Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

I've been saying for some time that VR is the next 3D TV. I've tried VR systems from Jaron Lanier's original rig with two SGI workstations in the 1980s to the HTC Vibe. Technically, there's been plenty of progress. The lag problem has been fixed. The resolution is better. The headgear is still clunky.

There's still no killer app. You can play FPS games. Works fine, for people who like shooters. You can run roller coaster sims. Works fine, gets boring fast. You can visit Second Life. Kind of cool, if you like SL. You can visit High Fidelity, which is a higher-res Second Life where nothing is going on. Boring. (Worse, the High Fidelity CEO is now talking about "sovereign identity on the blockchain". If one branch of hype isn't working, pivot to another.)

VR conferencing? Working in High Fidelity and Second Life now. HF even has gaze tracking and facial gesture capture.

In the early days of VR, there was hope that VR would provide a more natural interface to CAD programs. Autodesk put effort into VR to try to make that work. Turned out that trying to do precision work in VR is not only difficult, but really tiring.

It's all been built, and nobody came. Best Buy is removing the Oculus Rift demo stations from stores due to lack of interest.

For now the apps that aim for a kill are games. I've tried many VR games and I've only really liked one, Elite: Dangerous. I don't know if it's the killer app VR needs, probably not, but it's impressive and I truly felt transported to another world and that the technology has value, flaws too but value. I've never watched a 3D movie that made me feel the same.

I think VR and AR will be very big in the future. I don't know how long it will take. The current generation might fail for some understanding of the word but I think they are on to something.

Are you considering AR as a separate concern, or do you consider that one doomed to mediocrity as well?

Personally I think that features like virtual workspaces (e.g. multi-monitor displays / overlays) and HUDs (e.g. vehicle navigation) are going to be game-changing outside of the entertainment industry, when the headset tech gets to where it needs to be; this will probably be better implemented as an AR overlay (a la Hololens) than full VR.

I agree, I can't wait until we're all in VR desktop environments, which will I think open up really interesting new ways of personal computing and working.

Take for example software development. It has huge potential to improve how efficiently we can work together remotely. It is often difficult to communicate very well with remote team members, and to develop a rapport with them. But imagine if you could be pair programming right beside them, in a VR setting, pointing to some code in a floating IDE or something, and explaining to them how it works. Or you could pull up a virtual "white board" and start drawing maybe.

It could also go a long way to making work more comfortable. With your computer being just a VR headset, it would be easy to work in a laid back recliner, standing in your office, or even lying down.

AR is a separate line of development. Being able to label the real world has many use cases. There are many industrial applications. The big technical problem is getting location information good enough to register the annotations on the real world. That's not solved yet for big spaces.

In AR, the graphics don't have to be as good. Text and line drawing alone would be useful. This translates to less-clunky headgear. The Microsoft HoloLens is far less clunky than the HTC Vibe or Oculus Rift. Being able to walk an oil refinery or a server farm or a WalMart and have displays of what everything was and how it was doing would be valuable.

I like the comparison with 3D movies. Since (almost) the inception of moving pictures, there has been ways to do 3D movies. And every 20-30 years there has been a push toward 3D movies. It never really caught on.

Perspective[0] is a fabulous capacity (and Renaissance "invention" for artworks). Our eyes need 3D, but our brain is just fine with a bit of fake perspective.

PS: slightly tangential but, the only personal interest I have for VR is watching movies alone as if I were in an empty theater. I find it very cool.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_(graphical)

I think it's better to compare VR to Ham Radio in that there's a hobbyist or niche interest but not enough to spawn a mainstream adoption of the technology. Even AR I think has a similar problem since it's all about making a market where no real demand exists. VR is cool in my opinion but it really isn't something I can see even my nieces and nephew using beyond once or twice in their lives. The games they play tend to be focused on the relaxation they bring with the ability to just lounge in the living room which VR breaks from that format of leisure. VR seems to take effort to consume and if you don't find that kind of effort relaxing then you're not likely to do it for a pass time or hobby. Frankly, I think too many in Silicon Valley assume their interests mirror the interests of non-Valley and non-technically-minded people.

Best Buy wasn't removing Rift demos, Oculus was. According to Oculus, it was because they targeted too many fringe stores instead of just key stores.

All those uses you mention don't make exclusive use of VR features. Try some game like Climbey. It is the killer app for me and the only reason I reboot to windows almost every day, to play with a friend or alone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com