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This is all true but it can be a little bit of survivor ship bias at play. Look at all the technology conferences over the last 40 years and for the most part y

This is all true but it can be a little bit of survivor ship bias at play. Look at all the technology conferences over the last 40 years and for the most part you will see a grave yard of tens of thousand of ideas that looks promising but ended up going nowhere - sometimes simply due to being out maneuvered business wise. Bill Gates once said that in some ways Microsoft was lucky to be as succesful as they where, that they had compititors that had better products but to Microsofts luck, could never get a foothold in the market. Maybe Apple Vision is the future but it could also just end up as another path not taken on the trash heap of history. Time will tell.

_Tomas 3y ago
>This is all true but it can be a little bit of survivor ship bias at play. Look at all the technology conferences over the last 40 years and for the most part you will see a grave yard of tens of thousand of ideas that looks promising but ended up going nowhere Survivor bias is real, but the interesting failures (in comparison to VR) are things like 3D TV. 3D TV has a very weak effect, the 3D effect is basically dismissed after a while, after you get immersed in the actual content. A bit like watching a (good) silent movie, at first it's jarring, but after an hour you don't notice it anymore. On the other hand, because VR is so immersive, the effects on the brain are quantifiable, it is fundamentally different than all other forms of media. You can permanently change your brain with VR in ways that are literally impossible with letterbox media. It can change your brain, in a way that no technology has ever been able to before ('Strategic modification of Bayesian priors' if you're into the science). That kind of thing is why VR is a guaranteed success, it's not just about the fact that movies and entertainment and games will get to a new level, but the psychological possibilities for actually modifying the self with VR are going to ensure we all have headsets in a decade. VR is immersive to a degree that it tricks your brain completely. It can activate powerful biological mechanisms that cannot be done in other digital/scaleable ways. For example, there's a company in Spain called Virtual Bodyworks, founded by the VR researcher Mel Slater, which can affect your implicit bias with body swaps performed in VR. This is genuine selective neural net-surgery, done in a way that cannot be replicated outside of VR. The company I work at has a smoking-cessation VR app, takes 5 minutes for some people to go from decades of unbroken addiction/40 smokes a day/first smoke within 5 minutes of waking, to not even being able to think about smoking. There is no way to do what we do with a phone app or even a 3DTV, it requires VR. That kind of software is going to be the reason VR will take off, it's capable of changing the mind in ways we can't imagine at the moment. Not to mention that spatial computing is the 'final form' of human machine interaction, plenty of research on that.
- teruakohatu 3y ago
  > The company I work at has a smoking-cessation VR app, takes 5 minutes for some people to go from decades of unbroken addiction/40 smokes a day/first smoke within 5 minutes of waking, to not even being able to think about smoking. There is no way to do what we do with a phone app or even a 3DTV, it requires VR. Five minutes to quit smoking? There is one app that claims to be clinicly proven and even they only claim 33% of users actually quit after completing the program.
  - _Tomas 3y ago
    'only 33%' is not so bad, that's basically a market-leading rate. 10 weeks of CBT is the established benchmark for 'proven' tobacco cessation, and has a 2 year 33% success rate (IIRC). Most of the tobacco cessation products top out at 33% for some reason, but combining them gives higher success rates. What app are you referring to btw? Very interested in this area at the moment.
- codethief 3y ago
  While I'm not sure that > we [will] all have headsets in a decade you do mention a couple things I hadn't considered or heard of before. > The company I work at has a smoking-cessation VR app This sounds very intriguing! Could you possibly provide some references and/or the name of your company? (I don't smoke but I'd love to understand better how this works.) More generally, how do you stay on top of what's happening in VR tech & applications? I'm asking because I've clearly been missing out on some significant developments.
  - _Tomas 3y ago
    >While I'm not sure that >> we [will] all have headsets in a decade I'll take that bet. I'm a kind of tech-cynic, have a Nokia 8110, ten year old thinkpad and listen to minidiscs. But in January I'll fly to the states and buy a Vision pro day 1. The last time I was this excited about a technological innovation was with OS X. My brother was a CS guy and he recommended I buy an iBook when I started university because he thought OX was going to be a game changer. And in the beginning it was weird to have the only Apple in a lecture hall with 300 Dells. But 10.1, 10.2, 10.3... It felt like being on the cutting edge. That's what the Vision Pro looks like to me. The Powerbook 12" all over again, future-tech. >Could you possibly provide some references and/or the name of your company? (I don't smoke but I'd love to understand better how this works.) It's really simple as hell, there's an effect called the 'Garcia' effect, whereby if you feel sick ≈6 hours after eating or drinking a novel taste, you get a lifelong aversion to that taste of smell. It's highly conserved, found in every animal studied with the sole exception of vampire bats (they only have one dietary option). And this was used in tobacco cessation in the 60's. There's a lovely case study where a 14 year old boy is given apomorphine three times while smoking, he vomits so copiously he passes out at one point, but literally can't smoke afterwards. It fell out of favour because injecting people with opiates to induce uncontrollable bouts of vomiting wasn't a popular way to treat smoking. We just do with a simple VR spinning room, you take as long a break from smoking as you can comfortably manage, light up and then do our 'aversion' session for 5 minutes, or as long as you can manage. From that, we see around 20% of people that are unaffected (the efficacy is dependent on a factor that varies ≈10000:1 across a normal population). For most people, you get some effect, and for around a third you get an instant reaction where even 2-3 5 minute sessions mean they just can't smoke. They can cave to cravings and light up... and then just have to throw the cigarette away in disgust. https://sickofsmoking.app/ https://sickofsmoking.app/ Nicorette meets Clockwork Orange in a way. >More generally, how do you stay on top of what's happening in VR tech & applications? I'm asking because I've clearly been missing out on some significant developments. Very difficult, so much happening in various silos. Jaan Aru and Mel Slater are probably the two researchers I try to follow as much as possible, but this is a prescience at the moment, so even finding common terminology is a challenge.
bryanrasmussen 3y ago
>they had compititors that had better products but to Microsofts luck, could never get a foothold in the market. hmm, this seems to be a rather biased description of the history.
- NovaDudely 3y ago
  It is biased as it is coming from the winners. But it does say something that Gates was willing to admit that it was because of some glorious amazing product that they were successful. A big part of it was also Gates ruthless business practices.
- ghaff 3y ago
  There were any number of better operating systems at the time than DOS, especially in the 1.0 timeframe. CP/M was arguably at least on par. Any number of 16-bit minicomputer operating systems. Probably a bit early for Unix realistically.
  - bryanrasmussen 3y ago
    perhaps my tendency to expression is overly ironical and indirect at the cost of clarity and obviousness, but I meant it seemed biased that Gates described the reason why MS won out over superior tech was due to 'luck'
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Clearly Microsoft did lots of things right (and wrong) over the years. And one of them was creating DOS in the first place. But IBM could have presumably gone in a different direction for the IBM PC fairly easily. And had they done so, it's reasonable to speculate you might never have heard of Microsoft.
  - dagaci 3y ago
    Compared to Unix and especially modern operating systems DOS is more comparable to firmware than OS, it was something ultra minimal which basically got out of the way of developers. And being so minimal it allowed IBM PCs to sell for prices below $10,000 (1980s! dollars). This was they key to the success of Microsoft and the IBM PC. You might have created a ‘better’ OS at the time, but no one cared about your fancy slow OS which used all the memory cost a fortune in hardware.
mcculley 3y ago
> Bill Gates once said that in some ways Microsoft was lucky to be as succesful as they where, that they had competitors that had better products but to Microsofts luck, could never get a foothold in the market. Bill Gates famously engineered his own luck by opposing a free market.
leejoramo 3y ago
> a little bit of survivor ship bias at play I am not sure why you are focusing on "survivor bias". My comment was about being a programmer and the fun of seeing a new technology that is an undefined territory to explore. But I did directly mention that many of these do not workout as as I referenced: amiga, os/2, palm, and VisiCalc and Lotus 123 However, so that you may have some idea of my personal "survivor bias", here is a super simplified multi-dimension history of my over 43 years of computing smashed into a linear list with massive things forgotten: TRS-80 Model III, LDOS, BASIC, VisiCalc, modem-to-modem TRS-80 Model 100 CompuServe MS-DOS compatible, MultiPlan, TurboPascal, dBase Windows 3.0 DesqView Delphi Online OS/2, REXX Macintosh System 7 --> 1993 to OS X Dial-up ISP Solaris, Perl BBEdit Windows 95 Palm Pilot Linux for Servers --> 1998 to Today Linux Desktop ColdFusion Apache Python --> 1999 to Today Always on Internet (ISDN, DSL, Cable) --> 2004 to Today Nokia cellphones PHP Zope/Plone Mac OS X --> BETA to Today Windows XP Nginx iPhone --> 2009 to Today SublimeText Windows 10 --> 2018 to Today VS Code --> 2018 to Today NodeJS --> 2018 to Today SvelteKit --> 2021 to Today KDE Neon --> 2022 to Today (the year of Desktop Linux arrived for me) The longest thread is from 1993 to Today is what is now known as macOS, but for about the first 15 years of my usage Apple was considered at risk of failure. MS Windows was always a part of my world, but seldom my primary focus, it has only been since 2018 that I use it on an extended daily basis. Some of the above are clearly dead. Some I still use lightly (Nginx, BBEdit) but are no longer the focal point of my work. As far as Apple's Vision Pro, I have no clue if it will be successful. For myself personally, it is the first headset I am even interested in playing with.
- nappy 3y ago
  seems like the longest thread is Windows by the same reasoning?
  - leejoramo 3y ago
    But not as a daily driver. I have had one or more Macs since 1993, I went years without a Windows system. (Servers have been consistently Linux with some Unix and Macs early on). I probably spent less than a day total with Windows for Work Groups, NT, 98,ME,Vista,7,8,11, etc Much of my Windows 3 usage was under OS/2 Warp The above list really about my personal major themes. I already can see major omissions, but Windows is not one.

_Tomas 3y ago

>This is all true but it can be a little bit of survivor ship bias at play. Look at all the technology conferences over the last 40 years and for the most part you will see a grave yard of tens of thousand of ideas that looks promising but ended up going nowhere Survivor bias is real, but the interesting failures (in comparison to VR) are things like 3D TV. 3D TV has a very weak effect, the 3D effect is basically dismissed after a while, after you get immersed in the actual content. A bit like watching a (good) silent movie, at first it's jarring, but after an hour you don't notice it anymore. On the other hand, because VR is so immersive, the effects on the brain are quantifiable, it is fundamentally different than all other forms of media. You can permanently change your brain with VR in ways that are literally impossible with letterbox media. It can change your brain, in a way that no technology has ever been able to before ('Strategic modification of Bayesian priors' if you're into the science). That kind of thing is why VR is a guaranteed success, it's not just about the fact that movies and entertainment and games will get to a new level, but the psychological possibilities for actually modifying the self with VR are going to ensure we all have headsets in a decade. VR is immersive to a degree that it tricks your brain completely. It can activate powerful biological mechanisms that cannot be done in other digital/scaleable ways. For example, there's a company in Spain called Virtual Bodyworks, founded by the VR researcher Mel Slater, which can affect your implicit bias with body swaps performed in VR. This is genuine selective neural net-surgery, done in a way that cannot be replicated outside of VR. The company I work at has a smoking-cessation VR app, takes 5 minutes for some people to go from decades of unbroken addiction/40 smokes a day/first smoke within 5 minutes of waking, to not even being able to think about smoking. There is no way to do what we do with a phone app or even a 3DTV, it requires VR. That kind of software is going to be the reason VR will take off, it's capable of changing the mind in ways we can't imagine at the moment. Not to mention that spatial computing is the 'final form' of human machine interaction, plenty of research on that.

teruakohatu 3y ago
> The company I work at has a smoking-cessation VR app, takes 5 minutes for some people to go from decades of unbroken addiction/40 smokes a day/first smoke within 5 minutes of waking, to not even being able to think about smoking. There is no way to do what we do with a phone app or even a 3DTV, it requires VR. Five minutes to quit smoking? There is one app that claims to be clinicly proven and even they only claim 33% of users actually quit after completing the program.
- _Tomas 3y ago
  'only 33%' is not so bad, that's basically a market-leading rate. 10 weeks of CBT is the established benchmark for 'proven' tobacco cessation, and has a 2 year 33% success rate (IIRC). Most of the tobacco cessation products top out at 33% for some reason, but combining them gives higher success rates. What app are you referring to btw? Very interested in this area at the moment.
codethief 3y ago
While I'm not sure that > we [will] all have headsets in a decade you do mention a couple things I hadn't considered or heard of before. > The company I work at has a smoking-cessation VR app This sounds very intriguing! Could you possibly provide some references and/or the name of your company? (I don't smoke but I'd love to understand better how this works.) More generally, how do you stay on top of what's happening in VR tech & applications? I'm asking because I've clearly been missing out on some significant developments.
- _Tomas 3y ago
  >While I'm not sure that >> we [will] all have headsets in a decade I'll take that bet. I'm a kind of tech-cynic, have a Nokia 8110, ten year old thinkpad and listen to minidiscs. But in January I'll fly to the states and buy a Vision pro day 1. The last time I was this excited about a technological innovation was with OS X. My brother was a CS guy and he recommended I buy an iBook when I started university because he thought OX was going to be a game changer. And in the beginning it was weird to have the only Apple in a lecture hall with 300 Dells. But 10.1, 10.2, 10.3... It felt like being on the cutting edge. That's what the Vision Pro looks like to me. The Powerbook 12" all over again, future-tech. >Could you possibly provide some references and/or the name of your company? (I don't smoke but I'd love to understand better how this works.) It's really simple as hell, there's an effect called the 'Garcia' effect, whereby if you feel sick ≈6 hours after eating or drinking a novel taste, you get a lifelong aversion to that taste of smell. It's highly conserved, found in every animal studied with the sole exception of vampire bats (they only have one dietary option). And this was used in tobacco cessation in the 60's. There's a lovely case study where a 14 year old boy is given apomorphine three times while smoking, he vomits so copiously he passes out at one point, but literally can't smoke afterwards. It fell out of favour because injecting people with opiates to induce uncontrollable bouts of vomiting wasn't a popular way to treat smoking. We just do with a simple VR spinning room, you take as long a break from smoking as you can comfortably manage, light up and then do our 'aversion' session for 5 minutes, or as long as you can manage. From that, we see around 20% of people that are unaffected (the efficacy is dependent on a factor that varies ≈10000:1 across a normal population). For most people, you get some effect, and for around a third you get an instant reaction where even 2-3 5 minute sessions mean they just can't smoke. They can cave to cravings and light up... and then just have to throw the cigarette away in disgust. https://sickofsmoking.app/ https://sickofsmoking.app/ Nicorette meets Clockwork Orange in a way. >More generally, how do you stay on top of what's happening in VR tech & applications? I'm asking because I've clearly been missing out on some significant developments. Very difficult, so much happening in various silos. Jaan Aru and Mel Slater are probably the two researchers I try to follow as much as possible, but this is a prescience at the moment, so even finding common terminology is a challenge.

bryanrasmussen 3y ago

>they had compititors that had better products but to Microsofts luck, could never get a foothold in the market. hmm, this seems to be a rather biased description of the history.

NovaDudely 3y ago
It is biased as it is coming from the winners. But it does say something that Gates was willing to admit that it was because of some glorious amazing product that they were successful. A big part of it was also Gates ruthless business practices.
ghaff 3y ago
There were any number of better operating systems at the time than DOS, especially in the 1.0 timeframe. CP/M was arguably at least on par. Any number of 16-bit minicomputer operating systems. Probably a bit early for Unix realistically.
- bryanrasmussen 3y ago
  perhaps my tendency to expression is overly ironical and indirect at the cost of clarity and obviousness, but I meant it seemed biased that Gates described the reason why MS won out over superior tech was due to 'luck'
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Clearly Microsoft did lots of things right (and wrong) over the years. And one of them was creating DOS in the first place. But IBM could have presumably gone in a different direction for the IBM PC fairly easily. And had they done so, it's reasonable to speculate you might never have heard of Microsoft.
- dagaci 3y ago
  Compared to Unix and especially modern operating systems DOS is more comparable to firmware than OS, it was something ultra minimal which basically got out of the way of developers. And being so minimal it allowed IBM PCs to sell for prices below $10,000 (1980s! dollars). This was they key to the success of Microsoft and the IBM PC. You might have created a ‘better’ OS at the time, but no one cared about your fancy slow OS which used all the memory cost a fortune in hardware.

mcculley 3y ago

> Bill Gates once said that in some ways Microsoft was lucky to be as succesful as they where, that they had competitors that had better products but to Microsofts luck, could never get a foothold in the market. Bill Gates famously engineered his own luck by opposing a free market.

leejoramo 3y ago

> a little bit of survivor ship bias at play I am not sure why you are focusing on "survivor bias". My comment was about being a programmer and the fun of seeing a new technology that is an undefined territory to explore. But I did directly mention that many of these do not workout as as I referenced: amiga, os/2, palm, and VisiCalc and Lotus 123 However, so that you may have some idea of my personal "survivor bias", here is a super simplified multi-dimension history of my over 43 years of computing smashed into a linear list with massive things forgotten: TRS-80 Model III, LDOS, BASIC, VisiCalc, modem-to-modem TRS-80 Model 100 CompuServe MS-DOS compatible, MultiPlan, TurboPascal, dBase Windows 3.0 DesqView Delphi Online OS/2, REXX Macintosh System 7 --> 1993 to OS X Dial-up ISP Solaris, Perl BBEdit Windows 95 Palm Pilot Linux for Servers --> 1998 to Today Linux Desktop ColdFusion Apache Python --> 1999 to Today Always on Internet (ISDN, DSL, Cable) --> 2004 to Today Nokia cellphones PHP Zope/Plone Mac OS X --> BETA to Today Windows XP Nginx iPhone --> 2009 to Today SublimeText Windows 10 --> 2018 to Today VS Code --> 2018 to Today NodeJS --> 2018 to Today SvelteKit --> 2021 to Today KDE Neon --> 2022 to Today (the year of Desktop Linux arrived for me) The longest thread is from 1993 to Today is what is now known as macOS, but for about the first 15 years of my usage Apple was considered at risk of failure. MS Windows was always a part of my world, but seldom my primary focus, it has only been since 2018 that I use it on an extended daily basis. Some of the above are clearly dead. Some I still use lightly (Nginx, BBEdit) but are no longer the focal point of my work. As far as Apple's Vision Pro, I have no clue if it will be successful. For myself personally, it is the first headset I am even interested in playing with.

nappy 3y ago
seems like the longest thread is Windows by the same reasoning?
- leejoramo 3y ago
  But not as a daily driver. I have had one or more Macs since 1993, I went years without a Windows system. (Servers have been consistently Linux with some Unix and Macs early on). I probably spent less than a day total with Windows for Work Groups, NT, 98,ME,Vista,7,8,11, etc Much of my Windows 3 usage was under OS/2 Warp The above list really about my personal major themes. I already can see major omissions, but Windows is not one.