10 ms·

In my mind, there's no other way for VR to go mainstream except for mobile. Average people will not buy a multi thousand dollar gaming rig, and the big software

• hood_syntax 10y ago
  > If VR is going to go beyond the high end gaming niche Why should it? Frankly, that seems to be the main use case. VR that can fit in a phone isn't worthwhile VR, it would be incredibly underpowered.
  • increment_i 10y ago
    Like I said before, I imagine the large platform companies want to see how much a revenue generator it can become if it reaches mass appeal. This can only really happen on mobile.
  • rifung 10y ago
    I think it will be a big use case but the main one? I'd guess that goes to.. (note NSFW) http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2016/07/japan-vr-porn-festival-shut-down/ http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2016/07/japan-vr-porn-festi...
    • drzaiusapelord 10y ago
      I have a Vive and have tried VR porn. There's not a lot of say. You get some pretty bad uncanny valley issues and having a first person view of porn is weird and unatural and frankly unsexy. Porn that 'happens to you' doesn't really work. I don't think porn VR is the killer app people think it is. Perhaps in a few generations especially in conjunction with tele-dildos or robot sex dolls or somesuch, but that's a lot to ask when ordinary 2D photos and videos get the blood flowing with much less hassle.
  • ececconi 10y ago
    I think it's going to get as much adoption as the Playstation Move controllers or Microsoft Kinect.
    • xigency 10y ago
      Exactly. I can hardly see an application or any utility outside of gaming.
    • JBReefer 10y ago
      The Kinect is truly giant in computer vision/hobbyist circles. Your metaphor may be good, but not for the reasons you mean - I think gaming won't be impacted, but industries will be.
  • atom-morgan 10y ago
    VR has so many possibilities outside of gaming I think saying gaming is the tip of the iceberg might be exaggerating gaming's overall role in VR.
    • beefield 10y ago
      Could you mention a few? (I definitely am not trying to be sarcastic, your statement is pretty much what I think, but somehow whenever I try to think of these practical opportunities, I fail to grasp anything with even remotely the potential user base of gaming.)
      • talmand 10y ago
        Education for one. A properly scanned museum would be interesting to walk through. Able to walk around construction projects before they start. Able to walk around construction projects as they are built. Main deal I could expect out of a cheap version of VR technology with decent enough data connection is telepresence. One could attend any event, large or small, around the world as if you were there.
      • wehadfun 10y ago
        I asked the same question and got downvoted to oblivion. In what situation would you watch netflix on this as opposed to your 60 inch TV?
        • shiftpgdn 10y ago
          When Netflix starts serving up hardcore pornography.
        • Corrado 10y ago
          How about on a long, boring, airline flight?
          • wehadfun 10y ago
            Yes, on a flight, passenger in a car/bus, maybe on a machine on gym.
  • msabalau 10y ago
    VR photographs can be both be captured and viewed on a smartphone. Big screen playback of YouTube and Netflix through a smartphone would offer a much better experience than watching a limited selection of titles on a postcard sized screen on the back of an aircraft seat. Given that you're going to own a smartphone anyway, an accessory that's an order of magnitude cheaper than high end VR seems like it has a place.
    • Corrado 10y ago
      Actually, I think that using VR to watch movies in constrained spaces (i.e. airplane seat) would be a fantastic idea. Having just been on a long and boring flight, I would have given quite a bit to watch a movie on a "big screen", even if it was virtual.
      • ryandamm 10y ago
        This is actually one of the best, current use-cases for today's mobile VR. There will be more, though.
  • erikpukinskis 10y ago
    > Frankly, [high end gaming] seems to be the main use case. That's the case now, that and porn will be the early adopter uses. But I'm pretty sure the Killer App is going to be feeling like you are in the same space as someone you're not actually in the same space with. Which doesn't require much technologically. You could probably get social presence with a pair of microlasers pointed at pair of lenses, plus spatial audio.
• talmand 10y ago
  That's not that big a deal. Today's high end gaming is tomorrow's mainstream gaming and the day after tomorrow's budget gaming. If the market wants it, the market will get it.
• MBCook 10y ago
  I disagree, and the answer is released next week. It's the Playstation VR. Sony has sold 40m of the things (the PS4) world wide and each one is capable of doing VR if you buy the headset. Something wireless is almost certainly the ideal way to do VR but until we get WAY more power and efficiency that won't work. In the mean time the PS VR will have lots of industry support (best push we've got) and doesn't need a $900-$2000 computer.
  • awesomerobot 10y ago
    You're still talking about an audience that's predominantly gamers. The mobile phone market by default has a much larger market. My parents have phones that can do VR, they don't have a Playstation.
    • MBCook 10y ago
      The gamer audience is pretty damn big. It's not an obscure hobby. A huge number of households have gaming consoles. It's way way way bigger than the number that have custom built ultra-high end PCs. Phones that will be powerful enough to provide a good experience for more than a short amount of time (due to battery, etc.) and with the abilities of other VR systems (hand controllers, positional tracking, etc) are going to be a fair ways off.
      • Snowdax 10y ago
        A vast swathe of "the gamer audience" is on mobile though. The bulk of the numbers are people playing the likes of Candy Crush and Temple run, not COD or Halo. Just the ones who flesh out the most money for gaming.
        • MBCook 10y ago
          Does that really detract from my point that the PS VR is probably the most mainstream way of introducing VR we'll have for a while that isn't heavily constrained and doesn't require thousands of dollars of hardware? Yes all gamers (including phones) is a bigger group than console gamers, but there are still a TON of console gaming households who have proven willing to throw down real money to buy hardware to play specific games.
• deleted 10y ago
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• ronald_raygun 10y ago
  I think there is a market for both. I think that you will see systems bifurcate (like you see right now with games -- high end rigs and consoles vs mobile) to high end systems and low end systems.
• excalibur 10y ago
  Surrendering your phone to your VR device is a hassle. It's a lot of work to make sure your battery is adequately charged, remove it from its case, sync all of your peripherals, and insert it in the headset. I think that ideally VR should be a standalone device that connects to nothing but power, WiFi, 4G/5G, and bluetooth. (And yes, it can have a 3.5 mm jack too.) The basis for this technology would naturally be a built-in mobile device, so mobile VR is in this sense the path forward.
  • BinaryIdiot 10y ago
    This is the right answer. Putting your phone into a visor is an awkward stop-gap but ultimately it needs to be something that can interface with your phone, wirelessly, so you can simply pop it on whenever you want to play around with some VR.
  • dragonwriter 10y ago
    > Surrendering your phone to your VR device is a hassle. Yes, but it is cheaper than duplicating the hardware of a flagship phone in a VR device, which is basically the atlernative, given that the phone-based VR devices are using the sensors, display, and basic compute functionality (CPU/GPU/RAM, etc.) of the phone. Eventually, the necessary hardware for acceptable VR will be cheap enough that its not worth the hassle of surrendering a phone for it, and it will be viable for the mass market as a standalone device, but right now I think -- outside of very narrow niches -- the phone-as-core VR display design makes a lot of sense.
• montibbalt 10y ago
  I think VR can only become mainstream/ubiquitous once it has an "iPhone moment" that fundamentally changes what VR even is in the first place. Right now everyone is thinking about how to make the VR we heard about 30 years ago. Sure, we have faster processors and everything is smaller and lighter now but if you look at VR demos from the 80s it's really all of the same stuff taking the same approach with all the same issues and all the same empty promises. VR's problem right now is it's just the same boring novelty it's always been.
  • imaginenore 10y ago
    Well, there are only a few real options 1) A dark box on your head with a screen (or a projector) inside 2) Direct connection to the brain We're not even close to solving #2, and even if we were, I'm not sure many people would agree so a surgical procedure. We could create a light weight version of #1 without the box - something like glasses with screens or low-power laser projectors, but then you'd need to be in a relatively dark place for the true immersion. Dlodlo V1 VR is doing that, I think. And ODG R-7 Smartglasses, kind-of.
    • montibbalt 10y ago
      I'm not even necessarily talking about just the hardware specifically - the whole experience stinks. Nobody's really figured out what to do with it yet. I think mainstream VR as a whole will have to be something way different from what's being made now, and I don't know what that even looks like.
• nilkn 10y ago
  Give it a few years and affordable PCs will be able to power VR just fine. A device like the Rift will also become much cheaper over the next few years. Given how easy the Rift is to set up (pretty much just plug it in along with a single webcam that sits on your desk), I don't see any other major impediments to it going mainstream once the prices fall. Mobile VR still has an important unsolved problem too (absolute positional tracking throughout a room). Google and Oculus's John Carmack are working on this problem (independently of one another), and hopefully we'll see some of their work make it into commercial products in the next few years. But for now it's a real limitation of mobile VR devices.
  • theinternetman 10y ago
    Still means you need a PC, mainstream is all tablets, laptops and consoles. If vr ever goes mainstream beyond a mobile phone gimmick addon it will be via Playstation or Xbox
    • nilkn 10y ago
      I consider PC gaming to be mainstream. It's a huge market, as evidenced by Steam.
• chrischen 10y ago
  There's PS4.
• fooey 10y ago
  Seems the answer is pretty obvious. Strap a thing to your face style VR is never going to be mainstream.
• eloisant 10y ago
  I've tried the Samsung Gear VR. It doesn't feel immersive at all, it just feels like I'm looking at a phone strapped on my head. I agree that the multi-thousand machines to power an Oculus is too expensive to go mainstream, but phone-based VR suck too much to go mainstream. The resolution is too low, headtracking is not good enough... At best people will get those phone VR headset for free, play a little bit with it, show it off to their friends and as soon as the novelty wears off it will collect dust. VR needs a much, much better experience to become a thing. Either PC-based VR becomes cheaper or phone-based VR becomes better I don't know, but that's not for 2017.
• zamalek 10y ago
  > multi thousand dollar gaming rig This meme is blatantly incorrect. You don't require a multi-thousand dollar rig for VR, let alone gaming at maximum settings. A multi-thousand dollar rig is strictly enthusiast-grade - that is when you put components into the PC for no practical purpose whatsoever and in some cases to the detriment of performance (e.g. 4-way SLI/Crossfire). Even $1000 is pushing the boundary of enthusiast. Getting into PC-based VR can cost less if you go with entry-level VR components. This $850 PC[1], for example, will crush nearly all VR titles with little-to-no compromise. Valid and educated criticism levied against PC VR would be the price of the devices themselves, the annoying cables and the immaturity of the optics (both the Vive and the Oculus are different imperfect trade-offs). [1]: http://pcpartpicker.com/list/nDXTM8 http://pcpartpicker.com/list/nDXTM8
  • alexhawdon 10y ago
    Okay, slight hyperbole from OP, but the point still stands: most people need to buy (and find room for) a desktop PC in order to experience VR. Also, you linked to a parts list. This automatically excludes most people who don't have the knowledge or motivation to assemble their own computer.
    • zamalek 10y ago
      Completely valid criticism. That being said, the Gigabyte Aero 14 is a fantastically priced and built gaming laptop that might be able to pull off VR (if not, you can get GPU enclosures now). Personally I find that roomscale is a bit of gimmick, but I'm more interested in seated VR titles because I'm one of the lucky few that don't get VR sickness (another valid concern).
      • alexhawdon 10y ago
        As in external GPUs? Would these connect to USB3 or do they require something more heavy duty?
        • zamalek 10y ago