4 ms·

I was one of the co-founders of an early social VR startup and observed first hand the technical capabilities that these applications will afford bad actors to

by gfodor 9y ago

I was one of the co-founders of an early social VR startup and observed first hand the technical capabilities that these applications will afford bad actors to use for surveillance. You can easily capture voice, body tracking, and interaction data, and basically record a full view of the world through the eyes of another human being. It's quite remarkable being able to record and play back a copy of yourself in seconds from a remote server, but the potential for abuse is immense. Facebook's made a move, probably the biggest move of any company, into VR. They bought Oculus for $2B while everyone else was scratching their heads. Social VR is their focus at Facebook proper, and they are leaving the entire rest of the VR ecosystem to their subsidiary Oculus. Isn't it obvious why? VR, if it becomes the dominant form of human communication, will make their current surveillance machine look like a joke. Facebook would be in a position to be an intermediary for every human interaction on earth that doesn't take place in physical space. It's nice to see the public become aware of what they've done before they are able to take it to the next level of nearly being inside of our heads. This is the primary underlying motivation for why we are working on building an alternative open communication platform for Mixed Reality at Mozilla. We're heads down building stuff now but you can expect to see us shipping things soon. https://blog.mozvr.com/enabling-the-social-3d-web/ https://blog.mozvr.com/enabling-the-social-3d-web/

mliker 9y ago
VR hasn’t taken off as promised and the hype is dying down now. The headset is too clunky in its current incarnation. People view it as a novelty item rather than a useful tool, so I’m inclined to believe this won’t be the massive surveillance tool VR proponents think it’ll be.
- gfodor 9y ago
  Untethered standalone VR devices are likely a prerequisite to any mainstream adoption and are shipping this year. Your guess is as good as mine if they will reach mass appeal, but to assume VR is not viable before these devices are available at low prices is probably wrong. The one to keep your eye on is the Oculus Go which is a self contained device for $199. (Also a Facebook product, probably going to have all this social functionality burned in. My guess is this is their first big play.)
  - root_axis 9y ago
    > Untethered standalone VR devices are likely a prerequisite to any mainstream adoption and are shipping this year Not good ones though. Any VR headset without positional tracking is essentially a google cardboard.
    - soylentcola 9y ago
      Sure, but when the iPhone came out I'd already been using Palm and PocketPC smartphones for a few years. At the time I thought "any smartphone without the ability to install third party software, send MMS messages, use a GPS radio to locate me accurately, copy and paste, or even change the ringtone is essentially just a feature phone". Things start out simple, limited, clunky, and expensive. Occasionally they become capable, svelte, commonplace, and affordable after 5 or 10 years of development and refinement.
      - root_axis 9y ago
        Yeah, I think it's pretty safe bet that it will get there, I just haven't seen any announcements regarding an upcoming standalone tetherless headset with positional tracking.
    - gfodor 9y ago
      I don't agree with this sentiment. VR enthusiasts tend to cite 3dof tracking as a non-starter but I have seen enough evidence to suggest that 3dof head tracking is sufficient to deliver comfortable, long sessions for social VR applications. The reason 3dof is not a non-starter is because you can still interact with people in a very natural way in VR with these devices, and the low cost enables access to the experience for people who literally have no other means to interact with people in this way. For many social VR applications people simply need to be able to look at one another, make eye contact, and be able to explore a virtual space together. A 3dof head tracker with a 3dof controller, if comfortable to wear and easy to set up, can deliver this. What is a non-starter are dropped frames, overheating, or other issues around comfort and ease of use. All of these are solved by Oculus Go (and a subset are solved by GearVR) in a way that are not solved by google cardboard. If a device can hold up for 60 minutes, doesn't hurt to wear, has no cables or messy setup steps, and includes asynchronous timewarp to generate missing frames, I believe that is a sufficient device that could takeover the market for a wide variety of communication use cases and is exactly what Oculus Go is the first to offer in full.
- washadjeffmad 9y ago
  The commercial products aren't representational of the limits of the form, just what's currently economically feasible to produce and sell. You've got to have a market first, and affordable entry-level VR is damn good way to generate interest.
- neospice 9y ago
  VR is still early but it's convincing. Have you tried a very good VIVE setup? I've only used it once but that's all it took for me to understand that VR is the future of immersive entertainment. Based on that experience it seems apparent to me that the only thing stopping it from becoming mainstream is the clunkiness you describe. However, we should all know that it's only a matter of time before that clunkiness is replaced by a better engineered form factor.
- 3pt14159 9y ago
  Eh, it's still in the palm-pilot phase. They'll figure it out quietly over the next 10 years. Machine learning will help figure out what to pull into the headset (things you're about to walk into) or it will intelligently make the game world similar enough in your immediate surroundings to where you don't hit stuff. I could see people hanging out at parks or beaches with these things on. Even going for a swim if the headset is waterproof enough. It will just take decades of work to get there.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
zerostar07 9y ago
why not just support the open source Highfidelity.io platform instead?

by gfodor 9y ago

mliker 9y ago

VR hasn’t taken off as promised and the hype is dying down now. The headset is too clunky in its current incarnation. People view it as a novelty item rather than a useful tool, so I’m inclined to believe this won’t be the massive surveillance tool VR proponents think it’ll be.

gfodor 9y ago
Untethered standalone VR devices are likely a prerequisite to any mainstream adoption and are shipping this year. Your guess is as good as mine if they will reach mass appeal, but to assume VR is not viable before these devices are available at low prices is probably wrong. The one to keep your eye on is the Oculus Go which is a self contained device for $199. (Also a Facebook product, probably going to have all this social functionality burned in. My guess is this is their first big play.)
- root_axis 9y ago
  > Untethered standalone VR devices are likely a prerequisite to any mainstream adoption and are shipping this year Not good ones though. Any VR headset without positional tracking is essentially a google cardboard.
  - soylentcola 9y ago
    Sure, but when the iPhone came out I'd already been using Palm and PocketPC smartphones for a few years. At the time I thought "any smartphone without the ability to install third party software, send MMS messages, use a GPS radio to locate me accurately, copy and paste, or even change the ringtone is essentially just a feature phone". Things start out simple, limited, clunky, and expensive. Occasionally they become capable, svelte, commonplace, and affordable after 5 or 10 years of development and refinement.
    - root_axis 9y ago
      Yeah, I think it's pretty safe bet that it will get there, I just haven't seen any announcements regarding an upcoming standalone tetherless headset with positional tracking.
  - gfodor 9y ago
    I don't agree with this sentiment. VR enthusiasts tend to cite 3dof tracking as a non-starter but I have seen enough evidence to suggest that 3dof head tracking is sufficient to deliver comfortable, long sessions for social VR applications. The reason 3dof is not a non-starter is because you can still interact with people in a very natural way in VR with these devices, and the low cost enables access to the experience for people who literally have no other means to interact with people in this way. For many social VR applications people simply need to be able to look at one another, make eye contact, and be able to explore a virtual space together. A 3dof head tracker with a 3dof controller, if comfortable to wear and easy to set up, can deliver this. What is a non-starter are dropped frames, overheating, or other issues around comfort and ease of use. All of these are solved by Oculus Go (and a subset are solved by GearVR) in a way that are not solved by google cardboard. If a device can hold up for 60 minutes, doesn't hurt to wear, has no cables or messy setup steps, and includes asynchronous timewarp to generate missing frames, I believe that is a sufficient device that could takeover the market for a wide variety of communication use cases and is exactly what Oculus Go is the first to offer in full.
washadjeffmad 9y ago
The commercial products aren't representational of the limits of the form, just what's currently economically feasible to produce and sell. You've got to have a market first, and affordable entry-level VR is damn good way to generate interest.
neospice 9y ago
VR is still early but it's convincing. Have you tried a very good VIVE setup? I've only used it once but that's all it took for me to understand that VR is the future of immersive entertainment. Based on that experience it seems apparent to me that the only thing stopping it from becoming mainstream is the clunkiness you describe. However, we should all know that it's only a matter of time before that clunkiness is replaced by a better engineered form factor.
3pt14159 9y ago
Eh, it's still in the palm-pilot phase. They'll figure it out quietly over the next 10 years. Machine learning will help figure out what to pull into the headset (things you're about to walk into) or it will intelligently make the game world similar enough in your immediate surroundings to where you don't hit stuff. I could see people hanging out at parks or beaches with these things on. Even going for a swim if the headset is waterproof enough. It will just take decades of work to get there.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

zerostar07 9y ago

why not just support the open source Highfidelity.io platform instead?