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Comment by jmiskovic | Hacker News Reader

On same note, developing VR from inside is incredible and it quickly turned into my #1 hobby. At first you are surrounded with blank space, then you slowly fill it out with whatever reality rules you can think of.

I went with code-only approach (no binary assets) and built a primitive development environment that works in VR. Now I have a neat little virtual shed with different experiments and demo projects. Geometrical landscapes, driving & flying, teleporting, various gizmos...

Currently I'm tweaking physics engine to work with hand tracking skeleton. Masses connected with springs turn out to be amazingly palpable even without any haptic feedback and with simple cartoonish visuals.

VR is already fun and we're in for a wild ride once AR hits the market.

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> VR is already fun and we're in for a wild ride once AR hits the market.

I, personally, see VR as being much more exciting than AR, from an entertainment and capabilities perspective. I don't want to be limited to my small living room or whatever setting I'm in. When I'm in the real world outside of my house, I can't imagine what AR would bring that wouldn't be completely utilitarian, like replacing my phone/watch with a virtual device, holochat calls, maybe add more trees, etc. But, I'm also not very imaginative.

What do you see in the future with AR?

VR is simply a stepping stone. AR is the real future.

But that's not to say that fully immersive experiences have no future. I just don't think VR will fully take off until it's available in a small form-factor, and likely combined with AR in the same device.

For a long time I've wanted VR-like games, but played in the freedom of AR, where it maps and adapts to your environment. This would allow you to actually move around and interact with your space.

I briefly played the HoloLens AR game where you have to shoot at robotic bugs that crawl out from your walls.[1] The fact that I could duck behind my office partition was awesome. The fact that when I blew a hole in my wall I could see the "studs" behind it was similarly cool.

In an ideal world, I could trace out my house and play up and down the stairs. Or go to a field or forest and play in a whole other world.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29xnzxgCx6I

Custom Home Mapper is a current Quest project in this vein. It’s VR rather than AR, you map out your whole area (with walls and furniture) and then play some mini-games in it.

To focus on positive potential: Augmented hearing, like tuning into parts of frequency spectrum and directional amplification. Augmented vision with integrated maps, 'scouting' around with street view. Visualizing music with colors. Remote socializing with even less friction. Surrounding yourself with contextual spatial information - food recipes next to stove and PDFs around working desk. Completely new forms of media content, like TV series that follows you around.

It's predictable that big players will want to control every aspect of AR because it gets them complete attention while device is on. Facebook has already pounced. I'm more interested in VR/AR that is in service of user and that means open source.

We won't get VR force feedback for a long time. With AR you could turn a laser tag arena into almost any scenario and incorporate a lot of physical elements.

AR lets you bring virtual experiences into a more ad hoc setting. You can't really play a VR game while waiting for the bus but you could be feeding your AR pet.

I was an early video game developer, publishing games in '82. I found then that making the games was far and away a more creative and productive and lucrative way to spend my time. Beyond the while developing testing of the several dozens games I made when I made games professionally, I've not played a video game out of interest in the game itself since "Robotron 1984".

Any resources you can share? Sounds amazing

Here are few dated examples [0][1] and the code[2].

I saw similar thing from Mr.doob[3]. Few years ago Carmack talked about live-coding VR[4], but code was on 2D monitor.

[0] https://twitter.com/j_miskov/status/1312701109232902144 [1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/mqw1s04z70dm3y4/vr-physics.mp4?dl=... [2] https://github.com/jmiskovic/indeck [3] https://twitter.com/mrdoob/status/1263498538316636162 [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30wNPgx6D8E

You may find Neos very interesting. It's an online metaverse with a turing-complete scripting language called Logix built-in. Here are some demos:

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWbm9AzgDxw

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqI_j6pDdjg (start here if you're a developer)

3. https://youtu.be/STZN6qTGRbQ

4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XafA4WeppxM

>VR is already fun and we're in for a wild ride once AR hits the market.

I for one can't wait for full field of vision pop up adds to infest our daily lives. How exiting.

I'm all for that ad subsidized tech.

I'll take advantage of it just as soon as uBlock Origin VR is released.

Imagine cheering for a dystopian future.

HYPER-REALITY by Keiichi Matsuda

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs

Or you could build actual things in an actual shed? This is the same impulse that drives people to build furniture, boats, and model train layouts. To me, the real physical objects are much more fulfilling.

Very few people can experience your physical shed. Everyone can experience the VR shed at 0 marginal cost.

Yeah, why weave animate things out of pure thoughtstuff in cyberspace, bounded only by your imagination and compute resources, when you could be messing with plywood in a shed?

Exactly, the fun is accidentally destroying your laboriously constructed circuit because you misread the resistor bands, or reversed the polarity. What's the point if I can just Ctrl-Z that shit and recompile?

I like making furniture too (it's a stereotype for many devs), but I don't look down my nose and pretend that there's some objective reason that my hobby is "more fulfilling" than someone else's (particularly when that person's hobby also involves being creative and using their brain). I mean, sheesh.

That's an awkward opinion to have on hackernews. Like, why write software when you can't touch it? Go engineer real things: buildings, bridges, cars!

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