They're possible now, but you also need expensive hardware to run them. This is meant to run on the oculus quest. Give it a few more years (and probably a few more) and portable ultrarealism will get here eventually.
This reminds me of higher-res Mii's from the Wii, which was dated tech even at the time.
That said, the most important thing people should be asking is: is it fun? Because if you aren't gonna go super realistic then you had better nail the gameplay (Nintendo or Blizzard style).
I really don't think VR needs to wait half a decade for hardware to catch up. Existing systems can create beautiful experiences with the right artistic decisions
Sometimes ultra-realism takes the fun nature out of things.
Simpsons and South Park could easily use high tech graphics but the simple nature of it all is what makes it appealing . Same with Minecraft or even Zelda.
It's also easy to build expansive worlds with breakable objects that don't require tons of physics and special effects to make something like a box exploding look realistic.
Perhaps but you haven't established that.
> To meet your deadline for a 120hz video frame, your signal can travel at most 1500 miles in a vacuum, closer to 1000 miles in copper/fiber.
Edge computing is a feature of some modern clouds, and certainly is intended to have much lower round trip distance than that to at least major markets, specifically to reduce latency.
Admittedly, public cloud offerings don't tend currently to have compute resource suitable for hosting VR in their edge offerings, but it's certainly something a major cloud player supporting their own gaming/VR offering could do, and for that matter a feature that it is easy enough for public cloud vendors to offer if there was sufficient demand.
If it takes 4ms to generate a frame you’re down to < 500 miles from the data center. If you need to pad for packet loss you’re down even further.
As I understand, edge computing locations tend to be in most major cities in the regions covered, providing tens-of-miles distance to most people in major markets.