Free Isn’t Cheap Enough – The Blog of Palmer Luckey
palmerluckey.com
palmerluckey.com
Immersive VR porn that involves fluids and smells, that could sell well enough that people might make a career of content creation of it. Queasy feeling video games, not so much.
The "Cyberspace" notion that arose after "Neuromancer" came out is so captivating that it draws people to think that's the thing we need. Take the display technology: 3d "retina resolution" FPS world... We keep seeing hardware that comes as close as possible to that given current manufacturing, and it's never good enough. it's always the hardware's fault, or there wasn't enough appealing content...
No one really wants that kind of display, though. Nintendo's efforts were a good enough effort to show what that can do. Autodesk's version made years earlier and costing several limbs and organs more, was pretty much the same thing.
"Ready Player One" shows a really cool VR world but... it's still the same basic vision, the same basic thing, it's been since 1990 or so. However many more boom and bust cycles VR goes through, it's still going to be the limited use and limited appeal thing it has been because it isn't what anyone actually needs.
So I'm a curmudgeon: I'm typing on a 1992 Model M and just replaced my 1996 Microsoft Trackball because a decent alternative has become available, (finally! blessings on Elecom). I use these input tools because they are the best I have found... And judging by the $500+ price on the MS Trackballs that are still sold, and the large Model M / Mechanical keyboard fanbase, I'm not alone in that opinion.
How is it possible that none of the VR research has yet managed to improve on these input tools enough to dethrone them? Is there truly no real concept of a 300WPM keyboard equivalent that everyday users can use? Is it that we have to ensure users upstream bandwidth can't exceed 1/10th of their downstream (shades of "sit and consume like a good citizen!") I won't even mention voice recognition because many people do not talk as fast as they wish to communicate already.
Haptics would be nice, right? What could we do today, right now, with bubble wrap suits with individual air pressure control of each bubble. Make the bugs crawl all over you, tele-massage... There's potential there. Does anybody want it? "I don't want to be touched" would have been a weirder thing to say in public in 1990 than today. I don't think our culture is about to celebrate skin as a sense organ anytime soon.
I'm just a bit cynical about "VR". Perhaps someday some of the VR work will become widely useful, probably be under a different name, like "bio-interfaces" or something, just because the VR meme has so much suction.
And people have been trying with force-feedback; it's just really hard to make it work with something that allows for wide range of motion, isn't massively cumbersome, and costs less than a new car.
These VR devices are already as expensive as game consoles and all you get is a single player experience that a companion can’t even watch as you play. The force feedback devices may improve individual experience but wouldn’t help the price point.
When you're drawing, for instance, the pressure and friction of the pencil against the page is pretty critical for accurately feeling and controlling your movement. You cannot just wave your finger in the air with the same precision or control you can draw a line with a pencil.
Likewise for sculpting - your hands are far more sensitive to precise shape than your eyes are, and being able to feel the material resist against you lets you use precise amounts of pressure to judge how you are deforming it.
As long as VR inputs involve waving your hands in the air unsupported, they will never be able to achieve the same level of precision input and utility for serious tasks as a mouse or a drawing tablet.