We Won’t See Hard AR Anytime Soon (2012)
blogs.valvesoftware.com
blogs.valvesoftware.com
It's interesting to me since I've followed VR/AR for 40 years myself, and what I can say is if you look at the money and hype that have surrounded HMD's (especially in the last couple of years), the technology is still just not there, and neither are the applications.
That said, a lot of very bright people are doing very cool things with technology in the name of VR/AR. That can only be a good thing.
So keep at it...
Nice article, thanks for resurfacing it.
Have you demoed VR on a PC, or at least PSVR? I've heard this far too often from people who have only seen a phone HMD, which are complete and utter crap (apart from the mobility aspects - which has recently been solved for Vive).
I get that there is an immediate "Wow" factor, but then I wander off and look at the real world, and think "Holy crap!".
They are good, I get that... Not great but something. I don't understand the purpose though.
The best virtual reality experiences I've ever had have been between the pages of a book, or induced by psychotropic substances.
If they can fix the latency, resolution and FOV issues, reduce the size of the headsets and make them cost $150, I can see that a certain sector of people might sit at home on the couch and do whatever they do. But moving around with those things on seems like an accident waiting to happen, even more so if they get the display technology right.
For AR, I can see it as a technology used in business a lot more than for the consumer.
That said, as one of the comments in the article mentioned... would be great to ditch my monitors and have an ultra wide panoramic coding experience. But again, that is more of a business application.
I really struggle with the fatigue aspects.
And yes you are right, the phone stuff is abysmal.
I'll be the first to criticize VR for being expensive, but the Hololens is absurd - you'd think that Microsoft would have paid attention to the Glass stillbirth. Oculus pulled off $600 devkits, which gave VR a fighting chance. AR has no fighting chance right now, not at that price, not with so few devs making apps (and many of the issues in the article still apply).
I also haven't seen anyone get sick from HoloLens or trip over anything while using one.
I wouldn't be surprised if the price point of HoloLens is absurdly high for a very specific reason: to stop people from thinking it's consumer technology - it isn't - not yet. And if that's Microsoft's strategy then I'd say it's a smart move. As a HoloLens developer you have to focus your efforts on enterprise and practical applications. Not gimmicks, because there's no money in that.
But this is because I have the perspective of having played around with DIY VR back in the mid-1990s. Back then, the only way you could have gotten anything -close- to what we have now, would have been to drop about $50k on hardware. Even then, it still would have been lacking.
Today, you can get a much better experience in your home for under $5k. To me, that's astounding.
Sadly, we still don't know what to do with it - beyond games and a few other gimmicky things. There has yet to be that "must have" application for VR - we don't have a "photoshop" or "desktop publishing" or whatever you want to call it application yet - at least for the consumer.
For the consumer, it's mainly about video games, and maybe some kind of "social VR" - but that's about it, for now. Those applications (except for the "hardcore") don't justify the price. I'm not sure there is an app that could.
Tiltbrush on the Vive absolutely blew my mind. I could paint in the air and use the wide brushstrokes as an immediate and intuitive 3D modeling tool. And then walk around my scuplture, etc.
I would have to categorize the experience to the same slot where building snowmen, igloos, painting, etc goes - ie. creative fun with aesthetically pleasing results. The difference is that modeling on on the Tiltbrush/Vive was so effortless I literally felt I was operating at the speed of thought and intuition, instead of figuring out what to do, then work the aspect for several minutes, then move onwards.
Consumer side I agree, I've not seen anything I would call transformative.
The trend I've personally found with demoing VR is that the less interactive it is, the more likely it is to "wow" a newcomer.
This is specific to Vive, with the short latency and the fact that I could walk around my sculpture. This is a major difference to VR platform such as Oculus where the view point is fixed.
The only time anything digitally produced has felt as tangible has been when I've ordered 3D prints of my models.
I think you need to create something on the medium to experience this exhilaration. Not just walk around someone else's scene.
Or, take the general complaint that learning 3D modeling is really hard. Well, with this paradigm is completely changed with Tiltbrush. That said, it's not yet a production ready modeler.
"Do you experience life differently than you did before?"
I think the expression "Life changing" is usually used to describe traumatic experiences more than anything positive. That said I've felt a moderate urge to purchase a VR rig ever since.
May I ask, what sort of 3D modeling packages are you used to? Did you try the "paint a picture in the air" approach or did you attempt to paint 3D meshes? I went first with the "painting in the air" approach but when I realized the system was effectively a hard surface modeler as well I changed the brush width to really wide and then could just paint forms. I enjoyed the fact that I could use same speed as sketching, but could actually think and create in 3D. I could paint the anatomy of a humanoid body in air. With traditional 2D medium I have to project the 3D shape to a 2D canvas, while with most 3d modeling packages the laying out of shapes is more like meticulous mechanical engineering more than intuitive creation of forms. The tilt brush system combined the fluidity of 2d medium sketching with the pleasurable sensation of actually working in 3d form.
Packages such as zbrush and Blender's sculpt mode enable fluid sculpting - but having the capability to create continuous 3D free flowing curves with the full muscular control of my entire body was such a kick. Maybe it's just me - I don't know.
I'm just not impressed with most of my VR experiences to the point that they made a real impact on my thinking. Maybe it's cause I'm an AR developer.
I still think it's missing the killer app that'll make it stick. It's too low resolution for a virtual monitor and the fatigue would set in well before lunchtime.
I've seen a few very niche businesses where VR will probably change things. Room scale VR really helps with visualizing something; scale and shape. One of the car companies is using VR to prototype interiors--this replaces foam core, glue, and paint. I also think it'll do well in architectural visualization if the tools and talent to generate content are reasonably priced.
And it really is a shame you haven't tried Vive roomscale. 9/10 people I've demoed it to all agreed that it was immersive as hell.
>The best virtual reality experiences I've ever had have been [...] induced by psychotropic substances.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Drugs/comments/3nxyei/oculus_rift_f...
;)
Please, keep this in mind... ;-)
A statement like that is so subjective. What is "truly immersive"?
I believe it is soon here, at least from my definition of truly immersive.
You're never going to "truly" be immersed. You feel your carpet under your feet. You feel the weight of the headset. You don't smell anything. Nothing you pick up weighs anything. The list goes on. Every item breaks "true" immersion to a certain extent.
But your brain really loves to be tricked, and the visual does this rather easily. When I'm playing Valve's Xortex 26xxx, I'm in a futuristic room fighting orbs that are shooting at me. My hand is that spaceship. I don't even really care that my FOV is smaller than normal, or that it's a little blurry due to the low resolution. It's good enough that my brain is fooled. When I take off the headset, I generally have NO CLUE where I am in my room because for the entire time my brain didn't know or care.
And does it need to be "truly immersive"? No. It just needs to offer experiences that you can't find elsewhere. Try coming even close to the awesomeness of Google Earth VR, for instance.
Let's go with "its going to be a while" instead of never
I'm going to hold out that a Ready Player One full body haptic suit will be possible someday. Perhaps someday instead of asking about the resolution of our screens we will be talking the latest in "resolution" of haptic feedback.
Plus smell-o-vision surely will someday work.. right? :)
I'll keep trying whenever I get opportunities.
It will never be true immersion. There will always be some level of unreality to it until we figure out how to plug a computer directly into our nervous system.
In theory it's possible to build a standing wave on the retina, but to do it with pixel precision with a vrd/fsd is beyond difficult compounded worse by form factor.
I disagree with the article that rendering black is necessary for wide consumer adoption of AR.
I disagree with it based on my interactions with naiive (not an epithet) consumers who are playing in AR. They are excited enough about HMD AR when shown that shadow casting and an AR version of "presence" isn't as much of a consideration whether they would adopt or not. It comes down to "does this provide value." Shadows create realism and people are flexible with realism.
That said, "casting shadows" would be a huge benefit and I think it will get there eventually but there isn't a roadmap to it yet.
Reading this article, it seems like we should be on the cusp of realizing this technology. Does anyone know if this will be hitting the mainstream in the next couple of years?
There's also father.io, which looks pretty fun, but I haven't tested that out yet.
For me, in my uneducated almost ignorant understanding of the situation, AR has a massive advantage over VR in that it tends to not make you quite as motion sick.
I second your remark on motion sickness. And VR cuts the user/player from the real world, which is a social annoyance outside your own living room.
We've run thousands of VR demos, both in the road and at our dedicated "arcade" space in DC. Not one person has reported anything more than mild discomfort, and that had been a rare minority.
Simsickness is anti-VR FUD. I don't know why, but there is a small cohort of AR advocates and VR detractors who would be gleeful to see the demise of VR.
You can easily convince yourself that this won't work for an eye. Of course, you can use your finger to block out any object - as long as you hold your finger well away from your eye. Now take a match, and try to block out objects by holding it a centimeter in front of your eye; it doesn't work - you will see a diffuse slightly darkened area, but all objects will be visible.
It seems then that the best option would be a device which affects your neural cortex more directly.