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Comment by austenallred | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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

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.

A product is greater than the sum of its specs.

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.

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

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