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How to Get into VR

305 points by vincentschen 9y ago

it_learnses 9y ago
do I need a PC to be able to get into it?
- moron4hire 9y ago
  Not necessarily. As always, the answer is "it depends". If you're looking to get into high-end, room-scale VR with hand-tracked controllers and high-fidelity graphics, then yes. You need a Windows 10 PC with as much RAM, CPU, and GPU as you can muster. Plan on spending at least USD 2000 on a custom-built PC. If you're looking to get into smartphone-based AR, you can use practically anything to write the code, and there are plenty of tools to be able to build completely cross-platform apps. But you will want a flagship phone, whether that's the latest iPhone or one of the Androids with a powerful CPU and GPU. AR is very CPU intensive. While there have been demonstrations of SLAM on GPUs, all of the implementations I'm aware of are doing it on the CPU. Where should you start? Well, without hand-tracking of some kind, I don't really consider it VR. Google Cardboard, Google Daydream, Samsung Gear VR, and Oculus Rift without the Touch controllers are all glorified 2D interfaces. They don't provide anything actually new in terms of being able to interact with the application. Smartphone-based AR apps will probably reach a wider audience sooner than VR. But if Microsoft's approach to headsets and Windows Holographic pays off, I think that is not a perpetual state of affairs. Ideally, this gets down to the size of a pair of sunglasses (which is very nearly the case already). At that point, smartphone-based AR is going to be a quaint novelty.
  - kettlecorn 9y ago
    2000 USD is too high for the cost of a VR PC. I built a PC in fall 2016 that was more powerful than what was required for VR and it cost me around $1200. Additionally there are companies advertising "VR Ready PCs" that come with an Oculus headset for around USD 1,000. See this article: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/01/dont-look-now-but-oculus-ready-pcs-are-getting-relatively-cheap/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/01/dont-look-now-but-ocu...
    - moron4hire 9y ago
      Well lah dee freaking dah, dude. I'm just talking about rough ballparks.
      - kettlecorn 9y ago
        You used the language "at least" implying that you had a fair amount of certainty that that's the minimum cost of a VR PC. Additionally you were off by at least a factor of 2, which is outside a rough ballpark. While it might seem picky the amount of people who would decide to commit 2k to VR is far lower than those who would commit 1k, so in this case it is important to be accurate.
        omg_ketchup 9y ago
        If you include the price of the headset with a serious VR development computer, you get pretty close to $2,000 pretty quickly.
        kettlecorn 9y ago
        That is true. I was discussing just the cost of the PC in the above comments, but when I built my development PC and bought a Vive it ended up costing me over 2k USD after taxes.
        moron4hire 9y ago
        $1000 might be good enough for playing the Vive and Rift games that launched with the platform. If that's all you want, I guess you're not quite so annoyingly pedantic as you first seem. But that's a really narrow use case. "I'd like to play only the worst VR games, please. Let's forget about keeping up with the market. That's not for me." If you're just getting in as a consumer, a $1000 VR-capable PC is going to age very quickly. In my experience, the only way to get any sort of legs out of a high-end purchase is to buy the top of the line. Unless you're buying right before a major product release, my experience has been that you end up spending less year over year than if you try to commoditize. But I took the person I was replying to to be asking about getting in as a developer, considering the blog post is about getting in as a developer, and considering this site is full of developers. $2000 has been very consistently the price one pays for "top of the line PC with parts that aren't going to shit the bed". You should not cheap out on a development PC for VR. You're going to be doing a lot of experimenting and running up against performance limits during development. You should have some headroom to avoid giving yourself a headache for the day. But go ahead. Buy a Radeon GPU. Have fun not being able to use your VR headset right before a crucial demo because of some obscure driver issue. Cheap out on a crappy power supply. See how many investors you get for our VR startup when your demo PC won't even start.
- carlosdp 9y ago
  At the moment, if you want the real VR with positional 6 DOF tracking, yes.
- haydenlee 9y ago
  Check out the Samsung Gear VR and Google Daydream if you have a compatible smartphone. If you don't you can use Google Cardboard (I believe even with iOS). From a development standpoint the main difference between mobile headsets and PC headsets is that mobile VR doesn't track the physical position of your head or hands. However you can still learn a ton and make a lot of cool things with them.
  - omg_ketchup 9y ago
    You can just download VR prototyping kits for Unity or Unreal, you don't even need a headset.
- DSMan195276 9y ago
  Nope. I just recently did a VR project for school, and we did it all with a Gear VR using Samsung phone's. The interfaces aren't the best, but you can make things fairly portable so you could always move to a PC later if you wanted to.
- Ologn 9y ago
  I have a Google Pixel and Google Daydream and am an Android programmer. If you have these things you can go into Google's Daydream store and download some Daydream apps, free or paid. I have done so and virtually every app has a logo somewhere said made with Unity. Each app seems to be multi-platform - it is made with Unity, and exported to Google Daydream, Oculus, Gear VR etc. I programmed a basic OpenGLES shape in Android Studio for Daydream, but there was a lot that was lacking. I suspect most people will use Unity, and target the various VR platforms. So in general, the answer is you need a platform Unity is on. Which in production is MacOS and Windows, although they have a Linux beta from what I understand.
- vincentschen 9y ago
  No! To get started, there are many opportunities for VR dev on smartphones. You can even start working with hand-tracking with the new Samsung Gear/Google Daydream! However, you do need a PC with a pretty good GPU if you want to get serious about playing with more advanced systems like the Vive and the Rift. (This was a great resource for me when I built my PC! http://www.logicalincrements.com/articles/vrguide http://www.logicalincrements.com/articles/vrguide)
moron4hire 9y ago
I've only seen the talk in person and I've not been able to find a resource online that enumerates exactly what he means, but Dr. Ken Perlin gives an excellent talk (with live demo) about how AR could potentially change the human communication completely. The gist of it is: assuming ubiquitous access to an AR system that provides a completely shared experience, people will naturally start using that shared experience as a communication tool. We will draw what we mean when words become difficult. We will riff on those ideas in a real-time simulation. And with the mind-set or combination of services, it may as well be, or could actually become, a physical reality. If you've seen any of his more recent, HTML5-based demos (he has completely switched off of Java) involving visually-oriented, live-programmable environments with physics baked-in, it's almost completely targeted at this dream of communication. He has said he's not in it for graphics or VR/AR anymore, it's the communication aspect he's after.
- GFischer 9y ago
  Sounds reasonable, VR or AR need to be a means to a goal, not the goal in and of itself. I share that vision, I believe AR and VR will enable some truly amazing experiences and interactions - the currently limited means of communication of the Internet still amaze me, but we can do so much more...
return0 9y ago
First they should ask if you want to get into VR. I mean, there is a certain crisis, as the hype did not live up and obvious problems (sickness) remained obvious.
- haydenlee 9y ago
  As a professional VR developer I'm unaware of this crisis. There's also about as many headsets sold as people thought there would be (and way more GearVR's than expected). I haven't gotten sick from a VR experience (that I wasn't half-way through building) in over a year. The headsets are good enough that they don't make you sick by default (like they used to) and to make somebody sick you have to go against best design practises.
  - smacktoward 9y ago
    I'm not a VR developer, but from an outside perspective it actually looks like there are a few different crises. 1) Developers seem to be interested in heavyweight VR systems like Vive and Rift, while users (based on sales figures, anyway) seem to be interested in inexpensive, cordless systems like GearVR and Cardboard. Which leads to the awkward situation where all the innovative software is coming out for hardware that very few users actually own. (And then that market gets segmented even further -- with Rift development now orienting around Rift + Touch, for instance, which leaves users without Touch behind.) 2) "It hasn't made me sick in over a year!" is not an answer to concerns about VR making people sick that is going to get people to rush out and buy hardware. Once a product has developed a rep for making people sick (not everybody, of course, but all it takes is enough people), it can take a long, long time to shake that rep off. 3) There's a fundamental problem that nobody in this generation of VR has been able to really solve yet, which is making a headset that is comfortable to wear for long periods. Even simpler solutions like GearVR are heavy enough that you feel their weight after wearing them for 30 minutes or more, and with developers pushing the platform towards bigger/deeper experiences, the trend in hardware doesn't seem like it'll be running primarily towards weight reduction. This could lead to a self-reinforcing cycle of pushing the tech further and further away from a mass audience, as VR enthusiasts (i.e. people who don't mind the weight of existing hardware) demand higher-resolution experiences, which leads to hardware companies pursuing more power instead of less weight, which leads to products that only sell to VR enthusiasts, who demand higher-resolution experiences, etc. Something similar to this happened to the market for flight simulations in the '90s, which resulted in one of the main categories of entertainment software evolving into a tiny niche market of interest only to obsessives. None of which is to say that VR is doomed, or that these things are in reality as serious as they appear to be to an outsider. But I would say there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical that VR will become a big, mass-market hit, at least this go-around.
minimaxir 9y ago
> The development of VR has been surprisingly tied to science fiction. Authors in the field have envisioned the futures that engineers set out to build Incidentally, the high romanticism of VR one of the reasons why I am highly skeptical of the industry. The article argues "VR will also enable immersive concerts, reinvented museums, and live, court-side sporting events", but what is it doing now outside of games, which have been hit-or-miss? (the Samsung Gear VR commercials make VR look ridiculous, IMO) AI is a similarly romantic industry, but the difference is that there are many practical, non-gimmicky applications of AI now and already implemented on your phones/PCs.
- erichocean 9y ago
  > what is it doing now outside of games I'm using room-scale VR to build and explore virtual film sets (HTC Vive, Unreal Engine) and scenes.
- avaer 9y ago
  > The article argues "VR will also enable immersive concerts, reinvented museums, and live, court-side sporting events", but what is it doing now outside of games, which have been hit-or-miss? It's literally doing all of the stuff you mentioned, if you look for it. The blocker is that most people don't have a headset to experience it. The same thing could be (and was) said about the early internet.
  - smacktoward 9y ago
    With the important difference that getting on the early Internet only required a telephone line, which everybody already had, and a modem, an inexpensive piece of hardware you did not have to physically strap onto your face.
    - sbarre 9y ago
      No it also required a computer, which a lot of people did not have back in the mid-90s, and not everyone was prepared to shell out the money to get one (it was certainly not "inexpensive" if you were buying one for the sole purpose of getting online). My source on this? I worked at one of the first consumer ISPs in Canada, and we regularly had people coming in to sign up because they heard about "this Internet thing" but did not have a computer. Most people thought we provided one with the service, and some people just didn't understand that you accessed the Internet through a computer.
mfrager 9y ago
Using VR makes me sick...
- haydenlee 9y ago
  What have you tried?
  - jamesrcole 9y ago
    I think this is a reasonable question, as different headsets are more likely to make people feel ill than others, from what I've heard.
    - haydenlee 9y ago
      Not just different headsets but even different content on the best headsets (as will always be the case until we figure out how to zap your vestibular system in an accurate and safe way).
- vincentschen 9y ago
  This is still a big problem that could hold the technology back... VR devs have the responsibility of creating experiences that don't cause simulator sickness. Ideally, with more powerful systems in the coming years, we'll have the ability to increase performance so our visual and vestibular cues don't get mixed up in VR.
TheOneTrueKyle 9y ago
Why are most of you people shitty human beings with no interests?
adamnemecek 9y ago
To learn shader programming, check out ShaderToy https://www.shadertoy.com/ https://www.shadertoy.com/ its insane how short some of these implementation are.
- cr0sh 9y ago
  I'm not a shader programmer, but I think the key to making proper shaders is to understand that the shaders are a parallel computational system based on vector/matrix math (linear algebra), and being able to conceptualize how to use that for graphic purposes (within the context of a pixel vs vertex shader). It seems that some people (software developers) can do this, and others struggle. Myself, I'm kinda in the middle - then again, I haven't really tried anything with shaders beyond simple examples and such. But my "aha" moment in parallel calcs of this nature came to me during the course of the original 2011 ML Class (MOOC) taught by Andrew Ng - it used Octave as the programming language, and we had to implement a neural network. The "serial implementation" was first implemented (and was really slow), but then we were "challenged" to do the same using only vector/matrix math. I struggled wrapping my head around it, but then a lightbulb went on, and I realized what it was all about. Granted, behind the scenes a still very-much serial process was happening (likely using BLAS), but I could understand the conceptual underpinnings (and that they applied to all similar parallel systems - like clustered processors and GPUs). It was a real revelation to me at the time. Even so, there is something special about these people who can see and do similar things at a "frame buffer" level; some of that stuff is down-right beautiful and amazing to watch (and the code oftentimes so small, as you noted).
  - adamnemecek 9y ago
    That's only a part of the story. The linear algebra and the GPU execution model are like the first step. To write a shader, you have to understand quite a few things about light, materials etc which is the hard part.
Tossrock 9y ago
It's exciting to me that there are still this many naysayers, even here on HN. That suggests there's still time to enter the field before the inflection point hits.
- psyc 9y ago
  The everyday discourse on HN is dominated by naysaying. Vision doesn't stand a chance here.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
soared 9y ago
While this was super interesting to read it was fairly disappointing. I'm hoping the entire series focuses on VR and this wasn't our only post. They lead off with > We talked to college students interested in engineering, business, and technology to figure out what resources would be most helpful to them. Then, we reached out to experts from academia, industry, or some combination of the two. But we all ended up with was a blog post with some links to online courses and books. Is yc doing ...more? I was expecting something like an actual online course/intro with low requirements to get in. IE let me use my laptop camera and some html/css/js to see what building in AR is like.
- haydenlee 9y ago
  Here's an example of using your laptop camera and html to see what building AR is like: https://github.com/jeromeetienne/AR.js https://github.com/jeromeetienne/AR.js
  - soared 9y ago
    Exactly what I've wanted to see and with an easy demo. Thank you!
aVReality 9y ago
Perhaps counterintuitively, I see/hear more interest in VR for business/productivity than for gaming, right now. I think it comes down to stimulation: we're used to gaming and other entertainment being high-octane, exciting experiences. But work/productivity is boring. VR, by virtue of its immersion and fantastical interactions, can bring more excitement to productivity uses (which are typically boring), while adding legitimate value (e.g., building better relationships with remote employees through business collaboration in VR).
- Namrog84 9y ago
  I think VR is still so early and there is still no 'viral winning app' that 100% justifies VR. There is a lot of searching and scrambling for it. Perhaps it is in business and productivity. There is limitless potential for VR, but the tech isn't quite there for many use cases. And worse yet, is there is still no single app or game that is like, this is the single reason you buy into VR. With rising property costs in many major areas and pushes towards open offices. Think of how VR would solve the proximity problem, if you could plug into VR into a virtual office and still have 'proximity benefits' while working remotely but still have privacy/separation and cheap rent and commute.
  - munchbunny 9y ago
    I've been tossing around the adoption issue as well, and I think the "viral winning app" issue is maybe the wrong way to think about it. The viral winning app sells a device, but not an ecosystem. I don't think the iPhone for example had a single viral winning app. It was more a confluence of enough capabilities merged into your phone that it became really helpful to own a smartphone. I suspect that's how VR will go if it succeeds. It eventually hits a price point and there are enough individual reasons to own and use a VR headset that it begins to make sense for everyone to own one.
- munchbunny 9y ago
  I'm working on a VR game at the moment (solo side project for now), and one thing I notice is that you very quickly hit immersion limits for even simple interactions when you use the Touch or Vive controllers. The UX is actually a really hard problem! I can see why that leads to an enterprise approach where UX is a bit less important. More specifically, I'm building a juggling simulator. Other apps and games have simulated throwing and it looks and feels convincing, but once you have to throw multiple things per second, the immersion totally breaks with trigger based grabbing. I've been experimenting trying to find a better approach. Originally I thought it could be a nice fun little project, not really trying to make money. But it took all of maybe five hours of Unity programming to hit untrodden territory! Now I'm starting to nerd out on the immersion and design problem.
Animats 9y ago
Somebody at YC likes "Ready Player One", which is a stupid book. (Essential skill for taking over a big company: ability to play a perfect game of PacMan.) "Snow Crash" was ahead of its time. Yet the plot of Snow Crash would play out the same if everybody simply had modern phones. Where's the killer app for VR? VR headsets have been around for years. The current generation of technology works adequately. Yet other than first person shooters, there's not much to do in there. You can plug into Second Life or High Fidelity with a VR headset, but few people do. Using a VR headset to simulate a screen so you can watch a movie is more trouble than it's worth.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- avaer 9y ago
  > Essential skill for taking over a big company: ability to play a perfect game of PacMan. Upcoming generations see Youtubers as their idols. It sounds stupid on the surface, but the ability to play a perfect game of Pacman wouldn't be the worst thing to bet on if you wanted to take over some big media company. Even if you don't have a tech billionaire stacking the deck. > Where's the killer app for VR? Like finding startup ideas, I don't think the killer VR app is going to come about from someone looking for killer VR apps. It's going to start as something silly done by the people messing around with VR today.
  - kenning 9y ago
    > Upcoming generations see Youtubers as their idols. It sounds stupid on the surface, but the ability to play a perfect game of Pacman wouldn't be the worst thing to bet on if you wanted to take over some big media company. Even if you don't have a tech billionaire stacking the deck. Except talented players are not the most popular youtubers. The best pac-man player in the world is famously unpleasant. > Like finding startup ideas, I don't think the killer VR app is going to come about from someone looking for killer VR apps. It's going to start as something silly done by the people messing around with VR today. This is true. Most VR feels gimmicky to me now, but the best VR experience I've seen was 3d video with extremely well-calibrated audio. For some reason, that was the big difference for me, but I doubt anyone would have predicted that to be the case.
deepnet 9y ago
At least in my case VR simulator sickness was nascent prioproception. Fast paced and hectic movements performed in VR would make someone sick if performed in real life. Back in the day, playing FPSs with shutter glasses, I realised the motion sensations were tied to the motion. Then the sensations became a feature not a bug. Once I understood the feelings they stopped making me nauseous. VR-prioproception improved my FPS performance. Feeling orientation and velocity really helps. And immersion goes off chart. Hard to know what way one is pointing in space, sometimes there are scant motion cues. But in VR with prioproception When your stomach jumps into your mouth, pulling insane high-G maneuvers as bolts of laser fire crackle past your ship. With prioproception you sense it, becoming as Tudyk said "a leaf on the wind". Fully Embodied. No mind, no controls, you just are. My vision for VR is a web browser, informed by Gibson's original vision of cyberspace, XEROX Park's 3D information sorting and VRML97 with Unreal style portals as hyperlinks. IMHO The VR in Snowcrash was mundane. Predating the net, Gibson saw further, to a paradigm shift coming from a new knowledge tool. Gibson's later 'locative art' idea is a nice twist on Augmented Reality - you have to go somewhere to see the virtual art overlayed on that place - it is site specific.
- westoncb 9y ago
  Do you mean 'proprioception'? Btw, I'm working on something that I think has some relation to Gibson's vision of cyberspace—just the '3D information sorting' part though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvfMthDInwE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvfMthDInwE (that video is very outdated unfortunately, but here's a newer screenshot: http://symbolflux.com/images/avdscreen.png http://symbolflux.com/images/avdscreen.png)
  - deepnet 9y ago
    Have you seen Underkoffler's Oblong ? https://www.ted.com/talks/john_underkoffler_drive_3d_data_with_a_gesture
    - westoncb 9y ago
      I haven't. I'll check it out—thanks!
gavanwoolery 9y ago
For those interested in how NOT to get into VR, I present: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OHlaVNOKGM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OHlaVNOKGM
centrinoblue 9y ago
Does anyone have a good resource covering Headset Hardware reviews and specs? I researched this recently looking for an HDMI compatible AR headset to try command line coding with but it was tough to find concise feature/spec/price comparisons. Sign of the times I guess.
- moron4hire 9y ago
  There are no good AR headsets right now. The Hololens doesn't have enough field of view, processing power, or battery to make it very useful, especially not as a development computer of any kind. And while the Meta 2 is tethered to a PC, it's also garbage. I'm not aware of any others that its actually possible to acquire right now.
  - centrinoblue 9y ago
    I'm fine with a tether. I just want something simple that plugs into an HDMI or thunderbolt port and projects my laptop screen into the headset
    - moron4hire 9y ago
      That's what I'm saying. The Hololens works (for some value of "works", as far as the simple demos go) but doesn't tether. The meta 2 tethers but doesn't work.
    - corysama 9y ago
      https://www.reddit.com/r/HMDprogramming/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HMDprogramming/ is about discussing programming inside VR. Not a lot of activity. Current headsets are still equivalent to MCGA solid-angle wise. Best so far for programming seems to be the "Pimax 4K VR" https://medium.com/@n4ru/mobile-full-stack-development-in-4k-vr-dd963bd7cd7d https://medium.com/@n4ru/mobile-full-stack-development-in-4k...
benjoho 9y ago
Another good resource for those starting out in computer graphics/VR. It's the textbook for our VR class at UIUC. http://vr.cs.uiuc.edu/ http://vr.cs.uiuc.edu/
Keyframe 9y ago
There seems to be certain momentum behind VR development, but I'm afraid it will fizzle out on mass market. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it (talk about VR) reminds me a lot of talk about VR in 90's, just on a larger scale. I hope I'm wrong, I just don't see it now for some reason. Maybe if it dies out a bit and then another wave comes around with improved tech and maybe riding on the haptics of the future... who knows. As for AR, I don't see it at all. I just don't see it living outside of commercials with happy people clicking on their phones. What I'm sure is that VR, dead or not on the mass market, will continue to live on in niche varieties (as it did after 90's fizzle out) like job trainings (space, military, medicine..) and such.
- mncharity 9y ago
  This time phones and China exist. Phones will continue to drive display and other tech. China has a dynamic manufacturing sector, to keep churning headsets. And has internet cafes, to support game dev. And VR seems to be catching on in US non-governmental industries like realty. This VR wave seems much more a "look what we can do with current societal phone experience, and phone manufacturing tech", than a "let's struggle again to make something novel and hope it catches on". As for AR, how about this - picture sitting down at your work desktop/laptop screen(s), and having lower-than-screen-resolution 3D, with direct hand manipulation, surround you. Not interested? What else might go badly? The patent trolls are spinning up - BillGates/IntellectualVentures have announced it as a focus. But asia seems still insulated enough to keep going, even if the US sidelines itself. A media freakout seems increasingly unlikely (about VR at least), and would be limited to the US. A game market may grow more slowly than expected, but no longer seems able to vanish. What else? So while takeoff trajectory is perhaps uncertain, I'm having trouble seeing how this wave might fizzle?
  - Keyframe 9y ago
    I'm just not sure it will succeed this time around (en masse). VR needs killer apps, price going down (it's not only about headset), and even more advanced tech in order to be (more) successful. Everyone's talking about headset/displays, but I can't remember anyone talking much (any) about haptics and total immersion - which would be a right and killer direction. As for AR, we've seen Pokemon Go as a success. It was a perfect storm. Even if you disregard AR/Camera segment, one could possibly categorise geolocation segment as AR. There are AR apps for museums, but it's debatable how much of a success that is. Have you used anything with 'hands in the air' for much time? I did use some 3D digitisers with haptic feedback before (in 3D work) and 'gorilla arms' syndrome is real.
sevensor 9y ago
> VR is a new medium This is just blatantly not true, at least not on the implied timescale. VR has been around for literally decades, including immersive VR with head and hand tracking. I know because I used it in 1998. The current VR hype cycle is based on this all having gotten a lot cheaper and faster. To top it off, listing Snow Crash and Neuromancer as suggested reading is just silly. Those are the exact same books we were reading during the last VR boom, and while they're two of my favorites, they're both laughably wrong about VR. Specifically, VR is bad for the exact use cases presented in these novels! VR is, was, and will continue to be a product with niche appeal. We'll see the market expand because it's cheaper, but it's not an effective user interface for most applications.
- faitswulff 9y ago
  They quote this earlier in the article before contradicting themselves with that claim: > “VR is not a new technology. It just became accessible.” – Jeremy Bailenson (Stanford VHIL)
- mncharity 9y ago
  The folks coming from film/video to VR speak of it as a new medium. Describing it as analogous to the early days of cinema, before the now familiar cinematic idioms had been developed. The folks working on WebVR say similar things wrt web idioms. And, to a perhaps lesser extent, gamedevs do too (motion, controls, showing state, haptics, accessing inventory, etc). And almost none of these communities were active in past VR waves. So perhaps you and the article are using the phrase "new medium" differently.
- vincentschen 9y ago
  Yes, perhaps I could have been more clear here. As I mentioned in the post, while technology is certainly not new, it's more accessible, such that creators have access to it as a new medium.
devmunchies 9y ago
I would love to see a "Paths" post about getting into 3D printing. Or if anyone has any good resources for a total beginner I'd be grateful.
Clubber 9y ago
"Silicon Valley" touched on this last week: “It’s a VR play,” Bachman says. “That’s the frothiest space in the Valley right now. Nobody understands it but everyone wants in. Any idiot could walk into a fucking room, utter the letters ‘v’ and ‘r’, and VC’s would hurl bricks of cash at them. “By the time they find out it’s vaporware, it’s too late. I’ve got to get into this.”
- ryandamm 9y ago
  The show is about a year, year and a half out of date. Anecdotally, the funding climate for VR was stupid in 2015, more restrained in 2016 and today. (I think AR might be frothier at this point.) That said, I haven't seen the episode yet, but the show is usually pretty spot on.
  - Clubber 9y ago
    There was a lot of hype, but from what I understood watching the experience videos, the first experience is amazing, then boring because there isn't anything else to it. Like a boring game with great graphics. I suspect once better games or software are written for it, it may improve. Perhaps training and whatnot, but I don't see what it offers over headphones and a big monitor setup, other than nausea, hot eye sockets and possibly a headache. Like I said, I haven't experienced it yet though. Maybe I'm just getting old and crotchety. AR is also interesting. I'm not quite sure how much more helpful it would be over your regular ole' eyeballs. Maybe identifying wildlife or something. Currently a HUD for cars is the most useful thing out there and it's been around for years. It's not groundbreaking though, I can just look down a few more inches. Also, you can't do much more with a HUD as far as information goes without distracting the driver. I would definitely like to identify speed traps before I get there. The police have been trying to collect revenue around my neighborhood (for my safety of course) and I almost became a donor. AR reminds me of the segment where Colbert made fun of the "tech" cup that was able to identify and confirm what you just poured into it. http://www.cc.com/video-clips/9nzwjt/the-colbert-report-vessyl-digital-cup http://www.cc.com/video-clips/9nzwjt/the-colbert-report-vess... IMO, for something to really matter, it must be related to: communication, automation or transportation. (CAT) I just made that up, so if someone wants to put that in a textbook or something, I want credit. You can just use "Clubber." Also, their cellular network idea was pretty good, but it would make much more sense to do something like that out of WIFI because there isn't a centralized provider to snoop and restrict bandwidth. I don't want to spoil it, this season is pretty good.
gfodor 9y ago
One thing that I think can get lost is that to "Get into VR" if you are already a great software engineer you may not need to learn anything new, just find a place to work where you can immediately apply the skills you already have, towards a VR-oriented product. From there, look for opportunities to develop VR-specific skills like the ones mentioned in this article. For example, at our company (AltspaceVR) we have a huge need for engineers of all stripes, not just the types of folks you'd normally think of for what is traditionally thought of as a "game" (this term, too, is probably about to become very stale.) It's a huge challenge for us to get great engineers who are not in the games industry to realize that working in this space, depending on the application, can be much like hopping, say, from a web app to a mobile app. Are there new skills to learn? Yes, tons. But that doesn't mean you are starting at ground zero nor that your current skills aren't going to highly valued and critical to an organization's success. We need people to help build our backend systems (Rails, Kafka, etc), manage ops (Ansible, Datadog, AWS), create deployment tools, build UI (React, but rendered in VR!), work on our mobile app (React Native), build analytics pipelines, the list goes on. In fact I'd argue if you are looking at an organization that doesn't understand the need for such a wide spectrum engineering talent to deliver a great application, you should be careful! Basically for VR companies who are working on applications that will leverage VR, the "VR-specific" slice of the engineering work is probably a lot smaller than you'd expect, just like for companies developing mobile applications, the "mobile specific" part of engineering work is only a part of the effort. In other words, don't think you can't get into this field just because you aren't a graphics geek. (Oh yeah, we're hiring :) https://altvr.com/careers https://altvr.com/careers)
- justin66 9y ago
  There is some fundamental irony in a VR company not allowing remote work (during the first year of employment).
rezashirazian 9y ago
I've always been sceptical of VR. As much as I was amazed by Oculus the first time I tried it, I never thought it was going to catch on. All for the sole reason that humans do not like to have things on their faces. Any technology that needs to mount on the user's face will have to propose a huge value proposition.
anderspitman 9y ago
Just wanted to add my voice to the author's plug for Rainbows End (book). Although I didn't find the story especially engagin, the technological ideas and perspective on VR were inspiring. Bonus if you're into genetics or bioinformatics at all (similar to Jurassic Park in that respect).
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Seconded. I ended the book very impressed with Vernor Vinge's ideas but found the story and writing almost insufferable. I tried it again a few years later and had the same experience. If it were a movie, it would win all technical oscars and blow lots of minds. Neuromancer, on the other hand, has aged astonishingly well. Even though Gibson is a sort of awkward writer, I believe in the people he writes about. If it were a movie, it would bomb but the actors would say it was the best work they ever did.
intrasight 9y ago
The elephant NOT in the room here is Apple. I think one can safely assume that Apple is very actively doing R&D to solve the very hard problems with VR - and they will probably succeed. It'll probably be a walled garden like iOS, but it will still move the market.
- ktta 9y ago
  Are you sure? Because everyone is still waiting on the Mac mini and Mac Pro that is overdue. I really doubt apple's doing anything in the VR space.
  - pswilson14 9y ago
    Apple doesn't have much incentive to build new Mac minis and new Mac Pros.
    - intrasight 9y ago
      Exactly. But they do have a big incentive to participate in the next big wave of personal computing.
      - ktta 9y ago
        Apple has never been about spearheading the 'next big wave'. It's modus operandi has always been step in late, but do it right. VR as I see it now isn't any where close to being the big wave that people are anticipating it to be. I think we still need a bunch more computing power and time before it has any chance of disrupting anything. Even then I doubt Apple will get into VR. Apple is very elitist when it comes to adopting industry standardds. That hasn't stopped it from getting a good foothold in the personal computing market. But it did pretty much kill Apple's chance at making money in the hardcore gaming sector. Which I think will happen again with VR.
        intrasight 9y ago
        I, for one, anticipate it being a big wave - perhaps even the biggest after smartphones. I think it's what comes next. And I for one wouldn't miss the era of walking around poking our index fingers at 5" screens. I do hope that there are senior folks at Apple thinking the same, because I think Apple has the resources to do VR well.
damaru 9y ago
Why are VR posts devoided of any talk about porn technology development. I think a huge market for VR will be the porn industry, and it seems quite untapped at this point.
greggman 9y ago
I still haven't drunk the VR kool-aid. I want to believe. I've used all the software. Played many games. The problems for me are 2 fold 1. I don't have the space. I don't personally know anyone that does. Maybe if you live in the mid-west or the suburbs but there are plenty of cities where people are unlikely to have a space for room scale VR and arguably the non-room scale VR is just not that compelling. Visiting a "VR space" is not ever going to be mainstream so that seems like an issue for mass VR adoption. 2. When I play a good non-VR game I play for hours and days at a time. As an example last month I played Zelda:Breath of the Wild for 70+ hours, 10-14 hours a day. I've yet to play anything in VR that I could stay in for 10-14 hours. In fact many VR games get extremely tiring very quickly. I've played a few where after 10 minutes I'm exhausted. That's doesn't seem likely to become a main form of entertainment. I've also played at a few VR arcades. Again the games have been fun and immersive but the also felt like thrill rides. In other words, 5-10 minutes and I'm done. Neat experience but just like I could not ride a rollercoaster for 10hrs I can't do VR for 10hrs. It's not about the form, it's about the activity. Searching a room, opening draws, pressing various floating buttons, holding virtual weapons. It's tiring not relaxing like non VR games. Those issues don't seem solvable. They aren't tech issues they're inherent to the whole concept. Fixes for the space would require direct brain implants so you don't actually move around, you just think you are. I don't know if there is a solution to the 2nd. It's one thing to push buttons to see Nathan Drake climb mountains. It's another to actually do the climbing. As for the article itself I was a little sad to see VR defined as only > VR… only tracking, rendering, and display. Tracking is the process of recording the user’s location and orientation in 3D space. Rendering is the process of constructing the appropriate image for a user. Display refers to the fidelity with which the hardware can produce the rendered image." Even with the problems mentioned above there seems to still be low-hanging fruit. If you want to be able to talk to people in VR you need to be able to emote. That means you need low-res cameras looking at your eyes and mouth so your avatar can show your expressions. Similarly, 2 hands is not enough. I need censors on my feet and maybe knees, waist, elbows. In many VR experiences I've played things where bumping up against something with my waist or, kicking something away with my feet, using my knee to close a draw etc seem like natural actions that were thwarted by lack of input.
- fitzroy 9y ago
BatFastard 9y ago
Everyone in VR thinks they are creating things for the first time. From 2000 to 2009 I founded and ran the second largest VR company in the world. The number of firsts that my team had was amazing. What really amazes me is now that VR is growing. Zero people have talked to me about what my team learned. Its like the past never existed...
- khuknows 9y ago
  Well... what did your team learn?
  - BatFastard 9y ago
    I will boil down 10 years experience into a few words, "its hard, and expensive". Leveraging the real world paradigm works great in some situations and not at all in others. There are some things that 2D will always be better for, like search and shopping.
mixedbit 9y ago
A very interesting development in this space is WebVR. You can use WebGL to create widely available (95% of browsers) web-based 3D experience and thanks to WebVR the experience can upgrade to VR for visitors that have VR hardware.
JokerDan 9y ago
I would love to get my hands on a VR kit in order to look into AR and UX design, but sadly, I do not have the money to invest in a HTC VIVE or similar.
artur_makly 9y ago
VR Porn i believ will be the biggest of all social consumption. last year i had a chance to try it (out of sheer curiosity and nostalgia) . it was way way to real. the end of society.
euske 9y ago
Everyone is talking about the hardware cost, but people seem to have forgotten the software cost, which will have a much bigger impact to the industry overall. Yes, there will be a few great VR apps and games that actually add to the experience, but what an average VR app is going to be? Making something in VR doesn't necessarily make it better. You have to make a good game/app in the first place. And then there's an additional cost for VR. Now you have one more element to screw up. Look, even a regular standard PC could be 10x more useful if all the software is better built and run flawlessly. Instead we ended up with half-baked glitchy mess. Making a good VR app won't be easier than this. The profit break even point will be higher because people have a higher expectation. It seems the industry is ill-fated.

How to Get into VR

305 points by vincentschen 9y ago

it_learnses 9y ago

do I need a PC to be able to get into it?

moron4hire 9y ago
Not necessarily. As always, the answer is "it depends". If you're looking to get into high-end, room-scale VR with hand-tracked controllers and high-fidelity graphics, then yes. You need a Windows 10 PC with as much RAM, CPU, and GPU as you can muster. Plan on spending at least USD 2000 on a custom-built PC. If you're looking to get into smartphone-based AR, you can use practically anything to write the code, and there are plenty of tools to be able to build completely cross-platform apps. But you will want a flagship phone, whether that's the latest iPhone or one of the Androids with a powerful CPU and GPU. AR is very CPU intensive. While there have been demonstrations of SLAM on GPUs, all of the implementations I'm aware of are doing it on the CPU. Where should you start? Well, without hand-tracking of some kind, I don't really consider it VR. Google Cardboard, Google Daydream, Samsung Gear VR, and Oculus Rift without the Touch controllers are all glorified 2D interfaces. They don't provide anything actually new in terms of being able to interact with the application. Smartphone-based AR apps will probably reach a wider audience sooner than VR. But if Microsoft's approach to headsets and Windows Holographic pays off, I think that is not a perpetual state of affairs. Ideally, this gets down to the size of a pair of sunglasses (which is very nearly the case already). At that point, smartphone-based AR is going to be a quaint novelty.
- kettlecorn 9y ago
  2000 USD is too high for the cost of a VR PC. I built a PC in fall 2016 that was more powerful than what was required for VR and it cost me around $1200. Additionally there are companies advertising "VR Ready PCs" that come with an Oculus headset for around USD 1,000. See this article: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/01/dont-look-now-but-oculus-ready-pcs-are-getting-relatively-cheap/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/01/dont-look-now-but-ocu...
  - moron4hire 9y ago
    Well lah dee freaking dah, dude. I'm just talking about rough ballparks.
    - kettlecorn 9y ago
      You used the language "at least" implying that you had a fair amount of certainty that that's the minimum cost of a VR PC. Additionally you were off by at least a factor of 2, which is outside a rough ballpark. While it might seem picky the amount of people who would decide to commit 2k to VR is far lower than those who would commit 1k, so in this case it is important to be accurate.
      - omg_ketchup 9y ago
        If you include the price of the headset with a serious VR development computer, you get pretty close to $2,000 pretty quickly.
        kettlecorn 9y ago
        That is true. I was discussing just the cost of the PC in the above comments, but when I built my development PC and bought a Vive it ended up costing me over 2k USD after taxes.
      - moron4hire 9y ago
        $1000 might be good enough for playing the Vive and Rift games that launched with the platform. If that's all you want, I guess you're not quite so annoyingly pedantic as you first seem. But that's a really narrow use case. "I'd like to play only the worst VR games, please. Let's forget about keeping up with the market. That's not for me." If you're just getting in as a consumer, a $1000 VR-capable PC is going to age very quickly. In my experience, the only way to get any sort of legs out of a high-end purchase is to buy the top of the line. Unless you're buying right before a major product release, my experience has been that you end up spending less year over year than if you try to commoditize. But I took the person I was replying to to be asking about getting in as a developer, considering the blog post is about getting in as a developer, and considering this site is full of developers. $2000 has been very consistently the price one pays for "top of the line PC with parts that aren't going to shit the bed". You should not cheap out on a development PC for VR. You're going to be doing a lot of experimenting and running up against performance limits during development. You should have some headroom to avoid giving yourself a headache for the day. But go ahead. Buy a Radeon GPU. Have fun not being able to use your VR headset right before a crucial demo because of some obscure driver issue. Cheap out on a crappy power supply. See how many investors you get for our VR startup when your demo PC won't even start.
carlosdp 9y ago
At the moment, if you want the real VR with positional 6 DOF tracking, yes.
haydenlee 9y ago
Check out the Samsung Gear VR and Google Daydream if you have a compatible smartphone. If you don't you can use Google Cardboard (I believe even with iOS). From a development standpoint the main difference between mobile headsets and PC headsets is that mobile VR doesn't track the physical position of your head or hands. However you can still learn a ton and make a lot of cool things with them.
- omg_ketchup 9y ago
  You can just download VR prototyping kits for Unity or Unreal, you don't even need a headset.
DSMan195276 9y ago
Nope. I just recently did a VR project for school, and we did it all with a Gear VR using Samsung phone's. The interfaces aren't the best, but you can make things fairly portable so you could always move to a PC later if you wanted to.
Ologn 9y ago
I have a Google Pixel and Google Daydream and am an Android programmer. If you have these things you can go into Google's Daydream store and download some Daydream apps, free or paid. I have done so and virtually every app has a logo somewhere said made with Unity. Each app seems to be multi-platform - it is made with Unity, and exported to Google Daydream, Oculus, Gear VR etc. I programmed a basic OpenGLES shape in Android Studio for Daydream, but there was a lot that was lacking. I suspect most people will use Unity, and target the various VR platforms. So in general, the answer is you need a platform Unity is on. Which in production is MacOS and Windows, although they have a Linux beta from what I understand.
vincentschen 9y ago
No! To get started, there are many opportunities for VR dev on smartphones. You can even start working with hand-tracking with the new Samsung Gear/Google Daydream! However, you do need a PC with a pretty good GPU if you want to get serious about playing with more advanced systems like the Vive and the Rift. (This was a great resource for me when I built my PC! http://www.logicalincrements.com/articles/vrguide http://www.logicalincrements.com/articles/vrguide)

moron4hire 9y ago

I've only seen the talk in person and I've not been able to find a resource online that enumerates exactly what he means, but Dr. Ken Perlin gives an excellent talk (with live demo) about how AR could potentially change the human communication completely. The gist of it is: assuming ubiquitous access to an AR system that provides a completely shared experience, people will naturally start using that shared experience as a communication tool. We will draw what we mean when words become difficult. We will riff on those ideas in a real-time simulation. And with the mind-set or combination of services, it may as well be, or could actually become, a physical reality. If you've seen any of his more recent, HTML5-based demos (he has completely switched off of Java) involving visually-oriented, live-programmable environments with physics baked-in, it's almost completely targeted at this dream of communication. He has said he's not in it for graphics or VR/AR anymore, it's the communication aspect he's after.

GFischer 9y ago
Sounds reasonable, VR or AR need to be a means to a goal, not the goal in and of itself. I share that vision, I believe AR and VR will enable some truly amazing experiences and interactions - the currently limited means of communication of the Internet still amaze me, but we can do so much more...

return0 9y ago

First they should ask if you want to get into VR. I mean, there is a certain crisis, as the hype did not live up and obvious problems (sickness) remained obvious.

haydenlee 9y ago
As a professional VR developer I'm unaware of this crisis. There's also about as many headsets sold as people thought there would be (and way more GearVR's than expected). I haven't gotten sick from a VR experience (that I wasn't half-way through building) in over a year. The headsets are good enough that they don't make you sick by default (like they used to) and to make somebody sick you have to go against best design practises.
- smacktoward 9y ago
  I'm not a VR developer, but from an outside perspective it actually looks like there are a few different crises. 1) Developers seem to be interested in heavyweight VR systems like Vive and Rift, while users (based on sales figures, anyway) seem to be interested in inexpensive, cordless systems like GearVR and Cardboard. Which leads to the awkward situation where all the innovative software is coming out for hardware that very few users actually own. (And then that market gets segmented even further -- with Rift development now orienting around Rift + Touch, for instance, which leaves users without Touch behind.) 2) "It hasn't made me sick in over a year!" is not an answer to concerns about VR making people sick that is going to get people to rush out and buy hardware. Once a product has developed a rep for making people sick (not everybody, of course, but all it takes is enough people), it can take a long, long time to shake that rep off. 3) There's a fundamental problem that nobody in this generation of VR has been able to really solve yet, which is making a headset that is comfortable to wear for long periods. Even simpler solutions like GearVR are heavy enough that you feel their weight after wearing them for 30 minutes or more, and with developers pushing the platform towards bigger/deeper experiences, the trend in hardware doesn't seem like it'll be running primarily towards weight reduction. This could lead to a self-reinforcing cycle of pushing the tech further and further away from a mass audience, as VR enthusiasts (i.e. people who don't mind the weight of existing hardware) demand higher-resolution experiences, which leads to hardware companies pursuing more power instead of less weight, which leads to products that only sell to VR enthusiasts, who demand higher-resolution experiences, etc. Something similar to this happened to the market for flight simulations in the '90s, which resulted in one of the main categories of entertainment software evolving into a tiny niche market of interest only to obsessives. None of which is to say that VR is doomed, or that these things are in reality as serious as they appear to be to an outsider. But I would say there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical that VR will become a big, mass-market hit, at least this go-around.

minimaxir 9y ago

> The development of VR has been surprisingly tied to science fiction. Authors in the field have envisioned the futures that engineers set out to build Incidentally, the high romanticism of VR one of the reasons why I am highly skeptical of the industry. The article argues "VR will also enable immersive concerts, reinvented museums, and live, court-side sporting events", but what is it doing now outside of games, which have been hit-or-miss? (the Samsung Gear VR commercials make VR look ridiculous, IMO) AI is a similarly romantic industry, but the difference is that there are many practical, non-gimmicky applications of AI now and already implemented on your phones/PCs.

erichocean 9y ago
> what is it doing now outside of games I'm using room-scale VR to build and explore virtual film sets (HTC Vive, Unreal Engine) and scenes.
avaer 9y ago
> The article argues "VR will also enable immersive concerts, reinvented museums, and live, court-side sporting events", but what is it doing now outside of games, which have been hit-or-miss? It's literally doing all of the stuff you mentioned, if you look for it. The blocker is that most people don't have a headset to experience it. The same thing could be (and was) said about the early internet.
- smacktoward 9y ago
  With the important difference that getting on the early Internet only required a telephone line, which everybody already had, and a modem, an inexpensive piece of hardware you did not have to physically strap onto your face.
  - sbarre 9y ago
    No it also required a computer, which a lot of people did not have back in the mid-90s, and not everyone was prepared to shell out the money to get one (it was certainly not "inexpensive" if you were buying one for the sole purpose of getting online). My source on this? I worked at one of the first consumer ISPs in Canada, and we regularly had people coming in to sign up because they heard about "this Internet thing" but did not have a computer. Most people thought we provided one with the service, and some people just didn't understand that you accessed the Internet through a computer.

mfrager 9y ago

Using VR makes me sick...

haydenlee 9y ago
What have you tried?
- jamesrcole 9y ago
  I think this is a reasonable question, as different headsets are more likely to make people feel ill than others, from what I've heard.
  - haydenlee 9y ago
    Not just different headsets but even different content on the best headsets (as will always be the case until we figure out how to zap your vestibular system in an accurate and safe way).
vincentschen 9y ago
This is still a big problem that could hold the technology back... VR devs have the responsibility of creating experiences that don't cause simulator sickness. Ideally, with more powerful systems in the coming years, we'll have the ability to increase performance so our visual and vestibular cues don't get mixed up in VR.

TheOneTrueKyle 9y ago

Why are most of you people shitty human beings with no interests?

adamnemecek 9y ago

To learn shader programming, check out ShaderToy https://www.shadertoy.com/ https://www.shadertoy.com/ its insane how short some of these implementation are.

cr0sh 9y ago
I'm not a shader programmer, but I think the key to making proper shaders is to understand that the shaders are a parallel computational system based on vector/matrix math (linear algebra), and being able to conceptualize how to use that for graphic purposes (within the context of a pixel vs vertex shader). It seems that some people (software developers) can do this, and others struggle. Myself, I'm kinda in the middle - then again, I haven't really tried anything with shaders beyond simple examples and such. But my "aha" moment in parallel calcs of this nature came to me during the course of the original 2011 ML Class (MOOC) taught by Andrew Ng - it used Octave as the programming language, and we had to implement a neural network. The "serial implementation" was first implemented (and was really slow), but then we were "challenged" to do the same using only vector/matrix math. I struggled wrapping my head around it, but then a lightbulb went on, and I realized what it was all about. Granted, behind the scenes a still very-much serial process was happening (likely using BLAS), but I could understand the conceptual underpinnings (and that they applied to all similar parallel systems - like clustered processors and GPUs). It was a real revelation to me at the time. Even so, there is something special about these people who can see and do similar things at a "frame buffer" level; some of that stuff is down-right beautiful and amazing to watch (and the code oftentimes so small, as you noted).
- adamnemecek 9y ago
  That's only a part of the story. The linear algebra and the GPU execution model are like the first step. To write a shader, you have to understand quite a few things about light, materials etc which is the hard part.

Tossrock 9y ago

It's exciting to me that there are still this many naysayers, even here on HN. That suggests there's still time to enter the field before the inflection point hits.

psyc 9y ago
The everyday discourse on HN is dominated by naysaying. Vision doesn't stand a chance here.
deleted 9y ago
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soared 9y ago

While this was super interesting to read it was fairly disappointing. I'm hoping the entire series focuses on VR and this wasn't our only post. They lead off with > We talked to college students interested in engineering, business, and technology to figure out what resources would be most helpful to them. Then, we reached out to experts from academia, industry, or some combination of the two. But we all ended up with was a blog post with some links to online courses and books. Is yc doing ...more? I was expecting something like an actual online course/intro with low requirements to get in. IE let me use my laptop camera and some html/css/js to see what building in AR is like.

haydenlee 9y ago
Here's an example of using your laptop camera and html to see what building AR is like: https://github.com/jeromeetienne/AR.js https://github.com/jeromeetienne/AR.js
- soared 9y ago
  Exactly what I've wanted to see and with an easy demo. Thank you!

aVReality 9y ago

Perhaps counterintuitively, I see/hear more interest in VR for business/productivity than for gaming, right now. I think it comes down to stimulation: we're used to gaming and other entertainment being high-octane, exciting experiences. But work/productivity is boring. VR, by virtue of its immersion and fantastical interactions, can bring more excitement to productivity uses (which are typically boring), while adding legitimate value (e.g., building better relationships with remote employees through business collaboration in VR).

Namrog84 9y ago
I think VR is still so early and there is still no 'viral winning app' that 100% justifies VR. There is a lot of searching and scrambling for it. Perhaps it is in business and productivity. There is limitless potential for VR, but the tech isn't quite there for many use cases. And worse yet, is there is still no single app or game that is like, this is the single reason you buy into VR. With rising property costs in many major areas and pushes towards open offices. Think of how VR would solve the proximity problem, if you could plug into VR into a virtual office and still have 'proximity benefits' while working remotely but still have privacy/separation and cheap rent and commute.
- munchbunny 9y ago
  I've been tossing around the adoption issue as well, and I think the "viral winning app" issue is maybe the wrong way to think about it. The viral winning app sells a device, but not an ecosystem. I don't think the iPhone for example had a single viral winning app. It was more a confluence of enough capabilities merged into your phone that it became really helpful to own a smartphone. I suspect that's how VR will go if it succeeds. It eventually hits a price point and there are enough individual reasons to own and use a VR headset that it begins to make sense for everyone to own one.
munchbunny 9y ago
I'm working on a VR game at the moment (solo side project for now), and one thing I notice is that you very quickly hit immersion limits for even simple interactions when you use the Touch or Vive controllers. The UX is actually a really hard problem! I can see why that leads to an enterprise approach where UX is a bit less important. More specifically, I'm building a juggling simulator. Other apps and games have simulated throwing and it looks and feels convincing, but once you have to throw multiple things per second, the immersion totally breaks with trigger based grabbing. I've been experimenting trying to find a better approach. Originally I thought it could be a nice fun little project, not really trying to make money. But it took all of maybe five hours of Unity programming to hit untrodden territory! Now I'm starting to nerd out on the immersion and design problem.

Animats 9y ago

Somebody at YC likes "Ready Player One", which is a stupid book. (Essential skill for taking over a big company: ability to play a perfect game of PacMan.) "Snow Crash" was ahead of its time. Yet the plot of Snow Crash would play out the same if everybody simply had modern phones. Where's the killer app for VR? VR headsets have been around for years. The current generation of technology works adequately. Yet other than first person shooters, there's not much to do in there. You can plug into Second Life or High Fidelity with a VR headset, but few people do. Using a VR headset to simulate a screen so you can watch a movie is more trouble than it's worth.

deleted 9y ago
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avaer 9y ago
> Essential skill for taking over a big company: ability to play a perfect game of PacMan. Upcoming generations see Youtubers as their idols. It sounds stupid on the surface, but the ability to play a perfect game of Pacman wouldn't be the worst thing to bet on if you wanted to take over some big media company. Even if you don't have a tech billionaire stacking the deck. > Where's the killer app for VR? Like finding startup ideas, I don't think the killer VR app is going to come about from someone looking for killer VR apps. It's going to start as something silly done by the people messing around with VR today.
- kenning 9y ago
  > Upcoming generations see Youtubers as their idols. It sounds stupid on the surface, but the ability to play a perfect game of Pacman wouldn't be the worst thing to bet on if you wanted to take over some big media company. Even if you don't have a tech billionaire stacking the deck. Except talented players are not the most popular youtubers. The best pac-man player in the world is famously unpleasant. > Like finding startup ideas, I don't think the killer VR app is going to come about from someone looking for killer VR apps. It's going to start as something silly done by the people messing around with VR today. This is true. Most VR feels gimmicky to me now, but the best VR experience I've seen was 3d video with extremely well-calibrated audio. For some reason, that was the big difference for me, but I doubt anyone would have predicted that to be the case.

deepnet 9y ago

At least in my case VR simulator sickness was nascent prioproception. Fast paced and hectic movements performed in VR would make someone sick if performed in real life. Back in the day, playing FPSs with shutter glasses, I realised the motion sensations were tied to the motion. Then the sensations became a feature not a bug. Once I understood the feelings they stopped making me nauseous. VR-prioproception improved my FPS performance. Feeling orientation and velocity really helps. And immersion goes off chart. Hard to know what way one is pointing in space, sometimes there are scant motion cues. But in VR with prioproception When your stomach jumps into your mouth, pulling insane high-G maneuvers as bolts of laser fire crackle past your ship. With prioproception you sense it, becoming as Tudyk said "a leaf on the wind". Fully Embodied. No mind, no controls, you just are. My vision for VR is a web browser, informed by Gibson's original vision of cyberspace, XEROX Park's 3D information sorting and VRML97 with Unreal style portals as hyperlinks. IMHO The VR in Snowcrash was mundane. Predating the net, Gibson saw further, to a paradigm shift coming from a new knowledge tool. Gibson's later 'locative art' idea is a nice twist on Augmented Reality - you have to go somewhere to see the virtual art overlayed on that place - it is site specific.

westoncb 9y ago
Do you mean 'proprioception'? Btw, I'm working on something that I think has some relation to Gibson's vision of cyberspace—just the '3D information sorting' part though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvfMthDInwE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvfMthDInwE (that video is very outdated unfortunately, but here's a newer screenshot: http://symbolflux.com/images/avdscreen.png http://symbolflux.com/images/avdscreen.png)
- deepnet 9y ago
  Have you seen Underkoffler's Oblong ? https://www.ted.com/talks/john_underkoffler_drive_3d_data_with_a_gesture
  - westoncb 9y ago
    I haven't. I'll check it out—thanks!

gavanwoolery 9y ago

For those interested in how NOT to get into VR, I present: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OHlaVNOKGM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OHlaVNOKGM

centrinoblue 9y ago

Does anyone have a good resource covering Headset Hardware reviews and specs? I researched this recently looking for an HDMI compatible AR headset to try command line coding with but it was tough to find concise feature/spec/price comparisons. Sign of the times I guess.

moron4hire 9y ago
There are no good AR headsets right now. The Hololens doesn't have enough field of view, processing power, or battery to make it very useful, especially not as a development computer of any kind. And while the Meta 2 is tethered to a PC, it's also garbage. I'm not aware of any others that its actually possible to acquire right now.
- centrinoblue 9y ago
  I'm fine with a tether. I just want something simple that plugs into an HDMI or thunderbolt port and projects my laptop screen into the headset
  - moron4hire 9y ago
    That's what I'm saying. The Hololens works (for some value of "works", as far as the simple demos go) but doesn't tether. The meta 2 tethers but doesn't work.
  - corysama 9y ago
    https://www.reddit.com/r/HMDprogramming/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HMDprogramming/ is about discussing programming inside VR. Not a lot of activity. Current headsets are still equivalent to MCGA solid-angle wise. Best so far for programming seems to be the "Pimax 4K VR" https://medium.com/@n4ru/mobile-full-stack-development-in-4k-vr-dd963bd7cd7d https://medium.com/@n4ru/mobile-full-stack-development-in-4k...

benjoho 9y ago

Another good resource for those starting out in computer graphics/VR. It's the textbook for our VR class at UIUC. http://vr.cs.uiuc.edu/ http://vr.cs.uiuc.edu/

Keyframe 9y ago

There seems to be certain momentum behind VR development, but I'm afraid it will fizzle out on mass market. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it (talk about VR) reminds me a lot of talk about VR in 90's, just on a larger scale. I hope I'm wrong, I just don't see it now for some reason. Maybe if it dies out a bit and then another wave comes around with improved tech and maybe riding on the haptics of the future... who knows. As for AR, I don't see it at all. I just don't see it living outside of commercials with happy people clicking on their phones. What I'm sure is that VR, dead or not on the mass market, will continue to live on in niche varieties (as it did after 90's fizzle out) like job trainings (space, military, medicine..) and such.

mncharity 9y ago
This time phones and China exist. Phones will continue to drive display and other tech. China has a dynamic manufacturing sector, to keep churning headsets. And has internet cafes, to support game dev. And VR seems to be catching on in US non-governmental industries like realty. This VR wave seems much more a "look what we can do with current societal phone experience, and phone manufacturing tech", than a "let's struggle again to make something novel and hope it catches on". As for AR, how about this - picture sitting down at your work desktop/laptop screen(s), and having lower-than-screen-resolution 3D, with direct hand manipulation, surround you. Not interested? What else might go badly? The patent trolls are spinning up - BillGates/IntellectualVentures have announced it as a focus. But asia seems still insulated enough to keep going, even if the US sidelines itself. A media freakout seems increasingly unlikely (about VR at least), and would be limited to the US. A game market may grow more slowly than expected, but no longer seems able to vanish. What else? So while takeoff trajectory is perhaps uncertain, I'm having trouble seeing how this wave might fizzle?
- Keyframe 9y ago
  I'm just not sure it will succeed this time around (en masse). VR needs killer apps, price going down (it's not only about headset), and even more advanced tech in order to be (more) successful. Everyone's talking about headset/displays, but I can't remember anyone talking much (any) about haptics and total immersion - which would be a right and killer direction. As for AR, we've seen Pokemon Go as a success. It was a perfect storm. Even if you disregard AR/Camera segment, one could possibly categorise geolocation segment as AR. There are AR apps for museums, but it's debatable how much of a success that is. Have you used anything with 'hands in the air' for much time? I did use some 3D digitisers with haptic feedback before (in 3D work) and 'gorilla arms' syndrome is real.

sevensor 9y ago

> VR is a new medium This is just blatantly not true, at least not on the implied timescale. VR has been around for literally decades, including immersive VR with head and hand tracking. I know because I used it in 1998. The current VR hype cycle is based on this all having gotten a lot cheaper and faster. To top it off, listing Snow Crash and Neuromancer as suggested reading is just silly. Those are the exact same books we were reading during the last VR boom, and while they're two of my favorites, they're both laughably wrong about VR. Specifically, VR is bad for the exact use cases presented in these novels! VR is, was, and will continue to be a product with niche appeal. We'll see the market expand because it's cheaper, but it's not an effective user interface for most applications.

faitswulff 9y ago
They quote this earlier in the article before contradicting themselves with that claim: > “VR is not a new technology. It just became accessible.” – Jeremy Bailenson (Stanford VHIL)
mncharity 9y ago
The folks coming from film/video to VR speak of it as a new medium. Describing it as analogous to the early days of cinema, before the now familiar cinematic idioms had been developed. The folks working on WebVR say similar things wrt web idioms. And, to a perhaps lesser extent, gamedevs do too (motion, controls, showing state, haptics, accessing inventory, etc). And almost none of these communities were active in past VR waves. So perhaps you and the article are using the phrase "new medium" differently.
vincentschen 9y ago
Yes, perhaps I could have been more clear here. As I mentioned in the post, while technology is certainly not new, it's more accessible, such that creators have access to it as a new medium.

devmunchies 9y ago

I would love to see a "Paths" post about getting into 3D printing. Or if anyone has any good resources for a total beginner I'd be grateful.

Clubber 9y ago

"Silicon Valley" touched on this last week: “It’s a VR play,” Bachman says. “That’s the frothiest space in the Valley right now. Nobody understands it but everyone wants in. Any idiot could walk into a fucking room, utter the letters ‘v’ and ‘r’, and VC’s would hurl bricks of cash at them. “By the time they find out it’s vaporware, it’s too late. I’ve got to get into this.”

ryandamm 9y ago
The show is about a year, year and a half out of date. Anecdotally, the funding climate for VR was stupid in 2015, more restrained in 2016 and today. (I think AR might be frothier at this point.) That said, I haven't seen the episode yet, but the show is usually pretty spot on.
- Clubber 9y ago
  There was a lot of hype, but from what I understood watching the experience videos, the first experience is amazing, then boring because there isn't anything else to it. Like a boring game with great graphics. I suspect once better games or software are written for it, it may improve. Perhaps training and whatnot, but I don't see what it offers over headphones and a big monitor setup, other than nausea, hot eye sockets and possibly a headache. Like I said, I haven't experienced it yet though. Maybe I'm just getting old and crotchety. AR is also interesting. I'm not quite sure how much more helpful it would be over your regular ole' eyeballs. Maybe identifying wildlife or something. Currently a HUD for cars is the most useful thing out there and it's been around for years. It's not groundbreaking though, I can just look down a few more inches. Also, you can't do much more with a HUD as far as information goes without distracting the driver. I would definitely like to identify speed traps before I get there. The police have been trying to collect revenue around my neighborhood (for my safety of course) and I almost became a donor. AR reminds me of the segment where Colbert made fun of the "tech" cup that was able to identify and confirm what you just poured into it. http://www.cc.com/video-clips/9nzwjt/the-colbert-report-vessyl-digital-cup http://www.cc.com/video-clips/9nzwjt/the-colbert-report-vess... IMO, for something to really matter, it must be related to: communication, automation or transportation. (CAT) I just made that up, so if someone wants to put that in a textbook or something, I want credit. You can just use "Clubber." Also, their cellular network idea was pretty good, but it would make much more sense to do something like that out of WIFI because there isn't a centralized provider to snoop and restrict bandwidth. I don't want to spoil it, this season is pretty good.

gfodor 9y ago

One thing that I think can get lost is that to "Get into VR" if you are already a great software engineer you may not need to learn anything new, just find a place to work where you can immediately apply the skills you already have, towards a VR-oriented product. From there, look for opportunities to develop VR-specific skills like the ones mentioned in this article. For example, at our company (AltspaceVR) we have a huge need for engineers of all stripes, not just the types of folks you'd normally think of for what is traditionally thought of as a "game" (this term, too, is probably about to become very stale.) It's a huge challenge for us to get great engineers who are not in the games industry to realize that working in this space, depending on the application, can be much like hopping, say, from a web app to a mobile app. Are there new skills to learn? Yes, tons. But that doesn't mean you are starting at ground zero nor that your current skills aren't going to highly valued and critical to an organization's success. We need people to help build our backend systems (Rails, Kafka, etc), manage ops (Ansible, Datadog, AWS), create deployment tools, build UI (React, but rendered in VR!), work on our mobile app (React Native), build analytics pipelines, the list goes on. In fact I'd argue if you are looking at an organization that doesn't understand the need for such a wide spectrum engineering talent to deliver a great application, you should be careful! Basically for VR companies who are working on applications that will leverage VR, the "VR-specific" slice of the engineering work is probably a lot smaller than you'd expect, just like for companies developing mobile applications, the "mobile specific" part of engineering work is only a part of the effort. In other words, don't think you can't get into this field just because you aren't a graphics geek. (Oh yeah, we're hiring :) https://altvr.com/careers https://altvr.com/careers)

justin66 9y ago
There is some fundamental irony in a VR company not allowing remote work (during the first year of employment).

rezashirazian 9y ago

I've always been sceptical of VR. As much as I was amazed by Oculus the first time I tried it, I never thought it was going to catch on. All for the sole reason that humans do not like to have things on their faces. Any technology that needs to mount on the user's face will have to propose a huge value proposition.

anderspitman 9y ago

Just wanted to add my voice to the author's plug for Rainbows End (book). Although I didn't find the story especially engagin, the technological ideas and perspective on VR were inspiring. Bonus if you're into genetics or bioinformatics at all (similar to Jurassic Park in that respect).

anigbrowl 9y ago
Seconded. I ended the book very impressed with Vernor Vinge's ideas but found the story and writing almost insufferable. I tried it again a few years later and had the same experience. If it were a movie, it would win all technical oscars and blow lots of minds. Neuromancer, on the other hand, has aged astonishingly well. Even though Gibson is a sort of awkward writer, I believe in the people he writes about. If it were a movie, it would bomb but the actors would say it was the best work they ever did.

intrasight 9y ago

The elephant NOT in the room here is Apple. I think one can safely assume that Apple is very actively doing R&D to solve the very hard problems with VR - and they will probably succeed. It'll probably be a walled garden like iOS, but it will still move the market.

ktta 9y ago
Are you sure? Because everyone is still waiting on the Mac mini and Mac Pro that is overdue. I really doubt apple's doing anything in the VR space.
- pswilson14 9y ago
  Apple doesn't have much incentive to build new Mac minis and new Mac Pros.
  - intrasight 9y ago
    Exactly. But they do have a big incentive to participate in the next big wave of personal computing.
    - ktta 9y ago
      Apple has never been about spearheading the 'next big wave'. It's modus operandi has always been step in late, but do it right. VR as I see it now isn't any where close to being the big wave that people are anticipating it to be. I think we still need a bunch more computing power and time before it has any chance of disrupting anything. Even then I doubt Apple will get into VR. Apple is very elitist when it comes to adopting industry standardds. That hasn't stopped it from getting a good foothold in the personal computing market. But it did pretty much kill Apple's chance at making money in the hardcore gaming sector. Which I think will happen again with VR.
      - intrasight 9y ago
        I, for one, anticipate it being a big wave - perhaps even the biggest after smartphones. I think it's what comes next. And I for one wouldn't miss the era of walking around poking our index fingers at 5" screens. I do hope that there are senior folks at Apple thinking the same, because I think Apple has the resources to do VR well.

damaru 9y ago

Why are VR posts devoided of any talk about porn technology development. I think a huge market for VR will be the porn industry, and it seems quite untapped at this point.

greggman 9y ago

I still haven't drunk the VR kool-aid. I want to believe. I've used all the software. Played many games. The problems for me are 2 fold 1. I don't have the space. I don't personally know anyone that does. Maybe if you live in the mid-west or the suburbs but there are plenty of cities where people are unlikely to have a space for room scale VR and arguably the non-room scale VR is just not that compelling. Visiting a "VR space" is not ever going to be mainstream so that seems like an issue for mass VR adoption. 2. When I play a good non-VR game I play for hours and days at a time. As an example last month I played Zelda:Breath of the Wild for 70+ hours, 10-14 hours a day. I've yet to play anything in VR that I could stay in for 10-14 hours. In fact many VR games get extremely tiring very quickly. I've played a few where after 10 minutes I'm exhausted. That's doesn't seem likely to become a main form of entertainment. I've also played at a few VR arcades. Again the games have been fun and immersive but the also felt like thrill rides. In other words, 5-10 minutes and I'm done. Neat experience but just like I could not ride a rollercoaster for 10hrs I can't do VR for 10hrs. It's not about the form, it's about the activity. Searching a room, opening draws, pressing various floating buttons, holding virtual weapons. It's tiring not relaxing like non VR games. Those issues don't seem solvable. They aren't tech issues they're inherent to the whole concept. Fixes for the space would require direct brain implants so you don't actually move around, you just think you are. I don't know if there is a solution to the 2nd. It's one thing to push buttons to see Nathan Drake climb mountains. It's another to actually do the climbing. As for the article itself I was a little sad to see VR defined as only > VR… only tracking, rendering, and display. Tracking is the process of recording the user’s location and orientation in 3D space. Rendering is the process of constructing the appropriate image for a user. Display refers to the fidelity with which the hardware can produce the rendered image." Even with the problems mentioned above there seems to still be low-hanging fruit. If you want to be able to talk to people in VR you need to be able to emote. That means you need low-res cameras looking at your eyes and mouth so your avatar can show your expressions. Similarly, 2 hands is not enough. I need censors on my feet and maybe knees, waist, elbows. In many VR experiences I've played things where bumping up against something with my waist or, kicking something away with my feet, using my knee to close a draw etc seem like natural actions that were thwarted by lack of input.

fitzroy 9y ago

BatFastard 9y ago

Everyone in VR thinks they are creating things for the first time. From 2000 to 2009 I founded and ran the second largest VR company in the world. The number of firsts that my team had was amazing. What really amazes me is now that VR is growing. Zero people have talked to me about what my team learned. Its like the past never existed...

khuknows 9y ago
Well... what did your team learn?
- BatFastard 9y ago
  I will boil down 10 years experience into a few words, "its hard, and expensive". Leveraging the real world paradigm works great in some situations and not at all in others. There are some things that 2D will always be better for, like search and shopping.

mixedbit 9y ago

A very interesting development in this space is WebVR. You can use WebGL to create widely available (95% of browsers) web-based 3D experience and thanks to WebVR the experience can upgrade to VR for visitors that have VR hardware.

JokerDan 9y ago

I would love to get my hands on a VR kit in order to look into AR and UX design, but sadly, I do not have the money to invest in a HTC VIVE or similar.

artur_makly 9y ago

VR Porn i believ will be the biggest of all social consumption. last year i had a chance to try it (out of sheer curiosity and nostalgia) . it was way way to real. the end of society.

euske 9y ago

Everyone is talking about the hardware cost, but people seem to have forgotten the software cost, which will have a much bigger impact to the industry overall. Yes, there will be a few great VR apps and games that actually add to the experience, but what an average VR app is going to be? Making something in VR doesn't necessarily make it better. You have to make a good game/app in the first place. And then there's an additional cost for VR. Now you have one more element to screw up. Look, even a regular standard PC could be 10x more useful if all the software is better built and run flawlessly. Instead we ended up with half-baked glitchy mess. Making a good VR app won't be easier than this. The profit break even point will be higher because people have a higher expectation. It seems the industry is ill-fated.