The Story of Oculus Rift
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> Luckey does not come from money, nor did he have access to the prep-school, Ivy League fast track that Zuckerberg and so many of Silicon Valley’s young masters started on.
People are still surprised that poor white people and rich white people are not the same. Wealth divides far more than race in America.
What makes Palmer Luckey all the more badass is that he created a product from scratch that changed the world. Zuck cloned Friendster and leveraged the exclusivity of a "Harvard social network" to bootstrap his site.
John Carmack, also from a poor background, is the one who believed in Oculus first. He is most responsible for helping Palmer Luckey make VR happen. They're the big heros here, not the rich kid who bought it for $2 billion.
Why can't Zuck actually compete with Snapchat, WhatsApp, or Oculus? His response to competition is to spend $30 billion buying these companies instead of actually contributing something new in the world himself.
Zuckerberg, Chris Dixon, and Andresssen Horowitz dismissed Oculus. Many thousands of regular people could see that Oculus was special but these Titans of Silicon Valley believed "bad intel" about Microsoft (of all companies) having something better. Better than what John $#U*%# Carmack had chosen to work on!
Such are the brave risk takers of Silicon Valley.
My friends make anywhere from 10 bucks an hour to over half a million every year. My wealthy friends are incredibly nice but sometimes they are awkward. Multiple rich people have asked me about the kind of boat I own. I don't have a boat. Sometimes I make my poor friends feel the same way. They are jealous that I can afford a mortgage.
I also have white co-workers and black co-workers. My white co-workers are incredibly nice but sometimes they are super awkward. They ask me questions about chopsticks and interment camps. As for my black friends, well, sometimes they deal with worse.
Bonus: Everyone's favorite astrophysicist on the challenges of being black https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inz1sdhsMCU
It has also not changed the world yet.
Palmer was more innovative, sure, but Zuck showed much more leadership and vision. Sort of like woz versus jobs.
As for changing the world, I think that might be a stretch at this point.
>"Zuck cloned Friendster and leveraged the exclusivity of a "Harvard social network" to bootstrap his site."
Ah, I wish it were that easy to create a $250+bn company.
DK1&2 owner. I felt the same, but the Crescent Bay demo blew me the heck away. More amazing than experiencing the DK1 for the first time.
Then, recently, I tried the Oculus Touch demos. For an hour or so afterwards, I felt like reality was less real than the simulation, even despite its limitations. I felt like the realm of possibilities within that box was infinite, and real-life was limited in comparison.
Couldn't it just as likely be the inherent conflict between proprioceptual cues and visual cues causing sickness?
Sure, that's the general concept. OP's two points are specific examples of the causes of mismatch - examples which are well known, and can be mitigated.
a) When a program's framerate is high enough, moving your head causes a corresponding change in visual cue. When the framerate is too slow, the visual cue update is delayed from the motion. A mismatch.
b) When a game allows you to walk forward in a virtual world, your eyes get visual cues that you're walking forward, even though your body knows you're not. VR applications that instead simulate you sitting in place, and give you visual cues to that effect, limit that mismatch.
VR-wise, b) can definitely be mitigated. There seem to be two current strategies - either you design the experience to be primarily stationary, or you set up a room that people can actually, physically walk in.
stationary-only experiences might seem like a tight constraint, but constraints breed creativity :).
Rooms to walk around in have also been done, but they're obviously more effort to set up and maintain, and are typically done by larger institutions.
It's got to be a dream to make and play games on and right now, it's not.
It's not so much the motion sickness for me though. It's just that the novelty wore off and it became a chore. Elite Dangerous with a DK2 was incredible for a quite a while. I used to just fly around space stations and look around. Now after the 100th trading run i prefer the monitor as it doesn't require me to clean lenses or deal with a tangle of cables.
This is one of my worst fears about VR adoption: gamers, especially the kind who will be on the leading edge of this stuff, want badly to play FPS games and they'll find ways to do it and they're all going to hate VR.
I'm glad Oculus is putting their "comfort ratings" front and center, and being really vocal about the principles of sickness-free VR, but I'm worried people are going to skip all the warnings and advice and ruin this for everyone.
>>This is one of my worst fears about VR adoption: gamers, especially the kind who will be on the leading edge of this stuff, want badly to play FPS games and they'll find ways to do it and they're all going to hate VR.
Part of the promise of VR is being able to negotiate a virtual world on foot which currently has too much of a mismatch to work without sickening the user. So what are the long term solutions to this? To me they are really hard if not impossible problems.
Another idea is something called redirected walking, which basically tricks you into walking in circles even though you think you're walking in a straight line.
Someday we may have electronic solutions to sim sickness -- they've discovered that by sending tiny amounts of electricity through our inner ears, they can programmatically control how you feel you're moving.
Edit: Here's a video of Palmer Luckey talking about that inner ear stuff (GVS): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CRdRc8CcGY&feature=youtu.be...
I see a lot of parallels with early mobile app development. Early mobile games often plastered the screen with virtual buttons, poorly replicating controller-based UI's onto a touch screen. The experience was bad and plenty of people wrote off mobile gaming as impossible. Then we learned how to build mobile games with a touch-centric UI.
I get that FPS-style games seem like perfect contenders for VR since they are already pretty realistic and immersive for 2d constructs. Still, the conventions of FPS evolved to fit the flat world of computer monitors and TV screens. Once you're immersed, running around can be quite nauseating even if you're experienced with VR or have a decent resistance to VR motion sickness.
I'm more interested in trying out (and building) new conventions that are a natural fit for VR. Seated experiences and, eventually, ones that allow for walking around 1:1 in the room you're actually in will beat running around with a controller while looking through a HMD.
As a DK1&2 owner, I had a similar experience, but what brought VR back to me was Elite: Dangerous, a space sim. FPS's are a horrible VR experience currently and likely will remain so until we redefine FPS for VR. With Elite + joysticks, I've not experienced any of the motion sickness in the DK2.
I'm also worried about the impossible problems to solve. For me, the biggest issue is the screen door effect. it is said that only 8k per eye resolution can solve this.
I think there are still 10 more years before vr becomes small, cheap and good enough.
It may still look pixelated, but that's easier to ignore IMO.
Ovr might want to restrict what apps can be run on what computers. Their mobile version has this benefit. Carmack had real vision leading the charge on their Samsung partnership.
I've seen Mark's vision for Oculus described as the next step in connecting all of the people on the planet in a few pieces now. What interests me about this position is that it implies:
1) gaming and entertainment braodly are not the end game. Instead, the social interactions.
2) VR hardware will see broader consumer penetration in the population not yet reached by facebook than mobile phones
Not sure what I think yet.
I would also ask, what's the market penetration of a $600 smart phone that you can take everywhere and do tons and tons of useful things with? No where near facebook's total penetration. Sure they're becoming more and more ubiquitus but remember that most people don't have a need for a upper end gaming pc and convincing them that they have to have it so they can virtual-skype with their friends from only one room in their house makes it seem a lot like the original telephone for quite a while. Expensive, and tied to a single place.
Don't get me wrong, it's SUPER COOL to demo (I went onsite at valve).
Imagine how kids are glued to their cell phones today. Not I true a slim, always on VR/augmented reality device that allows them to connect with their friends virtually. Add cameras and mics for shared experiences and streaming their lives and it is clear this is in its infancy.
"Rainbow's End" by Vernor Vinge starts to get into this a bit and provides great insight there. Functional "telepathy" seems almost reachable with how fast this has moved.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/22/tech/mobile/americans-prefer-t...
I wonder if VR as a communication tool could supplant video calling? Although it lacks the ability for a family to physically gather around a screen and communicate as a group.
http://media.steampowered.com/apps/abrashblog/Abrash%20Dev%2...
In the last go-round of VR, the killer app was supposed to be the Multiverse (as in "Snow Crash"). Now that Second Life is available but slowly sinking, that doesn't seem as compelling. The problem with Second Life doesn't seem to be graphics resolution, lag, or anything technical; it just isn't worth the trouble. There's an Oculus Rift client mod for Second Life, not that anybody cares. (The Second Life people should do a WebGL client; more people might try it.)
Interestingly, in the first round of VR, back in the 1980s, it was "gloves and goggles", so you could actually do something while in there. This time, the gloves seem to have disappeared. The stock controller is the XBox game controller, although there's an optional wrist-tracking controller. Full finger tracking, no.
Here's my guess: Feeling like you're in the same room with someone who is far away.
I ask because I wonder whether the overhead of using the device is outweighed by its value as a communications tool.
I actually think you could probably make a standalone stereo Bluetooth headset/glasses with clear lenses and two lasers that project a single 3d stereo positioned dot onto each lens. You'd just need a chip to position the audio and the two dots so I think you could do a really compact low power device and sell them for <$100.
You could just walk around your house, and the dot would stay close to you and talk to you and you would feel like they were in the house with you, rather than inside a little phone.
Just like smart phones, it wasn't the early devices with clunky hardware, high price tags, and cool features that drove mass adoption. It was the move toward ergonomics and ease of use with a core set of common functions that turned it from a techie thing into something ubiquitous.
100 years ago: "Risque" was defined as the lingerie section of a J.C. Penney mail-order catalog.
Tomorrow: A pioneering generation of habitual VR wankers.
http://assayviaessay.blogspot.com/2014/03/virtual-spaces-rea...
I'm sceptical and not least because of Zuckerberg's involvement. Mark Zuckerberg reminds me most of Bill Gates and has so far displayed the same level of vision and imagination as Gates (i.e. almost none).
I think a world in which technology is a black box that is controlled by corporations by means of proprietary software WAS Bill Gates' vision for Microsoft.
I bought a DK2, played with it and developed some prototypes with it. I have a very wide IPD (Interpupillary Distance), which meant that I couldn't focus cleanly on the image of the DK2. I experience some mild to moderate motion sickness when I use the DK2 in most titles.
However, there are some experiences -- particularly those with a cockpit or a third person camera -- that significantly reduce or eliminate the sickness. At PAX this year, I tested both the HTC Vive (Call of the Starseed -- a Myst-like title) and the Oculus CV1 (Eve Valkyrie -- a space superiority dogfighter) with absolutely no motion sickness at all, despite some rather hectic motion in Eve. Both demos were approximately 15 minutes of VR time. The higher frame rates and resolution, along with better accommodation of my wideset eyes absolutely improved the 'presence' in the demo. It was absolutely a material change from the DK2, which I've shelved until the consumer ready hardware is available.
Additionally, DK1 and DK2 content is still generally content under development. We're still learning which experiences are good or bad in VR, and how to move the player without disturbing their equilibrium. Games like Eve Valkyrie and Call of the Starseed were both designed from the ground up with VR in mind, which also helps.
that's one of the best example of confirmation bias I have seen in a while. Chris is assuming because he doesn't feel brain damage he doesn't have it! (I have no opinion on if VR causes brain damage - just pointing out the absurdly of that quote)
My guess is that he'll simply stop watching the moment he realizes that whatever he's looking at was made by a clueless developer. It doesn't take a whole lot of experience before you can distinguish the good from the bad within a few seconds.
I wonder whether he is aware that Oculus has been moving away from that goal for a while now. They are now a company that works with Microsoft, AMD and nvidia on Windows-exclusive APIs and have dropped support for all other operating systems.
That's why all "social" VR applications for the Oculus Rift are a joke. Sure, you can get together in VR. But only when you use windows and only with other windows users. Zuckerberg says he wants to connect everyone. Right now Oculus is working on connecting Windows users exclusively. I wonder what Zuckerberg thinks about his newly acquired company acting this way.