VR technology is the ultimate escapist technology to be used as a platform for entertainment. It's just a matter of time before it replaces TV. I can't see why it wouldn't have a place in every home (like TV).
We're practically living in a VR world where we have not only ubiquitous black mirrors everywhere but displays in our cars, restaurants, work, schools, homes, refrigerators. Stop for a second and think about it and it's as though, in our urban existence, we already have a headset on. In a manner of speaking.
As Orson Welles said, (paraphrased), "Now people only watch Shakespeare plays in order to hear the quotations."
Sure, many people still enjoy replicating existing postcard pictures and posting them to their Instagram/Facebook.
But those experiences are fairly limited compared to what's available if you look at VR's potential — meaningful shared experiences across unlimited varied universes and identities. To be fair, that argument could be made about gaming. But I think gaming and VR are on a pretty obvious collision course.
>How would I turn to my wife and make a comment
You just turn your head/gaze to your wife's avatar in 3D space and make a comment to her...
>how would whatever your answer is going to be actually be any better than AR?
If we're talking "escaping together" you could be inside some virtual world (e.g. a virtual game of thrones 3D environment) watching events or playing together.
AR would just add some extra figures and/or annotations on top of the real world, but it wont be as immersive.
And not being able to enjoy your friend/partner's reaction, facial expression, or simply what they're doing. That mutual participation is half the fun. No, looking at an avatar mimicking your partner's movements doesn't count.
VR ain't gonna be a perfect simulacrum of the real world, but it doesn't have to be. It only needs to be good enough to let people express themselves somehow, and people will figure out the rest.
You also can't conveniently eat, drink, or go to the bathroom while using VR, and those are very common things for people to do in the midst of a period of social interaction. Imagine in how many households any given night the following happens in a group of friends or a family: people are watching TV or a movie, someone gets up, maybe goes to relieve themselves, stops by the kitchen to grab a snack or a can of pop, asks if anyone else wants anything, grabs what was asked for, comes back, hands over the item, sits down, and resumes watching.
Because TV and movies tend to be designed to be comprehensible with partial attention, that person very well have kept track of what was happening. Maybe they have to ask "who's that guy?" This kind of thing might happen multiple times a night. This doesn't have to be a planned or organized event -- it's a totally casual domestic interaction.
VR as it currently exists, and as far as can be reasonably predicted based on our understanding of the technology, is something that requires a great deal of physical and mental focus. That will necessarily limit its reach, unless it manages to fundamentally rewrite human society. (And I don't think I, for one, am eager to see what that new society would look like.)
I think there's a lot of interesting opportunities for VR technology. But should I live another 4-5 decades I doubt that I will live to see VR attain anything close to the social pervasiveness of video games, much less TV.
Err, you could see your friend/partner in the VR world trivially, facial expressions and everything.
Besides, when you're looking to escape, this could include seeing your partner 24/7. Not everybody has just fallen in love yesterday...
>No, looking at an avatar mimicking your partner's movements doesn't count.
Yeah, like exchanging texts with friends as opposed to hearing their voice on the phone or going to hang out with them "doesn't count", and yet everybody does it to the detriment of the former activities...
Besides, if we're making arbitrary "laws", then I say it counts double!
Rather, think of the hundreds of people who AREN'T right next to you: out of town parents, friends, your wife when she's on vacation, etc.
It won't replace everything, but'd be nice to play a game with a friend on the opposite coast, collaborate on a project with a remote coworker, or have a conversation with a relative far away.
For 2-3 hours, me and two other people sat cuddled on a couch, alternating in a pretty free flow way between speaking with each other, speaking about the show we were watching, and just watching the content passively — based partly on small tactile, visual, or auditory invitations to shift attention.
VR seems to propose completely removing that dynamic and human contact, that free flowing interaction, with distance and barely more than passive consumption of content.
Because I can picture the AR equivalent, and that situation is the bulk of my TV time. So for me, I just can’t see what VR is offering outside of a few really limited times I want to be deeply in a fake world, alone.
A more likely audience is the millions of people who, for example, played Call of Duty together last night. Most of those players were connected remotely via a virtual world and voice chat and did not share a geographic location much less the same room.
Let's ignore the fact you were watching the content passively and thus making your argument moot given we're talking about a technology designed to hold your complete attention.
The VR equivalent of that is simple: you keep doing that, but with a headset on. Now all of you are still within ears reach of each other and can continue to talk, but the audio for the simulation is shared among those in the room, and only the visuals are private and slightly different to compensate for your slightly different "physical" location in the 3D space, just like the real world.
Now you're flying over the top of the rings of Saturn listening to Brian Cox explain how they formed and using a controller (perhaps single handed and optional), to click on things and reach out into the 3D space and explore what's going on elsewhere... now you can flip down the private audio option on the headset and listen to Professor Cox give you a private tour of a moon around Saturn. You're free to return to the shared experience as and when you wish.
That technology probably could exist today, but it's certainly available yet. But given the article is talking about future implementations, well there you go.
And no one is saying it'll replace what you've described, just augment it.
I’d rather interact with the people next to me than fake touch things while adjacent to other people. Further, if I want to fake touch things with other people — why would I do it with us both wearing immersive displays instead of AR and a shared projection we can collaboratively touch?
In this case, AR seems like a genuine augmentation of what I was doing, while VR sounds like a regression in quality.
What you describe sounds like what a planetarium would install, not anything I need in my living room — precisely because I have limited need to be engaged with content over adjacent persons.
> Let's ignore the fact you were watching the content passively and thus making your argument moot given we're talking about a technology designed to hold your complete attention.
Yes, that’s precisely what I’m trying to call out: in one situation I’m freely switching between passive content and local interactions, while the other insists on my full, continuous attention. They’re not really equivalent activities, so I’m confused why they’re compared.
I have very little use for a full attention display, because that’s the minority of content I engage with or interactions I want to have.
Which is great for introverted people, people who are bored with their spouses/s.os, and people who don't care for "subtle visual cues for interactions between people" compared to the possibility to experience an alternate reality.
It's as if some people can't understand why others would rather escape in an alternate reality than have "quality time"...
>I’d rather interact with the people next to me than fake touch things while adjacent to other people. Further, if I want to fake touch things with other people — why would I do it with us both wearing immersive displays instead of AR and a shared projection we can collaboratively touch?
Because that way you don't immerse yourselves into another world, just project stuff into your living room.
>They’re not really equivalent activities, so I’m confused why they’re compared.
They don't have to be "really equivalent" for one to eat in (or overtake) the other, it's enough that they compete for people's spare entertainment time in the house. Nothing before TV was "really equivalent" to TV, and yet it replaced what people did before in their living rooms by a large margin.
Seeing the current failure of VR proves that the example of flying around the rings of Saturn in VR is not compelling enough vs. seeing that scene on a TV.
People here can't seem to imagine a future filled with stuff they don't do currently.
In fact, each of those media conveyances has made concessions to that activity, rather than the other way around.
So I’m naturally skeptical that a media form which ignores it is going to somehow replace the ones that don’t, given the history of that activity.
I’m asking why other people seem to think otherwise.
Lots of other activities people used to do haven't survived, for example gathering in houses where they played music themselves (eg. on the piano). Heck, visits to friends have almost been killed by social media today...
Combined with the fact that Mr. Andreessen is a bit of a taste maker of a venture capitalist... well there you are.
Betting against VR feels like betting against drugs. I do not see any future where it will not be absolutely massive.
VR just isn’t that useful, even by your tacit admission you can’t think of how it directly competes in a situation where it’s obvious how AR would fit in.
This is not a case against AR. AR has the potential to enhance many lifes. VR has the potential to create fake new ones.
VR can supplant other experiences many of us spend time on. Like, a multiplayer video game. Or watching a movie alone (reading comments here I feel like I'm a weird person by watching alone, even though I can't see how you can immerse yourself and truly enjoy a deep movie if you keep talking with your friends or spouse). Or casually hanging out with people halfway across the country.
VR is not, and should not be, a 100% or nothing tech. You should be able to enjoy both virtual and real experiences during your day, as you see fit.
So the bet that VR will be massive, and particularly that it will be larger than AR, seems unlikely.
I think it will have a place — in the same way high end gaming rigs currently do, but not even at the level of penetration video game systems have, and certainly not like cellphones.
By contrast, AR seems to be on track to be as common as cellphones.
That said, let's remember that AR today does not exist. HoloLens demos barely qualify as AR. Google Glass was essentially a trimmed down ~2006 feature phone blocking some of your FOV. And before someone says this, Ingress and Pokémon Go do not qualify. It's not really AR until you can overlay images on top of the real world, and until those images are contextually relevant.
With the current trends I see in both spaces, VR has plenty of space to explode before AR becomes ubiquitous, or even usable.
Mayo Clinic has a page on how deaf people can hear these days by tapping into the auditory portion of the brain stem.
It's not something I've found much use for (but I don't own a TV so your scenario isn't one that has much relevance to me) but it is a common thing and one that already translates quite successfully into VR.
So, to answer your question: perhaps you won't be able to ideally replicate your experience in VR. But you will be able to come close. Why bother? Because you can have that experience with any human on Earth instantly, instead of the privileged few who happen to be taking up extraordinarily close coordinates to you in real world space.
From the two, I'd say watching TV together is what is "barely more than passive consumption of content", VR feels more much active, because the people involved create the action, rather than just consume it.
VR misses the mark on a bunch of real life scenarios: selfies, device sharing vs different body sizes, multitasking (e.g. cooking while watching youtube).
https://imgur.com/gallery/boUed
Totally not a thint.
And that's beside the point anyways. Selfies exploded after digital photography became mainstream since one no longer needed to buy film. You could say that selfies happened because a physical burden was taken out of the picture.
In contrast, you could say VR is a type of technology that _adds_ physical burden: today I can walk down to T-mobile, buy a new phone and get a free TV delivered to my house that I can then use to watch Peppa Pig w/ my kids. VR can do that too for, what, $1600 for a family of 4? Except I can't actually see my kids laughing with the thing stuck on my face and half of the devices have a high likelihood of breaking in 2 weeks in the hands of toddlers anyways.
The biggest is motion sickness. It’s still a huge problem despite advances. I can’t game for several hours straight, it’s just impossible.
Movies are better, but the second problem is the the total immersion. It’s a pain in the ass to even check the time with a VR headset on. I can’t easily answer a text, I can’t get up to go to the bathroom without untangling myself, I can even pick up a beer without risking spilling it.
When I have my TV on, I can still cook, flip through catalogs, look at my partner, write emails on my iPad, etc.
Nothing sounds more tedious than having a conversation with somebody whose attention is being drawn by something that only one of us can see.
Then you'd be free to chat over the top of the boring bits...
I agree that replicating the full social context of TV will be difficult
Try that with relatives living in three different places across the country.
Typically whatever is seen in VR is repliacted on the monitor, so it's not true that only one person in the room can see what's going on in VR.
I almost exclusively watch shows while drinking coffee.