power in 1995? Not to mention things that were impossible.) The right question is do consumers want fully immersive media with sensory depravation to the outside world, or do they want some sort of Heads up display? Secondly, some motion sickness issues in VR may not be solvable, like what happens when you are riding in a moving car?
- burkaman 10y ago
  Well I would call DK1 and 2 more of the 0th generation. The Vive is good enough for regular use, and from what I hear the released Rift is too. Motion sickness I think will become less of a problem as developers get better, and people just get used to VR. You don't have to be superhuman to have no problem with the current headsets. And yes, for entertainment, people want fully immersive media. Not for all applications, but it has high appeal for games and other pure entertainment. > I don't have time for the game stuff. Well, ok. I guess an xbox would end up in your closet too, then.
partiallypro 10y ago
I wouldn't consider Google Glass to be real "AR", but just a small HUD, it doesn't really map your environment. I'd consider Hololens true AR, it too has a long way to go, but as I said businesses can fill the void between now and then...with VR, what use does it have in business? I would argue very little to none.
- burkaman 10y ago
  I don't know how successful VR will be in business, but I think that's sort of tangential to this discussion. I am convinced it will be very successful as an entertainment product. Some companies have been experimenting with VR apartment tours, room planning, architecture demos, etc. Not sure how successful those will be. I agree that Hololens is closer to "true" AR. That's why I said VR is more ready for public consumption, because you can go out and by a Vive right now, and it works great. Hololens isn't out and might not be out for a while, and it's not clear how well it actually works right now.
  - ewzimm 10y ago
    You can actually buy a working HoloLens right now! Limited release though. https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-hololens https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-hololens

sergiosgc 10y ago

I've had my Vive for a bit over a month now. It's definitely past the point of "showing off to friends" and by now I'm pretty sure VR will forever be a feature of any gaming rig I own. I've clocked about 20hrs in Elite:Dangerous, which is a bit above my monthly average, even after having the Vive setup at my company for a week so my coworkers could try it out. Playing games like Elite without VR is now a very real downgrade. It has all the defects you could expect from a first gen device. It is also way past the point of fancy gimmick and well into routine usage hardware territory.

Vexs 10y ago
I played with a friends one over a couple days, and it's at the top of my must-buy list right now- I rigged up my own cardboard setup, but it's still not the real thing. Mass VR is literally right around the corner, and some of the best evidence to that is how many games are supporting it (fallout 4! WHEE) and that the newest vcards are designed for it.
sleepybrett 10y ago
I will say as a vive/rift owner (i was a kickstarter backer and got a rift for free, but the vive is where my heart is) Elite Dangerous is crazy cool, but only about 20% cooler than just using something like trackir with it.

intrasight 10y ago

As was the case with early personal computers - until some "killer apps" arrived. For businesses, the killer app was Lotus 1-2-3 and/or WordPerfect. Rest assured that some clever young things are actively working on the killer apps for VR headsets. I assume there will be at least one, and I assume that it won't be a FPS game.

sergiosgc 10y ago
I see two avenues for great VR games: 1) Cockpit based games. Flying a plane, or spaceship, in VR is immensely better than on a screen. I get nauseous in car racing games but, my friends who do not, rate them as best simulated driving experience ever. 2) Room scale games. Here, I have no idea wich ones. It is a complete green field in terms of gaming. There are some great concepts, like Fantastic Contraption or the "space invaders"-like game in The Lab (with hilarious results for non-playing spectators), but all in all, it's something that is not explored yet and shows fantastic promise.
- intrasight 10y ago
  I totally agree about "room scale games". Has add-on benefits of getting out of the house and getting some exercise. Here's my idea (shh - don't tell anyone). Buy an abandoned roller skating rink and transform it into a VR game space. Of course this assume that some other entity will create one or more compelling games to be played in your space.
  - malnourish 10y ago
    I've always (wishfully) thought that VR will revitalize the arcade. VR (or AR) laser tag would be an extremely compelling experience.
    - komali2 10y ago
      It's already being worked on: http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/enter-the-void-the-worlds-first-virtual-reality-theme-park http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/enter-the-void-the-w...

flatline 10y ago

VR fundamentally conflicts with how the eyes focus, and it will never be solved with the current technology. For some people it's not a big problem, but a sizeable portion of the population will be unable to use VR at all or for any extended period without ending up with eye strain, headaches, nausea, and/or a general sense of malaise. It will always be something of a niche technology IMO - very cool, but of limited use. It's the same basic problem that 3D films have. There's a reason that films are still shown in 2D. I have only ever watched one film in 3D and it was overall an unpleasant experience that I don't care to repeat. Application developers could work to mitigate the worst of the effects on the eyes, and that's something that would help adoption. That has, however, not happened with films and I doubt it will with games - everyone seems to want to give people as great a sense of depth as possible, which simply doesn't work at all for many people. AR largely eliminates these problems, and I'm inclined to agree there is more overall promise there.

abelhabel 10y ago
In addition to this I think an inherent problem with occulus rift and similar technology is that as humans in the real world our vision is connected with our body. When we move our head, focus and so on we also use the rest of our body. A visual experience is not just visual but a full sensory experience with visual focus. Occulus rift, then, for example, only works with your eyes and so gives you a disconnected experience. The VR technology tries to eliminate any real world point of reference which makes us use reference points inside the VR which, I believe, is one reason the experience for us gets disconnected. The most common symptom of this is that you get nauseous. My guess is that the (sensory) disconnected experience makes us lose balance. What would solve this problem, I think, is to make the VR work with the whole body. So wearing a suit with goggles and standing on a plate that moves as you move which gets translated to in-game movement.
- augustt 10y ago
  Vive has partially solved this problem with room scale - moving your goggles also moves your perspective in game.
- 10y ago

loudmax 10y ago

John Carmack had an interesting take on AR. His feeling is that AR is a more difficult problem to solve, and for artificial objects to blend nicely with reality you'll probably need to redraw the entire field of vision anyway. By this reasoning, VR is a necessary first step along the way to the development of AR.

marricks 10y ago

It's weird your comment is so far up and you haven't given any reasons as to why VR is not ready for mainstream. You have a reason for why it's being pushed, but not a reason for why it won't take. Steam sale numbers show tens of thousands of games are being bought by Vive owners, which is a pretty high percentage of the ~90k Vive units out there. Some games are as high as 50k / ~90k units. People are continuing to buy games and play them.* Where's your reasons for why it's not ready, and numbers to support they will just sit on the shelf? Other metrics seem to point otherwise. * Best indication we have for Vive sales numbers is bundled game ownership, SteamSpy shows that Job Simulator has ~65K owners, Fantastic Contraption has ~85K owners, and Tilt Brush has ~90K owners. Two most popular non-bundled HTC Vive games, Audioshield and Space Pirate Trainer, both have a SteamSpy ownership of ~50K.

nostrademons 10y ago
It's kinda ironic that the Apple Watch can sell 12 million units and be deemed a failure, yet the HTC Vive can sell 90 thousand units and be deemed the next big thing...
- marricks 10y ago
  That's a big apples to oranges comparison, but breaking it down anyways... for an apple watch all you need is a smartphone which the majority of people have. For one of these VR HMDs you need a 300 dollar graphics card and a capable computer, which is a much smaller market segment for a device which has only been out a handful of months. So, how will this change? Well GPU's are getting increasingly powerful, Nvidia will likely debut a GPU that is powerful enough for a Rift/Vive on a laptop this year, and AMD will release a graphics card powerful enough for VR on desktop at a price point less than 200 bucks.
pyrophane 10y ago
I own a Vive and love it, but I'll give a few reasons why VR may not quite be ready yet: - The resolution needs to be higher. It is very difficult to read anything but oversized text at a hand's distance. While the low resolution doesn't kill the immersive effect of VR, it is very noticeable. - The clear viewing angle through the headset is small. You can't look too far off of center screen before everything becomes blurry. - They haven't found a decent solution to the problem of moving around in a VR world. Right now the best answer is teleportation, but that is an awkward solution that pointedly breaks immersion. We'll see how well that can work in a large open-world game when Fallout 4 VR comes out. - The catalog has very few complete games at this point. Almost all of what is available is very early access or "discrete experiences" that don't last very long. So, for the most part the Vive has convinced me of VR. Having played with it I am not sure I would enjoy a first-person gaming experience outside of VR now. Still, it is at the early-adopter stage. Better graphics hardware needs to be cheaper, and a couple of generations of headsets will likely see a drastic improvement in the quality of the experience.

gambiting 10y ago

VR is already being used in enterprise. I know of at least one company that is designing VR software(using common headsets like the Vive) for a major restaurant chain, where the managers will be able to arrange everything in 3D before the restaurant is even built.

ghostly_s 10y ago
We are, of course, already arranging everything in 3D before a restaurant is even built. That's what architecture is. But being able to actually understand the spatial feel of a space is an absolute game-changer, both for the design process and especially for communicating design decisions to clients. VR is unquestionably going to be ubiquitous in the architecture industry before the year is out.
asenna 10y ago
That sounds awesome. Could you let me know the name of that company?

GabeN 10y ago

There is tremendous potential for this technology far beyond entertainment. It allows the user to perceive themselves to be in another place with minimal need for imagination, abstraction or suspension of disbelief. Those qualities all lend themselves quite well to entertainment, but they also enable many uses as a tool, such as for industry or education. Zuckerberg is counting on this, though I suspect he is thinking along the lines of the social implications (a family on different continents could sit down and have dinner together, or you could play a card game with your grandmother from 1,000 miles away). VR enables the use of human-operated tools and machines in places we cannot physically be with a minimum of interface limitations. Consider robotic surgery; the current Da Vinci machine uses a 3D view-port at a large station with three small loops to detect the movement of three fingers on each hand. The upshot is that a surgeon can now see a 3D view inside an abdomen and manipulate surgical tools with almost the full amount of dexterity of a human hand. This differs notably from older surgery methods in that only very small incisions are made to access the abdomen rather than a single very large one, greatly reducing the pain, scarring, and risks of the recovery process (though of course laparoscopy also offers similar benefits, save for the tools' degrees of freedom). VR is close to replicating this with much less expensive technology in essentially any environment you could choose, provided latency is kept low. Soon a surgeon could be in a separate, non-sterile room with a VR headset on and manual controls to enable full hand and wrist movement, and software can intervene with safety measures to prevent sudden unintended movements or accidental damage to important structures like blood vessels or nerves. The scale can be altered so that the body is perceived to be the size of a room and tools can be manipulated on a finer scale than the human hand is capable of (think of performing surgery inside a blood vessel as if you were there, rather than manipulating primitive instruments at the end of a single camera on a catheter as they do now). We could teach physics in a digital space where you can alter physical constants to gain an intuitive sense of their consequences. We could teach geography as if we were flying over any place on earth. We could reconstruct New York City circa 1900 and walk its streets. Walk the ocean floor and collect samples for scientific study. Defuse a bomb from a mile away as if we were standing in front of it. Clean a nuclear waste zone with no radiation risk. See the full scale of the earth as viewed from the ISS or the moon. Conduct rescue efforts in burning or damaged buildings with no risk to the rescue crew. A lot of these things are already possible, but VR dramatically reduces the level of training needed to adapt to unintuitive user interfaces. And there will be many applications no one has thought of yet. A few days ago I saw a video on YouTube where a Disney artist talked about how Tilt Brush fundamentally alters drawing in a way that has never been possible before. Sculpture is about subtracting or manipulating something already existing to create art, whereas painting generates something wholly new but only in two dimensions. With Tilt Brush be recreated Ariel and met her as he sees her in his mind for the first time - a three dimensional entity taken directly from his mind with none of the limitations of sculpture and all the freedom of painting. As with most technologies, entertainment will probably drive the initial development of the technology. And I do expect it to be successful - I've demoed the Vive and it does not feel like a flash in the pan the way previous attempts at VR have (here's looking at you, VirtualBoy). The software will need to be there to drive the market, and growth will be slow in the beginning due to cost considerations. But people also said home video with the VCR was a flash in the pan and it was too expensive to ever be successful, people would always rather go to the movies instead. VR represents at least as much of a shift in culture and technology as home video did, probably much, much more. I'm looking forward to watching it happen.

drzaiusapelord 10y ago

> I am firmly in the position that it's not ready for public consumption yet and won't be for quite some time. Perhaps right now, but come October the PSVR will be out. Its half the price of the Vive and works with your existing PS4. The reviews for the games have been mostly positive and the graphics in them are incredible compared to the shovelware both the Vive and the Rift suffer from. The move controllers seem to have better back-end processing and will probably never match the smoothness and fidelity of Vive tracking, but I imagine it will be good enough. Sony's 60 to 120fps re-projection seems to be working well too. I'm very impressed at what Sony is attempting to pull off here. VR with maybe 1/3rd the GPU/CPU heft of an average gaming PC is quite the technical hurdle for Sony's engineers. I think PSVR is going to change everything in terms of VR adoption and how the public sees VR. >I expect a lot of VR units are shown off to friends and thrown into the closet or put on a shelf to collect dust. I use mine multiple times a week. Its very exciting to see what the new VR game of the week/month is and try it out. Right now, all the Vive owners I know are enjoying Battle Dome, which is a laser tage/Splatoon style game. Its early access and ugly as sin, but a lot of fun. Or if not that PoolNationVR, which is much more polished. I've also enjoyed spending some time in AltspaceVR. As far as I'm concerned its the metaverse jr. I am looking forward to what the guys at High Fidelity are doing (which is pretty much Second Life in VR), but I think the more managed, simplistic, and curated AltspaceVR approach will win in the long run.