4 ms·

Free Isn’t Cheap Enough – The Blog of Palmer Luckey

17 points by mrfusion 8y ago

h2odragon 8y ago
"VR Sculpting / CAD" is probably the best actual use for the tech as it seems to be so far, nifty as that is (for me)... Many people have never wanted to design something, so making it easier doesn't mean much to them. Immersive VR porn that involves fluids and smells, that could sell well enough that people might make a career of content creation of it. Queasy feeling video games, not so much. The "Cyberspace" notion that arose after "Neuromancer" came out is so captivating that it draws people to think that's the thing we need. Take the display technology: 3d "retina resolution" FPS world... We keep seeing hardware that comes as close as possible to that given current manufacturing, and it's never good enough. it's always the hardware's fault, or there wasn't enough appealing content... No one really wants that kind of display, though. Nintendo's efforts were a good enough effort to show what that can do. Autodesk's version made years earlier and costing several limbs and organs more, was pretty much the same thing. "Ready Player One" shows a really cool VR world but... it's still the same basic vision, the same basic thing, it's been since 1990 or so. However many more boom and bust cycles VR goes through, it's still going to be the limited use and limited appeal thing it has been because it isn't what anyone actually needs. So I'm a curmudgeon: I'm typing on a 1992 Model M and just replaced my 1996 Microsoft Trackball because a decent alternative has become available, (finally! blessings on Elecom). I use these input tools because they are the best I have found... And judging by the $500+ price on the MS Trackballs that are still sold, and the large Model M / Mechanical keyboard fanbase, I'm not alone in that opinion. How is it possible that none of the VR research has yet managed to improve on these input tools enough to dethrone them? Is there truly no real concept of a 300WPM keyboard equivalent that everyday users can use? Is it that we have to ensure users upstream bandwidth can't exceed 1/10th of their downstream (shades of "sit and consume like a good citizen!") I won't even mention voice recognition because many people do not talk as fast as they wish to communicate already. Haptics would be nice, right? What could we do today, right now, with bubble wrap suits with individual air pressure control of each bubble. Make the bugs crawl all over you, tele-massage... There's potential there. Does anybody want it? "I don't want to be touched" would have been a weirder thing to say in public in 1990 than today. I don't think our culture is about to celebrate skin as a sense organ anytime soon. I'm just a bit cynical about "VR". Perhaps someday some of the VR work will become widely useful, probably be under a different name, like "bio-interfaces" or something, just because the VR meme has so much suction.
- MrEldritch 8y ago
  The fact that we don't have good force-feedback technology yet is basically why we don't have great VR input devices. Being able to make fast, precise, confident movements depends on having resistance and collision to take the brain's motion control from open-loop to closed-loop. Even supposedly feedbackless touchscreens have the benefit of screen friction and a defined rigid plane. And people have been trying with force-feedback; it's just really hard to make it work with something that allows for wide range of motion, isn't massively cumbersome, and costs less than a new car.
  - tyleo 8y ago
    I think the previous poster makes a good point touting sculpting and design apps as better applications as they don’t need such force feedback devices. These VR devices are already as expensive as game consoles and all you get is a single player experience that a companion can’t even watch as you play. The force feedback devices may improve individual experience but wouldn’t help the price point.
    - MrEldritch 8y ago
      Even sculpting and design apps would strongly benefit from force feedback. In fact, those are some of the specific things I was thinking of where the kind of precise movements that closed-loop control enables are critical! When you're drawing, for instance, the pressure and friction of the pencil against the page is pretty critical for accurately feeling and controlling your movement. You cannot just wave your finger in the air with the same precision or control you can draw a line with a pencil. Likewise for sculpting - your hands are far more sensitive to precise shape than your eyes are, and being able to feel the material resist against you lets you use precise amounts of pressure to judge how you are deforming it. As long as VR inputs involve waving your hands in the air unsupported, they will never be able to achieve the same level of precision input and utility for serious tasks as a mouse or a drawing tablet.
bleh123 8y ago
Reading the comments here, it pains me that after all this time, the tech community still doesn't see that they're not like everyone else. No. The answer simply cannot be 'better performing' tech that does the same thing. People are different. There's no talk of the "experience" that these games or tools give their users that would compel them to stay, considering the escalating war for their attention from everything ranging from modern consoles and the amazing storylines the games there have to those short bursts of attention grabbing content from "Content creators" on IG/YT/Tik-tok. The hardware specs are just one part of the puzzle and you're going to have an incredibly hard time convincing the average person to spend any time organically just because the hardware "allows" some sort of superior perf. Can i play my PS4/Xbox library on this? Give me a benchmark to something i love and stop pushing me towards a nerd ideal of what you think i should do with the tech. I wonder how hard it would be to adapt existing open world/ First person games like Assasins creed or GTA V to output here? Maybe hack in an external GPU for those platforms while we're at it so it can handle the load. . . MSFT already has a tie up with Oculus and Sony would be happy to for a few billion (That FB, Oculus' parent has lying around) Once you show gamers that what they're doing at present pales in comparison to what you're offering here, it's going to be hard to get them to go back to the sub optimal standard. That's not going to happen or is going to be much harder by trying to get them to abandon what they're doing right now in favor of a completely new platform with nothing from what they're used to.

17 points by mrfusion 8y ago

"VR Sculpting / CAD" is probably the best actual use for the tech as it seems to be so far, nifty as that is (for me)... Many people have never wanted to design something, so making it easier doesn't mean much to them. Immersive VR porn that involves fluids and smells, that could sell well enough that people might make a career of content creation of it. Queasy feeling video games, not so much. The "Cyberspace" notion that arose after "Neuromancer" came out is so captivating that it draws people to think that's the thing we need. Take the display technology: 3d "retina resolution" FPS world... We keep seeing hardware that comes as close as possible to that given current manufacturing, and it's never good enough. it's always the hardware's fault, or there wasn't enough appealing content... No one really wants that kind of display, though. Nintendo's efforts were a good enough effort to show what that can do. Autodesk's version made years earlier and costing several limbs and organs more, was pretty much the same thing. "Ready Player One" shows a really cool VR world but... it's still the same basic vision, the same basic thing, it's been since 1990 or so. However many more boom and bust cycles VR goes through, it's still going to be the limited use and limited appeal thing it has been because it isn't what anyone actually needs. So I'm a curmudgeon: I'm typing on a 1992 Model M and just replaced my 1996 Microsoft Trackball because a decent alternative has become available, (finally! blessings on Elecom). I use these input tools because they are the best I have found... And judging by the $500+ price on the MS Trackballs that are still sold, and the large Model M / Mechanical keyboard fanbase, I'm not alone in that opinion. How is it possible that none of the VR research has yet managed to improve on these input tools enough to dethrone them? Is there truly no real concept of a 300WPM keyboard equivalent that everyday users can use? Is it that we have to ensure users upstream bandwidth can't exceed 1/10th of their downstream (shades of "sit and consume like a good citizen!") I won't even mention voice recognition because many people do not talk as fast as they wish to communicate already. Haptics would be nice, right? What could we do today, right now, with bubble wrap suits with individual air pressure control of each bubble. Make the bugs crawl all over you, tele-massage... There's potential there. Does anybody want it? "I don't want to be touched" would have been a weirder thing to say in public in 1990 than today. I don't think our culture is about to celebrate skin as a sense organ anytime soon. I'm just a bit cynical about "VR". Perhaps someday some of the VR work will become widely useful, probably be under a different name, like "bio-interfaces" or something, just because the VR meme has so much suction.

MrEldritch 8y ago
The fact that we don't have good force-feedback technology yet is basically why we don't have great VR input devices. Being able to make fast, precise, confident movements depends on having resistance and collision to take the brain's motion control from open-loop to closed-loop. Even supposedly feedbackless touchscreens have the benefit of screen friction and a defined rigid plane. And people have been trying with force-feedback; it's just really hard to make it work with something that allows for wide range of motion, isn't massively cumbersome, and costs less than a new car.
- tyleo 8y ago
  I think the previous poster makes a good point touting sculpting and design apps as better applications as they don’t need such force feedback devices. These VR devices are already as expensive as game consoles and all you get is a single player experience that a companion can’t even watch as you play. The force feedback devices may improve individual experience but wouldn’t help the price point.
  - MrEldritch 8y ago
    Even sculpting and design apps would strongly benefit from force feedback. In fact, those are some of the specific things I was thinking of where the kind of precise movements that closed-loop control enables are critical! When you're drawing, for instance, the pressure and friction of the pencil against the page is pretty critical for accurately feeling and controlling your movement. You cannot just wave your finger in the air with the same precision or control you can draw a line with a pencil. Likewise for sculpting - your hands are far more sensitive to precise shape than your eyes are, and being able to feel the material resist against you lets you use precise amounts of pressure to judge how you are deforming it. As long as VR inputs involve waving your hands in the air unsupported, they will never be able to achieve the same level of precision input and utility for serious tasks as a mouse or a drawing tablet.

bleh123 8y ago

Reading the comments here, it pains me that after all this time, the tech community still doesn't see that they're not like everyone else. No. The answer simply cannot be 'better performing' tech that does the same thing. People are different. There's no talk of the "experience" that these games or tools give their users that would compel them to stay, considering the escalating war for their attention from everything ranging from modern consoles and the amazing storylines the games there have to those short bursts of attention grabbing content from "Content creators" on IG/YT/Tik-tok. The hardware specs are just one part of the puzzle and you're going to have an incredibly hard time convincing the average person to spend any time organically just because the hardware "allows" some sort of superior perf. Can i play my PS4/Xbox library on this? Give me a benchmark to something i love and stop pushing me towards a nerd ideal of what you think i should do with the tech. I wonder how hard it would be to adapt existing open world/ First person games like Assasins creed or GTA V to output here? Maybe hack in an external GPU for those platforms while we're at it so it can handle the load. . . MSFT already has a tie up with Oculus and Sony would be happy to for a few billion (That FB, Oculus' parent has lying around) Once you show gamers that what they're doing at present pales in comparison to what you're offering here, it's going to be hard to get them to go back to the sub optimal standard. That's not going to happen or is going to be much harder by trying to get them to abandon what they're doing right now in favor of a completely new platform with nothing from what they're used to.