If VR is going to go beyond the high end gaming niche, people are going to have to be able to access it through the computer in their pocket.
Why should it? Frankly, that seems to be the main use case. VR that can fit in a phone isn't worthwhile VR, it would be incredibly underpowered.
(note NSFW) http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2016/07/japan-vr-porn-festi...
I don't think porn VR is the killer app people think it is. Perhaps in a few generations especially in conjunction with tele-dildos or robot sex dolls or somesuch, but that's a lot to ask when ordinary 2D photos and videos get the blood flowing with much less hassle.
(I definitely am not trying to be sarcastic, your statement is pretty much what I think, but somehow whenever I try to think of these practical opportunities, I fail to grasp anything with even remotely the potential user base of gaming.)
Able to walk around construction projects before they start. Able to walk around construction projects as they are built.
Main deal I could expect out of a cheap version of VR technology with decent enough data connection is telepresence. One could attend any event, large or small, around the world as if you were there.
I don't have a 60 inch TV, I do have a phone (and tend to keep a pretty recent one), so the marginal cost of Daydream over what I would have anyway vs. the marginal cost of a 60-inch TV over what I would have anyway is a pretty clear win for Daydream.
In 2001/2002 they trained surgeons with it and found significant improvements:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1422600/
Siemens has done training for Oil Rig crews while the rig was being constructed. Reduced real world training times:
http://www.siemens.com/innovation/en/home/pictures-of-the-fu...
Design and simulation. The auto and oil industry have paid millions for whole-wall, multi-user, 3D display systems because they want slightly better visualization tools for people doing car design and oil exploration. Spending on that saves them 10X on avoiding wasted effort. Commoditize that to fashion, gadgets, furniture...
Real estate. In the near future, you would be considered an idiot to pay for a building to be built without walking through it first. Very soon when shopping for a house, you will walk through 50 prospective houses in VR before bothering to visit 5 in meatspace. Architects already call VR visualization "cheating" because it is so much more effective --even for professionals-- than drafting and CAD on flat media.
Education. Firing full-scale catapults is a much more engaging way to teach physics than staring at diagrams of catapults.
Tourism. VR won't replace going there. VR will replace not going there. To say that most people don't go to most places is a comic understatement. For people who can't travel because of personal/financial/health constraints, being able to get out of the house/hospital bed/nursing home for just a while would be quite a boon.
Socialization. The telephone is basically lightweight social VR. Social VR is like the telephone but more intense. The phone will not be replaced by VR. VR opens up more intense options for being with other people you couldn't be with otherwise. Instead of just sitting in the same room having a chat, you can hike through Minecraft mountains, play D&D, paint a sculpture, or shoot catapults together.
Autodesk previously demoed their app working with project tango so you can walk around holding a tablet as a viewport.
Big screen playback of YouTube and Netflix through a smartphone would offer a much better experience than watching a limited selection of titles on a postcard sized screen on the back of an aircraft seat.
Given that you're going to own a smartphone anyway, an accessory that's an order of magnitude cheaper than high end VR seems like it has a place.
That's the case now, that and porn will be the early adopter uses.
But I'm pretty sure the Killer App is going to be feeling like you are in the same space as someone you're not actually in the same space with. Which doesn't require much technologically.
You could probably get social presence with a pair of microlasers pointed at pair of lenses, plus spatial audio.
It's the Playstation VR. Sony has sold 40m of the things (the PS4) world wide and each one is capable of doing VR if you buy the headset.
Something wireless is almost certainly the ideal way to do VR but until we get WAY more power and efficiency that won't work.
In the mean time the PS VR will have lots of industry support (best push we've got) and doesn't need a $900-$2000 computer.
It's way way way bigger than the number that have custom built ultra-high end PCs.
Phones that will be powerful enough to provide a good experience for more than a short amount of time (due to battery, etc.) and with the abilities of other VR systems (hand controllers, positional tracking, etc) are going to be a fair ways off.
Yes all gamers (including phones) is a bigger group than console gamers, but there are still a TON of console gaming households who have proven willing to throw down real money to buy hardware to play specific games.
It remains to be seen how many of these will buy a VR headset. Peripherals have always been a very marginal aspect even on dedicated gaming hardware. If there's an actual killer application (i.e. a must have game) I could see myself buying into it, but as long as the VR "games" are either glorified demos or badly converted regular games that are worse than their non-VR counterpart, I won't spend a cent on it.
I'm not a big fan of "console/PC or it's fake" attitudes towards games. Some of the best games I've played in years were on iPhone/iPad.
With some exceptions like Game of War, Candy crush and Pokemon Go the average mobile user doesn't play that much. They just need a quick 5 minute distraction. That's the wrong mindset for VR.
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-3180987/ps4-pro-equ...
The GPU in the PS4 pro will be the RX480 desktop-equivalent graphics card. This has a slight lower passmark than the Nvidia GTX 970, which is the minimum spec for the HTC Vive.
Of course, it's not like and like - you can't just compare cards like that, and Playstation have the advantage of controlling the hardware and software configurations (which has always been an advantage for consoles), but saying it easily has the resolution and framerate sounds suspect - I expect it will just about have the resolution and framerate.
I'll find out in a week - I'm going to the Playstation Future of Gaming Tour, and I'll be able to compare it to the Vive with a 970.
I've noticed on benchmarks that the relationship between resolution and framerate is exponential - so a lower resolution will go a long way to a higher framerate.
The bigger issue seems to be game design. There are some things you just can't ever do without causing a huge chunk of people to get sick.
I heard of one hack, for minecraft or something, that snapped view angle increments to 30degrees or something like that, and it was helpful. That would simulate saccading.
Expect a lower point of view frame rate (vs animations that don't change point of view) would be helpful. i.e. smoothly move whatever is in your hand, or that pig on the landscape, but turning your head triggers saccade emulation.
Why would your eyes not saccade when wearing a VR headset? The screen isn't the source of saccades. Your eyes are.
You can dart around within that narrow window, but mostly you are looking around by turning your head. You are subjected to more visual motion than you would in real life.
Some examples: strafing side to side (try it), going up stairs, any sort of sudden acceleration.
Vive avoids this in room scale VR since you receive the feedback since you're really doing the action.
I think it's a great way to demo the limits that motion sickness places on experiences for the vast majority of people. It's more than just being in control, and there are other effects at work, just like hand-held video footage without image stabilization is painful to look at. But my pet theory is that the big one is working with your body - if your body sits in a chair, your avatar should too (ie: drive a car, fly a spaceship is ok, walking around an art gallery at a leisure pace, not so much).
People still get sick with Oculus because many of the games involve moving while you're sitting still.
That's why Vive does "room scale" games where it doesn't involve moving the world around you.
The Daydream is likely going to work with most top tier Android phones in the coming year or two and will likely start working with mid tier phones soon after. You'll be able to use it anywhere you want and bring it with you to friends and family. And it's only $79 with the included controller.
While I have no doubt the PS VR will have similar success to the HTC Vive and Occulus, I think VR with a phone as a base will likely have a wider market due to economics and market penetration.
I think that ideally VR should be a standalone device that connects to nothing but power, WiFi, 4G/5G, and bluetooth. (And yes, it can have a 3.5 mm jack too.) The basis for this technology would naturally be a built-in mobile device, so mobile VR is in this sense the path forward.
Yes, but it is cheaper than duplicating the hardware of a flagship phone in a VR device, which is basically the atlernative, given that the phone-based VR devices are using the sensors, display, and basic compute functionality (CPU/GPU/RAM, etc.) of the phone.
Eventually, the necessary hardware for acceptable VR will be cheap enough that its not worth the hassle of surrendering a phone for it, and it will be viable for the mass market as a standalone device, but right now I think -- outside of very narrow niches -- the phone-as-core VR display design makes a lot of sense.
1) A dark box on your head with a screen (or a projector) inside
2) Direct connection to the brain
We're not even close to solving #2, and even if we were, I'm not sure many people would agree so a surgical procedure.
We could create a light weight version of #1 without the box - something like glasses with screens or low-power laser projectors, but then you'd need to be in a relatively dark place for the true immersion. Dlodlo V1 VR is doing that, I think. And ODG R-7 Smartglasses, kind-of.
Mobile VR still has an important unsolved problem too (absolute positional tracking throughout a room). Google and Oculus's John Carmack are working on this problem (independently of one another), and hopefully we'll see some of their work make it into commercial products in the next few years. But for now it's a real limitation of mobile VR devices.
If vr ever goes mainstream beyond a mobile phone gimmick addon it will be via Playstation or Xbox
I agree that the multi-thousand machines to power an Oculus is too expensive to go mainstream, but phone-based VR suck too much to go mainstream. The resolution is too low, headtracking is not good enough...
At best people will get those phone VR headset for free, play a little bit with it, show it off to their friends and as soon as the novelty wears off it will collect dust.
VR needs a much, much better experience to become a thing. Either PC-based VR becomes cheaper or phone-based VR becomes better I don't know, but that's not for 2017.
This meme is blatantly incorrect. You don't require a multi-thousand dollar rig for VR, let alone gaming at maximum settings. A multi-thousand dollar rig is strictly enthusiast-grade - that is when you put components into the PC for no practical purpose whatsoever and in some cases to the detriment of performance (e.g. 4-way SLI/Crossfire). Even $1000 is pushing the boundary of enthusiast.
Getting into PC-based VR can cost less if you go with entry-level VR components. This $850 PC[1], for example, will crush nearly all VR titles with little-to-no compromise.
Valid and educated criticism levied against PC VR would be the price of the devices themselves, the annoying cables and the immaturity of the optics (both the Vive and the Oculus are different imperfect trade-offs).
Also, you linked to a parts list. This automatically excludes most people who don't have the knowledge or motivation to assemble their own computer.
Personally I find that roomscale is a bit of gimmick, but I'm more interested in seated VR titles because I'm one of the lucky few that don't get VR sickness (another valid concern).
One thing I'd definitely recommend you do before purchasing a VR setup is demoing it for a decent amount of time. If you're susceptible to VR sickness, that's $800 down the drain.
>We are working with a number of smartphone manufacturers to create a specification for Daydream-ready phones. These smartphones enable VR experiences with high-performance sensors for smooth, accurate head tracking, fast response displays to minimize blur, and powerful mobile processors. [1]
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[1] https://blog.google/products/google-vr/vr-google-jump-expedi...
(Disclaimer: work at Google, but not speaking as a representative of the company.)
That is, it's nauseating if you're trying to imagine that you're running or biking through an area, because the movement doesn't match your movements. There are a few exceptions.
Our content was live action video, but massively stabilized (it almost looked like CG; many partners assumed it was). So I'm not optimistic that standard video would work for this, at all. Just my two cents, though it's a pretty well-informed couple of pennies.
I mean videos in the general sense. I watch 2d videos (while using fitness equipment) on a VR headset and find it enjoyable. The best part is blocking out all of the visual distraction from my environment. I look forward to getting a higher resolution headset.
- Custom made screens for VR, Rift/Vive have 90hz refresh rates, I believe Daydream phones will be 60hz (same as GearVR)
(Or maybe the new generation is already there).
It just seems easier to add functionality to the $1000 investment you already made.