Comment by nissimk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nissimk | Hacker News Reader

This generation of AR is going to be like the last generation of VR -- a cool gimmick with great promise of things to come, but not really advanced enough to deliver on that promise. Even the virtualboy was pretty cool at the time, but it took 20 years to get to occulus. If someone can make these things work like they do in the movies then everybody will get one, but the technology doesn't seem to be there yet. I don't understand most of the words in this article, but it sounds like even if the computation equipment is powerful enough to render these images that the hardware to transmit them to the viewer has a lot of limitations.

I used the HoloLens at a demo and it was amazing, but after 3 demos of 5 minutes each over the course of 30 minutes, my eyes felt tired for the next hour. And the limited field of view did detract from the experience.

I've been wanting a heads up display in my glasses for years ever since the first "wearable computing" wave. Eventually it will happen, but all the hardware breakthroughs are so much slower than software.

virtualboy was pretty cool at the time

The Virtualboy was objectively, empirically utterly uncool the second it came out. There are multiple peer-reviewed papers on this. The µVb was a widely used unit for uncoolness for a while at the time.

Do you have any idea how that turkey made it through multiple levels of management to eventually reach the market? You seem knowledgeable in this arena.

Wasn't the Virtual Boy created by Gumpei Yokoi, the guy who basically created the Game Boy? Maybe it got through based on his reputation alone?

I recall reading (unconfirmed) stories in the gaming press that after the Virtual Boy failed, Yokoi was basically relegated to an office where he basically did nothing.

Apparently https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Virtual_Boy&oldid... Yokoi didn't really choose to ship the product that actually came out: like many another long-drawn-out, ambitious project Virtual Boy ended up being basically thrown out the door as-was once senior management lost patience with it.

They looked back at what the Vectrex 3D Imager had done a decade earlier and thought, "the technology has advanced; this time it's different!" ?

I dunno. I believe a lot of kids at the time did think the Virtual Boy was cool (less so for adults), but the timing of its release was also unfortunate.

People were getting their first taste of the 3D rendering capabilities of the Playstation and Saturn around that time. Given a choice between asking their parents to spend their hard earned money on what was basically a new monochrome vector based, single player VirtualBoy and the new, flashy 32-bit systems that supported multiplayer, it's pretty clear which systems were going to win.

Add the fact that Nintendo fans were also saving up their money for the Nintendo 64, and the Virtual Boy all of a sudden becomes a very hard sell.

Is that even fair though (that your eyes were tired)? I mean non-techies get eye strain after looking at a screen for a couple of hours. I've been looking at screens for 10 hour days since my childhood and never have an issue. Isn't it just adjusting to the new experience? Not to mention you are probably processing a lot of new information in an AR scenario causing brain fatigue.

I have a Gear VR and I'm finding I can "last" longer and longer in VR the more I use it. Initially it was like maybe 30min to 1 hour and then a few days rest. Now it doesn't really bother me much at all.

I do wonder how many people give up on VR before the comfort level sets in.

Also, the difference between cell-phone VR and something with full positional tracking is huge. I can't really deal with Daydream/GearVR for more than 30 minutes but I can use even my Rift dev unit for hours. I'd imagine the retail Rift or the Vive would be even nicer but I've not used either for extended periods.

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