I Tried VR and It Was Just OK | Hacker News Reader

I Tried VR and It Was Just OK

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162 pointscremno136 comments

LOL. I lived through the first VR hype bubble, and it's pretty remarkable how similar this is to my recollection of VR back then -- the only difference is that at the time, the goofy, uncomfortable headset was tethered to a refrigerator-sized SGI machine at the science museum, and there was no hope of getting it at home. Instead, we got the Lawnmower Man on VHS.

It sounds like technology has advanced enough that we have finally miniaturized the underwhelming user experience for the home viewer, but we still haven't addressed the bigger problem of coming up with something compelling to do with it. Plus ça change...maybe soon we'll get to see investors salivating over "multimedia experiences" delivered via some futuristic version of CD-ROM!

Do I really have to be the one to say it. .. the four (or more) letter word starting with "p"?

Heh. That's an area where quality input devices become even more essential, no?

So true! People looking at something and finding it "mindblowing" for short periods says almost nothing about whether a) there is actual value delivered, or b) there's a real business to be built there.

I can count at least 5 waves of 3D hype going back to the 1850s. Stereoscopic photos were all the rage for brief periods starting with the 1851 World's Fair in London [1], and we are all familiar with the 3D View Master, which was developed in 1939. There was the anaglyph 3D [2] wave in the 1950s, and as the marketing suggests, the main audience appeal was novelty. [3] Next came, as you say, the VR wave of the 1990s, including predictions of "affordable VR by 1994". [4] We next have this decade's rise and fall of 3D movies, with a related rise and fall of 3D TV.

So far, history suggests that this is just another wave of novelty. 3D pictures did not replace pictures. 3D movies and TV did not replace movies and TV. The evidence is equally strong that many otherwise smart people can combine "cool novelty effect" plus "OMG future" and to end up fooling themselves.

Sure, it could be different this time. But I suspect that 3D will end up, for at least the 6th time, as being about as appealing as Smell-o-Vision. [5] This is in strong contrast to color and sound, which started out being optional and became mandatory both for movies and computers. Wake me up, I say, when we get to showing movies in "Feel Around". [6]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereoscope [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaglyph_3D [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wax_%281953_film%29#/... [4] http://i.imgur.com/j73ipNp.jpg which is from http://www.cgwmuseum.org/galleries/index.php?year=1992&pub=2... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smell-O-Vision [6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjm_zmBoxjw#t=2m20s [7] and dang, when will we get some hypertext here?

I was previously getting my PhD in VR (I dropped out to start a company) and I can't believe the hype around a HMD, like it's a new revolutionary thing. I do own an Oculus as I love VR and I am a proud UMD alum but generalized VR is so far off, immersion is way too difficult to completely generalize. I do think that there has been enough significant improvements from the first VR hype bubble that there could be a serious specialized VR arcade where the application is very well understood and you can build real immersion into the product. For example a fighting robot MOBA where you can control the haptic feedback and the player's surroundings match the virtual world (cockpit is real compounded with stereoscopic screens for windows)

> we still haven't addressed the bigger problem of coming up with something compelling to do with it

For the most of the games that are developed today with first-person view in mind, adding support for VR isn't something that is very hard to add. And these games are already pretty compelling.

The only question is convenience. The post mentioned 3d in televisions — but 3d did win in cinemas. I recently wanted to watch Inside Out in 2d (I get dizzy from 3d), and I couldn't it, although it was just released into the theaters. Only in 3d.

> but 3d did win in cinemas

lolwut?

But does VR make existing 3D games better? Better enough to wear the bulky headset? I think that is yet to be seen.

First person games as they exist today don't transfer well to VR. The issue is the locomotion problem: Moving the player in the virtual world but not the real world causes motion sickness, since they're not getting a matching input to their vestibular system. Oculus' system today is suited more for cockpit games or 3rd person games with gentle camera movement. Valve are also targetting room sized first person experiences, where the user has enough physical space that the play area can be mapped 1:1.

Cockpit simulators have a leg up in this department - not much movement expected in driving / flying / spaceships.

Not really. In the real world, you still moving and thus feeling acceleration. Problem therefore still exists.

It is for this reason that I think that the first successful iteration of VR tech will be experienced in next generation video game arcades. That will solve both the cost problem and the space problem. You'll plan in a very big (100x100ft) room where everything physical is wrapped with three inches of foam. Things you climb on will have level drops of no more than four feet, but with a total height of perhaps twenty feet. Of course what you "see" through your helmet goggles won't be grey foam.

Will be a great place to play.

It says something that we're writing blog posts about, "This early version of tech didn't absolutely blow my mind"

I mean, this is still early-iPod-days of this tech. You could look at it, especially after hearing hype about the iPod, and say something like, "No wireless, less space than a Nomad, lame." http://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ip...

Anecdotally, I've found that looking at anything from a perspective of, "People are raving about this, does it live up to the hype?" always makes me respect the thing less.

That doesn't make it less transformative. It just means you didn't like it as much in the beginning. The criticisms are warranted, but that doesn't sway what the future of VR looks like for me.

Not only is this based on "early versions of the tech", but no one has even released a consumer product yet. These are are all developer prototypes. Even the Samsung Gear VR is still an "innovator edition".

from the article: "The technology to do it is there, battle tested, and completely mature. I know because I saw Captain EO at Epcot Center in 3D way back in 1985, and it was amazing thirty years ago!"

>I mean, this is still early-iPod-days of this tech.

Well, people have been touting VR since the early nineties. When is this "late version" gonna come out?

Now that we have sub-one-dollar accelerometer circuits with enough accuracy and reliability to embed into commercial gaming controllers coupled with the existence of enough processing power to render DOOM-level graphics at the 60FPS necessary to minimize the number of people who get physically ill in the headset, the "late version" is actually very close.

It has always been a hardware challenge, and we are actually likely to be right on the cusp of meeting the challenge this time. It's an exciting time to be alive.

Double the FPS requirement to 120 because people have two eyes.

Um...or render in stereo to a framebuffer, one side per eye?

You know, like we've shown works?

VR is pretty much as old as everything else in computer graphics (45+ yrs):

http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/input-output/14/35...

Although now seems like a pretty great time for VR given the hardware available and the funds being thrown at it.

One person was wrong once about the iPod, that means that all criticism of new tech products is invalid forever!

A product is greater than the sum of its specs.

That's not what I was saying at all. I'm saying it's easy to misjudge the potential of very early technologies by looking at the wrong criteria.

Fundamentally, I'm just sick of that quote about the iPod. It gets trotted out all the time, and I don't see any sign that it encodes any profound wisdom. Is it easy to misjudge the potential of early technologies? How do we know? Because one guy misjudged the popularity of the iPod once? Was the iPod an early technology? Was its popularity due to at-that-time unrealized potential?

But perhaps more relevantly to the VR thing, I don't think that the original article had anything to do with "potential." Everyone understands the potential of VR, but there are people saying that it is really awesome RIGHT NOW. And the author was saying that it is not really awesome RIGHT NOW.

Yep, it means the tech is probably in the "Trough of Disillusionment" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle

I agree with this article. We bought a Oculus DK2 for work[1]. It functions. It's cool for an hour or two. But no one's touched the DK2 since I wrote that article. There's simply nothing to do with it, and what you can do is better done with a monitor screen. The DK2 is incredibly low resolution. You can easily see the pixels. I was able to get a sense of presence once or twice, when driving down a straight in iRacing, otherwise it was always just a cool 3D effect strapped to my face.

[1] https://www.codeweavers.com/about/blogs/aeikum/2015/5/29/cod...

(Aside:

> Current generation consoles such as the Xbox 360 and PS4 may be fine with (most) games running at 1080p, on the PS4 at least,

Ouch, that's gotta burn the XBone team.)

Well of course there's not much to do with it now (other than develop for it), since no good VR sets have come to market yet (this was a developer kit you're talking about), and no games have shipped for them. It's like saying "yeah I've got a PlayStation5 developer kit the other day.. there's not much to do with it".

I believe the DK2 is something like 3 models behind the Consumer version.

On DK2 website they ask users to wait to buy consumer. Best VR for me is Horror/360camera even on Cardboard.

It's just another waiting game for more "Apps". It's like buying a ps4 without any new NaughtyDog Titles.

> There's simply nothing to do with it, and what you can do is better done with a monitor screen.

What content? It's an development kit... except if you intends to develop content for it, for sure you won't find stuff to do with it. It's like saying I hate the android development kit because there's nothing to do with it.

We need content for VR, personally I believe this is why the rift is still not released. That's also why they invest that much in game development.

> I was able to get a sense of presence once or twice

You are unlucky then, the immersion I feel is crazy. Each time I remove my headset, I get the same weird feeling of not being at the right place.

> it was always just a cool 3D effect

I'm pretty sure some good old gamer said the same when they transitioned from text to graphic, and then again when they moved from 2D to 3D.

For sure it's not for everyone, the same way game console aren't for everyone. This is not the revolution that some are saying it is, it won't be the next iPhone, at least it doesn't have to be. It's a new way to play game, a new environment, that's all.

> You are unlucky then, the immersion I feel is crazy. Each time I remove my headset, I get the same weird feeling of not being at the right place.

What games/demos do you play with it? I'd love to experience more compelling software.

Jeff is speaking from a position of not having tried the good stuff that delivers a sense of 'presence' in the virtual world. That is the game changer, the thing that is making people believe something special is on the way. When he says "I have experienced modern VR. A lot. I've tried both the Oculus DK1, the Oculus DK2." he's just flatly wrong, he hasn't. Those headsets at not modern VR and using them as the reference for where VR is at is pretty crazy.

But you'll get a chance to try to presence-inducing stuff in the next ~6 months with the consumer release of the Vive and Oculus CV1.

> ... delivers a sense of 'presence' in the virtual world

I keep re-reading your comment and it keeps getting stuck in my marketing filter.

What do you mean by a sense of presence?

> What do you mean by a sense of presence?

A VR simulation where you are on top of a high tower/building, and you are physically unable to take a leap forward because your amygdala won't let you, that is VR presence.

I've interpreted presence as "how much can you fool the brain that you really are there".

The screen-door effect is still moderately high in DK2. I've heard the CV1 has much reduced the size of the pixels, so the effect is greatly reduced.

Also the refresh also needs to be jacked up further. I'd prefer 120hz or 240hz. That would assist in faster and more seamless head-tracking. I don't think HDMI can handle that much bandwidth though. I could be wrong.

Aside) The screendoor effect is the effect of magnifying pixels in a LCD screen so you can see the pixels along with the interstitial black space where the pixels arent. The black space creates black lines like a screen door. Your eyes will then flip on focusing on the image displayed and the screen door, losing the feeling of depth and presence.

The increased framerate only helps is the latency is low enough. If there is a very high framerate but the frames lag a few 10's of milliseconds behind the movement of the head of the user then that won't help one bit.

Of course. Ideally, head tracking would be locked to the latency no greater than the time between a frame.

240hz is only 4.16 ms, which is still within human perception of view. Ideally, I'd like 1khz refresh, but that's going to be a very long time away. I do remember an HN article recently discussing a 1khz 8bit screen with touch input running at 1khz as well. The comparison was fantastic and I believe also relevant.

Michael Abrash of Valve now at Oculus giving a basic description: https://youtu.be/G-2dQoeqVVo?t=3m14s

It's parts of your lower brain aligning to convince you you're in a virtual world, and while it is a spectrum you really need a high end headset to experience it. Abrash himself mainly dismissed VR's potential prior to experiencing it.

Slides (PDF) from that talk, for those who prefer text to video:

http://media.steampowered.com/apps/abrashblog/MAbrash%20GDC2...

I didn't know he'd move on to work at Oculus. Interesting.

I hesitate to call presence a buzzword because I've felt it (if only briefly), but then again big data is both real and a buzzword, so I guess presence can be too. However, I haven't seen the latter used in a bullshit way very often yet. Usually the people who use the word are pretty serious about VR and cautious about saying they felt presence.

I like the example of standing at the edge of something in VR and feeling the feeling you get in your stomach when you stand on the edge of a tall building. This happened to me in part of the HTC/Valve Vive demo where you stand on a shipwreck underwater.

I think more subtle examples are more interesting, though. E.g., when you're just standing in a room in VR, and you shift your weight slightly from one foot to the other (which moves your head slightly, of course), and the lighting is just right and something clicks in your head and for a second you forget you have a headset on — it's a bizarre feeling and very cool.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHaOeNUOdh8

Also somewhat related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxwn1w7MJvk

I hope you're right, and I'm really excited to see what Oculus and Valve have coming out. Honestly, I would dedicate the space in my basement for Valve's setup if it proves to work well; I'm really excited about VR.

But I'm in the same position as Jeff: I've tried the DK2 and it's not there yet. But at the same time, back when it came out, journalists were all over the DK2, saying it was revolutionary and all sorts of stuff. And it just isn't. Maybe the consumer version will be, but the gap between my experience with the DK2 and what journalists sold the DK2 to be leaves me skeptical.

To be fair, most of the people who are excited about VR (including myself) have been that excited already about DK1 and DK2, so your comment feels like it's just moving goalposts without seriously engaging the article.

Personally, I'm very excited about VR. But I know for a fact that other people have tried the same gear that I've tried and have been way less excited about it.

Overall, I'd say it's a good thing to see a bit of hype-reducing commentary on here from time to time.

I don't disagree completely but underlying the growing excitement was for the past 18 months (since Abrash, etc. started talking about VR and presence as something incredible, game-changing and deliverable in around 2 years) was in large part based on the pace things were advancing and what was in store for a consumer release.

Plus many of his specific points are just so temporary in nature, like resolution complaints, heaviness/comfort, tethered, form factor, etc. These will be solved in just the next few years.

I think it is very unlikely any of that will be solved in a few years.

For example resolution, arguably the easiest one to attack, when we are talking 4k res at 120fps, that is barely possible on the highest end PC rigs today with 2 or even 3 video cards in SLI.

Honestly, the consumer GPU market has been in a state of stagnation for the last 3 or 4 years because there's not a ton of demand for anything higher than 60fps/1080p. Hopefully VR will drive consumer demand for higher resolutions to bring prices down.

Isn't this only true if what you want is the equivalent of AAA FP games blasted directly at your retinas?

If you could solve all the problems of lag, resolution and artifacting, but only give me Nintendo 64-levels of polygons and shading, I bet I could still have some pretty compelling experiences.

On the Gear VR (dev kit, 2014) there was a 2.5k screen at a smooth 60fps. The consumer Gear VR coming out this fall will likely have a 2.5k screen but we'll likely see 4k screens on mobile headsets in 2016. 120fps will be a nice improvement but not required, with the Rift CV1 at 90fps and sufficient for presence. So we're talking a 2-4x difference.

The graphics card issue is not that relevant, Gear VR with a mobile GPU is showing that it's not really about some arbitrary graphical fidelity bar. Yes, some of the highest fidelity cool stuff will be on PC but multiple cards won't be required. Both the Vive and CV1 will run great on one high end card, and by the time they upgrade to ~4k/120Hz... they'll still require just 1 card.

Just to put this in perspective.

4k resolution is roughly 4x as demanding as 1080p. A lot of games run at 30 fps (especially on consoles) but most target 60 fps. If we want to do 4k @ 120 Hz, we are talking about 8x as much work. Rendering the scene twice (once for each eye) also adds quite a bit of overhead (lighting, etc.) and so that's a least a 2x factor. We are now looking at roughly 16x as much work. That is a very rough estimate but it gives a good feel for how much more processing is required to render the same scene in VR.

Rapidly moving goalposts in tech are often completely legitimate.

3 years ago, people were breathless about oculus. They're not anymore. They're breathless about the next things that are building on what oculus demonstrated was possible with synced stereoscopic viewing and head tracking 3 years ago (with steady improvements always coming).

If he had pointed to people still being breathless about Oculus today, I'd consider the argument much more compelling. The hype absolutely deserves skepticism, but he is trying to argue from a place of authority that I don't grant him.

(I also nitpick his view of predicted market time frames. Affordable niche is not mass market is not mainstream is not ubiquitous. Smartphones are already to basically ubiquitous. I haven't seen many predictions for when VR of any particular variety will reach ubiquity).

It feels like "good" or "real" VR has been ~6 months away for the past 2 years.

Counterpoint:

My friend's architecture office has Occulus, and everyone, clients and architects love it.

I asked her if anyone experienced any headaches or seasickness but since there is no action happening just a visual walk through buildings it seems side effects are minimized.

So for architecture Occulus fills a nice niche.

hey sireat! I'd love to learn more about how your friend's architecture office is using the Oculus and what their experience has been with is so far.

My company, InsiteVR, makes it super simple for architects to get from 3D modeling software to VR without the headache of programming a game engine or setting everything up. And we use the GearVR so it's wireless, nice res, and easy to set up.

Shoot me an email at angel[at]insitevr.com - I'd love an introduction to your friend.

Oh man this is heartbreaking. I've been developing what looks to be an incredibly similar product/workflow to yours, solo, for the last 8 months.

shiftpgdn we're hiring! shoot me an email angel[at]insitevr.com

This strikes me as a really good use of the technology. As you suggest, it doesn't need to be high frame rate or truly immersive. It just needs to be better than looking at blueprints (which is really hard for untrained people) or, best case, doing a VR walkthrough on a monitor.

I wonder if this and AR (e.g. Google Glass) are on a similar trajectory. Lots of hype that near to mid-term--call it over the next 10 years or so--ends up mostly as a relatively niche technology for specific commercial use cases.

>So for architecture Occulus fills a nice niche.

Ditto for plane and car simulators. I'm looking into picking up a headset for playing carsims, but don't think I'll be using it for, say, 3D shooters.

The real question for me is if architects end up working in the OR rig or whether it's just a novelty for client demos. As I mention upthread, 3D has a long history as a compelling novelty technology; a real test for me would be whether architects use it every day and the ones who don't have it are demanding it instead of demanding, say, bigger 2D monitors.

For comparison, 3D ultrasound are mostly a gimmick for parents to see their baby face in advance, so to speak. I don't think there is any medical applications where it is actually useful.

Still it creates an incentive for doctors to get a 3D ultrasound system because parents could go elsewhere otherwise.

You can imagine that, once it becomes more mainstream, architects or estate agent with a VR device would get more traffic.

(Better, give me an online estate agent where I can preview the house in VR before going there physically. A few photos are OK but they don't give you a sense of size or volume. And you can't look through the windows to check the view.)

we've definitely seen architects get real value from VR beyond the novelty. That's definitely one of the harder parts of being a VR company at this stage. Getting people to adopt because its actually valuable and not because it's cool or because they want to be the first.

Some of our customers are using it to analyze the impact of re-arranging work spaces or to communicate why design A while more expensive is better than design B. We've been working on and are really excited about using VR to A/B test physical spaces. We do it for websites, why not for the spaces we live in every day?

a cool case study:

www.interiorarchitects.com/blog/the-future-of-architectural-renderings-at-ia-is-in-virtual-reality/

Jeff compares the DK2 to Quake resolution (640x480), but I think that's quite misleading. Quake looks terrible, to modern eyes, but that has little to do with the resolution, and much more with the low polygon count, low quality textures and the lack of lighting effects.

Run Far Cry 4 at 640x480, and it'll look much better.

I do not think Far Cry 4 would look very good at 640x480. Imagine it full screen on even a modest 20" monitor at that resolution.

There are tricks, yes, but big pixels are a fundamental problem until you reach a "good enough" size. Sort of like when the iPhone 4 and retina was released. We are very, very far from retina resolution in VR.

http://images.cdn.stuff.tv/sites/stuff.tv/files/styles/flexs...

Looks significantly better than Quake, even when maximized to fullscreen (except for the JPEG artifacts)!

edit:

far cry 4 640x480 filetype:png

http://www.picmygame.com/wp-content/uploads/ktz/yQq6DDQq-m2a...

http://www.picmygame.com/wp-content/uploads/ktz/Z7ptQrAC-m1n...

The text isn't great and the last image is hard to look at, but that's probably post processing.

It still look way better than Quake.

The Vive's approach for the controllers works really well and it sounds like it'll be shipping this year. It's strange that he doesn't mention it. I've tried a bunch of the other attempts going back to primitive university lab stuff in the 90s that took up two SGI Octanes, the Vive is the first thing I've seen that seems good enough to build apps on. I think the biggest problem initially is going to be figuring out what the killer app is. In terms of comparisons with the growth curve of mobile VR might look the same but we're much closer to the AMPS brick phone stage not the iPhone.

I think this is where the adult industry can act as the "bridge" and can make use of VR as it is today until it is mature enough for gaming. The lack of input/feedback isn't that big of a deal since for adult entertainment your hands need to be free for a more fulfilling experience.

My only disagreement is with the "gloves" idea. I thought we learned from the Wii that motion controls without force feedback is anti-immersion. Imagine "firing" a 12 gauge shotgun and seeing considerable recoil in VR while your hands stay still. Without haptic feedback I'll have to rely on imagination for the full experience, which I thought video games were supposed to skip.

Maybe they could make it so you have to mimic the recoil motion yourself, with your own hands, to fire your shotgun.

You would have to make sure to always turn the safety of your shotgun before putting it away, otherwise if try to quick-draw you will shoot yourself in the foot.

edit: grammar

"I totally shot him! The game didn't register the motion at all! This sucks. I'm getting the controller."

That's anti-immersive, too. When you fire a shotgun in real life, you don't have to do the recoil motion yourself -- you just pull the trigger, and the recoil occurs on its own.

Yeah, and unfortunately haptic feedback is even farther away in terms of emersion than VR.

I imagine we might possibly come close by using a some sort of full body contraption that would somehow stimulate all your nerves. But it would need to be sophisticated enough to emulate muscle movement.

But then that's fundamentally incompatible with motion controls. So you'd have to then create something that's able to detect and interpret nerve signals from the brain to such a degree it wouldn't contradict the VR Headset and Haptic Pod version of the world. Otherwise immersion would tank.

What we learned from the Wii is that those kinds of controls can move over 100 million console units. Seems people don't mind the lack of force feedback that much.

The Wii was a fad. Most people ended up just playing Wii Sports until they got bored. Remember how well games like Guitaro Hero sold? Does anybody even play them anymore?

I always thought that shooters worked well on the Wii - simple rumble force feedback gives you recoil, and the Wiimotes work great as pointers, because the pointing mechanism was closed loop. What they lacked was closed loop position tracking of the Wiimote itself, which is why we ended up with terrible waggle controls in games. Oculus Touch & the lighthouse system will be closed loop, so they should be significantly better.

My disappointment with Wii force feedback came with the very first game I played for it: Legend of Zelda. Happened when I swung the wiimote to swing the sword, got blocked, and my arm kept moving. Then it just became the gimmick waggle.

Pointing/shooting controls were all right, couldn't really complain about a mechanic that Nintendo's had since NES Duck Hunt.

Seems contrarian just for the sake of being contrarian. Even the cheap google cardboard, which ticks all his requirements except 4K (and probably will have that in the next year), is mindblowing, both to me and friends and family I've shown it to. I didn't even show them games running on cardboard, just videos shot using Google's special 360 cameras.

The technical challenges around VR are not that deep, hard, and fascinating. At this point, it's only a matter of prices coming down.

Even with a 4k phone screen there would be a lot of room for improvement as the Oculus user sees it.

>Seems contrarian just for the sake of being contrarian.

Seems he gave about 2000 words of the concrete reasons he doesn't like it.

Heck, he event gave CONCRETE suggestions of things that need improvement.

So, no, this is the very opposite of "contrarian just for the sake of being contrarian".

>is mindblowing, both to me and friends and family I've shown it to

Gimmicks can be mindblowing too. Have you used it for extented periods of time? Would you? And, since there are always outliers, would others bother?

Some people were also totally in love with their Google Glass BS, and we know how that turned out in the market.

For some one who is not into gaming, the experience(no matter how horrible to the expert gamer) will seem like the first time some one would have seen Television, used a telephone or used a desktop computer. Its a new thing which the ordinary person hasn't used before, and they will be super thrilled to even get a chance to use it.

Heck even the tech crowd was excited about this around 2 years back, how do you expect the ordinary public to not be excited about it?

Yeah, there are problems to solve. And once the overall trend moves towards VR, there will be a good enough incentive to bring down prices and have more focussed engineering towards these problems.

Beyond all that, Gaming looks like a very small area of application for this kind of a technology.

No-one has ever accused Jeff Atwood of writing blog posts for the sake of having a blog post to write. ;) That having been said, his description is solid, even if it's only his take on a space he's not specialized in. He makes some good points (and spends several pages to do it, in classic Atwood style).

That's your opinion.

I do demos with a Alienware R18 laptop with a DK2 with demos different depts have made. I bring this oversized desktop in a laptop format to demos, and show them off.

I perhaps have 1 or 2 people out of 50+ each time that aren't wowed. And given that I've went through a 1000 people at semi-random, that I think its fair to say that this guy is in the ~3% minority who isn't impressed.

All I can say is to give it a shot. Try a roller coaster demo, or play different games in the Rift. It really is crazy awesome. The only bad thing is keyboard input is hard, and still an unsolved problem. I figure when haptic gloves get good, this will be the final answer.

Edit: Seriously? -1's over a valid comments from someone who has 4 DK2's and 2 DK1's ? So bashing VR on HN is in vogue now. Got it.

If you aren't a gamer or technology person, it's way more impressive then if you already live in that world. Spending hours on the thing vs a demo is a very different experience as well.

Admittedly true.

I do spend a great deal of time on our rifts. I've done some dev work for it, along with using it as my virtual desktop. I didn't think that people would be interested in my personal use case, because I am rather an outlier.

Airflow is one concern. I am hot, and stay hot. Along with that, it tends to fog up the lenses and get somewhat sweaty. Demos aren't a concern because condensation doesn't have a chance to form.

I also have issues of depth perfection after about 4 hours, which is around lunchtime. This goes away in perhaps 5 minutes, but is still a problem.

There is also the screen door effect still in DK2. I've heard the CV1 doesn't have this, but that shall be seen.

There is also the mention of input issue. Using keyboard is still hard. I still resort to looking down the nose-hole to see the keyboard (others with Rift will know what I mean). I've been playing around using a wiimote and nunchuck for input along with a sensor bar, and it works well.

Sound is also another problem area, but CV1 has builtin speakers. It's to be seen if they're good or not.

> I also have issues of depth perfection after about 4 hours, which is around lunchtime. This goes away in perhaps 5 minutes, but is still a problem.

Don't think depth perception is going to go away without modifying human eyes and/or the brain, which is a much harder task than VR itself.

I have short-term depth perception issues when I take off glasses.

I'm not so sure about that.

A small infrared camera and led mounted near the eye can track the eye. Along with tracking, you can also calculate the depth field by determining the circumference of the retina. This in turn allows for software-defined focus to be built in on applications.

I also see an interesting future for light-depth-field cameras and displays that capture all depths and allow user controlled focus. The question is: can we replay this data format in a single display?

It's easy to be impressed with a 10 minute demo, but once you start trying to actually play games with it, it falls apart pretty quickly. The article is spot on: the display and rendering tech isn't there yet, and the input devices need figuring out.

Edit: I upvoted you. I also don't know why your comment is < 0.

DK2 owner here. To me the roller coaster demos are the worst to me. Your brain thinks you're moving in one direction, but your body is there sitting still, and it causes a horrible feeling. I can't stay more than 2-3 minutes without feeling terribly nauseated.

Still scenes and static games are not as bad, but I still can't handle it more than 15-20 minutes.

While I love the VR and have been dreaming of a Snow Crash-world for the past 20+ years, I'm not so optimistic about its mainstream adoption as I was when DK1 was launched.

I'm really interested in good VR, but then I start to really think about it:

How long do I really want to play a game with a headset strapped to my face?

I'm going to need better input devices soon. That's more $$$

I have a pretty high-end system right now, capable of playing pretty much any top-end game at full settings at 60FPS, and it doesn't meet the specs facebook/oculus wants, so to use it my purchase-price goes up by 4 figures.

I buy it, and a year later an even betterer headset comes out.

I'm going to need to have a dedicated space for it, I have too many beer bottles and other things on my desk to be blindly moving around with motion controls.

I'm really concerned also about the marketing and messaging coming from facebook/oculus. I really don't want to be part of a facebook branded and owned cyberspace. And the marketing story (we're shipping with an Xbox One controller!) is not what I want to hear from a supposedly 2 billion dollar company.

They've already so much as said they're going to nickle and dime buyers with new controllers later anyway.

I'm most excited for VR headsets to replace my desktop monitors. Infinitely sized displays in 360 degrees around me...I think that's where the real future is for these things. And doing that won't require nearly the hardware power that a 3D game does. The main thing holding it back is that the displays in the Oculus are still a little too low-resolution to make text 100% crisp and clear. I fully expect that a couple of years from now, though, I'll be ditching my monitors for a VR headset.

This is the dream for me too. We're a couple k more lines of resolution on cell phone screens to making it happen though.

More likely you'll end up with something like the Hololens. It won't replace your monitor, rather augment it. AR is the stop-gap between what we have now and true VR. Truly immersive VR is going to require some sort of neural control interface, and we're at least 20 years off from that being a productized mass-market device.

VR headsets are hella disorienting. I can't imagine any manufacturer recommending more than an hour of continuous usage. I just don't see any benefit to trying to work on a VR headset: I continuously have to refer to items in the physical world (my cell phone, written notes, etc) while working. Being immersed in VR would simply be too disorienting.

Now, I don't doubt that it'll happen eventually. But the time horizon is closer to 15-20 years IMO; VR is still very much in its infancy. Things like this are an art and a science; we're doing pretty well with the science part but we need to figure out the art, and that takes iteration and above all, time.

And that would really be getting in the zone while coding, as long as I can keep HN out of that world...

So refreshing to see an article about VR that's sole purpose isn't to build hype for VR!

My only experience with VR was trying the Samsung Gear headset in Schipol airport. It was a new, exciting experience for the five minutes I got to try it out. I imagine that Oculus Rift will be a much better experience, seeing as it's not based off a mobile phone but built solely for a VR immersion.

Despite how relatively amazing my first VR experience was, I can quite clearly see what the author means about it not 'revolutionising' this and that industry upon release. But I feel the most important aspect is that the technology is in its early infancy and, just like the television/consoles that came before it, will take a lot of time, innovation and behavioural changes to truly break into the general public and make a difference across different industries.

A lot of his complaints seem to be imposed by constraints on current consumer spending - basically, surely people won't be bothered to buy a VR rig if they have a current gen console or spend more than they would on a tablet.

I disagree. So much of consumer electronics (TVs/phones/tablets) has become cheap enough that I think the usual demographics with disposable income won't mind making a splash if Oculus is truly offering a new experience. I've almost been disappointed by going to Best Buy in recent years and not even seeing anything especially cool/desirable there.

This generation also doesn't place a lot of value on traditional aspirational purchases (eg you'll see a lot of well to do yuppies in Priuses or Subarus rather than the BMW that was a rite of passage in previous generations) - if anything, I think this may lead people to massively underestimate how much millennials will spend on novel/innovative big ticket items.

As a counterpoint, I used a DK1 and I thought it was brilliant. Can't wait to use a production model.

I also showed it to an architect friend of mine and he loved it and wants to use it to walk his clients around unrealized house designs.

hey rwmj! Would love to talk to your architect friend about how we wants to utilize VR for client presentations. email: angel[at]insitevr.com

My company, InsiteVR, makes it easy for architects to take their 3D models and deploy a VR walkthrough that they can use for design reviews or client presentations. No coding experience required, just a 3D model.

here's a cool example of one of our customers using our software: a cool case study: www.interiorarchitects.com/blog/the-future-of-architectural-renderings-at-ia-is-in-virtual-reality/

How is this article news? Everyone knows that VR is still a work in progress. Another article pointing out the current flaws is not bring anything to the table.

I feel that VR hardware may be good enough to sell to early adopters, but my fear is that the software and products like 'SL 2.0 (Project Sansar)' won't be good enough to give early adopters a reason to buy the hardware. It's all a chicken/egg situation. If there's no good product out there to justify the price tag, no matter how small, then why buy the thing? With products like the iPod and the early smart phones there were compelling reasons to buy them (convenience is a common factor for both). But what's the compelling reason for VR other than novelty? Will it make it easier for game designers and story makers (think Pixar or anyone in the film industry tbh) to convey previously impossible stories? I'm not so sure VR gives creators a new tool in that regards, so I'm going to wait out this cycle of VR to see what happens. Buying the Rift to play Elite Dangerous in VR mode doesn't really excite me and I'm a long time user of virtual worlds like Second Life (going on 11 years on January 2016).

This article makes some fair points but the authors opinion is tainted by recency bias. A new technology doesn't need to be as good or better then recent technology it just needs to be different and unique in some way. Gamers and gaming has a really high bar of expectations. I agree that generation 1 of consumer VR won't meet existing AAA game title experiance but it doesnt have to garner mass market appeal. This is like expecting the first mobile phones to be as polished as the iPhone, or early versions of online video to be as good as highdef tvs for mass market appeal. Clearly that wasnt the case, people found value in these early versions of technology even though they were not as good as alternative options because they added some additional element that was unique. For mobile phones if was mobility, for online video it was easy sharing and watch on demand. What will be the key value consumers derive from VR? That remains to be answered but there is something unique and different enough about VR that makes it promising.

I find the Oculus Rift DK2 with Vorpx (one of several competing pieces of software to play older or not-designed-for-VR games using the Rift) actually kind of spectacular. Elder Scrolls Online works well with it, and the game is an entirely different kind of experience when you're "actually" there. Atwood might be entirely correct about it being far from mainstream, but did anyone think the first consumer VR headsets from Oculus and Valve were going to hit the big time? I assume they'll do well enough to get to the next generation, and that content will improve over time. If you look at videos of people trying the available demos, they're already feeling it... but everything custom made is short, as no major game works directly with VR.

FWIW, the DK2 screen looks a lot better to my eyes with a screen protector on it: it just barely blurs the pixels so there's much less screen door effect than there is out of the box. I've not had the chance to try the newer, higher-res and framerate headsets.

People fall into two camps:

Camp 1: "Anyone that doesn't understand what a seminal change this is needs to take a history lesson"

Camp 2: "Anyone that doesn't understand that this is mostly hype needs to take a history lesson"

I'm gonna stake an opinion here and put myself solidly in Camp 1. I think this is going to be as impactful as the transition from radio/audio to tv/screen. Radio didn't go away, but it is a much diminished medium. Compare your own daily radio time vs. screen time. The same shift will now occur, and we'll see similar ratio with daily screen time vs VR/AR time.

Go backward in time to 1945 and ask a teenager if they'd rather watch TV or listen to the radio. Ask the same question of today's teens with regard to VR. The human brain craves high-fidelity stimulation. A flat screen is just no match.

TV was "just OK" when first introduced to consumers. The picture was lousy, the tech was complex, the cost was high. No doubt that is all true of VR today. It won't be true for long.

Playing DA here, but a lot of what you said could be said about 3D movies, which were a total flop for 15-20 years and even today face a lot of backlash and hatred.

While I have high hopes/beliefs in VR, I do fall under the "3D movies suck, I wish they'd stop making them. It's a failed technology and gives me headaches." camp.

So I can see where Camp 2 is coming from when they hate on AR/VR technologies.

What surprised me even more than not especially liking 3D movies, was actively disliking high-frame-rate movies.

High frame rate movies will be fine once they get people who understand the psychophysics involved.

But follow my logic. Put a 13 year old in front of a TV with a collection of 2D and 3D movies - and see which ones she chooses to watch. My whole point is that the 13 year old's get to decide in the long run. Your "3D movies suck" sentiment is perhaps an adults opinion (one that I share), and perhaps also an opinion expressed about movie theaters - which is not the same as personal tech choices.

I feel that will vary more from household-to-household based on the parents experienced with 3D movies. I've met teenagers who have never seen a 3D movie but claim to hate them!

There has also been some talk (not sure about actual studies) that many adults who claim to hate 3D haven't even seen a 3D movie in the past 5-8~ years; in which 3D technology (and using it properly) has improved. A bad experience years ago "tainted" the technology and they want nothing to do with it. This is discussed by a number of movie critics.

My biggest fear for AR/VR is that the first experiences might be like how 3D movies were... and it'll take over a decade to dig out of the hole that creates. Lack of R&D, slow improvements, niche media, etc.

Which is also why I feel the big players on the field currently are taking their time, working out the kinks, and trying to make the "first generation" [0] as good as possible for as many people as possible.

[0] I know AR/VR is years old and some products have been marketed as consumer-end. None entered mainstream was well as Oculus has AFAIK, so the hype for the product is a lot higher than it used to be. Kind of like how Windows had tablets long before the iPad but it took the iPad to make tablets "a thing".

I believe the tech has great "mid-term" promise, and that it will avoid the issues which made 3D get rejected. However, I don't think that any of the specific VR products that we've been exposed to are going to go consumer commercial. They are way too weak and way too expensive. But we know the magic that Moore's Law can do in just a couple of years.

Oculus admits that their current tech can't/won't support natural Depth of Field, and is therefore unnatural to the point of making most users nauseated. They can't give a date for this problem to be solved - blame the bean counters not the engineers. But I've got no skin in the game so I'm going to stake another opinion. That is that it will take probably 5 years for the tech to support Depth of Field at a price point ($1000 in today's dollars) that consumers will accept.

DK1 and DK2 are light years behind the newest revision of VR tech. Try both of them back to back and see for yourself. Night and day.

They are both pretty far back. They are also only $350.

I have access to IUPUI's CAVE, as well as other VR equipment. The expensive equipment is really good, but on part with ~$20k and up. And it's not portable. And it requires applications developed for the CAVE system.

I can haul the laptop in a bag and the rift in its box. Fast, good, or cheap.

Rift picked Fast and cheap. Can't say I blame them. It does well for me and my groups.

Today's VR still isn't there. Yesterday's VR didn't go anywhere.

However as someone who has only used the Devkit1 of the Rift I can really see this is the future of SOME entertainment. It is going to be amazing, eventually.

Games in 5-8 years made for VR are going to be mindblowingly immersive. Then again we're still going to have non-VR games. I think it's important to understand that this tech is really only useful in certain contexts.

Horror games (for VR) are going to be painful, adrenaline pumping, sweat inducing, monstrosities.

Huge possibilities exist for experiencing other perspectives in VR, too numerous to even count. Even basic things like experiencing what it's like to be taller/shorter will have an unexpectedly large impact on immersion.

VR is basically the DDR dancepad of the future. It's just an unusual interface device to increase immersion, but it's going to (eventually) be incredible. I'm very excited for the future of VR and non-VR alike.

I went to E3 for the sole purpose of trying out VR (Oculus). First time I tried out DK1, I was incredibly disappointed. The resolution made the experience worthless. I went to E3 another time, again for Oculus, and they had a whole booth set up this time with DK2. It was also disappointing. Better resolution, but still not good enough, and like Atwood says, the controls are terrible. I was trying it out on a AAA game, too.

When I started seeing articles spouting how unbelievable VR was, I just assumed they were using some new model that fixed all these problems.. but I wouldn't be surprised if it's just hype, too. It could also be that these journalists simply aren't gamers, and seeing snazzy 3d graphics up in their face for the first time is enough to blow them away.

I was swayed by his points enough that my level of excitement for buying one of these things has taken a big hit.

On the other hand, the industry hasn't had much of a chance to get running yet. Maybe the hardware issues will prevent this from happening anytime soon. But I'm not surprised that you would get bored working with device which only has demo content available for it.

I took a look at a list of some of the highest gaming budgets. I would think an effort of the scale of a game on this list could create something which would provide a good counter argument.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_g...

A description I read about galaxy vr is the only application that made sense in the current VR space from consumer point of view - the optics can create a friggin huge 2D screen to view in 3D space. I haven't tested it though.

I'm not so sure gaming is the numero uno application. There are a shiteload of places I would like to experience but really cannot access. Oceanic trenches, top of Everest, experiencing a volcanic erruption from near by. Sports fans would probably appreciate a POV right above the playing field (images from drone cams). Games sound really boring to me - compared to the real world vistas I could experience. Yeah, middle aged geezer, blah blah blah.

i'd be interested to hear what Jeff thinks about the GearVR. Most people brush it off as just another phone holder with lenses, but I'd say it's the most compelling VR headset available on the market.

It has a lot of what he requests from a VR headset: wireless, better display than DK2, and doesnt require a gaming rig. It's virtually plug and play and I think that's why people love it.

MobileVR is what will and should be people's first taste. I've spoken with a lot of architects who love cardboard because it sets such low expectations but blows people away when they put it on. The DK2 is a bit underwhelming as you're strapped into some gaming rig so you're expecting some cutting edge graphics and end up with what something that looks like N64 VR.

One thing that was neglected in this post is the emotional response that VR, even in it's current state, can evoke. I was sold on the Rift after trying some of the early horror titles. They were graphically very basic, but every corner had me sweating and the jump scares had me looking away. You could argue a 2D monitor has the same effect but when you're in VR and try to look away only to find you don't see your living room or anything familiar everything changes. And the social experiences like Convrge or Altspace are also something to be excited about. I was at first quite skeptical of things like this, but the subtle head movements that are incorporated into the avatars are enough to give one a sense of "meatspace" social cues. I once found myself talking to someone in Convrge and was awkwardly nodding and avoiding eye contact when I realized this was just an avatar. It's simple but powerful.

This article is pure distillation of everything that's wrong with VR -- not the tech, but the people who are thinking about it and trying to build it. Specifically youngish white male gamer nerds.

I want to write about this more at length -- maybe I'll put something on my blog or on Medium or something -- but I also tried VR, and the most interesting aspect of the experience was just how clueless all of the gamer types at the gaming company office I went to were about what other people out there in the world would want from the experience. Here is what I mean.

The most impressive and important part of the otherwise crappy VR demo I sat through was a crudely rendered virtual media room with a big screen TV, where I was placed on a virtual couch to watch some movie clips. Why did this rock my world?

It rocked my world because I happen to know that it would cost me $40K at least to add a media room on to my house, and if I could buy $5K worth of VR gear for my wife and I and get pretty much the same effect, then that would be a major win for us (and a loss for Austin's contractors and architects).

In other words, gaming is the /least/ interesting thing about VR. VR has the potential to disrupt the architecture and building trades. In the real world, people like to have access to spaces that they can do various non-gaming things in, and they have historically been willing to pay quite a bit of money to have those spaces built. VR will drive the cost of adding those spaces to one's home/office/trailer/pad/etc. down towards zero.

I tried explaining this to the crowd of young white male gamer nerds gathered around the pizza station after the demo, and they sort of chuckled at this boring old guy rambling about building contractors (I'm pretty sure none of them owned a house) and went back to wracking their brains about what, to them, is the single most important thing in the world: how are we going to make a frigging GAME with this?

I know these guys, because prior to my wife + 3 kids + house I was one of them: a young white male gamer nerd. But at this point I've been around the block enough to recognize that the number of people interested in blasting virtual aliens or orcs is a few orders of magnitude lower than the number of people who want to just hang out on the deck of a mega-yacht at sundown, or have coffee once again in an exact replica of a Parisian cafe that they used to frequent in the 60's, or retreat from their kids and life into a virtual media room and watch Game of Thrones on a virtual big-screen TV.

Note that I'm not slamming Jeff Atwood, who for all I know owns a house and who thinks about many things other than leveling up and collecting loot. I'm just saying that he has thoroughly missed the point of VR, and in a super common and troubling way.

I'm not an SJW by any stretch, but VR needs women, and black people, and old people, and in fact it will get them because the market will demand it. That's because VR isn't the next Atari 2600 or Kinect -- it's the next TV, and the next Internet. Are today's Internet addicts hooked on MUDs or MOOs? No, they aren't. And tomorrow's VR junkies won't give a rip about games.

I have three kids for the record. And trust me, if VR isn't doing a good job of making a believable aliens-are-destroying-your-house game, it isn't going to be any more believable when it is just rendering your house with bigger rooms.

That's the problem.

I totally disagree. I would have taken that crappy media room demo home and (along with another headset for my wife) right then and there, for the simple reason that as crude as it was it totally scratched the itch of "watch TV in a dedicated room in the house with no kid stuff anywhere."

FWIW I agree with you about the technical stuff -- the resolution has to go way up. But it will.

Again, the tradeoff is not "do I buy this megabuck Windows PC for VR gaming, or do I just stick with a console?" The tradeoff is, "do I pay a bunch of money to knock a wall out and/or redecorate, or do I buy this VR rig and some DLC from virtualcelebritycribs.com and call it a day."

Not sure I'm buying into orders of magnitude of people visiting a "60's cafe in Paris". Just who, for example, is going to design said cafe that few people alive (You'd have to be 65+ years old, and that's being very generous) even remember?

Don't see that use case gaining a traction so massive.

What you described seems to be more of a Mind Machine Interface variety than a VR one.

It also does something else.

It makes smaller apartments even easier to live in. Suddenly my 400 sq. ft. studio is not small, but now very spacious. In fact it's as big as I want it. Virtual, of course, but that makes tight living spaces livable. Perhaps, it can even be applied to tiny houses movement. 150 sq.ft. is now reasonable, as long as I stay in the VR area.

Given that many of the younger generation rent, I would surmise that reasonably priced VR will make rents go up even further, because small spaces will be in demand. And I'd also think the hikkomori trend from Japan will be exported to the rest of the world, as well.

>Are today's Internet addicts hooked on MUDs or MOOs?

They are, kind of. The very same "addictive" mechanics in MUDs have been filtered and dumbed down into popular freemium games.

>I'm pretty sure none of them owned a house

This is what bothers me most about sites like HN and Reddit. Its a lot of loud proclamations of the future from people who are more or less kids. They've never bought property, never been responsible for raising a human life, never paid 'real' taxes, never buried a parent, never have been in positions of leadership, etc. They don't understand the status quo, let alone whats good about it and what's bad. They just yell about how everything sucks and how a revolution is always brewing. The problem is that its rare for revolutions to be brewing, so they all fall for this dumb hype machine. Reading /r/futurology on reddit is cringe inducing. Everything amazing is just 5 or maybe 10 years away. As someone who has been reading sci-fi and futurist junk since he was a kid, well, lets just say none of that fun stuff happened and "boring stuff" like commodization of SoC's onto touchscreens and better wireless data standards are the real revolutions, yet no one was really singing the praises of smartphones or saw their potential. Even when I had a Treo with 1mbps EVDO it was seen as an "executive toy" by even the most techy kids because it couldn't play games. How wrong they were.

The problem is that tech is almost exclusively a young man's game, so its young men who will be making the calls. Everything is filtered through the experiences and expectations of INTJ males. They don't have the social understanding to know that maybe people don't want to a tissue box sized device strapped onto their faces or that lots of people, especially women, suffer strongly from motion sickness illusions. Or that FP shooter "presence" isn't a compelling experience, even if its 'neat to experience.' There's a major, major hurdle to overcome here. Normal and social people don't want isolating boxes strapped to their faces. INTJ males do. This conflict isn't going away. VR isn't a shoo-in here. It has nothing but an uphill battle. Shame articles that point this out are often marginalized. Only Jeff's celebrity saves him here.

Sadly, there is probably a real and major revolution going on under our noses right now that is ignored by HN and Reddit because "it doesn't play games." I have my own thoughts on the matter, but I really don't want an argument about who is the better futurist here, so I'll keep them to myself, but life as seen through the eyes of hardcore gamers isn't mainstream. Older men and women with kids and bills are mainstream, not Steam and freemium addicts. I wish more people could accept that here. If your revolution can't win over parents, minorities, and the elderly, then you don't have a revolution. I remember seeing the mockups of the first iphone and looking at my Treo and thinking, "Wow, Apple solved this. They made a smartphone grandma can use. This is going to be big." Meanwhile geek media was calling the iphone a toy, slashdot was in hysterics about how terrible it was (no 3G? No games? No keyboard?!?!), etc.

You might be surprised at how far you can get with a media room with a pair of old $50 computer speakers a used subwoofer and a cheap projector pointed at a bedsheet hanging from the ceiling connected to a $300 laptop. Some variant on this has been my media room for years and a six foot screen (ahem bedsheet) works fine for everybody who likes to come over to see it.

These days you can probably just hook a chromecast up to the projector directly and save $300.

I'm extremely near-sighted, which is getting worse with age. Some believe that myopia is exacerbated by typical indoor activities. So my dream use case is to be able to do my computer work an a virtual drive-in movie theater screen. In other words, I could still do the same type of computer work, but my eyes would be exercised at a distance.

Put this VR drive-in theater in gorgeous outdoor settings (e.g. Grand Canyon, cruise ship through the Antarctic, Ancient Theatre of Delphi, Mars) and I can glance from my work to eye-opening beauty. If my physical environment is set up correctly, I can take a break easily shift to a pleasant exercise environment. It could be an adrenaline pumping first-person shooter, or it could simply be hopping on a treadmill or stationary bike and traveling through some of those gorgeous outdoor settings.

So, for those of us without a family, you sound kind of condescending.

The entire reason we have modern computers and technology is basically because of the push for bigger drives and better graphics, driven by hardcore gaming. Without that market driver--your looked-down-upon "youngish white male gamer nerds"--you wouldn't have tech worth worrying about.

Besides, Ars Technica exists pretty much to pander to same. Get off your high horse.

I think to a large extent the focus on gaming is more about the low hanging fruit and about what can translate into immediate business.

What do I mean by that?

Well I mean to say that there are no experiences you talk of that currently work on a screen. i.e. nobody turns on their computer screen to start a video of a sundown backdrop to create a romantic moment to have dinner with their partner. But millions of people turn on their screen to have the gaming experience you describe. The reason probably is that the former requires an insane degree of realism, and a screen, or even the first iterations of VR, just aren't good enough. Whereas the latter, gaming, can be immersive with much lower standards, as it has been from e.g. games 20 years ago to games today.

So the low hanging fruit for immediate business opportunities are probably games, and you can immediately get millions of people excited about that.

But getting people excited to go on vacation and take a walk on the beach requires more than just visual immersion. It means feeling sand beneath your feet. Or in the Parisian cafe you mentioned, simply interacting with an actual other human being, physically, holding hands, and seeing that other person you're in the cafe with with as realistically as in real life, mimicking their exact movements, as anything less immediately hits you with the realisation that you're looking at a virtual 3d model of your girlfriend.

Beyond that, I think you're writing this from a perspective of a ridiculously one-sided, self-selecting personal experience.

Of course if you're going to visit a gaming company, you're not just going to find people disproportionately passionate about games, but you'll find people trying to focus on gaming products.

After all if you'd gone to an architectural company and they demo'd a business meeting where they showed the new building design to a client, and you spent 30 minutes after talking about how it'd be so cool to shoot orcs in VR, what do you think they'd say or think? They'd just go right back to talking about their company's use of VR, architecture.

Yes VR needs diverse uses and will have them. What I'm seeing is VR being talked about in education, in health care, in architecture, in cinema, in completely new semi-gaming experiences (i.e. exploring the world as a bird [0]), in porn, in sports, in business/communications. I feel you're writing this as if nobody is open to that, or exploring those things. While it is true there is a focus on gaming, I also think that this is definitely a 'no-brainer' billion dollar industry that can start shipping serious, AAA class games within 1-2 years. Particularly because VR technology is so very closely tied to the skill sets and expertise of gaming companies. Whereas say getting in education, you won't find deep expertise there to start creating top schools whose courses on say history consists half out of VR, and when it finally does happen, the history VR course content probably heavily leans on technology and learnings from the gaming's industry's experiences with VR, hell they may even commission gaming companies to build it with them in cooperation. Which is why I don't think the focus on gaming is all that crazy, it makes a lot of sense business/expertise wise, and will probably create a tide that lifts all boats in other areas of VR.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWLHIusLWOc

"Of course if you're going to visit a gaming company, you're not just going to find people disproportionately passionate about games, but you'll find people trying to focus on gaming products. After all if you'd gone to an architectural company and they demo'd a business meeting where they showed the new building design to a client, and you spent 30 minutes after talking about how it'd be so cool to shoot orcs in VR, what do you think they'd say or think? They'd just go right back to talking about their company's use of VR, architecture."

Yeah you've totally missed the point of my post. I'm talking about (and to) the people who are actually working in VR and building things with these systems -- which right now is game devs who know lots of math and can code, and not architects.

Game devs are the ones that, for a variety of reasons, are in the hot seat here and are tasked with building out the first generation of consumer VR, and they belong to a particular demographic. And that demographic is narrow, parochial, and hyper-focused on scratching its own itches. Often those are strengths, but in the case of VR they're a weakness.

DK2 isn't that good - ghosting, no positional tracking, screen door effect, etc..

CV1 really is amazing though. I've tried it. I wonder what the author would think.

This article is very much spot on. I think the true value of VR is the ability to provide new ways of playing in virtual spaces, but those ways of playing need to be compelling, they need to have good gameplay, like anything else. The 'gameplay' for watching a movie in VR is going to be absolute shit, because the viewer inherently has zero agency. The experience must be interactive and it must give the player a sense of agency (re: why hands are critical), otherwise the cost of putting on the headset will be too high for most people. Similarly, VR won't replace other experiences that have good gameplay and give players a sense of agency. Alien Isolation is an absolutely amazing game because the level of quality for the writing, pacing, level design, sound design, voice acting, control scheme, gameplay mechanics etc. are all in the 99th percentile for games and more importantly all of those parts complement eachother. Producing something like that is HARD regardless of the medium. For every Alien Isolation there are going to be a pile of shit games that you really don't want to play.

I think most of the VR guys admit that bad games in VR are going to be exceptionally bad, but I haven't heard anyone articulate quite so clearly Jeff's concerns that the experiences will just be boring. Watching Conway's game of life run: boring. Setting up and _playing_ with a fully interactive Conway's game of life: wait is it already 2am?!

the hype is about the trendline, not the current experiences. The DK1 was a quantum leap over previous efforts. DK2 was so far beyond DK1 it was a completely different experience. Vive is apparently as far beyond DK2 as DK2 was beyond DK1, though I haven't tried it.

Ignoring this in favor of "lol DK2 isn't that great" is shortsighted.

So his problem is that pre-release, AAA game software for pre-release hardware is nothing more than tech demos. And bloggers. But let's not get too far off topic discussing his own contributions to the "I need to get my voice included, too!" problems with blogging-as-a-career-move. Let's just stick to the tech.

It's disappointing to see someone who has such a prominent position in the developer community not just completely misunderstand a new piece of tech, but then go on to use his platform to stand up one part of that burgeoning sector as a straw man against all of it.

I agree, the games and other software available right now are underwhelming in a lot of aspects. That's because they are either made by indies who don't have the technical prowess to figure out best workflow for the nascent technology, or by AAA game studios that don't have the creativity necessary to make anything other than adaptations of their current FPS franchises, what all the serious pundents agree is the worst possible UX for VR. That's not too say there aren't great experiences, but they are few and far between right now.

Though frankly, so are monodisplay games, after you've burnt out on Call of Duty and World of Warcraft five (or more!) years ago.

But if all you see VR as good for is games, man, I just don't know if I can even reach you with words.

People keep comparing VR to when smartphones were new. I think that is wrong, because it implies a platform rather than peripheral approach, but even if we accept it, are smartphones just about games? IDK, maybe for some cynical, short sighted view of them they are. I don't think we are anywhere near fully taking the potential of smartphones. But even more, they represent a fairly different (though I wouldn't say fundamentally different) means if computing for users.

If you look at the original iPhone like Atwood has for VR, then you're going to come to similar conclusions, "this hardware sucks, the resolution sucks, who would want this? I want Siri now." I mean, the iPhone didn't even have the App Store when it was first released. Everyone was expected to make HTML5 web apps.

But VR isn't smartphones. It's upgrading from monochromatic CRTs to full color LCDs and adding a mouse to your computer, before any GUI operating system has been invented. Thinking this is only for games, that it won't evolve (thaaank you, Jeff Atwood, we weren't aware resolution should be improved or that the headsets are heavy), that I don't think I've ever seen anyone come unstuck from such stubbornly old ways of thinking.

VR is going to be the thing that keeps the first manned mission to Mars from dying of boredom-induced insanity on the longest single-leg voyage man has ever undertaken. The Mars colonists will use VR to exercise their body and minds. It will allow them to participate in vastly more cultural exchange with Earth than would be feasible without.

VR is going to be the thing to save the Rainforest and push people to cleanup any future ecological disasters. We are going to be able to put people in the space, to give then a hook on which to empathize that isn't possible through just TV.

Even for mundane things, VR is going to revolutionize content authoring, especially in the 3D space. Editing 3D models with 2D tools is an exercise in learned zen suppression of frustration. I'm working on an IDE in VR, where text isn't just an adaptation of the old dog chow of your Visual Studios or Eclipses or Emacsen of the world.

So yeah, it's young. Is it "not ready?" I don't agree. When the first color CRTs were released, we knew they would be better at a higher resolution, but that didn't stop us from using them. I think VR is ready. It's not ideal, but we won't be able to build the ideal unless we get it out, start exercising it.

EDIT: okay, to quell the "hype" a bit, things you can do in VR right now that are better than without VR.

- Simulator games, i.e. racing and flying, on the DK2. Project Cars and Elite: Dangerous are flipping amazing. I actually don't care for games for VR that much, but I love these games and I can't play them without the headset anymore. Yes, even the "low" resolution of the DK2 is better than playing these games at a "high" resolution on a flat screen.

- Architectural visualization with Google Cardboard. Several architecture firms are now using VR to visualize future buildings as well as additions to current buildings. I've heard several anecdotes of plans being fundamentally changed after seeing them in VR vs. just architectural drawings.

- Watch films made for VR in Vrse (http://vrse.com/). There aren't very many yet, and some of them are very short, but they are very good and not at all like 3D TV.

Things you'll be able to do, very soon

- Event space visualization with Google Cardboard. Sites like Social Tables are developing visualizers for their existing event space planning software.

- Interactively author GPU shaders in the DK2 https://share.oculus.com/app/shadertoy-vr

- Play "I Expect You To Die" which has not only been one of the few VR games I've enjoyed, it's one of the only "locked room" games I've enjoyed https://share.oculus.com/app/i-expect-you-to-die

So is VR "not ready yet"? I don't think so. I think it's as ready as any new tech on release day, perhaps even more so, because the developer ecosystem is just so much more open.

VR is going to be the thing to save the Rainforest

This is proving the article's point about excessive hype.

You pick that quote and not the Mars one? Because that particular reference is already happening. Excessive hype is when Magic Leap spends two years lighting up the tech press without showing any hard tech to people not locked up under an NDA. You can experience, right now, being physically in a certain place, seeing it on TV, and being in it virtually. VR really is closer to being there, even in simple forms like Google Cardboard, than it is to watching TV. As time progresses, the hardware improvements will push it even closer. No, it won't be perfectly like being there, but not everyone can (or in some cases should) be there. VR is already showing people things they probably wouldn't have seen without it.

How is it "saving the rainforest"? Doing so is a matter of policing in Brazil, funding anti-deforestation projects globally, and limiting the international market in hardwood.

Seeing trees in VR is absolutely not going to make more than a tiny difference to people's political beliefs on the importance of rainforests and their willingness to spend money on them.

> Seeing trees in VR is absolutely not going to make more than a tiny difference to people's political beliefs on the importance of rainforests and their willingness to spend money on them.

If you think that, then I think you have to also think that seeing it in person is not going to have much of a difference, either. I fundamentally disagree.

That's not how I read this article. It seemed to be more about tempering expectations about a highly hyped (see: your post) product.

I'd say for VR it's definitely an improvement. Resolutions will get better. More power will get cheaper.

I think we realize that to have immersion we absolutely need accessories. Haptic bodysuits and gloves. Simulate tacticle sensations and feedbacks digitally. Firing a shotgun resulting in your arms moving back as if you just fired a shotgun.

Next we can have some sort of stationary hamster ball where you could move about in complete freedom suspended in air. It would rotate to give you an illusion of gravity. The haptic bodysuit would give you the feeling that you are standing on the ground or in a race car or a spaceship.

Why stop there? Nanomachine solution you would drink and allow you to eat food in your VR and taste it.

The possibilities are endless but so are the unique challenges each of these necessary component of VR.

OR there was a way to fire some sort of lucid dream world but controlled by a software. You would know you are dreaming but you would be completely caught up in that VR world generated with the help of your own brain. Everything feels real, but what if people neglect their own bodies, wanting to be in the world as long as possible.

"I've always been the first kid on my block to recommend an awesome, transformative gaming experience, from the Atari 2600 to the Kinect"

Kinect was an awesome transformative gaming experience? Really?

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