VR won't be in every home? I stopped reading right here. There is no future where VR is not a huge part of it.
Turned out to be empty hype and not a product that was that desirable. VR headsets seem firmly in the same category. I've been hearing that VR will be huge since the 80s, which is when I first tried a VR headset. Current tech is higher res and framerate with nearly all the same limitations.
There's no sign VR Hype 5.0 will prove more successful than any previous incarnations.
Maybe it won't always be stuck as a niche gaming addon, but at this point I'm tempted to say "not in my lifetime".
I remember seeing a VR headset in the 90's once. The only thing in common with today VR is that it provided stereoscopic vision. I find it baffling to say that current VR only has higher resolution and framerate.
There were many different improvements, which make current VR way better than two decades ago:
- smaller headsets (those headsets from the 90's where huge helmets, nowhere near the size of current goggles)
- true 3d graphics (the 90's demo I saw was of Doom, which didn't even have 3d models, only sprites)
- headset tracking (the main source of immersion, if I turn my head I expect the view to turn in VR as well)
- hands tracking (because obviously I want to directly interact with the world, rather than through the mouse and keyboard)
- force feedback (by itself it always felt like kind of a useless gimmick, until I experienced it in VR)
First VR set I tried was driven by a powerful (for the time), expensive, Unix workstation, or may even have been a pair of them, one for each eye. Whatever the best graphics Sun or SGI offered at the time it had, ie the expensive option. It was intended as a technology exploration and dev kit for the "coming soon" huge wave of arcade and home VR systems. A wave that never arrived outside of a couple of rubbish arcade machines, and the awful, but massively hyped "VR is here", film Lawnmower Man.
Hand tracking was there - you got special gloves. Headset tracking was there too, and worked flawlessly. The graphics were clearly orders of magnitude different, as was latency. The level of hype is about the same too, with similar absurd predictions back then as this feature article! Yet the reaction was one of "ooh, neat demo", just as my reaction to Oculus was "ooh, neat demo". Then happy to put it back on the shelf until it's ready. Still just as much a gimmick as 3D tv is to the sibling commenter and me.
The limitations were the same, just scaled up. Headsets are annoyingly heavy still, enough to quickly distract (well oculus was/is) and hugely limit my wish to use. The first set was this, and more. Obviously with added cable harnesses. Both about as attractive in the home as sitting on my sofa with my motorcycle crash hat on, just now we have a fairly lightweight full face helmet. Nowhere near as forgettable as wearing a pair of specs or a baseball cap.
They still cause feelings of sub-nausea for some that better latency was meant to fix, yet didn't, weird isolation, and a feeling that it's almost, but not quite there. Current incarnation is clearly much nearer than back then. Yet it's funny, it felt, going on my fallible memory of the demo we played with that it would be there "quite soon" back then. I feel just the same now. So that quite soon turns out to be very, very subjective. I think that must have been the impression of most of us as the company didn't come close to buying, but it was certainly a talking point in the following weeks. They spent plenty on unnecessary and absurdly expensive toys just because they could or that might be the next interesting thing to develop for. Yet didn't on that.
So they seem destined to stay something that's a niche gaming addon, or niche industrial use like working on something remotely because it's on the sea floor or in a nuclear plant etc. The niches are clearly bigger, and you no longer need a brace of £20k workstations, but still to my eyes not likely to break out of those niches any time soon. If the killer game(s) arrived for VR I'd probably buy one and it would get used to play an occasional hour of those games. Yet those killer apps still haven't arrived, I think because for most a mouse, joystick or controller is more than enough. It's still more a tech to get me a divorce than of the family room. :)
We have a long way to go for the games that transplant you, the relative in Australia sitting on your sofa in place of Facetime calls, or eventually the Holodeck in every home. That seems like the point VR might actually become mainstream. I suspect I won't still be around.
I'm not even sure we need HW to improve, it's just a matter of creating the correct virtual world (which is what FB is working on I'm sure).
This argument keeps coming up, but it's not substantial enough. Not everybody wants to escape in that way, nor do they need to.
A good film, beautifully and cinematically realised to incite powerful emotions; a fun game that engages the player to the extent that it's suddenly midnight and you don't know where the day has gone; or simply a good book that you read in bed until your eyes are sore.
Or hell, just flicking through Facebook/Snapchat/Instagram/reddit/HN (circle as applicable).
> And if you are not a creative type you can pay 0.99$ to get a virtual pet dragon and hangout with your friends and play a bunch of crazy stuff
Sounds tedious. We've had those kinds of things already — Second Life, Small Worlds, Active Worlds, Habbo… their popularity comes and goes, but they're hardly mainstream. Most times people want to do something together, it's for the sake of communicating feelings and ideas; sitting across from avatars of my friends is so much more contrived than just talking to them through voice chat, video chat, or text messaging that I don't see that most would bother.
The pet dragon sounds more fun in AR, roaming around my actual house rather than requiring me to enter a limited virtual world by shutting out my ability to see the actual world around me. Even then, I don't think I could persuade my fully-grown adult friends to come watch me play with a 3D tamagotchi, mainly for the reason that … well, it's utterly stupid.
Going back a bit:
> be immersed in a place where you have a ton of power at the tip of your hands with 0 limit on your creativity
What you're describing sounds basically like 3D artwork. The majority of people aren't creatives who could draw stickmen let alone do great and massive 3D artworks; that's so much more intimidating, I don't see the general public dropping thousands of dollars on equipment to ignore whatever art software they've decided on. That's another thing: it's not as though zero limits on creativity is mutually inclusive with the concept of VR; it depends on the software available, and not everybody may be in a position to buy the best ones.
I don't see "an incredible escape mechanism" as the killer app for VR, nor do I see these examples are being what will drive the masses to VR. If anything, it's possible to do what people proposed in VR using AR, without the need to have people forsake the real world and their sense of security with it.
Those of us who want a 100% escape mechanism are fewer and further between than we may imagine, and I suspect many are driven by the technological impressiveness of VR rather than the daily utility.
I believe VR will have specific uses like gaming, art, simulations, and training. Maybe people with high levels of stress or mental illness could benefit from entering another world, too. But the masses? It ain't gonna happen.
Finally, I doubt FB is working on virtual worlds. It doesn't help their business in any tangible way. They want data that they can use to sell things; if they wanted data from our sensory perceptions, they'd just record our voice and video chats.