Want to Know What Virtual Reality Might Become? Look to the Past | Hacker News Reader

Want to Know What Virtual Reality Might Become? Look to the Past

nytimes.com

63 pointsprismatic38 comments

I think some Steve Jobs-ian thinking about the experience as a whole is called for at this point. VR/AR equipment needs to be friendly to the social experience and to social experiences, otherwise it's going to be out-competed through network effects by other equipment that has an advantage there.

Current VR "room-scale" equipment seems to be optimal for 1) god-like player experiences, where you can survey a world, teleport within it, and command/change/tinker/destroy what's within it or 2) the highly immersed "stage." By "stage" I literally mean it's like you are standing on a stage. It's about the same amount of space, and the immersive feeling is very much like being on the set of a movie or show.

the social nut in VR is going to be the hardest one to crack. It will be big when the solution appears. But we're not close to one yet.

The approach we're taking now is the "avatars and voice" approach, where you interact with other people through VR puppets, essentially. These puppets can mimic your body language and facial expressions and are supposed to increase the depth of human communication through nonverbal cues. The truth is, after experimenting heavily with this, I've found most of it to be pretty gimmicky.

It seems the human mind naturally gravitates to such ideas (e.g. second life), but it never pans out. I'm not sure what the right answer is, or if theres even one.

I personally think the things that have the biggest potential in VR are games like Tabletop Simulator, where both the game itself and the context of "being with other people playing a game" are part of the experience.

> I personally think the things that have the biggest potential in VR are

Porn. Let's be realistic.

When people can have the sensations of sex in VR porn media, without needing to interface bodily fluids with pieces of hardware, then porn VR will, in the words of Dennis Miller, "make crack look like Sanka." Or perhaps, when porn media makers figure out how to work the current forms of immersion to their advantage, there will be an uptick.

Right now, the increase in the quality of experience of VR porn over a screen and a pair of headphones is still marginal.

I have watched some VR porn. It's nothing to write home about yet. Maybe in future.

Being at the same table with others playing a tabletop game is like being gods in a competitive pantheon playing with a world. I think we're essentially talking about the same "thing" -- it's just that our culture's level of understanding of it is still nascent. Most of our experience of this thing is through tabletop games. Now, we are just getting into the possibilities of VR for the "thing."

A multiplayer Populous is what I am thinking.

Wouldn't that be more of an AR experience? Similar to the game in the original Star Wars on board the Falcon?

It could just as easily be a VR experience, one which the HTC Vive would be particularly well suited to.

I wanted to get into VR but it's too cost prohibitive right now.

You need a powerful computer. That means either buying a very expensive rig from a brand name seller (Alienware or Razer), or building one on your own.

The former is cost-prohibitive. The latter is skill-prohibitive.

A smartphone, on the other hand, is cheap and requires no technical know how to buy and use

The Playstation 4 VR is rather in-expensive and has a good selection of high quality content.

And I too think AR (augmented reality, known from Pokemon-Go) has higher potential/adoption rate. We will see it in our every day life soon, everywhere. And everyone has a smartphone, no need for a helmet.

(And for VR a "CAVE" is very cool. It's a special purpose small room where projectors point to 3 or 4 walls and the floor and you can just carry light&inexpensive 3D red-blue or shutter glasses and walk around eg with your friends. That's something we will probably see more and more in public locations too.)

VR right now is still targeted very much at gamers, many of which already have a capable enough system, or could get there easily enough with a few upgrades. As a side effect of putting together a good gaming PC I have everything I already need for VR save the actual headset. It's still expensive, but it's a good deal less than the total cost of a good gaming PC.

  "It is a delightful characteristic of these times, that new and
  cheap means are continuously being devised, for conveying the
  results of actual experience to those who are unable to obtain such
  experiences for themselves; and to bring them within the reach of
  the people ... New worlds open out to them, beyond their little
  worlds, and widen their range of reflection, information, sympathy
  and interest."

For the origin of this technology, we can look much further back in time than the 19th or even 17th century... back to pre-historic times at the origin of storytelling.

Storytelling was the first technology for "conveying the results of actual experience to those who are unable to obtain such experiences for themselves".

> The most surprising twist in the evolution of V.R. may turn out to be the pace of the new medium. Quick cuts are an almost physical act of violence in V.R.; jumping from one perspective to another can create a literal sense of nausea. But more telling, perhaps, is the fact that people don’t want to move on to another experience once they’ve put the headset on. They want to linger. “I want to just put you in a field,” Mooser told me, “and you just do what you want to do in that field.”

Quick cuts were seen as violent and jarring when film was new, too. We will get used to VR cuts just as we got used to film cuts. It may take a few generations; right now VR is still a novelty.

We will get used to VR cuts just as we got used to film cuts.

I don't think that the "cut" automatically applies to VR. Film is fundamentally more indirectly immersive. You are looking through a window into another world, and the immersion is also largely through involvement via plot/characters/interest. VR will also (hopefully) have this, but the jump up in immediacy from film is like the one film has from books. Instead of a "cut" I think other tools and vocabulary will arise that are much more interactive.

People like looking through a window into another world. I don't think slaving your POV to the level where it's strapped to your head is fundamentally viable. Looking through the magic window of cinema is an active choice to delve into that POV, moment by moment -- for you can always close your eyes or look away in an instant. With VR, it's more like you have the choice the moment you strap on the goggles, you give it up for the experience, then have the "safe word" of being able to take the goggles off. Many more people will like looking at stuff than they will like being strapped to it.

Day 1 Vive owner. It really isn't a big deal. Immersion gets overplayed a lot in the click-baity tech press. Sure it feels 'real' but about 3-4 steps removed from reality and where traditional 2D gaming is 5-6 steps away from reality. We are nowhere near anything that be can considered 0-2 steps from reality. There will always be an uncanny valley effect here and a sense of falseness. Humans aren't that easily fooled, unfortunately.

My Vive had performance issues where my background environment would randomly pop-up during games. It was kinda annoying the first time, but is no big deal. Sharp cuts are pretty meaningless. This stuff isn't exactly the Matrix. You're not going to be in constant amazement or think you're in some new reality with a new body. It still a screen pasted to your face and your mind knows this the whole time.

There's a big difference between the 3-4 steps and 5-6 steps. Just as you can't simply assume that everything in books automatically translates to film, you can't simply translate everything in film to VR.

My Vive had performance issues where my background environment would randomly pop-up during games.

I thought that was a feature called "Chaperone."

You're not going to be in constant amazement or think you're in some new reality with a new body. It still a screen pasted to your face and your mind knows this the whole time.

Who said anything about amazement? No one. What I'm referring to is precisely the fact that you know it's a screen strapped to your face. Being stuck on someone else's POV through something strapped to your face is a different experience than looking through the magic window of the cinema screen or the computer monitor. I think it makes a fundamental difference to how the "cut" works or won't work.

Chaperone is when you get close to your room's edge. There's a bug that can make your background environment, which can be anything - mine was a spaceship, appear instantly. Its no biggie.

Darkened theaters are rather like a screen stuck to your face. After a while you really stop noticing the 'static' background and people just focus on the screen.

This is true, but there is still a significant difference. You have to actively engage your eyes to have that immersion. This is also the case when you can explore and look around a VR environment. There is a difference in agency. Naievely use the conventions of film in VR, however, and you can lose that. Everyone wants to be able to peer into another's POV. No one wants to be strapped into it. Doing VR wrong can change VR from the former to the latter.

The difference here is that quick cuts in film, generally speaking, don't literally make people physically sick.

They used to make people sick. But we've adapted to watching screens, mostly. (First person shooters still make a lot of people ill, on regular TVs.) Plus, a grammar evolved (180 degree line of action, visual weights, etc) that allow experienced filmmakers to push the bounds of what's comfortable to watch.

Regular VR devs report (and I can corroborate) that you eventually lose your ability to get sick in VR. This extends to motion sickness in the real world; when I was experiencing a lot of nauseating VR, I no longer got nauseated by reading while driving, or on boats, etc. (Unfortunately your ability to get sick 'grows back' if you stop watching VR; the brain is rather plastic.)

Depends on the film, you can easily make viewers nauseous watching TV. The iMax film To Fly, had an insanely long run because it gives people a gut wrenching feeling at a few points. And 'shaky cam' footage bothers a lot of people.

Those reports of the past describe one-off location-based entertainment systems which didn't scale, and novelty devices which didn't last. That may be the future of VR headsets.

When your technology can modify someone's mind's eye view, call me. I will give you all my money if it works for me.

Would you have similarly avoided or not been impressed by photography or film when they were invented? How about writing?

I am not stating I would avoid this technology, so asking me if I would avoid similar technology isn't logical. I would take no action to avoid technologies, but I would limit them if I felt they were harmful to my well being.

I do not visualize (Aphantasia), so I would be much more excited if I could both see what is going on here AND have a mind's eye, even if it were artificial.

Welcome books and songs, our parents' technology that's been stable for a while and is always built to fit users' particular needs. Spend all your money on working less and enjoying these sensibilities; wind down to give them your full undivided mind. Imagination needs cultivation and the more you use (i.e. restrict it) the sharper it gets.

Clicking this link takes me to a login page with no ability to access the content in any way.

I screen shotted it because I've actually never seen something like this before: http://i.imgur.com/1YBFuiU.png

Also, doing the web link brings me to the same login page.

"Want to Know What Virtual Reality Might Become? Look to the Past

No doubt some future V.R. creators will figure out how to tell cinematic stories or make compelling game experiences.

The director Chris Milk, in a widely circulated TED talk, called V.R. systems "Empathy machines," a description echoed by other V.R. auteurs.

The paradox of V.R. is that when you see the world through someone else's eyes, you can't actually see the person's eyes.

Donning V.R. goggles, visitors entered a parallel version of the forest, where they could shift in and out of the perspectives of different creatures, from midges to frogs to owls.

"This isn't storytelling." If V.R. allows you to project yourself onto the deck of the Titanic, I suspect we won't want the entire James Cameron-style back story about a dashing artist and his fleeting romance with a wealthy young woman facing an arranged marriage.

"We weren't expecting it really," Steel says about the process of creating "In the Eyes of the Animal," "But by the end of it, we were all thinking, If you'd had a stressful day, it's super nice to just put it on and just explore. You always find new perspectives and angles. With these bigger trees, you're scanning so much detail that you notice stuff in V.R. that you wouldn't notice in real life. We're stuck at five to six feet high, and so you rarely go down and put your chin on the floor. But in V.R., you just stick yourself down there, and you're like: 'I love it down here! Look at all these pine cones!' ".

In an age when action movies have acclimated our eyes to multiple cuts per second, and in which video games bombard us with nonstop carnage, there turns out to a surprisingly meditative quality to the world we inhabit with V.R. goggles on."

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It's getting to the point where i don't even bother clicking links from the times or the post anymore.

At the moment, opening nytimes links in an incognito session works for me.

Because I have a habit of browsing NYT first thing in the morning, I tend to use Incognito mode. Never had it go through the nag screens then, but part of it may be ublock origin.

Something about blocking cookies or javascript stops the web search from working, or technically keeps their block working. I just search it in IE.

Try substituting "www." in the URL with "mobile."

Nope, it does not help. I've tried with lynx ( console browser ), with archive.org; I keep getting the login as well. If I disable cookies, I get a redirect loop.

Edit: Hah! Workaround:

    wget -O- http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/magazine/want-to-know-what-virtual-reality-might-become-look-to-the-past.html > /tmp/x.html && dillo /tmp/x.html

( note: dillo is a dead simple little browser )

Cool! Terminal version, piping directly into w3m:

    wget -O- http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/magazine/want-to-know-what-virtual-reality-might-become-look-to-the-past.html | w3m -T text/html

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