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A proprietary VR framework for a specific flavor of mobile phone with inadequate displays that will make people want to vomit if they try to use it for any seri

A proprietary VR framework for a specific flavor of mobile phone with inadequate displays that will make people want to vomit if they try to use it for any serious amount of time. Wonderful. God forbid we come together on WebVR instead of turning the VR space into yet another "monopolies punching eachother" not-invented-here pit fight.

watty 10y ago
I've got a GearVR with Galaxy S6 and the display is adequate. Not one of the 6 or so people I've let try it have wanted to vomit. No one is stopping you from running with your own WebVR platform, my guess is that it's not an easy thing to make money off of (which is what Google does).
- kyledrake 10y ago
  > I've got a GearVR with Galaxy S6 and the display is adequate. Not one of the 6 or so people I've let try it have wanted to vomit. Try using it for an hour or more. Keep a toilet handy. > No one is stopping you from running with your own WebVR platform, my guess is that it's not an easy thing to make money off of (which is what Google does). It's fun to pretend this is a passive thing that doesn't hurt the rest of the industry, but they've cannibalized talented people for this project that were previously working on WebVR. So I'm sorry if I'm not all that jazzed about torturing developers for the next 10 years with several shitty proprietary SDKs for doing VR development that won't work with eachother, when we could have a standard we can all come together and agree on and that runs on every device and platform with the same code. Have we seriously learned nothing from mobile phone competing SDKs and proprietary app stores nightmare?
  - fixermark 10y ago
    I think what we've learned from the past several years in game development is "Let Unity paper over the SDK differences, and if you need to rip apart the engine, hire a subcontracting game dev studio to port your stuff to other architectures."
  - vinylkey 10y ago
    > Try using it for an hour or more. Keep a toilet handy. I don't think that's quite fair. Some people might get nausea from using VR while others won't. Just like carsickness doesn't affect everyone, "VRsickness" doesn't either.
    - kyledrake 10y ago
      It's not about an individual's tolerance, it's because the phones are not capable of having a refresh rate that's fast enough for your brain's ability to process it. That's why all the serious VR headsets right now require a physical cable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBtXMtUNpdE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBtXMtUNpdE It's going to be a very long time before mobile phones are capable of refresh rates sufficient to prevent this issue. The fastest consumer graphics cards are barely capable of keeping up with this rate as-is. Aside from being yet-another proprietary SDK for VR development, Google VR is DoA regardless because it depends on a hardware platform that simply won't work well for what it's trying to do. Please let's focus on WebVR. Please?
      - 1457389 10y ago
        >refresh rate that's fast enough for your brain's ability to process it Lol can we keep junk science out of threads like these. Nobody knows enough about the tech yet to say things like this, especially with such vehemence. Let's start with the fact that the visual system definitely doesn't have some sort of unitary processing rate. It's incredibly context dependent, just like VR. From personal experience I have never had VR sickness, and I use my Note 4 Gear VR every week on flights to watch multiple ~2hr movies and play timepass games with no ill effects. On the contrary it's pretty fun once you get off HN and actually try it...
- shiftpgdn 10y ago
  Your GearVR is polling it's position and velocities at 1000hz, about 5x that of Daydream. Your GearVR is a much, much nicer device than this fabric cardboard.
fixermark 10y ago
What advantages, besides standardization, does WebVR bring to the space? VR is still a relatively high-performance 3D realtime application space. Those aren't generally adjectives I associate with either "JavaScript" or "Browser," so if I were trying to invest in an experience the average consumer will enjoy, I'd be extremely skittish about this tech stack unless I can see some successful high-performance demos.
- ngokevin 10y ago
  Room scale WebVR experience built with A-Frame (https://aframe.io https://aframe.io) running 90fps in the browser: http://blog.mozvr.com/a-painter http://blog.mozvr.com/a-painter WebVR advantages: open (not owned by a single entity), connected (travel from experience to experience without having to close and open), publish a web page in ten seconds vs. one month (six months for Oculus), no installs / downloads which is better suited for long-tail content, ability to be responsive / gracefully degrade (for better or worse).
natural219 10y ago
Standardization typically comes 5-10 years after the initial wave of hardware innovation. During the early years, it benefits individual companies to be able to iterate on both the hardware/software quickly. Once hardware stabilizes it's much easier to begin discussing software standardization.
- ethbro 10y ago
  Someone remembers Glide...
- kyledrake 10y ago
  Or we could discuss standardization right now and not waste billions of dollars trying to trick developers into building on ephemeral platforms via prison-inspired app stores that don't have their best interests in mind https://webvr.info/ https://webvr.info/
  - ethbro 10y ago
    To be fair, specifications that predate functional reference hardware tend to be either overly complex too simplistic.
    - kyledrake 10y ago
      The only "big" change that came about so far has been the HTC Vive controllers (which are amazing). The ridiculously simple solution for WebVR was to add support for them to the Gamepad API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Gamepad_API/Using_the_Gamepad_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Gamepad_API... This is a great example of how the hardware can differ but the software can be the same. Both Oculus and Vive work on WebVR, including the Vive controllers. Nobody had to throw away everything and start over just because of a hardware innovation. If we start seeing special SDKs for each platform, this benefit goes away.
  - detaro 10y ago
    And then waste money on hacks to get all that stuff that is missing from the standard to work.
_pius 10y ago
A proprietary VR framework for a specific flavor of mobile phone with inadequate displays that will make people want to vomit if they try to use it for any serious amount of time. Wonderful. That's neither fair nor accurate. Google wants to do VR at Android scale and they're starting with their flagship phone. The claim about the display and vomiting just isn't true. God forbid we come together on WebVR instead of turning the VR space into yet another "monopolies punching eachother" not-invented-here pit fight. People are coming together on WebVR! Chrome, Edge, Firefox, the GearVR browser all have experimental support for it and the spec is working its way through the W3C review process.

A proprietary VR framework for a specific flavor of mobile phone with inadequate displays that will make people want to vomit if they try to use it for any serious amount of time. Wonderful. God forbid we come together on WebVR instead of turning the VR space into yet another "monopolies punching eachother" not-invented-here pit fight.

watty 10y ago

I've got a GearVR with Galaxy S6 and the display is adequate. Not one of the 6 or so people I've let try it have wanted to vomit. No one is stopping you from running with your own WebVR platform, my guess is that it's not an easy thing to make money off of (which is what Google does).

kyledrake 10y ago
> I've got a GearVR with Galaxy S6 and the display is adequate. Not one of the 6 or so people I've let try it have wanted to vomit. Try using it for an hour or more. Keep a toilet handy. > No one is stopping you from running with your own WebVR platform, my guess is that it's not an easy thing to make money off of (which is what Google does). It's fun to pretend this is a passive thing that doesn't hurt the rest of the industry, but they've cannibalized talented people for this project that were previously working on WebVR. So I'm sorry if I'm not all that jazzed about torturing developers for the next 10 years with several shitty proprietary SDKs for doing VR development that won't work with eachother, when we could have a standard we can all come together and agree on and that runs on every device and platform with the same code. Have we seriously learned nothing from mobile phone competing SDKs and proprietary app stores nightmare?
- fixermark 10y ago
  I think what we've learned from the past several years in game development is "Let Unity paper over the SDK differences, and if you need to rip apart the engine, hire a subcontracting game dev studio to port your stuff to other architectures."
- vinylkey 10y ago
  > Try using it for an hour or more. Keep a toilet handy. I don't think that's quite fair. Some people might get nausea from using VR while others won't. Just like carsickness doesn't affect everyone, "VRsickness" doesn't either.
  - kyledrake 10y ago
    It's not about an individual's tolerance, it's because the phones are not capable of having a refresh rate that's fast enough for your brain's ability to process it. That's why all the serious VR headsets right now require a physical cable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBtXMtUNpdE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBtXMtUNpdE It's going to be a very long time before mobile phones are capable of refresh rates sufficient to prevent this issue. The fastest consumer graphics cards are barely capable of keeping up with this rate as-is. Aside from being yet-another proprietary SDK for VR development, Google VR is DoA regardless because it depends on a hardware platform that simply won't work well for what it's trying to do. Please let's focus on WebVR. Please?
    - 1457389 10y ago
      >refresh rate that's fast enough for your brain's ability to process it Lol can we keep junk science out of threads like these. Nobody knows enough about the tech yet to say things like this, especially with such vehemence. Let's start with the fact that the visual system definitely doesn't have some sort of unitary processing rate. It's incredibly context dependent, just like VR. From personal experience I have never had VR sickness, and I use my Note 4 Gear VR every week on flights to watch multiple ~2hr movies and play timepass games with no ill effects. On the contrary it's pretty fun once you get off HN and actually try it...
shiftpgdn 10y ago
Your GearVR is polling it's position and velocities at 1000hz, about 5x that of Daydream. Your GearVR is a much, much nicer device than this fabric cardboard.

fixermark 10y ago

What advantages, besides standardization, does WebVR bring to the space? VR is still a relatively high-performance 3D realtime application space. Those aren't generally adjectives I associate with either "JavaScript" or "Browser," so if I were trying to invest in an experience the average consumer will enjoy, I'd be extremely skittish about this tech stack unless I can see some successful high-performance demos.

ngokevin 10y ago
Room scale WebVR experience built with A-Frame (https://aframe.io https://aframe.io) running 90fps in the browser: http://blog.mozvr.com/a-painter http://blog.mozvr.com/a-painter WebVR advantages: open (not owned by a single entity), connected (travel from experience to experience without having to close and open), publish a web page in ten seconds vs. one month (six months for Oculus), no installs / downloads which is better suited for long-tail content, ability to be responsive / gracefully degrade (for better or worse).

natural219 10y ago

Standardization typically comes 5-10 years after the initial wave of hardware innovation. During the early years, it benefits individual companies to be able to iterate on both the hardware/software quickly. Once hardware stabilizes it's much easier to begin discussing software standardization.

ethbro 10y ago
Someone remembers Glide...
kyledrake 10y ago
Or we could discuss standardization right now and not waste billions of dollars trying to trick developers into building on ephemeral platforms via prison-inspired app stores that don't have their best interests in mind https://webvr.info/ https://webvr.info/
- ethbro 10y ago
  To be fair, specifications that predate functional reference hardware tend to be either overly complex too simplistic.
  - kyledrake 10y ago
    The only "big" change that came about so far has been the HTC Vive controllers (which are amazing). The ridiculously simple solution for WebVR was to add support for them to the Gamepad API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Gamepad_API/Using_the_Gamepad_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Gamepad_API... This is a great example of how the hardware can differ but the software can be the same. Both Oculus and Vive work on WebVR, including the Vive controllers. Nobody had to throw away everything and start over just because of a hardware innovation. If we start seeing special SDKs for each platform, this benefit goes away.
- detaro 10y ago
  And then waste money on hacks to get all that stuff that is missing from the standard to work.

_pius 10y ago

A proprietary VR framework for a specific flavor of mobile phone with inadequate displays that will make people want to vomit if they try to use it for any serious amount of time. Wonderful. That's neither fair nor accurate. Google wants to do VR at Android scale and they're starting with their flagship phone. The claim about the display and vomiting just isn't true. God forbid we come together on WebVR instead of turning the VR space into yet another "monopolies punching eachother" not-invented-here pit fight. People are coming together on WebVR! Chrome, Edge, Firefox, the GearVR browser all have experimental support for it and the spec is working its way through the W3C review process.