16 ms·

Another article on technology in search of a problem to solve. Once again, Silicon Valley just can't quite see the human factor in why VR won't be this universa

Another article on technology in search of a problem to solve. Once again, Silicon Valley just can't quite see the human factor in why VR won't be this universal technology that everybody uses. Yes, it will have its place, but that place won't be in every home. Prolonged stretches of being unable to see the real world, invoking feels of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty are completely alien to those who work in huge, warehouse-sized, empty rooms in secure facilities, trying out what they assume everybody will want to put in their ornately decorated front rooms. There's a disconnect between the tech industry and the "real world", so to speak, and it really makes you appreciate companies who can see the limits of certain technologies in certain domains. Take Apple, working to make AR easy and friendly on iOS; if, one day, VR takes off, then Apple is already prepared with plenty of machine learning and physics frameworks. Until then, they present AR as the next best thing to VR in a safe, controlled, and non-threatening way; we can see the real world very clearly both through our devices and around them, we don't need to pay for prescription headsets or eyewear, and we are all free to put our iPhones and iPads away at any time.

mattnewport 8y ago
Our customers for VR training are not particularly tech savvy and not part of the Silicon Valley bubble but we don't find any of the issues you raise to be concerns with our customers. VR probably won't have a place in every home, just as TV or Alexa type devices don't have a place in my home. I think the market can ultimately be as big as those technologies however.
- zapzupnz 8y ago
  > Our customers for VR training What sort of company do you work for, for what purpose are your customers getting VR training, and what are they (or their companies, if applicable) paying? > VR probably won't have a place in every home, just as TV [...] I think the market can ultimate be as big as [that technology] however. Nobody needs training to watch a TV.
  - giggles_giggles 8y ago
    I could be wrong but I think you've misunderstood the comment that you're replying to. It sounds like the comment is talking about a company that uses VR to train employees to do certain tasks, not a company that trains people to use VR.
    - zapzupnz 8y ago
      Even then, it still demonstrates that people need to become accustomed to the technology in a safe environment, a space for "training". As opposed to training people to use computers, where their visual faculties are still intact, you couldn't just release VR to the mass market and expect everybody to jump on board. Television was an easy sell. Radio you could see? Great. Smartphones and tablets were an easy sell. Computers you could put in your pocket? Computers that even your nana and grandad could operate? Brilliant. VR? I don't know what the sales pitch would be that someone in Best Buy could give to a technologically illiterate person, at least without that conversation devolving into a bunch of technobabble and an offer to come do some training in an environment and social context likely to be completely unlike where the customer would be likely to use theirs.
      - benj111 8y ago
        "Computers that even your nana and grandad could operate" Hmm no. My grandad had worked out the video recorder, my nan not so much. She has a dumb phone, but never turns it on, nor charges it. Agree with your final paragraph. Wonder if 'Surround' cinema would work as a marketing term?
      - hombre_fatal 8y ago
        You seem to have different goal posts for VR and you also seem to take existing tech for granted. Like television, VR sells itself. If someone has never seen television before, you don't need to draw up a sales pitch to convince them that it can enrich their life. You just need to have a television on display tuned to an action movie and that person can see for their self. It immediately entertains. Same with VR. Ever seen VR on display in the wild? People, young and old, are naturally drawn to it. It immediately fascinates people. Your post makes it seem like you would've poo-pooed computers and video games because keyboards and gaming controllers are too complicated. Yet the VR interface is much simpler than those. Watch a tech-illiterate person strap on VR for the first time. The first thing they do is look down at their hands and wave them around. Like the person seeing an action movie on television for the first time, they don't need a sales rep to tell them how this might be entertaining.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  VR will have a place in every home, pretty much in gaming and possibly entertainment. Once they make it a really great experience, I'll bet most games go 3D. But for other things ... not so much.
tauwauwau 8y ago
I think that appeal of VR is to be able to use real world interaction techniques learned since birth to interact with computer programs without having to learn a new UI with another new app. Biggest killer application of VR would probably be a new Internet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPTfdO5hQUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPTfdO5hQUw
- zapzupnz 8y ago
  Clip unavailable in my country, but upvoted for Summer Wars. That said, I'm not sure what you mean by "a new Internet". I have the internet on my desktop, my laptop, my tablet, my phone, my TV, my game consoles, and even my lightbulbs. Do you just mean a new interaction paradigm? A new style of presentation? A new social network?
  - tauwauwau 8y ago
    You're right, I mean the new style of presentation but in terms of everything presentable being connected in this system. (WWW) Not sure about the blocking. I watched the movie a long time ago, in movie it's in the first 5 minutes introduction of OZ platform.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >I think that appeal of VR is to be able to use real world interaction techniques learned since birth to interact with computer programs without having to learn a new UI with another new app. Anything complicated enough -- like most software uses are -- will remain so. Some niche fields aside (e.g. games, robotic surgery, immersive education, exercise, and obviously porn, the niche field to end all niche fields) VR only makes using the computer more tedious (as you have to move your body). We have seen mostly the trend of disassociating with our bodies through computers...
- benj111 8y ago
  Really? Are you referring to existing technology, or some kind of Sci fi holodeck thing? I can think of 2 broad categories of potential computer program. The first, old world computer programs, and I can't see flicking through virtual files in a virtual filling cabinet being an improvement over what we have now. And the 2nd category is 'real world' computer programs. Basically simulating real life. So ranging from VR watching the tv (what's the point) to white water rafting. Which I can see, but that's basically back to computer games. Which is the thing the VR always ends up being used for.
davidivadavid 8y ago
VR technology is the ultimate escapist technology to be used as a platform for entertainment. It's just a matter of time before it replaces TV. I can't see why it wouldn't have a place in every home (like TV).
- paulcole 8y ago
  TV isn't a dedicated activity that gets 100% of my attention. When I have my TV on, I can still cook, flip through catalogs, look at my partner, write emails on my iPad, etc.
  - zapzupnz 8y ago
    Even my grandparents can have a chat over the top of the boring part of a programme or eat their dinner whilst watching the news. Nothing sounds more tedious than having a conversation with somebody whose attention is being drawn by something that only one of us can see.
    - dhh2106 8y ago
      Couldn't the whole family enter the same VR environment? Why limit it to just yourself? Then you'd be free to chat over the top of the boring bits... I agree that replicating the full social context of TV will be difficult
      - barbecue_sauce 8y ago
        Because they could just share a screen in real reality?
        zapzupnz 8y ago
        Indeed. Much less hassle, much less expense, many fewer tradeoffs, and much more social.
        TeMPOraL 8y ago
woolvalley 8y ago
You can put a cheap binocular camera on the goggles to give people a quick way to see the outside world, kind of like how the Sony NC headphones let you hear the outside world when you put your hand over one of the pads. I don't really see that as a major barrier for VR. Currently the major barrier I foresee is the 3D TV & glasses issue. Many people just don't want to bother or care about setting up 3D TV content and glasses. It's why things like the occulus go exist.
- qu4z-2 8y ago
  Vive has an optional overlay with a weirdly-coloured[0] view of the outside world. It's pretty useful for quickly checking something in the environment, or grabbing a glass of water, etc. [0]: Apparently the lens distortion makes it not map perfectly 1:1 and putting it in like, "night vision" mode makes that less nausea inducing).
stcredzero 8y ago
Prolonged stretches of being unable to see the real world, invoking feels of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty Every day on my walking commute to work and when I go out to get lunch, I keep on having to walk around and avoid people whose faces are buried in their phones, sometimes walking straight at me, completely oblivious to those around them.
- zapzupnz 8y ago
  Not remotely comparable. They can still see around them, their peripheral vision allowing them to notice when there's somebody next to them, in front of them. They can detect dangers to avoid through sight and sound, and they can easily glance up to see what's coming ahead. Also: they're out and about in town doing things, moving between here and there, maybe going to meet someone at a café for lunch, not stuck in a building with a headset on. Totally incomparable.
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    There was one young man at a WWDC, who had his head buried in his phone while on the escalator. He reached the end of the escalator and just stopped where he was. All of us behind him on the escalator were yelling at him not to stop. I don't know how no one got hurt or killed, but we all somehow got around him. As I passed him, he seemed to not have noticed anything at all. Not remotely comparable...Totally incomparable. Note the above quote: "Prolonged stretches of being unable to see the real world, invoking feels of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty." Haven't we seen quite a few articles recently about how social media tends to produce feelings like that? They are very different things, but there are certain similarities.
smrtinsert 8y ago
It's almost like living in a bubble is bad for ideas.
gamma-male 8y ago
VR won't be in every home? I stopped reading right here. There is no future where VR is not a huge part of it.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  It's not so long ago that 3D TV was going to be in every home. Turned out to be empty hype and not a product that was that desirable. VR headsets seem firmly in the same category. I've been hearing that VR will be huge since the 80s, which is when I first tried a VR headset. Current tech is higher res and framerate with nearly all the same limitations. There's no sign VR Hype 5.0 will prove more successful than any previous incarnations. Maybe it won't always be stuck as a niche gaming addon, but at this point I'm tempted to say "not in my lifetime".
  - gamma-male 8y ago
    3D TV are gimmicky. Anyone who tries VR can see that it's the future.
  - kruczek 8y ago
    > I've been hearing that VR will be huge since the 80s, which is when I first tried a VR headset. Current tech is higher res and framerate with nearly all the same limitations. I remember seeing a VR headset in the 90's once. The only thing in common with today VR is that it provided stereoscopic vision. I find it baffling to say that current VR only has higher resolution and framerate. There were many different improvements, which make current VR way better than two decades ago: - smaller headsets (those headsets from the 90's where huge helmets, nowhere near the size of current goggles) - true 3d graphics (the 90's demo I saw was of Doom, which didn't even have 3d models, only sprites) - headset tracking (the main source of immersion, if I turn my head I expect the view to turn in VR as well) - hands tracking (because obviously I want to directly interact with the world, rather than through the mouse and keyboard) - force feedback (by itself it always felt like kind of a useless gimmick, until I experienced it in VR)
    - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
thecatspaw 8y ago
The technology is still in its infancy. Think of 20mb harddrived the size of a shoebox. I have no doubts that we will end up with a nice headset, with high dpi, eye trscking, full body tracking and a 360 threadmill too walk on. Maybe even fancy tracking shoes which could replace the threadmill. They could include realtime camerafeeds in front of you, and either show it, adapt the game to it (for tables etc) or show boundaries in the headset
- vkou 8y ago
  A 20mb harddrive the size of a shoebox is not a technology in its infancy. It is an incredibly useful, paradigm-changing piece of engineering, as long as you're not hoping to use it to store rich media. Nothing in AR has hit that yet. VR kinda-maybe-sorta does, but even in games, it's an expensive, niche periphery, at best.
  - ethbro 8y ago
    > Nothing in AR has hit that yet. The biggest problem AR has is that most people aren't fighter pilots. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3vbPEtSbv0&t=54s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3vbPEtSbv0&t=54s Hard drives succeeded (in the sense that we now see) because they exponentially created more use cases for themselves (by driving more data processing and storage). AR doesn't really do that. Most people simply can't derive value from annotations over the real world, in the way they can by simply storing things. So the total addressable market is a lot smaller. Furthermore, AR adoption doesn't drive more AR adoption. Which is where the VR case is stronger. There are some scenarios (all social) where I can see viral, exponential VR adoption. For all its flaws, the fact that SecondLife still exists demonstrates there's enough of an escapist market to self-sustain.
wildermuthn 8y ago
Most technological breakthroughs are first perceived as toys and hobbies of the rich: personal computers, cellphones, mechanical carriages, Facebook. In this context, sour-grape reactionism is unfortunate but not surprising. VR is where computation becomes human. No keyboards, no monitors, no mice or joysticks, but instead hands, gaze, movement, and voice. VR presents itself as a new way to receive information, but its essential innovation is data input in its most natural form. Enabling humanity to engage with itself and its machines with a fully embodied interface is a 10x improvement over touch-screens. Small example: whiteboards. The simple act of a talented group viewing and marking a large flat surface can change the world. Today, this is not possible without co-location. Once a VR headset with positional and hand tracking hits the market (Oculus promises this spring), the rate of world-changing collaboration will no longer be restricted to geography. Once these virtual whiteboard trend toward Jupyter notebooks, VR will not only have triumphed over location-restricted bodies, but also location-restricted computers. The future is bright and VR will be at the heart of it, regardless of how many people currently mistake it for a toy.
- wybiral 8y ago
  > Most technological breakthroughs are first perceived as toys and hobbies of the rich: personal computers, cellphones, mechanical carriages, Facebook. In this context, sour-grape reactionism is unfortunate but not surprising. But not every technology ends up being the next personal computer, cellphone, or Facebook. Someone probably once thought that hosting sites like GeoCities were the future before blogs/Facebook made it clear that the average user doesn't want to design their own website. It took something more approachable to come along.
  - cannonedhamster 8y ago
    VR vastly overestimates the amount of space people have in their living rooms. Unless we're designing houses with rooms just for VR, I don't ever see it taking off. Maybe as a destination like a holodeck?
- killjoywashere 8y ago
  VR sounds great. Where it falls apart, IMHO, is biology. Tech is a world of plastic, glass, and metal. Eukaryotes just don't get along with those things in close contact for very long. Dermatitides are a thing.
flycaliguy 8y ago
I tend to agree, then I think I bet Nintendo could pull it off. Some sort of unintuitive innovation will come along and break into every living room.
derefr 8y ago
Why do you interpret the interest in VR as an expectation that VR will become a universal recreational technology (in est, a replacement for playing video games on a TV)? Why not, instead, interpret the interest as being in a future where VR is a universal productivity technology? Any place where "training" or "simulation" matters, VR will be better than what it replaces. Verticals that have immediate use for VR for training: military, police, fire and rescue; medicine; sports. (With enhanced haptics support and careful use of physics engines, you could also include some of the skilled trades, like machining/woodworking or automotive repair.) Professions that have immediate use for VR for simulation: therapists; travel agencies; interior designers; architects and structural/civic engineers; criminologists, accident reconstructionists, and insurance adjusters. And that's just off the top of my head, as someone who doesn't really pay attention to the field. Certainly, VR is isolating. But so is sitting at your desk, in a cubicle, in an office, staring at a screen. If you're already being paid to suffer 0.9 units of isolation (cubicle+desk+screen), I'm not sure the company moving to 1.0 units of isolation (cubicle+desk+VR goggles) is going to make people upset. Either way, you still go back to 0.0 units of isolation when you get up and go to the water cooler. (Admittedly, though, a VR-centric office productivity paradigm would make pair programming harder. Unless, I guess, people were pairing in some Second-Life-alike virtual office—which would actually be quite good for remote-first companies.)

mattnewport 8y ago

Our customers for VR training are not particularly tech savvy and not part of the Silicon Valley bubble but we don't find any of the issues you raise to be concerns with our customers. VR probably won't have a place in every home, just as TV or Alexa type devices don't have a place in my home. I think the market can ultimately be as big as those technologies however.

zapzupnz 8y ago
> Our customers for VR training What sort of company do you work for, for what purpose are your customers getting VR training, and what are they (or their companies, if applicable) paying? > VR probably won't have a place in every home, just as TV [...] I think the market can ultimate be as big as [that technology] however. Nobody needs training to watch a TV.
- giggles_giggles 8y ago
  I could be wrong but I think you've misunderstood the comment that you're replying to. It sounds like the comment is talking about a company that uses VR to train employees to do certain tasks, not a company that trains people to use VR.
  - zapzupnz 8y ago
    Even then, it still demonstrates that people need to become accustomed to the technology in a safe environment, a space for "training". As opposed to training people to use computers, where their visual faculties are still intact, you couldn't just release VR to the mass market and expect everybody to jump on board. Television was an easy sell. Radio you could see? Great. Smartphones and tablets were an easy sell. Computers you could put in your pocket? Computers that even your nana and grandad could operate? Brilliant. VR? I don't know what the sales pitch would be that someone in Best Buy could give to a technologically illiterate person, at least without that conversation devolving into a bunch of technobabble and an offer to come do some training in an environment and social context likely to be completely unlike where the customer would be likely to use theirs.
    - benj111 8y ago
      "Computers that even your nana and grandad could operate" Hmm no. My grandad had worked out the video recorder, my nan not so much. She has a dumb phone, but never turns it on, nor charges it. Agree with your final paragraph. Wonder if 'Surround' cinema would work as a marketing term?
    - hombre_fatal 8y ago
      You seem to have different goal posts for VR and you also seem to take existing tech for granted. Like television, VR sells itself. If someone has never seen television before, you don't need to draw up a sales pitch to convince them that it can enrich their life. You just need to have a television on display tuned to an action movie and that person can see for their self. It immediately entertains. Same with VR. Ever seen VR on display in the wild? People, young and old, are naturally drawn to it. It immediately fascinates people. Your post makes it seem like you would've poo-pooed computers and video games because keyboards and gaming controllers are too complicated. Yet the VR interface is much simpler than those. Watch a tech-illiterate person strap on VR for the first time. The first thing they do is look down at their hands and wave them around. Like the person seeing an action movie on television for the first time, they don't need a sales rep to tell them how this might be entertaining.
sonnyblarney 8y ago
VR will have a place in every home, pretty much in gaming and possibly entertainment. Once they make it a really great experience, I'll bet most games go 3D. But for other things ... not so much.

tauwauwau 8y ago

I think that appeal of VR is to be able to use real world interaction techniques learned since birth to interact with computer programs without having to learn a new UI with another new app. Biggest killer application of VR would probably be a new Internet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPTfdO5hQUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPTfdO5hQUw

zapzupnz 8y ago
Clip unavailable in my country, but upvoted for Summer Wars. That said, I'm not sure what you mean by "a new Internet". I have the internet on my desktop, my laptop, my tablet, my phone, my TV, my game consoles, and even my lightbulbs. Do you just mean a new interaction paradigm? A new style of presentation? A new social network?
- tauwauwau 8y ago
  You're right, I mean the new style of presentation but in terms of everything presentable being connected in this system. (WWW) Not sure about the blocking. I watched the movie a long time ago, in movie it's in the first 5 minutes introduction of OZ platform.
coldtea 8y ago
>I think that appeal of VR is to be able to use real world interaction techniques learned since birth to interact with computer programs without having to learn a new UI with another new app. Anything complicated enough -- like most software uses are -- will remain so. Some niche fields aside (e.g. games, robotic surgery, immersive education, exercise, and obviously porn, the niche field to end all niche fields) VR only makes using the computer more tedious (as you have to move your body). We have seen mostly the trend of disassociating with our bodies through computers...
benj111 8y ago
Really? Are you referring to existing technology, or some kind of Sci fi holodeck thing? I can think of 2 broad categories of potential computer program. The first, old world computer programs, and I can't see flicking through virtual files in a virtual filling cabinet being an improvement over what we have now. And the 2nd category is 'real world' computer programs. Basically simulating real life. So ranging from VR watching the tv (what's the point) to white water rafting. Which I can see, but that's basically back to computer games. Which is the thing the VR always ends up being used for.

davidivadavid 8y ago

VR technology is the ultimate escapist technology to be used as a platform for entertainment. It's just a matter of time before it replaces TV. I can't see why it wouldn't have a place in every home (like TV).

paulcole 8y ago
TV isn't a dedicated activity that gets 100% of my attention. When I have my TV on, I can still cook, flip through catalogs, look at my partner, write emails on my iPad, etc.
- zapzupnz 8y ago
  Even my grandparents can have a chat over the top of the boring part of a programme or eat their dinner whilst watching the news. Nothing sounds more tedious than having a conversation with somebody whose attention is being drawn by something that only one of us can see.
  - dhh2106 8y ago
    Couldn't the whole family enter the same VR environment? Why limit it to just yourself? Then you'd be free to chat over the top of the boring bits... I agree that replicating the full social context of TV will be difficult
    - barbecue_sauce 8y ago
      Because they could just share a screen in real reality?
      - zapzupnz 8y ago
        Indeed. Much less hassle, much less expense, many fewer tradeoffs, and much more social.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago

woolvalley 8y ago

You can put a cheap binocular camera on the goggles to give people a quick way to see the outside world, kind of like how the Sony NC headphones let you hear the outside world when you put your hand over one of the pads. I don't really see that as a major barrier for VR. Currently the major barrier I foresee is the 3D TV & glasses issue. Many people just don't want to bother or care about setting up 3D TV content and glasses. It's why things like the occulus go exist.

qu4z-2 8y ago
Vive has an optional overlay with a weirdly-coloured[0] view of the outside world. It's pretty useful for quickly checking something in the environment, or grabbing a glass of water, etc. [0]: Apparently the lens distortion makes it not map perfectly 1:1 and putting it in like, "night vision" mode makes that less nausea inducing).

stcredzero 8y ago

Prolonged stretches of being unable to see the real world, invoking feels of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty Every day on my walking commute to work and when I go out to get lunch, I keep on having to walk around and avoid people whose faces are buried in their phones, sometimes walking straight at me, completely oblivious to those around them.

zapzupnz 8y ago
Not remotely comparable. They can still see around them, their peripheral vision allowing them to notice when there's somebody next to them, in front of them. They can detect dangers to avoid through sight and sound, and they can easily glance up to see what's coming ahead. Also: they're out and about in town doing things, moving between here and there, maybe going to meet someone at a café for lunch, not stuck in a building with a headset on. Totally incomparable.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  There was one young man at a WWDC, who had his head buried in his phone while on the escalator. He reached the end of the escalator and just stopped where he was. All of us behind him on the escalator were yelling at him not to stop. I don't know how no one got hurt or killed, but we all somehow got around him. As I passed him, he seemed to not have noticed anything at all. Not remotely comparable...Totally incomparable. Note the above quote: "Prolonged stretches of being unable to see the real world, invoking feels of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty." Haven't we seen quite a few articles recently about how social media tends to produce feelings like that? They are very different things, but there are certain similarities.

smrtinsert 8y ago

It's almost like living in a bubble is bad for ideas.

gamma-male 8y ago

VR won't be in every home? I stopped reading right here. There is no future where VR is not a huge part of it.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago
It's not so long ago that 3D TV was going to be in every home. Turned out to be empty hype and not a product that was that desirable. VR headsets seem firmly in the same category. I've been hearing that VR will be huge since the 80s, which is when I first tried a VR headset. Current tech is higher res and framerate with nearly all the same limitations. There's no sign VR Hype 5.0 will prove more successful than any previous incarnations. Maybe it won't always be stuck as a niche gaming addon, but at this point I'm tempted to say "not in my lifetime".
- gamma-male 8y ago
  3D TV are gimmicky. Anyone who tries VR can see that it's the future.
- kruczek 8y ago
  > I've been hearing that VR will be huge since the 80s, which is when I first tried a VR headset. Current tech is higher res and framerate with nearly all the same limitations. I remember seeing a VR headset in the 90's once. The only thing in common with today VR is that it provided stereoscopic vision. I find it baffling to say that current VR only has higher resolution and framerate. There were many different improvements, which make current VR way better than two decades ago: - smaller headsets (those headsets from the 90's where huge helmets, nowhere near the size of current goggles) - true 3d graphics (the 90's demo I saw was of Doom, which didn't even have 3d models, only sprites) - headset tracking (the main source of immersion, if I turn my head I expect the view to turn in VR as well) - hands tracking (because obviously I want to directly interact with the world, rather than through the mouse and keyboard) - force feedback (by itself it always felt like kind of a useless gimmick, until I experienced it in VR)
  - NeedMoreTea 8y ago

thecatspaw 8y ago

The technology is still in its infancy. Think of 20mb harddrived the size of a shoebox. I have no doubts that we will end up with a nice headset, with high dpi, eye trscking, full body tracking and a 360 threadmill too walk on. Maybe even fancy tracking shoes which could replace the threadmill. They could include realtime camerafeeds in front of you, and either show it, adapt the game to it (for tables etc) or show boundaries in the headset

vkou 8y ago
A 20mb harddrive the size of a shoebox is not a technology in its infancy. It is an incredibly useful, paradigm-changing piece of engineering, as long as you're not hoping to use it to store rich media. Nothing in AR has hit that yet. VR kinda-maybe-sorta does, but even in games, it's an expensive, niche periphery, at best.
- ethbro 8y ago
  > Nothing in AR has hit that yet. The biggest problem AR has is that most people aren't fighter pilots. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3vbPEtSbv0&t=54s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3vbPEtSbv0&t=54s Hard drives succeeded (in the sense that we now see) because they exponentially created more use cases for themselves (by driving more data processing and storage). AR doesn't really do that. Most people simply can't derive value from annotations over the real world, in the way they can by simply storing things. So the total addressable market is a lot smaller. Furthermore, AR adoption doesn't drive more AR adoption. Which is where the VR case is stronger. There are some scenarios (all social) where I can see viral, exponential VR adoption. For all its flaws, the fact that SecondLife still exists demonstrates there's enough of an escapist market to self-sustain.

wildermuthn 8y ago

Most technological breakthroughs are first perceived as toys and hobbies of the rich: personal computers, cellphones, mechanical carriages, Facebook. In this context, sour-grape reactionism is unfortunate but not surprising. VR is where computation becomes human. No keyboards, no monitors, no mice or joysticks, but instead hands, gaze, movement, and voice. VR presents itself as a new way to receive information, but its essential innovation is data input in its most natural form. Enabling humanity to engage with itself and its machines with a fully embodied interface is a 10x improvement over touch-screens. Small example: whiteboards. The simple act of a talented group viewing and marking a large flat surface can change the world. Today, this is not possible without co-location. Once a VR headset with positional and hand tracking hits the market (Oculus promises this spring), the rate of world-changing collaboration will no longer be restricted to geography. Once these virtual whiteboard trend toward Jupyter notebooks, VR will not only have triumphed over location-restricted bodies, but also location-restricted computers. The future is bright and VR will be at the heart of it, regardless of how many people currently mistake it for a toy.

wybiral 8y ago
> Most technological breakthroughs are first perceived as toys and hobbies of the rich: personal computers, cellphones, mechanical carriages, Facebook. In this context, sour-grape reactionism is unfortunate but not surprising. But not every technology ends up being the next personal computer, cellphone, or Facebook. Someone probably once thought that hosting sites like GeoCities were the future before blogs/Facebook made it clear that the average user doesn't want to design their own website. It took something more approachable to come along.
- cannonedhamster 8y ago
  VR vastly overestimates the amount of space people have in their living rooms. Unless we're designing houses with rooms just for VR, I don't ever see it taking off. Maybe as a destination like a holodeck?
killjoywashere 8y ago
VR sounds great. Where it falls apart, IMHO, is biology. Tech is a world of plastic, glass, and metal. Eukaryotes just don't get along with those things in close contact for very long. Dermatitides are a thing.

flycaliguy 8y ago

I tend to agree, then I think I bet Nintendo could pull it off. Some sort of unintuitive innovation will come along and break into every living room.

derefr 8y ago

Why do you interpret the interest in VR as an expectation that VR will become a universal recreational technology (in est, a replacement for playing video games on a TV)? Why not, instead, interpret the interest as being in a future where VR is a universal productivity technology? Any place where "training" or "simulation" matters, VR will be better than what it replaces. Verticals that have immediate use for VR for training: military, police, fire and rescue; medicine; sports. (With enhanced haptics support and careful use of physics engines, you could also include some of the skilled trades, like machining/woodworking or automotive repair.) Professions that have immediate use for VR for simulation: therapists; travel agencies; interior designers; architects and structural/civic engineers; criminologists, accident reconstructionists, and insurance adjusters. And that's just off the top of my head, as someone who doesn't really pay attention to the field. Certainly, VR is isolating. But so is sitting at your desk, in a cubicle, in an office, staring at a screen. If you're already being paid to suffer 0.9 units of isolation (cubicle+desk+screen), I'm not sure the company moving to 1.0 units of isolation (cubicle+desk+VR goggles) is going to make people upset. Either way, you still go back to 0.0 units of isolation when you get up and go to the water cooler. (Admittedly, though, a VR-centric office productivity paradigm would make pair programming harder. Unless, I guess, people were pairing in some Second-Life-alike virtual office—which would actually be quite good for remote-first companies.)