How to Get into VR
blog.ycombinator.com
blog.ycombinator.com
Incidentally, the high romanticism of VR one of the reasons why I am highly skeptical of the industry. The article argues "VR will also enable immersive concerts, reinvented museums, and live, court-side sporting events", but what is it doing now outside of games, which have been hit-or-miss? (the Samsung Gear VR commercials make VR look ridiculous, IMO)
AI is a similarly romantic industry, but the difference is that there are many practical, non-gimmicky applications of AI now and already implemented on your phones/PCs.
Another was how Siemens was able to reduce training times for oil rigs by significant periods [1] using VR tech.
> "Architecture is another field that is seeing rapid adoption of VR"
My architect is going to bring over a SketchUp model of the work he has planned on our house and I'll be loading it up with some software for the Vive [2]. He doesn't usually do that final step, but he's very interested in trying it out.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1422600/
[1] https://www.siemens.com/innovation/en/home/pictures-of-the-f...
Even outside of studies that specifically look at VR there is a lot of research into general learning, training and education that tends to support the hypothesis that VR will be a powerful tool for this type of application.
When I use LeapMotion I dont get motion sickness. Huge win!
reinvented museums - TiltBrush [1]
court-side sporting events - NextVR [2]
Not to mention architecture [3], communication [4], collaboration [5], medicine [6], 3d modeling [7], game development [8], film [9] and the myriad of other industries I'm forgetting. Also if you haven't tried any of the latest games on Oculus Rift or Vive you're really missing out. They've gotten incredible since the consumer launch last year.
[0] http://thewavevr.com/ [1] https://tiltbrush.com/sketches [2] http://nextvr.com [3] http://insitevr.com/ [4] https://web.facebook.com/spaces [5] http://bigscreenvr.com/ [6] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601911/better-than-opioid... [7] https://www.oculus.com/medium/ [8] https://blogs.unity3d.com/2016/12/15/editorvr-experimental-b... [9] https://www.oculus.com/story-studio/films/henry/
*Disclaimer: I work or have worked for a few of these co's.
It's $900 + big clunky thing on your head vs $500 for a really nice 4k monitor.
Something like Onward is pretty special for its realism, but its not a better game than Rainbow Six was 20 years ago. There are some other fun games but the novelty wears off quickly. It's like a really expensive ($1300 setup) Wii. The current experiences aren't worth the money.
The industry is still figuring out how to create gameplay that takes advantage of VR rather than just porting over gameplay mechanics from traditional games. There are also limitations on how ambitious VR games can get given the current size of the market. There's some very compelling experiences starting to appear already though in my opinion.
I think it's a mistake to put too much emphasis on the current relatively high cost of hardware as a guide to the future potential of the medium. We know that price will come down and if you compare it in real terms to the cost of early PCs it already looks quite affordable.
With nothing to back this up, I think the VR headset is a mass market item at $400 (or the price of a console) and better tech (mainly lighter headset, slightly improved panels). I guess with that belief the question is will the industry continue to subsidize those hardware improvements while developers figure things out? Or perhaps VR hardware will improve regardless of gaming success.
This might be an unfixable flaw in the VR market, but really all of this stuff seems like good business opportunities to me. If what people want out of VR is cheaper, better hardware and better games, and there isn't a fundamental flaw with the concept of VR, of course.
It is a two sided market, with a chicken and egg problem.
Gamemakers don't want to invest in a market with very few consumers, and consumers don't want to invest in a headset with very few games.
The Nintendo Entertainment System came with Super Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt at no additional cost. Sega made the Genesis and Sonic the Hedgehog.
To each their own.
Onward is a vanilla game that's improved because of the "experience" of VR (and yes, it's very cool), but I'd take better gameplay any day. The game that finally combines gameplay with VR, that'll be exciting.
The Oculus Rift is $500, $598 with the Touch controllers and and extra sensor.[1]
What's the Rift at that price missing compared to the Vive?
The Vive already has an accessory ecosystem as companies are more willing to invest in the more 'open' system. You can buy a thinner cable, various comfort gaskets, a complete wireless solution (only in China for now), non-controller trackers to attach to your body or objects in your playspace (still mostly devs doing this), a foveated rendering plugin (just anounced), etc.
You get a slightly wider FOV and a lot more room if you wear glasses. Also a built-in camera, which is a little gimmicky, but a godsend if you want to move a chair, read a text message, move the cat, etc without taking your headset off.
You're also supporting Valve and SteamVR which does not engage in the dirty business of exclusives or "walled garden" approaches like the Facebook/Oculus model. There are also privacy issue with the Oculus software. Even when its not running it has a encrypted connection to Facebook's server constantly.
Lastly, it seems to be the dev favorite. A few of the betas I've been involved with have been Vive-only.
That said, the Vive needs a price cut. It occasionally gets $100 off. I'm hoping they make that permanent.
Lighthouse tracking is indeed excellent, and tracks a larger volume. However, the Rift's sensor approach is /currently/ almost indistinguishable from Vive's tracking. Its historical performance, significantly hampered by a bad software update, has no relevance to someone considering an HMD today.
A third sensor is only $59, not $79. Saying "worse, you'll need to spring for..." implies this is somehow a severe negative, when the reality is that the extra cost of a third sensor still leaves the Rift over $100 less than a Vive (the magnitude of price difference depends on shipping costs and how you value the bundles of free software).
Again, while Lighthouse tracking can be considered "more premium", the general consensus is that the Rift has more fit and finish, is significantly lighter in the front and thus more balanced, has better optics (larger sweet spot and less screen door effect), and the convenient integrated audio (which can be removed if you have high-end headphones) all lead to it being thought of as "more premium" in other ways. The Vive's design, while exceedingly functional, is more "hacker chic" than "honed design".
Of course, the above positives on the Rift are traded off by a slightly smaller field of view, a somewhat dimmer screen, and less compatibility with glasses vs. the Vive.
Additionally, complaining about the cost of a third camera is disingenuous when you then talk about all of the other incremental (added cost) options available to the Vive. Some will come to Rift (e.g., wireless), some bring the Vive to parity (e.g., thinner cable, comfort gaskets, and [unmentioned] a more comfortable head strap with integrated audio), and some are truly cool (e.g., eye tracking and trackers) for those wishing to really be at the cutting edge of VR. But all significantly increase the cost delta.
Finally, implying something nefarious about the "encrypted connection to Facebook's server" is really beneath the level of discourse I expect from HN. The Oculus software checks for updates over a TLS-encrypted session - that is all, as has been confirmed by network analysis. Frankly, I would be upset if it didn't use encryption to protect my information.
The Vive is a fine product, and stands on its own. You do not need to provide misleading or biased information about its competitor to promote it.
The fact is, both HMDs are great. Do you have a 15'x15' space? Buy a Vive. Is price a factor, or do you run on lower-end hardware? Buy a Rift.
Otherwise, try them both, see which fits your face better, see which trade-offs work for you, and buy the one that makes you happy.
You can't go wrong, and VR is SPECTACULAR.
There are VR experiences were 2+ people are in the same sim in the same space. There are also VR spaces (arcades, tradeshows) where if there are 2 rifts near each other (2 adjacent booths) the rifts interfere with each other
The fact that you bring up Facebook shows that you are a technology zealot, and such people are always adverse to facts.
In most other respects Oculus is a bit better than Vive IMO: better ergonomics/comfort on both the Rift headset and Touch controllers, built in headphones (a big plus for convenience and comfort over the Vive), easier setup, slightly better optics, better handling of dropped frames thanks to timewarp.
The Oculus on the other hand uses image sensors with a limited field of view, so it is much easier to lose tracking on your hands when you move quickly, bend over, or turn around. They will sell you a third sensor to expand tracking to 360 degrees, but at that point you are basically buying a shitty Vive.
The FoV is pretty good on the Oculus cameras albiet a bit less than the vive's lighthouse. With two cameras I don't run into many issues unless playing Onward or something that requires me turning 360. I'm travelling atm so I actually just use one camera.
Very "comparable" and I'd argue you're actually getting more value for the $200 cheaper Rift than the Vive due to comfort and ergonomics of the HMD and controllers.
I still want to stand on the 50 yard line during a live game, or position myself wherever the action is, with fully realized 3D models of the players.
A crossover between game / social experience / musical fantasy. They have live shows once a week and have been gaining momentum within the VR community quite rapidly.
Important to remember we are quite literally still just beyond the one year mark since consumer VR devices hit the market. It will only get better.
I agree the Gear is not where VR is going in the future. You need full room-scale immersion to really "feel" like you are experiencing something truly new and exciting. 360 sports videos are NOT the future of VR.
> This item is currently unavailable in your region - http://store.steampowered.com/app/453000/
Really great internationalisation there. I'm guessing they're having the standard problem of not being able to get worldwide licenses for the builtin music.
It's literally doing all of the stuff you mentioned, if you look for it. The blocker is that most people don't have a headset to experience it.
The same thing could be (and was) said about the early internet.
Obviously he is biased but still pretty big statement from a CEO of the most popular game engine.
What AR not-so-obviously does is takes the internet and changes it from a limited access interface, wherein its a technology that has points of access that are limited to terminals that you have to actively access to an interface that you passively interact with.
An interface that you have to seek out, to an interface that seeks you out.
You mean someone that has a personal financial interest in a market growing is talking about how that market might grow. That's not very surprising to hear, don't you think?
It's like stating that computers are bigger than electricity.
My source on this? I worked at one of the first consumer ISPs in Canada, and we regularly had people coming in to sign up because they heard about "this Internet thing" but did not have a computer.
Most people thought we provided one with the service, and some people just didn't understand that you accessed the Internet through a computer.
So, if by "VR" you mean Vive/Rift-level VR, very few people will have a computer already lying around the house that can cut the mustard, even if they bought that computer relatively recently.
https://pifflelab.com/2012/07/22/computers-the-1990s-you-pai...
I would advance the hypothesis that the prospect of the internet back then seemed much worse compared to dropping a few hundred to have Vive hardware shipped to your door and plugging it in. But the people who built the internet saw what it could be, not the garbage that it was.
And we're still in the beta stages; this stuff only gets better with time.
As a day one Vive owner I also agree these kinds of statements are fairly bullshitty. VR doesn't remotely compare to the real experience of a real outing. Nor is it able to do much outside of gaming and there are probably valid reasons why. Gamers are used to being in virtual spaces, using VR is fun, etc but its also isolating, uncomfortable, expensive, and low res.
The good news is that "games" encompasses many categories of experience. Social fun like Rec Room, or RPG's, or MMOs, or shooters, or playing pool, or pingpong, etc. Its a varied experience and I think its a little dismissive to say something like "Oh but its only games now?" Games are huge! Why are we discounting this incredible part of the human experience and something part of all human cultures? This is like saying, "Oh you're in love and getting married? That's just endorphins and patriarchy." Its dismissive to an extreme.
That said, I've watched a bit of youtube with my Vive and can certainly see it making in-roads with consumption of media, but even the best pool simulators, gun range, or pingpong simulators not only feel nothing like the real thing, but they're barely a fraction of the fun of the real thing. If futurists are banking on VR replacing many real experiences, well, they better be ready to be disappointed. VR's strengths aren't being a digital version of real experiences, its making fantastic worlds and experiences of its own that feel 'real' and interesting.
I know of at least one music venue that is currently being built with VR attendance as a major goal.
For concerts and sporting events, you need the right cameras, video pipeline, and bandwidth. One potential camera is here: https://www.orah.co/
But how many music venues were built with the bandwidth requirements of high-resolution 360 streaming video in mind? My guess is almost none. The bandwidth to support things like that is an industry in itself.
As far as after-the-fact concert attendance, I know that at least Red Bull had a major presence at Bonnaroo (a major music festival with an attendance of around 70,000) last summer, and they were shooting concerts with 360 cameras with the intent of sharing them online.
(According to this article, they may have actually been live streaming, but I'm not sure: https://www.axs.com/bonnaroo-2016-to-be-livestreamed-on-red-... I know first hand that they were there shooting stuff on gopro rigs, though, which requires post processing, so probably wouldn't have been live)
Clearly VR is still in very early stages of its development, so I don't see how what's being done right now provides any valuable insight into its potential.
> the high romanticism of VR one of the reasons why I am highly skeptical of the industry.
Whether that romanticism exists or not doesn't change the technology or what can be done with it, so I don't see why that's a reason to be skeptical of it.
It's quite something to use one of these systems, I was responsible for maintaining one a few years ago. Our demonstration trick for visiting guests was to put a chair inside the cave that matched the coordiantes of a virtual helicopter cockpit command chair. We could sit guests in the chair, turn the system on, and ask them if they could comfortably reach the switches above their heads. They'd stretch out their hands and be able to give a confident yes or no within seconds.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_automatic_virtual_environ... [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STMcWUtQr1Y
Before that, there was Ivan Sutherland's "Sword of Damocles" - arguably the real beginning of AR/VR (Philco had an earlier system, but it was meant for tele-operation, whereas Sutherland's system used computer generated graphics):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sword_of_Damocles_(virtual...
Interestingly about this system - and isn't mentioned much - is a part of it called the "Twinkle Box" - it was a three-dimensional position tracking system that used light "beams" (generated by some form of slit-scanning mechanical system) to track an object...sound like anything familiar?
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1500278
Further back than that? Well - Hugo Gernsback had some kind of idea about a TV or such you strapped to your head:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/05/ralph-124c-41-a-...
It is based on lots of research showing that VR exposure therapy is extremely effective.
the sudden panic reaction when you perceive something that looks like a spider[0], really isn't going to keep you safe when it counts, while acting calm, rational and with common sense will.
heights can be dangerous but my fear of heights is not doing much of protecting me. the heights I may encounter but prefer to avoid aren't actually dangerous (see-through/grated floors are the worst :) ). the situations that are dangerous, I'd rather have my full faculties if I were to find myself there.
[0] i know people who react very strongly to just an image of a spider. living in NL where there's zero dangerous wildlife (just 1 or 2 endangered species of tiny poisonous snake, a lost/dead wolf every few years and 17M humans), that's quite an irrational fear but I won't mess with that because the panic reaction is very real and involuntarily. For fun, however, we tried an experiment where I very slowly drew a cartoon spider, to see at what amount of legs the reaction would kick in :) turned out drawing tiny hairs on the legs did way more for the response than whether I drew 5,6,7, 8 or 9 legs (at which point the other party didn't think it was fun anymore, so I had to end the experiment). and just in case you wondered yes I play with my own phobia in a similar way, whenever I find myself on a perfectly safe balcony that triggers my acrophobia, I like to see how many minutes I can enjoy the view before the GTFO feeling becomes overwhelming (on balconies it's not quite immediate, but still very strong when it kicks in, making it an interesting process to observe).
I think that's insane, and we should do what fighter pilots do... some hours of "normal" flying, and LOADS of time in a simulator dealing with extreme cases.
So... know of any good VR driving sims that attempt to model commuter traffic?
One of the main players in that area is a man named "Rudy Darken"; he was instrumental in quite a bit of the "Dismounted Soldier Training System (DSTS)" - and developed quite a few interesting input devices (one was a 360 degree treadmill with force feedback - think of two overlapping treadmills at 90 degrees to each other, with the surface made of rollers place parallel to the direction of travel of the belts - the part in the "center" of the intersection is such where you can walk, and move both belts at the same time, and your direction of walking determines the relative speed of the belts).
They've also long had networked simulator training systems, which also were setup to participate as part of "real" on-the-ground training and war-game simulations (that is, ones using live bodies and vehicles, aircraft, etc).
It wouldn't surprise me in the least if your scenario wasn't part of that already.
I'm using room-scale VR to build and explore virtual film sets (HTC Vive, Unreal Engine) and scenes.
“It’s a VR play,” Bachman says. “That’s the frothiest space in the Valley right now. Nobody understands it but everyone wants in. Any idiot could walk into a fucking room, utter the letters ‘v’ and ‘r’, and VC’s would hurl bricks of cash at them.
“By the time they find out it’s vaporware, it’s too late. I’ve got to get into this.”
That said, I haven't seen the episode yet, but the show is usually pretty spot on.
I suspect once better games or software are written for it, it may improve. Perhaps training and whatnot, but I don't see what it offers over headphones and a big monitor setup, other than nausea, hot eye sockets and possibly a headache. Like I said, I haven't experienced it yet though. Maybe I'm just getting old and crotchety.
AR is also interesting. I'm not quite sure how much more helpful it would be over your regular ole' eyeballs. Maybe identifying wildlife or something. Currently a HUD for cars is the most useful thing out there and it's been around for years. It's not groundbreaking though, I can just look down a few more inches. Also, you can't do much more with a HUD as far as information goes without distracting the driver. I would definitely like to identify speed traps before I get there. The police have been trying to collect revenue around my neighborhood (for my safety of course) and I almost became a donor.
AR reminds me of the segment where Colbert made fun of the "tech" cup that was able to identify and confirm what you just poured into it.
http://www.cc.com/video-clips/9nzwjt/the-colbert-report-vess...
IMO, for something to really matter, it must be related to: communication, automation or transportation. (CAT) I just made that up, so if someone wants to put that in a textbook or something, I want credit. You can just use "Clubber."
Also, their cellular network idea was pretty good, but it would make much more sense to do something like that out of WIFI because there isn't a centralized provider to snoop and restrict bandwidth.
I don't want to spoil it, this season is pretty good.
Overlaying your current route over the road itself rather than on an abstracted representation would be a good one.
Maybe recognize and highlight exit signs that you need to turn off on. It's usually high on the windshield and therefore not as distracting.
Parking assist is another thing that isn't quite right. It alarms me when I'm still a foot or two away. When I turn it off, I park much more precisely. It probably made a hell of a lot of money though, selling to car manufacturers.
But, the "what like exactly?" is eluding me atm. That's likely the key problem. :)
However... with something like leap magic (or any touch control), and voice. Suddenly you can constrain the data with your voice and manipulate it with your hands.
Huh? https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/ar-vr-startup-funding/
EDIT: Another report: https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/vrar-breakdown-vcs-inves...
Where's the killer app for VR? VR headsets have been around for years. The current generation of technology works adequately. Yet other than first person shooters, there's not much to do in there. You can plug into Second Life or High Fidelity with a VR headset, but few people do. Using a VR headset to simulate a screen so you can watch a movie is more trouble than it's worth.
Upcoming generations see Youtubers as their idols. It sounds stupid on the surface, but the ability to play a perfect game of Pacman wouldn't be the worst thing to bet on if you wanted to take over some big media company. Even if you don't have a tech billionaire stacking the deck.
> Where's the killer app for VR?
Like finding startup ideas, I don't think the killer VR app is going to come about from someone looking for killer VR apps. It's going to start as something silly done by the people messing around with VR today.
Except talented players are not the most popular youtubers. The best pac-man player in the world is famously unpleasant.
> Like finding startup ideas, I don't think the killer VR app is going to come about from someone looking for killer VR apps. It's going to start as something silly done by the people messing around with VR today.
This is true. Most VR feels gimmicky to me now, but the best VR experience I've seen was 3d video with extremely well-calibrated audio. For some reason, that was the big difference for me, but I doubt anyone would have predicted that to be the case.
Honestly I think if we had the right software we could do remote schools effectively right now. The largest barriers are going to be (as always) legislation, bureaucracy, and cultural. I mean companies still balk at remote workers, I don't see governments jumping at remote teachers and students any time soon unfortunately.
Edison thought education would be the killer app for the phonograph. Zworykin thought it would be the killer app for TV. The One Laptop Per Child people thought it would be the killer app for laptops. The tablet people thought it would be the killer app for tablets.
Education doesn't seem to be a technology problem. Would Udacity or Coursera be better with VR? Probably not.
No, they didn't.
They thought laptops would be a useful enabling technology for a particular model of education, but did not think that education would be the killer app for laptops (a product that was so we'll established by that time that thinking about it even needing a "killer app" at that point is senseless.)
>Negroponte seems to question whether teachers are needed at all. Speaking about providing the rural poor a solid educational basis for development at the 2007 Digital, Life, Design conference in Munich, Germany, Negroponte said: “It’s not about training teachers. It’s not about building schools. With all due respect [to Hewlett-Packard’s e-inclusion efforts], it’s not about curriculum or content. It’s about leveraging the children themselves.
>David Cavallo, OLPC’s chief education architect, says, “We’re hoping that these countries won’t just make up ground but will jump into a new educational environment.”
The OLPC people thought they were going to cause a literal, actual revolution in learning. Didn't happen.
I can't speak for Coursera, but Udacity would be much better if they didn't continue to muck with the platform as you are taking the course.
Seriously - things break all the time, then get fixed, etc; last big thing that happened - and I don't know exactly why, but it had to do with a large update to the site and course system I think - a big chunk of people from the second cohort (of which I am part of) in the Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree - lost access to their original mentor. That might not sound like a big deal, but it kinda was. Then, to get access restored, you had to email one particular support address, that was only posted about (IIRC) in a Slack channel.
By the time I realized that the problem was more widespread than just a simple "service interruption" like everything else and emailed the support about it, they had already assigned the "max number" (whatever that is) of people to my original mentor that I had been communicating with and using since I started last year; I was reassigned a brand new mentor, who knows only what he sees about my progress, and nothing about the other communication and help I had from my former mentor.
It's a bit frustrating, but I'm adjusting to it as best as possible - I'm certainly not going to let it stop me from completing the course (still going strong in the second term, just finished the second project of the UKM and now working towards the localization project) - but I'd rather have a stable platform to work with, especially since I am spending so much money on the course.
/sorry about the rant
A great advantage of VR compared to other interactive learning environments is that it eliminates all distractions and forces you to focus on the subject. I believe it could also lead to revival of MOOCs. We first need cheaper, lighter, no-hassle headsets.
And probably kids aren't going to just be left home alone all day. That's a very big logistics problem on a country-wide scale.
Very limiting in use-case scenarios for "grand worlds" if you have to pause every 15 or 30 minutes to not puke and/or go cross eyed.
I get intense motion sickness normally but can spend an hour or two in VR just fine. 90fps and teleport mechanics go a long way towards comfort. Considering there are almost 1m owners of Vives, PSVR's and Rifts combined I seriously doubt there was a 90% return rate here.
From my personal experience it's much much higher than 10%. Just about no one who has tried my vive reported motion sickness at any length of time. Something I do commonly hear from people who have just used vr for the first time is that for a brief period after the real world seems to take on a surreal quality, but as far as I can tell that effect stops happening fairly quickly with experience.
It's quite possible that "vr-sickness" is something you get over with more experience, like how most children grow out of car sickness. In any case there's a whole bag of tricks to help with vr-sickness that haven't been commonly applied at all yet (virtual noses anyone?). The field is in its infancy and it's unfair to judge it's future by fairly small and solvable problems that only exist right now.
With the PSVR or the Oculus no problems at all. The helmets can get annoyingly heavy after long play but besides that...
Isn't that due to the latency of the current generation VR? I think I remember Carmack tweeting something similar to that...
Which was disappointing to me, because among the crowds in SL/opensim/highfidelity there are many creators and early adopters.
High Fidelity may have made the mistake of bringing up their world empty. They should have used a terrain generator and SpeedTree to fill the world with virgin, natural terrain. Then let people buy real estate, clear it, and develop.
This would also impel people to do good graphical work. SpeedTree builds a good-looking nature. It would encourage people to try to do as well with what they build.
Treatment of mental illness, for example PTSD or vertigo.
But i don't think any of these are killer apps, these are very niche demographics.
Fast paced and hectic movements performed in VR would make someone sick if performed in real life.
Back in the day, playing FPSs with shutter glasses, I realised the motion sensations were tied to the motion. Then the sensations became a feature not a bug.
Once I understood the feelings they stopped making me nauseous. VR-prioproception improved my FPS performance. Feeling orientation and velocity really helps.
And immersion goes off chart.
Hard to know what way one is pointing in space, sometimes there are scant motion cues.
But in VR with prioproception When your stomach jumps into your mouth, pulling insane high-G maneuvers as bolts of laser fire crackle past your ship. With prioproception you sense it, becoming as Tudyk said "a leaf on the wind". Fully Embodied. No mind, no controls, you just are.
My vision for VR is a web browser, informed by Gibson's original vision of cyberspace, XEROX Park's 3D information sorting and VRML97 with Unreal style portals as hyperlinks.
IMHO The VR in Snowcrash was mundane. Predating the net, Gibson saw further, to a paradigm shift coming from a new knowledge tool.
Gibson's later 'locative art' idea is a nice twist on Augmented Reality - you have to go somewhere to see the virtual art overlayed on that place - it is site specific.
Btw, I'm working on something that I think has some relation to Gibson's vision of cyberspace—just the '3D information sorting' part though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvfMthDInwE (that video is very outdated unfortunately, but here's a newer screenshot: http://symbolflux.com/images/avdscreen.png)
https://www.ted.com/talks/john_underkoffler_drive_3d_data_with_a_gestureSort of like the interface in Terminator when Arnie is looking for matching clothes.
For example, at our company (AltspaceVR) we have a huge need for engineers of all stripes, not just the types of folks you'd normally think of for what is traditionally thought of as a "game" (this term, too, is probably about to become very stale.) It's a huge challenge for us to get great engineers who are not in the games industry to realize that working in this space, depending on the application, can be much like hopping, say, from a web app to a mobile app. Are there new skills to learn? Yes, tons. But that doesn't mean you are starting at ground zero nor that your current skills aren't going to highly valued and critical to an organization's success.
We need people to help build our backend systems (Rails, Kafka, etc), manage ops (Ansible, Datadog, AWS), create deployment tools, build UI (React, but rendered in VR!), work on our mobile app (React Native), build analytics pipelines, the list goes on. In fact I'd argue if you are looking at an organization that doesn't understand the need for such a wide spectrum engineering talent to deliver a great application, you should be careful!
Basically for VR companies who are working on applications that will leverage VR, the "VR-specific" slice of the engineering work is probably a lot smaller than you'd expect, just like for companies developing mobile applications, the "mobile specific" part of engineering work is only a part of the effort.
In other words, don't think you can't get into this field just because you aren't a graphics geek.
(Oh yeah, we're hiring :) https://altvr.com/careers)
I can see why that leads to an enterprise approach where UX is a bit less important.
More specifically, I'm building a juggling simulator. Other apps and games have simulated throwing and it looks and feels convincing, but once you have to throw multiple things per second, the immersion totally breaks with trigger based grabbing. I've been experimenting trying to find a better approach.
Originally I thought it could be a nice fun little project, not really trying to make money. But it took all of maybe five hours of Unity programming to hit untrodden territory! Now I'm starting to nerd out on the immersion and design problem.
I'd definitely agree that design challenges are worth nerding-out over...and probably the most difficult aspect on VR development. You don't even want to know how much time we've spent tossing around interface ideas...
That being said, I disagree that UX is less important for enterprise. UX is maybe even more important for enterprise. As a gamer, trying VR is an obvious next step. For enterprise, not so much; the bar is much higher for getting someone to start using 3D software whose functionality currently works on a 5" diagonal screen, a la mobile phones.
With rising property costs in many major areas and pushes towards open offices. Think of how VR would solve the proximity problem, if you could plug into VR into a virtual office and still have 'proximity benefits' while working remotely but still have privacy/separation and cheap rent and commute.
The viral winning app sells a device, but not an ecosystem. I don't think the iPhone for example had a single viral winning app. It was more a confluence of enough capabilities merged into your phone that it became really helpful to own a smartphone. I suspect that's how VR will go if it succeeds. It eventually hits a price point and there are enough individual reasons to own and use a VR headset that it begins to make sense for everyone to own one.
The gist of it is: assuming ubiquitous access to an AR system that provides a completely shared experience, people will naturally start using that shared experience as a communication tool. We will draw what we mean when words become difficult. We will riff on those ideas in a real-time simulation. And with the mind-set or combination of services, it may as well be, or could actually become, a physical reality.
If you've seen any of his more recent, HTML5-based demos (he has completely switched off of Java) involving visually-oriented, live-programmable environments with physics baked-in, it's almost completely targeted at this dream of communication. He has said he's not in it for graphics or VR/AR anymore, it's the communication aspect he's after.
I share that vision, I believe AR and VR will enable some truly amazing experiences and interactions - the currently limited means of communication of the Internet still amaze me, but we can do so much more...
its insane how short some of these implementation are.
It seems that some people (software developers) can do this, and others struggle. Myself, I'm kinda in the middle - then again, I haven't really tried anything with shaders beyond simple examples and such. But my "aha" moment in parallel calcs of this nature came to me during the course of the original 2011 ML Class (MOOC) taught by Andrew Ng - it used Octave as the programming language, and we had to implement a neural network.
The "serial implementation" was first implemented (and was really slow), but then we were "challenged" to do the same using only vector/matrix math. I struggled wrapping my head around it, but then a lightbulb went on, and I realized what it was all about. Granted, behind the scenes a still very-much serial process was happening (likely using BLAS), but I could understand the conceptual underpinnings (and that they applied to all similar parallel systems - like clustered processors and GPUs). It was a real revelation to me at the time.
Even so, there is something special about these people who can see and do similar things at a "frame buffer" level; some of that stuff is down-right beautiful and amazing to watch (and the code oftentimes so small, as you noted).
> We talked to college students interested in engineering, business, and technology to figure out what resources would be most helpful to them. Then, we reached out to experts from academia, industry, or some combination of the two.
But we all ended up with was a blog post with some links to online courses and books. Is yc doing ...more? I was expecting something like an actual online course/intro with low requirements to get in. IE let me use my laptop camera and some html/css/js to see what building in AR is like.
Neuromancer, on the other hand, has aged astonishingly well. Even though Gibson is a sort of awkward writer, I believe in the people he writes about. If it were a movie, it would bomb but the actors would say it was the best work they ever did.
I researched this recently looking for an HDMI compatible AR headset to try command line coding with but it was tough to find concise feature/spec/price comparisons.
Sign of the times I guess.
Yes, there will be a few great VR apps and games that actually add to the experience, but what an average VR app is going to be? Making something in VR doesn't necessarily make it better. You have to make a good game/app in the first place. And then there's an additional cost for VR. Now you have one more element to screw up.
Look, even a regular standard PC could be 10x more useful if all the software is better built and run flawlessly. Instead we ended up with half-baked glitchy mess. Making a good VR app won't be easier than this. The profit break even point will be higher because people have a higher expectation. It seems the industry is ill-fated.
This is just blatantly not true, at least not on the implied timescale. VR has been around for literally decades, including immersive VR with head and hand tracking. I know because I used it in 1998. The current VR hype cycle is based on this all having gotten a lot cheaper and faster.
To top it off, listing Snow Crash and Neuromancer as suggested reading is just silly. Those are the exact same books we were reading during the last VR boom, and while they're two of my favorites, they're both laughably wrong about VR. Specifically, VR is bad for the exact use cases presented in these novels! VR is, was, and will continue to be a product with niche appeal. We'll see the market expand because it's cheaper, but it's not an effective user interface for most applications.
So perhaps you and the article are using the phrase "new medium" differently.
> “VR is not a new technology. It just became accessible.” – Jeremy Bailenson (Stanford VHIL)
This VR wave seems much more a "look what we can do with current societal phone experience, and phone manufacturing tech", than a "let's struggle again to make something novel and hope it catches on".
As for AR, how about this - picture sitting down at your work desktop/laptop screen(s), and having lower-than-screen-resolution 3D, with direct hand manipulation, surround you. Not interested?
What else might go badly? The patent trolls are spinning up - BillGates/IntellectualVentures have announced it as a focus. But asia seems still insulated enough to keep going, even if the US sidelines itself. A media freakout seems increasingly unlikely (about VR at least), and would be limited to the US. A game market may grow more slowly than expected, but no longer seems able to vanish. What else?
So while takeoff trajectory is perhaps uncertain, I'm having trouble seeing how this wave might fizzle?
As for AR, we've seen Pokemon Go as a success. It was a perfect storm. Even if you disregard AR/Camera segment, one could possibly categorise geolocation segment as AR. There are AR apps for museums, but it's debatable how much of a success that is.
Have you used anything with 'hands in the air' for much time? I did use some 3D digitisers with haptic feedback before (in 3D work) and 'gorilla arms' syndrome is real.
VR as I see it now isn't any where close to being the big wave that people are anticipating it to be. I think we still need a bunch more computing power and time before it has any chance of disrupting anything.
Even then I doubt Apple will get into VR. Apple is very elitist when it comes to adopting industry standardds. That hasn't stopped it from getting a good foothold in the personal computing market. But it did pretty much kill Apple's chance at making money in the hardcore gaming sector. Which I think will happen again with VR.
VR does have great potential, but not as it is right now. IBM and Xerox have put in a lot of money then in a lot of things. And Google is throwing money at several things too. But seldom do the big wave things pan out as expected when we want them to.
What really amazes me is now that VR is growing. Zero people have talked to me about what my team learned. Its like the past never existed...
Any technology that needs to mount on the user's face will have to propose a huge value proposition.
1) Developers seem to be interested in heavyweight VR systems like Vive and Rift, while users (based on sales figures, anyway) seem to be interested in inexpensive, cordless systems like GearVR and Cardboard. Which leads to the awkward situation where all the innovative software is coming out for hardware that very few users actually own. (And then that market gets segmented even further -- with Rift development now orienting around Rift + Touch, for instance, which leaves users without Touch behind.)
2) "It hasn't made me sick in over a year!" is not an answer to concerns about VR making people sick that is going to get people to rush out and buy hardware. Once a product has developed a rep for making people sick (not everybody, of course, but all it takes is enough people), it can take a long, long time to shake that rep off.
3) There's a fundamental problem that nobody in this generation of VR has been able to really solve yet, which is making a headset that is comfortable to wear for long periods. Even simpler solutions like GearVR are heavy enough that you feel their weight after wearing them for 30 minutes or more, and with developers pushing the platform towards bigger/deeper experiences, the trend in hardware doesn't seem like it'll be running primarily towards weight reduction. This could lead to a self-reinforcing cycle of pushing the tech further and further away from a mass audience, as VR enthusiasts (i.e. people who don't mind the weight of existing hardware) demand higher-resolution experiences, which leads to hardware companies pursuing more power instead of less weight, which leads to products that only sell to VR enthusiasts, who demand higher-resolution experiences, etc. Something similar to this happened to the market for flight simulations in the '90s, which resulted in one of the main categories of entertainment software evolving into a tiny niche market of interest only to obsessives.
None of which is to say that VR is doomed, or that these things are in reality as serious as they appear to be to an outsider. But I would say there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical that VR will become a big, mass-market hit, at least this go-around.
1. I think if you looked at the time and money spent in mobile headsets vs heavyweight systems it would tell a different story than sales figures. Better to make a few people love you then lots of people just sorta like you, and all that YC jazz.
2. I'm extremely susceptible to motion sickness and I've been trying most of the latest content so I think I'm a good canary to see if VR actually makes you sick anymore. I do think there are some perception problems that are lingering around longer than I thought they would, and this is a consumer awareness problem that as you say, will take some time to solve. Luckily I think its largely a moot point because everybody that tries good content realizes that it doesn't always make you sick and that they need to have one as soon as they can afford it.
3. I bet every future Oculus Rift and Vive generation will be lighter than they are today. Making a bet that a piece of consumer technology will get heavier and larger as time increases is generally an ill-advised move.
Cardboard and GearVR are relatively convenient and inexpensive but do not seem to be a very compelling product, since it is inconvenient compared to a monitor and frequently causes motion sickness, while offering few advantages. I have both and barely use them.
Vive and Rift+Touch are incredibly expensive and inconvenient (cumbersome set up, tethered, not portable). But a lot of the content basically never causes motion sickness (even for sensitive people). I think there is at least the beginning of a compelling product since I've had a chance to let a variety of non-technical people use it. Even if they're reluctant to try it at first, there is usually one of the programs they enjoy and keep using for quite a while.
I don't want to oversell the Vive - there are a lot of problems starting with the low resolution. But the problems with the high end systems will inevitably improve over the next few years - there will be more content, the resolution will improve, the cost will decrease, it will be more mobile etc. Also, I'd expect the Vive to be a relatively low capability device in the future - there's a lot of tech being shown off these days with eye / facial expression / body tracking that hasn't been integrated into a mass market product yet. It will be interesting to see what applications benefit from those.
The current low-capability systems seem like a dead end though, they've been available for a while and don't seem to have taken the world by storm, and once more capable mobile systems come out that will be the end of that UI paradigm. Simple things like reaching out and picking something up or moving it aren't possible, for interactive content the differences are really fundamental.
As far as the comfort issue goes, the weight distribution can be improved a lot without waiting for next-gen display technologies. PlayStation is the best this generation with a rigid band the headset hangs down from, and LGs upcoming one can flip up without taking it off all the way. Certainly putting all the weight on the face is a bad idea though and harder to avoid for phone-based systems.
In the last two years, I've personally demoed thousands of people in VR, in a wide variety of experiences. In that time, one--maybe two--got sick. And it was mild discomfort. It wasn't keeling over, puking blood in the streets like every tech journalist begging for clicks makes it out to be. I know a lot more people with problems handling shaky camera views in movies and first-person shooters on consoles.
If anyone does this, Steve Mann will: http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/profiles/steve-mann-my-au... This is my favourite image showing the trend: https://www.flickr.com/photos/inju/3171307367
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VFX1_Headgear
The display itself could "flip up" so if you were doing world building back in the day - you could continue to use your keyboard and see your monitor, then "flip down" to try your world out.
Bad part about the system was the terrible FOV combined with very low res...
[0] https://www.meetup.com/Boston-Virtual-Reality/ [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iGszROz58U [2] https://altvr.com/
If you're looking to get into high-end, room-scale VR with hand-tracked controllers and high-fidelity graphics, then yes. You need a Windows 10 PC with as much RAM, CPU, and GPU as you can muster. Plan on spending at least USD 2000 on a custom-built PC.
If you're looking to get into smartphone-based AR, you can use practically anything to write the code, and there are plenty of tools to be able to build completely cross-platform apps. But you will want a flagship phone, whether that's the latest iPhone or one of the Androids with a powerful CPU and GPU. AR is very CPU intensive. While there have been demonstrations of SLAM on GPUs, all of the implementations I'm aware of are doing it on the CPU.
Where should you start? Well, without hand-tracking of some kind, I don't really consider it VR. Google Cardboard, Google Daydream, Samsung Gear VR, and Oculus Rift without the Touch controllers are all glorified 2D interfaces. They don't provide anything actually new in terms of being able to interact with the application.
Smartphone-based AR apps will probably reach a wider audience sooner than VR. But if Microsoft's approach to headsets and Windows Holographic pays off, I think that is not a perpetual state of affairs. Ideally, this gets down to the size of a pair of sunglasses (which is very nearly the case already). At that point, smartphone-based AR is going to be a quaint novelty.
From a development standpoint the main difference between mobile headsets and PC headsets is that mobile VR doesn't track the physical position of your head or hands. However you can still learn a ton and make a lot of cool things with them.
If you have these things you can go into Google's Daydream store and download some Daydream apps, free or paid. I have done so and virtually every app has a logo somewhere said made with Unity. Each app seems to be multi-platform - it is made with Unity, and exported to Google Daydream, Oculus, Gear VR etc.
I programmed a basic OpenGLES shape in Android Studio for Daydream, but there was a lot that was lacking. I suspect most people will use Unity, and target the various VR platforms.
So in general, the answer is you need a platform Unity is on. Which in production is MacOS and Windows, although they have a Linux beta from what I understand.
However, you do need a PC with a pretty good GPU if you want to get serious about playing with more advanced systems like the Vive and the Rift. (This was a great resource for me when I built my PC! http://www.logicalincrements.com/articles/vrguide)
I want to believe. I've used all the software. Played many games. The problems for me are 2 fold
1. I don't have the space. I don't personally know anyone that does. Maybe if you live in the mid-west or the suburbs but there are plenty of cities where people are unlikely to have a space for room scale VR and arguably the non-room scale VR is just not that compelling. Visiting a "VR space" is not ever going to be mainstream so that seems like an issue for mass VR adoption.
2. When I play a good non-VR game I play for hours and days at a time. As an example last month I played Zelda:Breath of the Wild for 70+ hours, 10-14 hours a day. I've yet to play anything in VR that I could stay in for 10-14 hours. In fact many VR games get extremely tiring very quickly. I've played a few where after 10 minutes I'm exhausted. That's doesn't seem likely to become a main form of entertainment.
I've also played at a few VR arcades. Again the games have been fun and immersive but the also felt like thrill rides. In other words, 5-10 minutes and I'm done. Neat experience but just like I could not ride a rollercoaster for 10hrs I can't do VR for 10hrs. It's not about the form, it's about the activity. Searching a room, opening draws, pressing various floating buttons, holding virtual weapons. It's tiring not relaxing like non VR games.
Those issues don't seem solvable. They aren't tech issues they're inherent to the whole concept. Fixes for the space would require direct brain implants so you don't actually move around, you just think you are. I don't know if there is a solution to the 2nd. It's one thing to push buttons to see Nathan Drake climb mountains. It's another to actually do the climbing.
As for the article itself I was a little sad to see VR defined as only
> VR… only tracking, rendering, and display. Tracking is the process of recording the user’s location and orientation in 3D space. Rendering is the process of constructing the appropriate image for a user. Display refers to the fidelity with which the hardware can produce the rendered image."
Even with the problems mentioned above there seems to still be low-hanging fruit.
If you want to be able to talk to people in VR you need to be able to emote. That means you need low-res cameras looking at your eyes and mouth so your avatar can show your expressions.
Similarly, 2 hands is not enough. I need censors on my feet and maybe knees, waist, elbows. In many VR experiences I've played things where bumping up against something with my waist or, kicking something away with my feet, using my knee to close a draw etc seem like natural actions that were thwarted by lack of input.
Same (NYC). Urban centers have been trending for the last 30 years and have become prohibitively expensive as a result. I can't help but wonder if a future (next?) generation of kids will move back out to the burbs in search of McMansions with two-car garages to use as immersive VR environments.