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Google is reportedly shutting down its in-house VR film studio
- exolymph 8y agowhen is google _not_ shutting something down, tbh
- godzillabrennus 8y agoWhen they are raising prices on it...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- samstave 8y agoBillions of people never knew it existed. Nobody knows what they even did or produced. Flagged as who gives a heck.
- buboard 8y agobillions of dollars were also invested, at the expense of other technologies
- pmoriarty 8y agoHow's the market for VR doing in general? Is it growing or shrinking? Around the time the first Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive, and Microsoft's HoloLens were released some years back seemed to be high water mark of media stories about VR. Since then it seems to be pretty quiet. Is VR dying on the vine?
- TheAceOfHearts 8y agoThere just hasn't been a big killer app for VR, and it's pretty expensive to get into it for any serious usage. Beat Saber [0] appears to be among the most popular games, but I don't think many people are playing regularly. Anecdotal, among my friends, people that own VR rigs don't use them very frequently either. The big problem is that even doing something super simple takes a fair amount of effort. Even watching a 3D video requires sourcing content and then finding a compatible video player. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV1sw4lfwFw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV1sw4lfwFw
- amelius 8y agoWatching a baseball/soccer/basketball game virtually from the stadium should be a pretty big market (?)
- godzillabrennus 8y agoWho wants regularly wear headgear to enjoy a sports game? I can see it being a novelty but not a normal situation.
- pjc50 8y agoThis misses all the physicality of being there while taking away the benefits of varying camera positions chosen for you by the TV coverage. If someone could manage the point cloud reconstruction techniques that would let you watch from positions in the middle of the game while there is no camera, they'd be on to something. Oh, and it's a bad business model - the sports IP owner would want almost all the money.
- 7952 8y agoAnd such a view would also work on a normal screen, and could follow the play smoothly. A VR view relies on the user moving their head, rather than letting a camera man do it for them.
- delfinom 8y ago>This misses all the physicality of being there while taking away the benefits of varying camera positions chosen for you by the TV coverage. What are you missing? The ability to pay $20 for a water bottle?
- tallanvor 8y agoIt seems that with VR the technology isn't really there yet, especially at the price needed for mass adoption. It's not clear to me that any company is really ready to put in more money to move it forward right now. But at the speed things are moving, it wouldn't surprise me to see another push in 2-5 years. AR is the more interesting space right now. On the consumer side, Pokemon, Ingress, and the new Harry Potter game are doing ok from what I can tell. I'm not sure when we'll really get to a wearable AR device that is popular (Google Glass obviously wasn't able to meet people's needs). Microsoft is still investing in AR, but they're focusing on business use rather than the consumer space. I'm not sure it will really take off with the HoloLens 2, but another iteration that improves the field of view and if they can bring down the price (the newest version starts at $3500) they might be able to manage broader adoption. But even that is likely to be a couple of years away.
- pjc50 8y agoThese are a very different sort of map-based AR, not a view-based one.
- andybak 8y agoYep. Lumping Pokemon and the Hololens into the same product category is a bit of a stretch. I can't see much in common other than buzzword sharing.
- miketuritzin 8y agoThe same could be said even moreso about (wearable) AR - that the technology isn't there yet, especially at a price needed for mass adoption. I see VR and AR as different sides of the same coin, and I believe that Facebook does as well from various comments they have made. Many of the technological problems are similar (with VR being "easier" to solve). It seems pretty clear to me that Facebook is investing heavily in VR because they see AR as being a big future platform. (And FB is still putting a lot of resources into VR, with the imminent release of Oculus Quest and continued heavy R&D.)
- glenndebacker 8y agoPersonally I see more in Augmented Reality than Virtual Reality, certainly regarding applications. It's also not that commercial interesting that a big percentage of people gets sick of VR. We stopped demoing because of this. AR seems to have less of those problems from empirical experience. I can use a Hololens for hours without feeling anything while with an oculus rift I get queasy after a couple of minutes. The only thing that I'm still waiting for is project northstar (http://blog.leapmotion.com/northstar/ http://blog.leapmotion.com/northstar/) so the devices becomes cheaper. The high price seems to hamper the adoption a lot.
- melling 8y agoDoesn’t everyone see more in AR, at least in the near term. Even conservative Apple is was working on AR. The ability to augment the real world has lots of useful benefits.
- jobigoud 8y agoI don't. I believe in AR but not short-term. I think AR will go into a "winter" soon and will be picked up by the mainstream some years later after key technology challenges are solved. I think AR (glasses) is at where VR was in the nineties. Currently AR has two form factors, phone and glasses. Phone-based AR is gimmicky. It can be fun and can work in some scenarios but it's monoscopic, has a ridiculous field of view, requires holding your phone in the air, and it's not really augmenting reality anyway, it's augmenting a video stream of reality (increased latency, reduced dynamic range, motion blur, etc.). Glasses-based AR will be great but currently has fundamental challenges with field of view, latency, optics, and integration of augmentations in the real world (e.g: procedural objects dynamically matching physical obstacles). It requires new inventions in hardware and software to fully realize the vision we have of it. On the other hand VR has a clear technological path for the next decade into human-like field of view and visual fidelity. The full enclosure means we can get +200° and fit eye tracking cameras in the headset. Foveated rendering, only render what you actually look at at full res. The advent of ray tracing hardware (easier foveated rendering and non-linear optics). There is no fundamental barrier to get from here to 60 pixels per degree at 200° fov.
- xroche 8y agoI have an Oculus (DK2, development version though, so please take my opinion with a grain of salt), and while it is great, there are some show-stoppers: • Games needs to be reinvented for VR, which basically makes adoption much harder - playing a FPS in VR will get you dizzy very quickly, even for people that are not very motion-sickness sensitive • Quality is still not good enough, you can feel the pixels, and it breaks immersion - 4K screens, or even 8K screens, are probably the minimum, which means that we need also graphic cards that can deliver two 3D scenes combined at 4K or 8K, and these cards aren't there yet • Plugging/handling all the messy cables is a pain • And of course the price, but I don't think this is the biggest issue here
- andybak 8y agoI actually disagree in several areas. 1. It's surprising how well flat screen games work in VR with minimal changes. 3rd person RTS, retro top-down shooters, casual puzzle games. I personally would love to see more "low-effort" ports to VR of existing content as just adding stereoscopy, 6DOF and 360 to a game can make it visually stunning. 2. I wouldn't turn my nose up at more resolution but even first gen Vive and Rift and more than enough to make me happy. You see past the pixels fairly quickly. I've demoed VR to over a hundred people and very few comment on the resolution (I'd prefer more FOV than more pixels personally) 3. Cable management varies from the annoying (Rift with 3 cameras) to a non-problem (plugging in a Windows MR headset is basically just 1 USB and a HDMI) 4. You can grab an Acer WMR for close to $200. The GPU cost is still a burden but we're on the 3rd gen of VR capable cards now so a 1060 or a 970 is now entry level for PC gamers.
- madeofpalk 8y ago> 3rd person RTS, retro top-down shooters, casual puzzle games What does that get us then? Just a worse version of the games we already have?
- andybak 8y agoI don't understand how your comment relates to what I was saying. Could you please elaborate?
- throwaway66666 8y agoI have spent quite sometime with Vive, Rift and PSVR. (rift, psvr at home, vive at my office) PSVR is unironically the hope for VR right now, even though it has by far the lowest quality. It has some very good games (Astrobot, Wipeout, RE7, Ace Combat 7, Moss, Beat Saber). It's cheap, easy to set up (aimed towards couch VR instead of room scale), cool helmet design, and the fact that the headset works as a regular monitor for non-vr games and one person can be watching TV while the other person gaming, is genius. Compared to let's say Oculus where you need, 4 usb ports (3x usb 3.0), cables everywhere, space, a ~$1200 pc/headset combo... I do believe in VR though and am excited for what the future holds.
- leemailll 8y agoIs gran tourismo vr ready?
- chime 8y ago> PSVR is unironically the hope for VR right now, even though it has by far the lowest quality. For me it's the upcoming Oculus Quest. I've been refreshing /r/oculusquest daily, hoping to get a release date or a way to reserve it.
- wlesieutre 8y agoMy big hope for the Quest is that they'll say "Surprise! The USB-C port isn't just charging, it also supports VirtualLink alternate mode!" Would be great to have one device that can operate as both a standalone device and be connected to a computer for more graphically intense experiences than the Quest's snapdragon hardware can provide. IIRC it's running at a lower framerate than a Rift does, but it'd still be cool to have that option because I have no plans to buy a dedicated PC-connected headset. Odds of this actually happening are probably not good, but fingers crossed anyway.
- jamesrcole 8y ago> How's the market for VR doing in general? Is it growing or shrinking? ... Is VR dying on the vine? VR is a fairly radically different technology and in the scheme of things it's still in its infancy. Given that, whether it's currently growing or shrinking probably isn't very meaningful, as that doesn't really say anything about VR's longer-term prospects.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jonathanhd 8y agoTo put VR’s scale into perspective, steam has as about many Linux gamers as VR gamers, ~0.8% of all users.
- giancarlostoro 8y agoI wonder if those stats have / will change in regards to Steam Linux gamers due to their added support for running games under Wine.
- Theodores 8y agoIt just needs a generational reboot. In the late 1990's I had seen the Virtuality VR headset on various Orbital album covers, when I got to have a go with the headset I was quite taken by it and didn't even notice that the '3D' wasn't ever stereo. At around the same time I saw Virtual I/O's iglasses and thought the experience was compelling. Had it not been a trade show I would have bought them there and then. I have a feeling that some person at Facebook had a similar moment of 'oh yes this must be the future' as what I had. They just had more money than me and bought the company instead of hoping to buy just the headset. Around the time this happened I was saying 'we have been here before' and everyone was saying 'this time it will be different!'. It wasn't different, there were just more pixels. So we will see what happens next time around when the next generation comes along and gets wowed by the VR of the day. Incidentally some of the use cases of the Virtual IO iglasses included being able to watch TV soaps whilst doing the washing up. People got dishwashing machines and Netflix instead of standing at the sink watching broadcast TV to occasionally look down at the draining board. Rinse and repeat.
- _red 8y agoThe same happens with 3D. Every 15-20 years, manufacturers and content producers seem to think "this is the year people will want to watch X in 3D". I'm a little skeptical that either will become mainstream daily-use technologies.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- buboard 8y agoTo give a perspective. Former Second Life founder and CEO founded Highfidelity.com to create an open source social VR world platform. 5 years later, and with at least 75M dollars in funding the platform is empty[1], even though it is in Steam, and even hardcore VR creators dont seem eager to use it. They had to pay users to join them for their stress tests. The creators' stories in the forum may be telling about the shortcomings of creating amd using VR regularly[2]. Meanwhile, secondlife's open source clone, opensimulator, has thousands of regions and users online[3] despite being a super buggy platform, with less than $0 in funding. 1. https://highfidelity.com/user_stories?include_actions=concurrency https://highfidelity.com/user_stories?include_actions=concur... 2. https://forums.highfidelity.com/ https://forums.highfidelity.com/ 3. https://opensimworld.com/ https://opensimworld.com/ (disclaimer:shameless plug)
- dustindiamond 8y agoI always thought Fortnight was the new Secondlife.
- deltron3030 8y agoThe devices just aren't there yet to be the goto solution for low hanging fruit gaming ecosystems with large existing audiences. If you look at the best players and their equipment, VR isn't a part of what's used competitively. You can see this with racing or flight simulations, genres that translate perfectly to VR in theory (also in practice if you ignore competing solutions). People there still buy and recommend monitors or projectors to get an competitive edge, to be able to use other peripheral devices like controllers and indicators (which would be blocked out in VR). This existing market of peripheral devices and their manufacturers are tightly knit with the core audience, and recommending VR would go against their own business. A VR user wouldn't buy a controller that he can't see. Augmented Reality with a VR like FOV could be a solution for both, VR manufacturers and existing audiences because it doesn't exclude a large part of the existing market and removes that resistance. The problem with native VR genres is that you can't show off how it's really like to people who don't own VR headsets. On top of that they compete for attention with existing gaming ecosystems which can be seen as hobbies in their own right, meaning that VR really needs to conquer existing genres one by one, which is difficult if it ignores existing market forces.
- honestoHeminway 8y agoCould glue screen to the outside of vr, showing what the wearer is seeing..
- mojomark 8y agoThe focus seems to be on games, but VR has huge potential in the workforce (engineering, medical, perhaps even office work - data mining/etc.). However, utility software companies like Autodesk products have very shoddy and fickle VR support. I currently have to pay a pricy $2K+ license for a 3rd party software (Revizto) to view Navisworks files in VR. It's worth it for my work, but it amazes me the lack of VR support these companies provide given the huge potential. VR in my field is still very new. Many engineers (young and old) I show it to have never used it or had just done a demo somewhere and had no idea you could use it for work. You can do stuff in VR you simply can't do on a 2D screen.
- nadam 8y agoThe market is growing slowly, but it is very small yet. Personally I don't want it to grow too fast just yet, because I need time to develop/strengthen my bootstapped VR 3D editor product before the highly funded competitors enter the market. I am almost afraid that the Oculus Quest will push the growth too fast, despite I am a diehard VR fan.
- lm28469 8y agoVR is like AI. It's a constant hype/disappointment cycle, albeit it's getting better at every iteration; it's far from delivering on their promises though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality#History
- brandnewlow 8y ago“Mobile” was the same until it was just everywhere.
- coldtea 8y agoNot really, mobile exploded immediately (in the early nineties), and kept expanding (with the smartphone boom).
- drharby 8y agoEarly 90s isnt an explosion by a long shot.
- coldtea 8y agoActually it was just that. A continuous growth from 100M 1990 to 1B in 2000 and onwards: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LyjMpXpsnyI/TZWzzCflQiI/AAAAAAAAP_I/mUwsqEnxumk/s1600/wolfram_cellphone.JPG http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LyjMpXpsnyI/TZWzzCflQiI/AAAAAAAAP_...
- EpicEng 8y agoIs the year 2000 now considered "the early 90's"?
- throwaway34241 8y agoAm I reading your linked chart wrong? No matter how I look at it, it says 100M in 2000 and a negligible amount in 1990 (instead of 100M in 1990 and 1B in 2000).
- aikah 8y ago> Is VR dying on the vine? No VR is heavily used in architecture, healthcare industry and other professions. VR as a mass market however is not doing that great right now, because it's not yielding the results the entertainment industry hoped, which leads to less investment and so on... it's a vicious circle. Ultimately someone will get it right. Apple, maybe.
- skybrian 8y agoI'd be interested in reading more about its use in architecture or healthcare. Running into it at a hospital or doctor's office doesn't seem all that likely?
- Ajedi32 8y agoIt's still a niche, but growing steadily. Here's a spreadsheet I'm maintaining with statistics from Steam's monthly hardware survey: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12GKZ3qsTZ7WuC_lj1-04zYOacO4J-Im-y3tg46N4jRY/ https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12GKZ3qsTZ7WuC_lj1-04... As you can see, over the past 2 years we've gone from 0.36% of Steam users having a PC VR headset, to 0.89%. We're also nearing the launch of the next generation of VR headsets. Both Vive and Oculus have products in development, and its rumored that Valve is working on a new headset as well. I expect we'll be seeing the launch of a few new headsets over the course of the next year. So no, VR isn't dying on the vine; it's just taking longer to reach maturity than some may have expected.
- T-A 8y agoNice resource! One thing worth keeping in mind: the Steam survey only sees a VR headset if the VR software stack is running while the survey is taken, and that requires the headset to be plugged in and powered up. So those figures likely underestimate the number of VR-equipped systems by some significant factor. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it's 2 or 3.
- Ajedi32 8y agoYeah, that little quirk is both a blessing and a curse, because while it does make it harder to judge the actual number of VR-equipped systems, it also makes the numbers more representative of _active_ VR users rather than just users who _have_ a headset but don't often use it. If you're trying to judge the size of the market in absolute numbers, you also have to account for the fact that this survey only measures _Steam_ users. So Rift users who don't use Steam, and owners of non-PC VR headsets like PSVR aren't included.
- T-A 8y ago> makes the numbers more representative of _active_ VR users rather than just users who _have_ a headset but don't often use it YMMV. My Vive-equipped PC launches Steam on boot, because that lets it install updates quietly in the background as they come in. Otherwise, the first thing likely to happen when I try to launch something is a long wait for stuff to download. The Vive on the other hand is only plugged in when I actually use it. It gets hot, and I don't particularly want it to burn electricity for no better purpose than to die a premature death. So even as an active VR user, my Vive is only visible to Steam for a minor fraction of the time my PC is logged on.
- kilbuz 8y agoIn my opinion, the VR market in a bit of a holding pattern right now, and it's running out of opportunities. I personally believe if the Oculus Quest flops and/or Sony opts not to build a PSVR2 for the next-generation PS5, it's over for now. Google and Samsung have pulled back, MS is not happy with their MR headset sales. Oculus continues to push forward, but increasingly they are alone.
- throwaway34241 8y agoIt's not dying, for full fledged VR (i.e. not Cardboard/GearVR) the active user base is small but persistently growing. There's a of low hanging fruit for improvement in the first wave that came out recently. Needing to be tethered with a cable to a $1000 PC is one of the big ones, and that should be addressed by the Quest in a few months. I don't know how it will compare to mobile phone growth, but I expect VR to grow at a much faster rate once the Quest comes out. It will bring the entry cost to $400 (from ~$1400 for most people, who don't already have gaming PCs), remove one of the biggest nuisances (the cable), and be drastically easier to set up. The software library is still small but better than it was a few years ago. Also keep in mind there's huge numbers of people who haven't ever tried VR yet. The Quest is likely to get in front of a much larger number of potential customers since it's so easy for a friend or relative etc to bring it over compared to the current non-portable systems.
- onion2k 8y agoThis is Google saying VR as a medium for passive consumption is dead, or at least the market isn't ready yet. There's could still be plenty of potential for interactive media like games though.
- sprash 8y agoWatching movies clearly only makes sense in a social context and is therefore predictably unsuitable for VR. However the "interactive media" market is also way overhyped, maybe similar to 3D-TVs. When the initial excitement of the user for VR wears of it feels more like a gimmick rather than an immersive experience. I know plenty of gamers who have rarely used VR goggles stuffed away in some cupboard while going back to their plain old 1080p monitor. VR will stay a small niche even in the context of gaming.
- hrktb 8y ago> Watching movies clearly only makes sense in a social context and is therefore predictably unsuitable for VR. It amazes me at how much difference there can be depending on the social circles and culture perhaps ? On the other end of the spectrum there will be people for who movies and TV are a way to distance from reality and the last thing they want is other people interfering with their experience. I think your view is aligned with how the movie industry sees itself, while the opposite view is materialised by how a whole swach of the viewers stopped or limited their going to cinemas, don't sit on the family couch and prefer to watch things on their iPad in their room or at home at night alone.
- yeahboats 8y agoI agree with you. Watching movies in the theater here in the US (with the exception of some Rocky Horror Picture show type screenings) is distinctly -not- a social experience. Talking and interruptions are forbidden and will get you removed for too many infractions. I would say serial TV shows can be a more social experience; I get together with friends to watch Westworld and I know the bachelor/bachelorette have big followings.
- 8y ago
- SeanDav 8y agoIt could just be that VR at Gooogle scale is not ready. There may still be a huge part for VR to play in "niche" markets like games, training simulators, data visualization etc.
- duxup 8y agoYeah perhaps there's just not that much room for large companies who want to throw gobs of money and resources at it. Smaller players, even capable hobbyists, who iterate and find what works and what doesn't and keep rolling on / don't shutdown if they don't hit a goal in X time, might just be the folks who find what works.
- paule89 8y agoVR is in its infancy for over 30 years now. It is just not really good.
- giancarlostoro 8y agoGetting a headset needs to be stupid simple. The Oculus as someone else mentioned rrquires 3 - 4 USB cables. What!? Regular non geeks dont have time for that. It should hook up to a single hub via USB C now that its a thing and do the rest wirelessly not necessarily BlueTooth since that can be unreliable. Whatever Logitech has been doing for their keyboards and mice seems efficient when BlueTooth fails their dongle just works. If the barrier to entry is beyond turn this thing on and use it. It will not get people crazy about it. Also you need some sort of fun goofy games that will be addictive / fun enough to market themselves. They dont need to be full blown Skyrim or Minecrafts just something free and simple enough media hype about it will make people want to buy it. Hell if Fortnite was somehow better in VR I could see people buying any headset they deem worthy.
- jobigoud 8y agoAt the moment inside-out 6DOF tracking isn't millimeter accurate, so we require additional hardware. Oculus uses cameras which is where the USB requirement is from, and Vive requires laser beaming stations (no USB required). Hopefully we can get rid of this extra hardware in the next few iterations.
- throwaway34241 8y agoThis actually looks like it will be solved pretty soon; Microsoft VR headsets have been using inside-out tracking for a year and a half, the Quest will use it, and a revision to the rift is widely expected to launch soon with inside-out tracking too. SteamVR tracking might have some advantages if you want lots of tracked objects (that may be outside the headset's field of view) but it seems like good-enough inside out tracking will be widely available this year.
- andybak 8y ago
- jimhefferon 8y ago> aggressively hocking Possibly they mean "hawking"?
- Ensorceled 8y agoI think they mean “hock” in the pawn off sense of the word and not intense falconry.
- michaelscott 8y ago"Hawking" can also refer to the sale of goods, usually in a kind of bazaar-like fashion
- moron4hire 8y agoNo, that's "hocking".
- oliveshell 8y agoActually, it’s “hawking”! To hock something is to pawn it, i.e. sell it because you need the money (and possibly plan to buy it back later): https://brians.wsu.edu/2016/05/19/hock-hawk/ https://brians.wsu.edu/2016/05/19/hock-hawk/
- mark_l_watson 8y agoI was a co-founder of a VR lab at SAIC in the 1990s. We shut down because we lacked a clear path to monetization even though everyone who tried our system loved it. It seems like a `chicken and the egg` problem: if enough people had VR gear then studios would have a chance of profitability.
- jaimex2 8y agoDaydream hardware didn't support most phones for no reason, I don't know what they thought was going to happen.
- aboutruby 8y agoReality is almost nobody wants to wear VR headsets, and that's going to take a while for VCs to admit that.
- theNJR 8y agoI bootstrapped a VR company (1) after leaving a high paying CMO job. I put in around $100k, we released three games, one got some funding from HTC, we were shown at GDC, SIGGRAPH, VRLA, etc. We hit around 2,700 MAU before my co-founder tapped out after no salary for two years. I took six months off from VR to go back to a normal job that paid well. That got acquired (in a very non-meaningful way, at least for me) in December and I’ve been drawn back to VR. Immersive computing is the inevitable next platform. Recent data(2) shows the kind of growth you’d expect and hope for at this stage. As others have said, the Quest will be a game changer. I think an NDA says I can’t confirm or deny that I have one, but I certainly agree it is a game changer. During my six month break from VR, I didn’t have any of my half dozen headsets setup. We had turned my living room into our office prior to dismantling, so it was nice to just have my living room back to normal. Setting up my Vive again after six months reminded me of what a pain in the ass that process is. The Quest fixes all of it. VR is not 3D TV. Anyone who has experienced both knows that to be true. AR will have a much higher install base, but VR will have an addressable market of tens/hundreds of millions. I’ve been working on a postmortem about my VR company for a while, but can’t seem to finish it. Partially because I’m not sure if that company is over yet. I’ve got plenty to say about VR, VR startups and VR venture, so any questions, ask away. (1) http://www.RLTYCHK.co http://www.RLTYCHK.co (2) https://www.roadtovr.com/monthly-connected-vr-headsets-on-steam-have-grown-exponentially-analysis https://www.roadtovr.com/monthly-connected-vr-headsets-on-st...
- insertcredit 8y agoLike you I think the Quest will change everything. I feel that it has to, at this point, for VR momentum to break through. Do you think Oculus will dominate the space in the coming decade? I can't help but be reminded of Sense/Net from Neuromancer as a potential VR-only business with massive upside and potential (userbase in the hundreds of millions if not billions) that can be done _today_ if VR headset proliferation went beyond gamers. I am thinking if Carmack and Abrash can't get it done, chances that anyone else will are slim, at least in this generation.
- theNJR 8y agoI have conflicting thoughts about Oculus' domination. Last night was an interesting example, Facebook went down and took Oculus with it. But beyond that, if this is going to be the platform of the future, we're going to need more than one company behind it. History tells me that there is a better solution being built in a garage right now. If Lucky Palmer could do it in the 2010's, someone else can be doing it again now. I'd certainly vote for that company to be stand alone. Have you read The History of the Future (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062455966 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062455966) yet?