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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.

>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.

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.

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.