6 ms·

Virtual Reality: still not quite there, again (2017)

49 points by bilsbie 3y ago

thelastgallon 3y ago
The killer app for any technology is porn. If porn is better on VR, we’ll see a decent number of sales.
kovacs_x 3y ago
if thats all he tried, i'm not surprised. never had anyone say "meh" after 3D xxx content! (pornhub has vr category too! :D )
trash_cat 3y ago
I feel like this applies as much today...
hnuser123456 3y ago
I met my S.O. in the VRchat club scene, where thousands of people get in full body tracking systems every weekend (if not every night) and dance together across dozens of virtual worlds in highly customized avatars decked out in as many graphical features as Unity supports. This scene has existed for years.
npalli 3y ago
Should have 2017. Thought Karpathy was reviewing Apple Vision Pro.
PseudoThought 3y ago
Blade & Sorcery was worth the price of VR for me, at least. A couple mods and suddenly you're in the best Jedi simulator ever made. It's also the only way to play DCS or any racing game now. No going back.
- bitwize 3y ago
  Rez Infinite was the VR killer app for me.
- treprinum 3y ago
  Well, Microsoft is killing off WMR so my headset will go with it... And frankly I don't want any VR stations when my headset worked just fine without them.
daft_pink 3y ago
Having owned a Quest 2, I think Apple has as shot at this, because I think most of these devices are essentially PC Monitors. Apple is the first company that has put a full on laptop chip into the device and unlike Facebook, they control a major desktop operating system, so it will likely be able to run full applications like Word, Excel, and a full Browser and more apps are going to easily be able to port. Instead of building a wall full of monitors, I think running on the entirely on device makes a lot more sense. Facebook just can’t pull it off, because they don’t have a full operating system like OSX to pull from, but they were right to but the processor in the headset.
- holoduke 3y ago
  I still think the headset must be merely a display. Feom your phone or desktop you stream to your vr display. The only way people are going to use vr is when the devices are small. Ideally just like a pair of glasses. Before this happens it's not becoming mainstream
- andsoitis 3y ago
  > they control a major desktop operating system Globally they’re at 6 — 10%. The rest is practically all Windows.
  - kanbara 3y ago
    said OS underpinned iOS/iPadOS/VisionOS/tvOS etc., has more users than linux, and is the only other major OS that consumers think of besides windows. it's also hugely relevant for sw dev. i don't quite get what this point is. macOS has always had small marketshare, but large profits from hw
  - edmundsauto 3y ago
    I think the comment was more about their ability to execute from a base competency. It’s REALLy hard to suddenly ship complex software like an OS. These companies have hundreds of engineers just on release processes and tooling.
- moron4hire 3y ago
matternous 3y ago
(2017)
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
(2017)
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago
  Something more current from today: Where Will Virtual Reality Take Us? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39233802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39233802
Terr_ 3y ago
> This might be because games are easier or faster to build. A simpler explanation is that outside of games VR simply doesn't bring much to the table. My favorite anti-VR-hype example involves sending a letter to people. Do I virtually fold paper into thirds for a virtual envelope and virtually lick the flap to seal it before exiting my virtual house to go to the virtual post-office to buy virtual stamps? Even in a game-world, would anyone want to, once the novelty wore off? Heck no: I click "Send" on my e-mail client. All the 3D parts of the workflow get removed, because they're tedious and tiring and not necessary for the goal. There may be some useful 3D visualizations for understanding things, but everybody will quickly realize that standing and crouching and waving their arms around all day "picking up" data-objects and and "dropping" them into virtual filing zones is going nowhere. Moving a mouse is so much faster and easier, even more-so with abstract filter/assistant tools.
- ynoatho 3y ago
  Galloping furiously through the forest on my trusty steed, intent on intercepting the courier agent before it arrives in the next town with my 2AM texts to my ex... I think it could go either way, honestly. As far as modern efficient e-mailing goes, it will simply be nice in many ways to have floating apps in the room instead of windows on a monitor, once the comfort/productivity tradeoff improves. But also, maybe when I open a real letter, my glasses recognize it as a letter, scan it into my library and blow it up into a floating virtual page, with or without OCR, maybe with additional context and history. Maybe I can choose to open a UI to respond digitally, or maybe it physically points me to my paper and pen. I can do any combination of writing a real letter or a virtual letter and sending it digitally or using the oldfashionedletters.com plugin to send out 100 cursive wedding invitations supported by whatever digital back-end is activated when the recipients' glasses detect reception of the letter. Point is, there's a unification of both approaches and they each gain new superpowers. You're talking about novelty wearing off, but I think that might just be the difference between good and bad skeuomorphic design. Your email scenario is definitely a plausible thing that someone would make right now, and it would absolutely suck and die, but maybe it's just part of an experimental trend that will exhaust itself like that period in the 90s when every new cd-rom you'd pop in would autolaunch a unique, horrendously ugly and confusingly skinned UI that looked like it was straight out of a Cronenberg movie. It suddenly becomes easy to make a bunch of dumb shit and it takes time to see what sticks, and there's a lot of silliness on the road to best practices... but they ARE buried somewhere in there, we DO eventually get to a fundamentally better way of interacting with computers.
fevar 3y ago
[dead]
adroitboss 3y ago
"Or hey, even more amusingly, a killer app could be something B2B, like enabling remote robotic work, where the worker’s commands get recorded and become training data for autonomous robotic systems. This is the core premise of my short story on AI, which I can now plug here. woohoo!" I actually thought this is where the next big AI company would come from. A gaming company that created a game that also had a business use case. They would use the data from that game to train ML models that were capable of doing work. If someone were able crowd source some AI robot training through gaming, they would be paid by consumers and by businesses. Kind of like how captcha digitized books in the backend.
- vonjuice 3y ago
  This reads like the plot of a videogame right before things go awry.
ElijahLynn 3y ago
7 years old, 2017
- justinator 3y ago
  Wrong. 1999 was only 5 years ago, says me and my mispent youth.
  - nathan_douglas 3y ago
    I unironically said 2001 in a presentation I gave yesterday when I meant 2021. It hurts a little, sometimes.
messiah_complex 3y ago
There's no reason to think there will ever be a sustained demand for VR entertainment. The experience is novel (for a time), but it's not qualitatively better than other delivery systems. And then, of course, the transient novelty never quite justifies the expense. VR's perception simulation has an uncanny valley-like effect. It's a bit too close visually (with the inevitable nausea), but it also calls attention to the absence of other forms of sensation.
- dpig_ 3y ago
  I have been playing online multiplayer VR games for years, with servers full of people who would beg to differ. The things you report (initial novelty, nausea, uncanny valley, little justification for the expense) simply are not applicable to anyone who plays VR for longer than a few Beat Saber sessions in front of friends & family. Of course it's a niche, but there is demand. Especially in Gen Z, many of whom received Quest HMDs over the last few years and have been rabid adopters who will grow up to be committed customers. Lobbies for basically every game on offer are full of them (for better or worse).
- philwelch 3y ago
  I disagree. 3D movies never really took off because the illusion of depth is limited to a prism around a two-dimensional screen, but VR allows for a full three-dimensional representation and a more complete illusion of depth. It’s like the difference between black-and-white and color film, or between silent film and film with sound. The only reason it seems like a novelty now is because virtually all the VR content is novelty content.

49 points by bilsbie 3y ago

The killer app for any technology is porn. If porn is better on VR, we’ll see a decent number of sales.

if thats all he tried, i'm not surprised. never had anyone say "meh" after 3D xxx content! (pornhub has vr category too! :D )

trash_cat 3y ago

I feel like this applies as much today...

hnuser123456 3y ago

I met my S.O. in the VRchat club scene, where thousands of people get in full body tracking systems every weekend (if not every night) and dance together across dozens of virtual worlds in highly customized avatars decked out in as many graphical features as Unity supports. This scene has existed for years.

npalli 3y ago

Should have 2017. Thought Karpathy was reviewing Apple Vision Pro.

PseudoThought 3y ago

Blade & Sorcery was worth the price of VR for me, at least. A couple mods and suddenly you're in the best Jedi simulator ever made. It's also the only way to play DCS or any racing game now. No going back.

bitwize 3y ago
Rez Infinite was the VR killer app for me.
treprinum 3y ago
Well, Microsoft is killing off WMR so my headset will go with it... And frankly I don't want any VR stations when my headset worked just fine without them.

daft_pink 3y ago

Having owned a Quest 2, I think Apple has as shot at this, because I think most of these devices are essentially PC Monitors. Apple is the first company that has put a full on laptop chip into the device and unlike Facebook, they control a major desktop operating system, so it will likely be able to run full applications like Word, Excel, and a full Browser and more apps are going to easily be able to port. Instead of building a wall full of monitors, I think running on the entirely on device makes a lot more sense. Facebook just can’t pull it off, because they don’t have a full operating system like OSX to pull from, but they were right to but the processor in the headset.

holoduke 3y ago
I still think the headset must be merely a display. Feom your phone or desktop you stream to your vr display. The only way people are going to use vr is when the devices are small. Ideally just like a pair of glasses. Before this happens it's not becoming mainstream
andsoitis 3y ago
> they control a major desktop operating system Globally they’re at 6 — 10%. The rest is practically all Windows.
- kanbara 3y ago
  said OS underpinned iOS/iPadOS/VisionOS/tvOS etc., has more users than linux, and is the only other major OS that consumers think of besides windows. it's also hugely relevant for sw dev. i don't quite get what this point is. macOS has always had small marketshare, but large profits from hw
- edmundsauto 3y ago
  I think the comment was more about their ability to execute from a base competency. It’s REALLy hard to suddenly ship complex software like an OS. These companies have hundreds of engineers just on release processes and tooling.
moron4hire 3y ago

matternous 3y ago

(2017)

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

(2017)

ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Something more current from today: Where Will Virtual Reality Take Us? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39233802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39233802

Terr_ 3y ago

> This might be because games are easier or faster to build. A simpler explanation is that outside of games VR simply doesn't bring much to the table. My favorite anti-VR-hype example involves sending a letter to people. Do I virtually fold paper into thirds for a virtual envelope and virtually lick the flap to seal it before exiting my virtual house to go to the virtual post-office to buy virtual stamps? Even in a game-world, would anyone want to, once the novelty wore off? Heck no: I click "Send" on my e-mail client. All the 3D parts of the workflow get removed, because they're tedious and tiring and not necessary for the goal. There may be some useful 3D visualizations for understanding things, but everybody will quickly realize that standing and crouching and waving their arms around all day "picking up" data-objects and and "dropping" them into virtual filing zones is going nowhere. Moving a mouse is so much faster and easier, even more-so with abstract filter/assistant tools.

ynoatho 3y ago
Galloping furiously through the forest on my trusty steed, intent on intercepting the courier agent before it arrives in the next town with my 2AM texts to my ex... I think it could go either way, honestly. As far as modern efficient e-mailing goes, it will simply be nice in many ways to have floating apps in the room instead of windows on a monitor, once the comfort/productivity tradeoff improves. But also, maybe when I open a real letter, my glasses recognize it as a letter, scan it into my library and blow it up into a floating virtual page, with or without OCR, maybe with additional context and history. Maybe I can choose to open a UI to respond digitally, or maybe it physically points me to my paper and pen. I can do any combination of writing a real letter or a virtual letter and sending it digitally or using the oldfashionedletters.com plugin to send out 100 cursive wedding invitations supported by whatever digital back-end is activated when the recipients' glasses detect reception of the letter. Point is, there's a unification of both approaches and they each gain new superpowers. You're talking about novelty wearing off, but I think that might just be the difference between good and bad skeuomorphic design. Your email scenario is definitely a plausible thing that someone would make right now, and it would absolutely suck and die, but maybe it's just part of an experimental trend that will exhaust itself like that period in the 90s when every new cd-rom you'd pop in would autolaunch a unique, horrendously ugly and confusingly skinned UI that looked like it was straight out of a Cronenberg movie. It suddenly becomes easy to make a bunch of dumb shit and it takes time to see what sticks, and there's a lot of silliness on the road to best practices... but they ARE buried somewhere in there, we DO eventually get to a fundamentally better way of interacting with computers.

fevar 3y ago

[dead]

adroitboss 3y ago

"Or hey, even more amusingly, a killer app could be something B2B, like enabling remote robotic work, where the worker’s commands get recorded and become training data for autonomous robotic systems. This is the core premise of my short story on AI, which I can now plug here. woohoo!" I actually thought this is where the next big AI company would come from. A gaming company that created a game that also had a business use case. They would use the data from that game to train ML models that were capable of doing work. If someone were able crowd source some AI robot training through gaming, they would be paid by consumers and by businesses. Kind of like how captcha digitized books in the backend.

vonjuice 3y ago
This reads like the plot of a videogame right before things go awry.

ElijahLynn 3y ago

7 years old, 2017

justinator 3y ago
Wrong. 1999 was only 5 years ago, says me and my mispent youth.
- nathan_douglas 3y ago
  I unironically said 2001 in a presentation I gave yesterday when I meant 2021. It hurts a little, sometimes.

messiah_complex 3y ago

There's no reason to think there will ever be a sustained demand for VR entertainment. The experience is novel (for a time), but it's not qualitatively better than other delivery systems. And then, of course, the transient novelty never quite justifies the expense. VR's perception simulation has an uncanny valley-like effect. It's a bit too close visually (with the inevitable nausea), but it also calls attention to the absence of other forms of sensation.

dpig_ 3y ago
I have been playing online multiplayer VR games for years, with servers full of people who would beg to differ. The things you report (initial novelty, nausea, uncanny valley, little justification for the expense) simply are not applicable to anyone who plays VR for longer than a few Beat Saber sessions in front of friends & family. Of course it's a niche, but there is demand. Especially in Gen Z, many of whom received Quest HMDs over the last few years and have been rabid adopters who will grow up to be committed customers. Lobbies for basically every game on offer are full of them (for better or worse).
philwelch 3y ago
I disagree. 3D movies never really took off because the illusion of depth is limited to a prism around a two-dimensional screen, but VR allows for a full three-dimensional representation and a more complete illusion of depth. It’s like the difference between black-and-white and color film, or between silent film and film with sound. The only reason it seems like a novelty now is because virtually all the VR content is novelty content.