6 ms·

Where Will Virtual Reality Take Us?

47 points by mitchbob 3y ago

CatWChainsaw 3y ago
You put the headset on. You wake up in The Veldt.
mitchbob 3y ago
https://archive.ph/2024.02.02-202235/https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/where-will-virtual-reality-take-us https://archive.ph/2024.02.02-202235/https://www.newyorker.c...
p1esk 3y ago
Written by none other than Jaron Lanier. That probably should be in the title.
bugbuddy 3y ago
Between 2016 and 2024, an advanced alien race arrived and was preparing to make first contact with humanity. Their primary goal was to ensure that the human race would be a good steward of their technological heritage they were about to bestow upon mankind. After observing the large wasteful investments in techs such as during the Crypto mania, AR/VR mania, and Gen AI mania, the alien race decided that the human race was still too immature and decided to schedule another return visit in 100,000 years hoping that the situation would be improved by then.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > Crypto mania, AR/VR mania, and Gen AI mania One of the things I will never stop finding weird, is the tendency to group together things that aren't really related. I wonder if I do it too? If I did, I expect I wouldn't notice…
  - adfm 3y ago
    They are all related as they are all primary examples of technologies enabled by hardware-accelerated floating point math. Pro tip: WebGPU provides a common API to all hardware acceleration going forward. From the din of bitcoin miners parked next to hydroelectric plants to the vents in the new Apple Vision Pro to the render farm spitting out hyper-surrealistic midjourney banality to your handset rendering this text; it's all happening via a Web-focused API. You may be asking yourself why Apple would release a half-baked $3500 HMD. This is why. They can balk all they want, but the app store model is eroding and they're looking for cover.
  - bugbuddy 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - xanderlewis 3y ago
    I think you can make a case they’re related; they’re all technologies that have been hyped in much the same way by much the same people. That’s not to say they’ll all end up in the same place, however — it seems already clear to me that ‘Gen AI’ has far more readily-applicable utility than, say, cryptocurrencies. I think you’re just objecting on the basis that AI is obviously already immensely useful while other hyped technologies (in their current state) aren’t. > I wonder if I do it too? If I did, I expect I wouldn't notice… A very good point! You might not. But grouping things together that don’t immediately seem related can be one of the most fruitful acts of all… ‘Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things’ - Henri Poincaré.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      > they’re all technologies that have been hyped in much the same way by much the same people. Really? I can see that for GenAI and Crypto (to my mild annoyance because I was doing GenAI before such people heard of Bitcoin), but not AR/VR. > I think you’re just objecting on the basis that AI is obviously already immensely useful while other hyped technologies (in their current state) aren’t. While I do indeed think AI is valuable, I also look at AR/VR and think "this is just another games console — some are handheld, some connect to your TV, this one is on your face". VR just… it just doesn't seem any more hyped than any of the other games consoles over the years that were also "revolutionary" and "amazing photorealistic graphics" etc., and mostly by different people?
      - xanderlewis 3y ago
        > Really? I can see that for GenAI and Crypto (to my mild annoyance because I was doing GenAI before such people heard of Bitcoin), but not AR/VR. Actually, you’re right. I haven’t seen AR/VR hyped in quite the same way as the other two. I’m not actually sure why… because it seems just as ripe for hyperbolic claims as any other ‘futuristic tech’. Possibly because the idea’s been around for much longer and has had a chance to burn out before it came close to being practically possible. Of course, ‘AI’ of the kind popular now is not an entirely new idea either (as you point out), but to the grifters on Twitter it is.
netsharc 3y ago
The author is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier
spcebar 3y ago
I like this article. It expands on the big question for VR. We have this technology, it's here, it's mostly good enough (with the caveats the article lays out) for a variety of purposes. But what is the purpose consumers will want to use it for? Apple has been the king of telling consumers what they want for years. If they can't sell VR, I don't think anyone can sell VR. This feels like the make or break moment for VR, where we'll know what people want to use it for/if it's capable of living in the mainstream, or if it's forever going to live as a niche product, as it has been since the VR renaissance started when the Occulus Rift came onto the scene.
- XorNot 3y ago
  How is anyone concluding VR is "mostly good enough"? FOV is still bad. Weight is still too high. Resolution I'd say is adequate for gaming (but see FOV above). Apple are selling the same problems in a very expensive package that they're desperately trying to pretend isn't a VR platform.
  - spcebar 3y ago
    The article gives a variety of industries and use cases where VR has been prevalent/useful for years.
    - andsoitis 3y ago
      How is that applicable to the consumer market, in your eyes?
      - spcebar 3y ago
        The fact that industry and special use cases like NASA are using it means that some consumer version will probably always exist, and if industry is finding uses for it, consumers might also find uses for it. VR could also fail catastrophically as a consumer product and just be something that's exclusively used by industry, but I don't see VR going away for good. I think it's carved out a healthy enough niche for itself at this point that some version of a VR/HMD industry is going to exist for a while.
bsimpson 3y ago
> But the truth is that living in V.R. makes no sense. Life within a construction is life without a frontier. It is closed, calculated, and pointless. Reality, real reality, the mysterious physical stuff, is open, unknown, and beyond us; we must not lose it. This is one of the throughlines of Interstate 60. It's an absurd existential comedy from the writer of Back to the Future with an insane cast for an indie film. It was one of my favorite movies in college; I wonder how it holds up. ----- From the movie: > He said the frontier was a safety valve for civilization, a place for people to go to keep from goin' mad. So, whenever there were folks who couldn't fit in with the way things were, nuts, and malcontents, and extremists, they'd pack up and head for the frontier. That's how America got started - all the crackpots and troublemakers in Europe packed up and went to a frontier which became the thirteen colonies. When some people couldn't fit in with that, they moved farther west, which is why all the nuts eventually ended up in California. Turner died in 1932, so he wasn't around long enough to see what would happen to the world when we ran out of frontier. Some people say we have the frontier of the mind, and they go off and explore the wonderful world of alcohol and drugs, but that's no frontier. It's just another way for us to fool ourselves. And we've created this phony frontier with computers, which allows people to, you know, think they've escaped. A frontier with access fees?
bee_rider 3y ago
> Life within a construction is life without a frontier. It is closed, calculated, and pointless. Reality, real reality, the mysterious physical stuff, is open, unknown, and beyond us; we must not lose it. Only a tiny minority of people have lived on a frontier, that’s sort of the inherent to the definition. Most people now live in a very constructed environment (urban areas). In the past, most people lived somewhere in between; towns, suburbs, etc. Many of us find our mysteries in artificial areas: parks, little shops, back yards. There’s plenty of beauty and complexity in nature of course. But in human spaces we see just as much complexity and mystery; somebody builds something, it decays, gets fixed up, added to, gets some graffiti. We’ve all got little worlds in our heads that motivate us to do things, there’s plenty of complexity in there, especially once our actions start bouncing off each other. I think most of the problem with VR so far has been, well… first, the tech just isn’t there yet, it kind of sucks still. But also we’re mostly getting silo’d VR experiences from single authors or companies. Games. There’s no mystery there because it was all intentionally placed by the designer. Eventually we’ll get better persistent dynamic multi-user spaces I bet.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- bugbuddy 3y ago
  It is disingenuous to conflate artificial physical and artificial virtual environments. If this is the kind of thinking that is accepted in contemporary discourse without challenge, then it won’t be long before everyone becomes completely subjugated by mediocrity pretending to vanguard. I would take a mediocre physical couch over a virtual one any day. At least, my buttocks will have some cushion with a real couch. What this whole AR/VR obsession is all about is concentrated tech capital jealousy afraid of anyone even appearing to be slightly more technologically advanced. It is all ego.
  - beautifulfreak 3y ago
    That conflation is what Baudrillard addressed in Simulacra and Simulation (a book that the cast of the Matrix were required to read before filming started). When environments are designed, the blueprint is what one experiences in those environments, the conceptual underpinning, even if the environment consists of matter. In a sense, they try to tell us what to think. The book came out in 1983, so these are old ideas, not really vanguard anymore, but it raises legitimate points that are becoming a lot more noticeably believable with the rise of information technology. I think the OP has a point.
bsimpson 3y ago
> There are many reasons why V.R. and gaming don’t quite work, and I suspect that one is that gamers like to be bigger than the game, not engulfed by it. You want to feel big, not small, when you play. I'm curious how he feels about Half Life: Alyx. What makes that game so compelling is the degree of interactivity it affords. You can pick up anything. If it's glass, you can break it. It allows you to interact with a tangible world to a degree that no other consumer VR software does. It's one of the most well-reputed games of all time, and it's only available in VR. As such, modders have figured out how to make it playable without a VR headset. The reviews of non-VR players are that it's actually a pretty boring game when you're not in a simulated environment. If you're not taking the time to open the drawers and break the bottles and duck behind the barrels in a gunfight, it's mostly just walking through tunnels waiting for the occasional ambush.
- Skinetio 3y ago
  I played it, i liked it and thats it. Its not relevant in my day to day life. And as long as i'm limited to what VR can do today, it will never replace reality. I want to move in vr, i want to touch, move around freely without hitting the floor, walls or roof.
- treprinum 3y ago
  Play Senua's Sacrifice in VR, maybe you'll change your mind. Much more immersive than anything else, and it's an action game with puzzles as well. Alyx is kinda stationary compared to that one.
  - bsimpson 3y ago
    I think that was on sale for like $3 last week. I'll have to be on the lookout for it.
bsimpson 3y ago
> But in the old days I’d build one-of-a-kind V.R. headsets into big masks from different cultures, sometimes adding lightning bolts and feathers. I wanted the headsets to be vibrant, exciting objects that enriched the real world, too. I'm disappointed there are no images in this article. I'd love to see this. I love how it celebrates something by giving it a more playful character.
andsoitis 3y ago
> The brain has had to adapt to many body plans over the course of its evolution, and it’s pre-adapted to work with more. I think highly of Jaron and his unique point of view, but this is invalid.
amelius 3y ago
Reading the headline, I was about to say porn, but Apple will forbid it and Zuck will watch over your shoulder, so I guess not.
- penjelly 3y ago
  browsers already know our p*rn preferences, i doubt itll be different with meta quest
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
andsoitis 3y ago
A profound truth, however, is that the greatest mysteries are found in conserved systems, which can become rich and complex, not in infinite ones, which stretch out like blank white sheets to the edge of the cosmos. Is imagination not infinite?
chaosprint 3y ago
My feeling is that it's just like IMAX 3D movie. it will continue to exist, but will not be accepted by mainstream. This is because of our physical limits.
spaceman_2020 3y ago
As a parent of a 6 month old, I really worry about this stuff. I fear that once she is even a little older, this technology will be so good that it will make the real world seem intolerable.
- sjwhevvvvvsj 3y ago
  As parent of a 7 year old…you’ll figure it out. We try to avoid an “abstinence only” approach to tech (which doesn’t work once the kid goes to school or a friends house), and be very deliberate about what is allowed and not allowed. You’ll figure it out, but take the time you have now to discuss with your spouse what your approach is going to be. Good luck!
  - beedeebeedee 3y ago
    This is a tangent, and I am not a parent yet, but when I am, I've been thinking I would follow Ernst Haeckel's saying "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" for computing. I.e., little kids get Commodore 64's, 12 year olds get old Macs, then teenagers get late 90's desktops, then finally iPhones and modern computers when they're 18.
andsoitis 3y ago
…ego rush, because they often couldn’t grasp what was being said or what had just happened to them. It was a primal validation, a power trip, and I wish I had done it with more humility. Someone is still on this journey.
- Animats 3y ago
  > Someone is still on this journey. Yeah, that's Jaron Lanier. Apple's headset isn't VR at all. It's stuff overlaid on the real world. Rather banal stuff, usually screens. That's augmented reality. The hardware ought to be able to support most of the stuff Magic Leap faked a few years ago. Since you see the world through cameras, they can draw dark, which optical overlay systems cannot do. Someone will probably do some games that way. Pokemon Go would work. Someone really should do Hyperreality, the famous concept video of AR hell.[1] > There are many reasons why V.R. and gaming don’t quite work, and I suspect that one is that gamers like to be bigger than the game, not engulfed by it. You want to feel big, not small, when you play. (“Star Wars” might have got this right with holographic chess.) Don't see that. VR about going some place more interesting than where you are. As for tabletop AR combat chess, Jeri Ellsworth made that work quite well with Tilt Five.[2][3][4] Good idea, never really caught on. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzr-IeyWj40 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzr-IeyWj40 [3] https://www.tiltfive.com/ https://www.tiltfive.com/ [4] https://www.tiltfive.com/games/chess-knights-shinobi https://www.tiltfive.com/games/chess-knights-shinobi
  - wilsonnb3 3y ago
    > Apple's headset isn't VR at all Yes, it is VR, no matter how much Apple wants to avoid saying that. Reading all the reviews, the thing most people agree it is good for is immersive media consumption, which is definitely VR. You cant go 10 comments in a post about it without people saying they want to use it on an airplane to block out their surroundings, which is again VR. Even 90% of the functionality people claim is AR is really about having a virtual computer monitor that isn't interacting with the real world, which is more mixed reality than augmented reality.
Karrot_Kream 3y ago
I've never read Lanier's writing, and this was an interesting article, but the pastoral reverence in the article just felt... weird. Some thoughts. On this line contrasting Apple's approach from Magic Leap's approach: > Camera-based mixed reality is vastly easier to accomplish than the optical version, but it is concerning. Early research by a Stanford-led team has found evidence of cognitive challenges. Your hands are never quite in the right relationship with your eyes, for instance. Given what is going on with deepfakes out on the 2-D Internet, we also need to start worrying about deception and abuse, because reality can be so easily altered as it’s virtualized. The two thoughts, cognitive challenges and deception, are unrelated. And Lanier spends no time saying why the optical version will be free of deepfakes. Instead he uses this piece of emotionally charged language to justify why the camera approach is inferior: > Today, in much of the online world, algorithms calculate “feeds”—a term suggesting that people are cattle, and not free-range ones. Again seemingly uninterested with engaging substantively with why the camera approach is worse than the optical one other than by making us feel, well, moral. Then there's: > Today, the V.R. community seems to want to make headsets smaller and smaller, until they disappear. But in the old days I’d build one-of-a-kind V.R. headsets into big masks from different cultures, sometimes adding lightning bolts and feathers. I wanted the headsets to be vibrant, exciting objects that enriched the real world, too. It's unclear how much this is some shift in values vs simply a shift in aesthetic culture. The culture of the '80s and early-'90s was loud bikes, loud cars, big heavy computing, lots of cables. This isn't the aesthetic culture of today. What confuses me the most is: > There are fresh, urgent reasons to reaffirm the value of experience. It is impossible to judge technology without a sense of its purpose—and its only plausible purpose is to benefit people, or perhaps animals, or the over-all ecosystem of the planet. In any case, if we pursue technologies that make it hard to delineate the beneficiaries—for instance, by blending brains into robotics not to cure a disease but just because it seems cool—then we make the very idea of technology absurd. Even though near the beginning Lanier says: > V.R. can be a way of exploring the nature of consciousness, relationships, bodies, and, perception. In other words, it can be art. V.R. is most fun when approached that way. So which is it? Must technology be anchored to a purpose or can it simply be art? The idea that technologies are purely utilitarian is surely not something people still believe right? Not after synthesizers, modded cars, modded motorcycles, personalized beatboxes, and the like? Then there's: > But the truth is that living in V.R. makes no sense. Life within a construction is life without a frontier. It is closed, calculated, and pointless. Reality, real reality, the mysterious physical stuff, is open, unknown, and beyond us; we must not lose it. The average person in the developed world lives in a meticulously designed world. They ride some form of manmade transit or hop into some form of human constructed personal vehicle and go along infrastructure meticulously planned and designed to go to a destination whose very form has been prescribed by pages of municipal code and undergirded by large sums of public monies. They have access to sanitation systems, emergency services, and more. The average person does not spend time on some open frontier pondering their "real reality". In general the article seems... like a weird, romantic, pastoral polemic steeped in the sort of romanticism common to older folks waxing about how the physical world is "real" while the virtual world is "fake."
kalkr 3y ago
> Can the everyday miracle of the real world be appreciated enough? I always roll my eyes when I see this or things that share a similar sentiment. I have dreams every night that aren't "real", but produce real emotions, feelings, and sensations. Whenever the dream machine comes out, I'll be hanging out in my cool af castle and all you philosophers can keep kneecapping yourselves with "what's really real".
- vonjuice 3y ago
  I think that in this context what it means is that it's something fabricated and put on flat screens. Quite literally there's no depth to it. Dreams are another beast entirely, you're fabricating and perceiving the contents at once, like you say, with all the senses. VR takes advantage of our vision being so prevalent among our senses, but the fact that only it and sound are involved is what makes it fake.

47 points by mitchbob 3y ago

You put the headset on. You wake up in The Veldt.

https://archive.ph/2024.02.02-202235/https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/where-will-virtual-reality-take-us https://archive.ph/2024.02.02-202235/https://www.newyorker.c...

p1esk 3y ago

Written by none other than Jaron Lanier. That probably should be in the title.

bugbuddy 3y ago

Between 2016 and 2024, an advanced alien race arrived and was preparing to make first contact with humanity. Their primary goal was to ensure that the human race would be a good steward of their technological heritage they were about to bestow upon mankind. After observing the large wasteful investments in techs such as during the Crypto mania, AR/VR mania, and Gen AI mania, the alien race decided that the human race was still too immature and decided to schedule another return visit in 100,000 years hoping that the situation would be improved by then.

ben_w 3y ago
> Crypto mania, AR/VR mania, and Gen AI mania One of the things I will never stop finding weird, is the tendency to group together things that aren't really related. I wonder if I do it too? If I did, I expect I wouldn't notice…
- adfm 3y ago
  They are all related as they are all primary examples of technologies enabled by hardware-accelerated floating point math. Pro tip: WebGPU provides a common API to all hardware acceleration going forward. From the din of bitcoin miners parked next to hydroelectric plants to the vents in the new Apple Vision Pro to the render farm spitting out hyper-surrealistic midjourney banality to your handset rendering this text; it's all happening via a Web-focused API. You may be asking yourself why Apple would release a half-baked $3500 HMD. This is why. They can balk all they want, but the app store model is eroding and they're looking for cover.
- bugbuddy 3y ago
  [flagged]
- xanderlewis 3y ago
  I think you can make a case they’re related; they’re all technologies that have been hyped in much the same way by much the same people. That’s not to say they’ll all end up in the same place, however — it seems already clear to me that ‘Gen AI’ has far more readily-applicable utility than, say, cryptocurrencies. I think you’re just objecting on the basis that AI is obviously already immensely useful while other hyped technologies (in their current state) aren’t. > I wonder if I do it too? If I did, I expect I wouldn't notice… A very good point! You might not. But grouping things together that don’t immediately seem related can be one of the most fruitful acts of all… ‘Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things’ - Henri Poincaré.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > they’re all technologies that have been hyped in much the same way by much the same people. Really? I can see that for GenAI and Crypto (to my mild annoyance because I was doing GenAI before such people heard of Bitcoin), but not AR/VR. > I think you’re just objecting on the basis that AI is obviously already immensely useful while other hyped technologies (in their current state) aren’t. While I do indeed think AI is valuable, I also look at AR/VR and think "this is just another games console — some are handheld, some connect to your TV, this one is on your face". VR just… it just doesn't seem any more hyped than any of the other games consoles over the years that were also "revolutionary" and "amazing photorealistic graphics" etc., and mostly by different people?
    - xanderlewis 3y ago
      > Really? I can see that for GenAI and Crypto (to my mild annoyance because I was doing GenAI before such people heard of Bitcoin), but not AR/VR. Actually, you’re right. I haven’t seen AR/VR hyped in quite the same way as the other two. I’m not actually sure why… because it seems just as ripe for hyperbolic claims as any other ‘futuristic tech’. Possibly because the idea’s been around for much longer and has had a chance to burn out before it came close to being practically possible. Of course, ‘AI’ of the kind popular now is not an entirely new idea either (as you point out), but to the grifters on Twitter it is.

netsharc 3y ago

The author is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier

spcebar 3y ago

I like this article. It expands on the big question for VR. We have this technology, it's here, it's mostly good enough (with the caveats the article lays out) for a variety of purposes. But what is the purpose consumers will want to use it for? Apple has been the king of telling consumers what they want for years. If they can't sell VR, I don't think anyone can sell VR. This feels like the make or break moment for VR, where we'll know what people want to use it for/if it's capable of living in the mainstream, or if it's forever going to live as a niche product, as it has been since the VR renaissance started when the Occulus Rift came onto the scene.

XorNot 3y ago
How is anyone concluding VR is "mostly good enough"? FOV is still bad. Weight is still too high. Resolution I'd say is adequate for gaming (but see FOV above). Apple are selling the same problems in a very expensive package that they're desperately trying to pretend isn't a VR platform.
- spcebar 3y ago
  The article gives a variety of industries and use cases where VR has been prevalent/useful for years.
  - andsoitis 3y ago
    How is that applicable to the consumer market, in your eyes?
    - spcebar 3y ago
      The fact that industry and special use cases like NASA are using it means that some consumer version will probably always exist, and if industry is finding uses for it, consumers might also find uses for it. VR could also fail catastrophically as a consumer product and just be something that's exclusively used by industry, but I don't see VR going away for good. I think it's carved out a healthy enough niche for itself at this point that some version of a VR/HMD industry is going to exist for a while.

bsimpson 3y ago

> But the truth is that living in V.R. makes no sense. Life within a construction is life without a frontier. It is closed, calculated, and pointless. Reality, real reality, the mysterious physical stuff, is open, unknown, and beyond us; we must not lose it. This is one of the throughlines of Interstate 60. It's an absurd existential comedy from the writer of Back to the Future with an insane cast for an indie film. It was one of my favorite movies in college; I wonder how it holds up. ----- From the movie: > He said the frontier was a safety valve for civilization, a place for people to go to keep from goin' mad. So, whenever there were folks who couldn't fit in with the way things were, nuts, and malcontents, and extremists, they'd pack up and head for the frontier. That's how America got started - all the crackpots and troublemakers in Europe packed up and went to a frontier which became the thirteen colonies. When some people couldn't fit in with that, they moved farther west, which is why all the nuts eventually ended up in California. Turner died in 1932, so he wasn't around long enough to see what would happen to the world when we ran out of frontier. Some people say we have the frontier of the mind, and they go off and explore the wonderful world of alcohol and drugs, but that's no frontier. It's just another way for us to fool ourselves. And we've created this phony frontier with computers, which allows people to, you know, think they've escaped. A frontier with access fees?

bee_rider 3y ago

> Life within a construction is life without a frontier. It is closed, calculated, and pointless. Reality, real reality, the mysterious physical stuff, is open, unknown, and beyond us; we must not lose it. Only a tiny minority of people have lived on a frontier, that’s sort of the inherent to the definition. Most people now live in a very constructed environment (urban areas). In the past, most people lived somewhere in between; towns, suburbs, etc. Many of us find our mysteries in artificial areas: parks, little shops, back yards. There’s plenty of beauty and complexity in nature of course. But in human spaces we see just as much complexity and mystery; somebody builds something, it decays, gets fixed up, added to, gets some graffiti. We’ve all got little worlds in our heads that motivate us to do things, there’s plenty of complexity in there, especially once our actions start bouncing off each other. I think most of the problem with VR so far has been, well… first, the tech just isn’t there yet, it kind of sucks still. But also we’re mostly getting silo’d VR experiences from single authors or companies. Games. There’s no mystery there because it was all intentionally placed by the designer. Eventually we’ll get better persistent dynamic multi-user spaces I bet.

deleted 3y ago
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bugbuddy 3y ago
It is disingenuous to conflate artificial physical and artificial virtual environments. If this is the kind of thinking that is accepted in contemporary discourse without challenge, then it won’t be long before everyone becomes completely subjugated by mediocrity pretending to vanguard. I would take a mediocre physical couch over a virtual one any day. At least, my buttocks will have some cushion with a real couch. What this whole AR/VR obsession is all about is concentrated tech capital jealousy afraid of anyone even appearing to be slightly more technologically advanced. It is all ego.
- beautifulfreak 3y ago
  That conflation is what Baudrillard addressed in Simulacra and Simulation (a book that the cast of the Matrix were required to read before filming started). When environments are designed, the blueprint is what one experiences in those environments, the conceptual underpinning, even if the environment consists of matter. In a sense, they try to tell us what to think. The book came out in 1983, so these are old ideas, not really vanguard anymore, but it raises legitimate points that are becoming a lot more noticeably believable with the rise of information technology. I think the OP has a point.

bsimpson 3y ago

> There are many reasons why V.R. and gaming don’t quite work, and I suspect that one is that gamers like to be bigger than the game, not engulfed by it. You want to feel big, not small, when you play. I'm curious how he feels about Half Life: Alyx. What makes that game so compelling is the degree of interactivity it affords. You can pick up anything. If it's glass, you can break it. It allows you to interact with a tangible world to a degree that no other consumer VR software does. It's one of the most well-reputed games of all time, and it's only available in VR. As such, modders have figured out how to make it playable without a VR headset. The reviews of non-VR players are that it's actually a pretty boring game when you're not in a simulated environment. If you're not taking the time to open the drawers and break the bottles and duck behind the barrels in a gunfight, it's mostly just walking through tunnels waiting for the occasional ambush.

Skinetio 3y ago
I played it, i liked it and thats it. Its not relevant in my day to day life. And as long as i'm limited to what VR can do today, it will never replace reality. I want to move in vr, i want to touch, move around freely without hitting the floor, walls or roof.
treprinum 3y ago
Play Senua's Sacrifice in VR, maybe you'll change your mind. Much more immersive than anything else, and it's an action game with puzzles as well. Alyx is kinda stationary compared to that one.
- bsimpson 3y ago
  I think that was on sale for like $3 last week. I'll have to be on the lookout for it.

bsimpson 3y ago

> But in the old days I’d build one-of-a-kind V.R. headsets into big masks from different cultures, sometimes adding lightning bolts and feathers. I wanted the headsets to be vibrant, exciting objects that enriched the real world, too. I'm disappointed there are no images in this article. I'd love to see this. I love how it celebrates something by giving it a more playful character.

andsoitis 3y ago

> The brain has had to adapt to many body plans over the course of its evolution, and it’s pre-adapted to work with more. I think highly of Jaron and his unique point of view, but this is invalid.

amelius 3y ago

Reading the headline, I was about to say porn, but Apple will forbid it and Zuck will watch over your shoulder, so I guess not.

penjelly 3y ago
browsers already know our p*rn preferences, i doubt itll be different with meta quest

deleted 3y ago

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andsoitis 3y ago

A profound truth, however, is that the greatest mysteries are found in conserved systems, which can become rich and complex, not in infinite ones, which stretch out like blank white sheets to the edge of the cosmos. Is imagination not infinite?

chaosprint 3y ago

My feeling is that it's just like IMAX 3D movie. it will continue to exist, but will not be accepted by mainstream. This is because of our physical limits.

spaceman_2020 3y ago

As a parent of a 6 month old, I really worry about this stuff. I fear that once she is even a little older, this technology will be so good that it will make the real world seem intolerable.

sjwhevvvvvsj 3y ago
As parent of a 7 year old…you’ll figure it out. We try to avoid an “abstinence only” approach to tech (which doesn’t work once the kid goes to school or a friends house), and be very deliberate about what is allowed and not allowed. You’ll figure it out, but take the time you have now to discuss with your spouse what your approach is going to be. Good luck!
- beedeebeedee 3y ago
  This is a tangent, and I am not a parent yet, but when I am, I've been thinking I would follow Ernst Haeckel's saying "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" for computing. I.e., little kids get Commodore 64's, 12 year olds get old Macs, then teenagers get late 90's desktops, then finally iPhones and modern computers when they're 18.

andsoitis 3y ago

…ego rush, because they often couldn’t grasp what was being said or what had just happened to them. It was a primal validation, a power trip, and I wish I had done it with more humility. Someone is still on this journey.

Animats 3y ago
> Someone is still on this journey. Yeah, that's Jaron Lanier. Apple's headset isn't VR at all. It's stuff overlaid on the real world. Rather banal stuff, usually screens. That's augmented reality. The hardware ought to be able to support most of the stuff Magic Leap faked a few years ago. Since you see the world through cameras, they can draw dark, which optical overlay systems cannot do. Someone will probably do some games that way. Pokemon Go would work. Someone really should do Hyperreality, the famous concept video of AR hell.[1] > There are many reasons why V.R. and gaming don’t quite work, and I suspect that one is that gamers like to be bigger than the game, not engulfed by it. You want to feel big, not small, when you play. (“Star Wars” might have got this right with holographic chess.) Don't see that. VR about going some place more interesting than where you are. As for tabletop AR combat chess, Jeri Ellsworth made that work quite well with Tilt Five.[2][3][4] Good idea, never really caught on. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzr-IeyWj40 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzr-IeyWj40 [3] https://www.tiltfive.com/ https://www.tiltfive.com/ [4] https://www.tiltfive.com/games/chess-knights-shinobi https://www.tiltfive.com/games/chess-knights-shinobi
- wilsonnb3 3y ago
  > Apple's headset isn't VR at all Yes, it is VR, no matter how much Apple wants to avoid saying that. Reading all the reviews, the thing most people agree it is good for is immersive media consumption, which is definitely VR. You cant go 10 comments in a post about it without people saying they want to use it on an airplane to block out their surroundings, which is again VR. Even 90% of the functionality people claim is AR is really about having a virtual computer monitor that isn't interacting with the real world, which is more mixed reality than augmented reality.

Karrot_Kream 3y ago

I've never read Lanier's writing, and this was an interesting article, but the pastoral reverence in the article just felt... weird. Some thoughts. On this line contrasting Apple's approach from Magic Leap's approach: > Camera-based mixed reality is vastly easier to accomplish than the optical version, but it is concerning. Early research by a Stanford-led team has found evidence of cognitive challenges. Your hands are never quite in the right relationship with your eyes, for instance. Given what is going on with deepfakes out on the 2-D Internet, we also need to start worrying about deception and abuse, because reality can be so easily altered as it’s virtualized. The two thoughts, cognitive challenges and deception, are unrelated. And Lanier spends no time saying why the optical version will be free of deepfakes. Instead he uses this piece of emotionally charged language to justify why the camera approach is inferior: > Today, in much of the online world, algorithms calculate “feeds”—a term suggesting that people are cattle, and not free-range ones. Again seemingly uninterested with engaging substantively with why the camera approach is worse than the optical one other than by making us feel, well, moral. Then there's: > Today, the V.R. community seems to want to make headsets smaller and smaller, until they disappear. But in the old days I’d build one-of-a-kind V.R. headsets into big masks from different cultures, sometimes adding lightning bolts and feathers. I wanted the headsets to be vibrant, exciting objects that enriched the real world, too. It's unclear how much this is some shift in values vs simply a shift in aesthetic culture. The culture of the '80s and early-'90s was loud bikes, loud cars, big heavy computing, lots of cables. This isn't the aesthetic culture of today. What confuses me the most is: > There are fresh, urgent reasons to reaffirm the value of experience. It is impossible to judge technology without a sense of its purpose—and its only plausible purpose is to benefit people, or perhaps animals, or the over-all ecosystem of the planet. In any case, if we pursue technologies that make it hard to delineate the beneficiaries—for instance, by blending brains into robotics not to cure a disease but just because it seems cool—then we make the very idea of technology absurd. Even though near the beginning Lanier says: > V.R. can be a way of exploring the nature of consciousness, relationships, bodies, and, perception. In other words, it can be art. V.R. is most fun when approached that way. So which is it? Must technology be anchored to a purpose or can it simply be art? The idea that technologies are purely utilitarian is surely not something people still believe right? Not after synthesizers, modded cars, modded motorcycles, personalized beatboxes, and the like? Then there's: > But the truth is that living in V.R. makes no sense. Life within a construction is life without a frontier. It is closed, calculated, and pointless. Reality, real reality, the mysterious physical stuff, is open, unknown, and beyond us; we must not lose it. The average person in the developed world lives in a meticulously designed world. They ride some form of manmade transit or hop into some form of human constructed personal vehicle and go along infrastructure meticulously planned and designed to go to a destination whose very form has been prescribed by pages of municipal code and undergirded by large sums of public monies. They have access to sanitation systems, emergency services, and more. The average person does not spend time on some open frontier pondering their "real reality". In general the article seems... like a weird, romantic, pastoral polemic steeped in the sort of romanticism common to older folks waxing about how the physical world is "real" while the virtual world is "fake."

kalkr 3y ago

> Can the everyday miracle of the real world be appreciated enough? I always roll my eyes when I see this or things that share a similar sentiment. I have dreams every night that aren't "real", but produce real emotions, feelings, and sensations. Whenever the dream machine comes out, I'll be hanging out in my cool af castle and all you philosophers can keep kneecapping yourselves with "what's really real".

vonjuice 3y ago
I think that in this context what it means is that it's something fabricated and put on flat screens. Quite literally there's no depth to it. Dreams are another beast entirely, you're fabricating and perceiving the contents at once, like you say, with all the senses. VR takes advantage of our vision being so prevalent among our senses, but the fact that only it and sound are involved is what makes it fake.