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Comment by benja123 | Hacker News Reader

The older I get the more I realize how incredibly hard it is to predict anything about the future, especially when it comes to technology.

Growing up in the 90s I thought virtual reality was just around the corner - only now 30 years later are we starting to see virtual reality.

5 years ago it seemed like 100% self driving cars were just around the corner. You can argue we are much closer than we were, but it still seems like we are pretty far away.

10 years ago, the web was dead and apps were the future... today hardly anyone believes apps are the future.

I imagine that travel to Mars, and a moon colony seemed like it was just around the corner in 1970 and yet here we are 50 years later and neither one of those came to fruition.

The reality is tech is incredibly fast moving, which makes it hard to predict, but still not as fast as we think it is.

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"only now 30 years later are we starting to see virtual reality"

As Tom Hall said (paraphrase) "No one wants to strap shit to their face". I'd bet it's still very much a novelty in 30 years.

I am not sure. In the past year I have actually started to see quite a few non techie friends buy the oculus quest and are avid users.

I do feel like we are at a turning point where VR will become the dominant non mobile gaming device of the future. If it will be used much outside of gaming is the big question.

Agree with you. I think we've just entered a period of rapid adoption, and the driver is FB making better and better low-cost entry level devices, hopefully pulling along more and more competitors.

And jesus christ the motion sickness is just unbearable for me. It can ruin me for an entire day.

Try games where you are static (beat saber, table tennis etc.).

Do not play games where you are in any vehicle or need to walk around.

Yeah, I really wish people qualified where they're having the problems.

Seated experiences where you use smooth locomotion are bad. Aircraft (or spaceship) cockpit type experiences are even worse because not only do you have translation that's out of sync with your inner ear and sense of movement, but you have rotation as well (which is much worse).

also, newer headsets are much, much better than in the 90s.

Right, but as I'm sure you realize, if that's the case, then mass-adoption of VR is a non-starter. We /love/ games and movies that transport us to places. There are very very few movies with a static camera, though I do happen to like them.

It's bizarre how inverse-correlated motion sickness susceptibility vs VR sickness appear to be. I don't get motion sick at all, but even a few minutes in a poorly-designed VR experience makes me want to puke. Some of my friends are complete opposites. Most people I know are lean one direction or another, usually pretty strongly.

I do wonder if this is a simple statistical fluke, or if it's pointing at some deeper aspect of our biology.

I get very motion sick, but I do fine in VR. The only time I get sick with VR is when the motion is not correlated with my head movement.. for example, if you turn the camera with a controller.

I was "walking" around in some VR meeting thing called RecRoom, I wanted to throw up. If I was teleported, it was mostly okay, still nauseating but holy cow it physically hurt to move like that.

But motion sickness is when there's acceleration. That is, the physical acceleration is the cause of the sickness. It's not the visuals.

VR sickness is when there's somewhat equivalent visuals, but not acceleration. So I could see motion sickness and VR sickness being essentially opposites.

Exactly so. What I find interesting is that folks seem to be naturally prone to one or the other, but not both.

Arm-chair psycho-psychologist: Extra attuned to your eyes, and you get VR sickness because your body keeps refusing to follow what your eyes are telling your brain. Extra attuned to your body, and you get motion sickness because your eyes keep refusing to confirm what your body is telling you.

Anecdotal evidence: if you get motion sickness, you can help mitigate it by focusing on the horizon (ie, feed your eyes what your body is already telling you).

If you get VR sickness, maybe you can concentrate your focus on your body/breath to mitigate.

I worked on a relatively compact head mounted display that the company thought would be successful for 3D movies (this was 2005/6). They also imagined that users would want to watch this content while traveling on airplanes. We did some (cheaper) user testing by putting people in the back of a limo and driving on highway 280 in the bay area. One of the users had to pull over to vomit. He was an ex-fighter pilot.

I still question if VR will ever truly take off.

I've got a long-standing bet with a friend that 'VR' will take off as soon as it becomes 'AR', ie transparent glasses that overlay information on the real world.

That, IMO, is the killer feature, and once it hits takeoff, the headset era of VR will be looked back at as a necessary stepstone that was ultimately completely replaced with what ultimately will be used.

VR by itself is probably a thing. There are times when you want an immersive experience such as gaming or virtual exploration. But I expect it's a niche. I'm not wearing VR to your virtual meeting.

AR, in the inobstrusive/genuinely useful sense is harder but seems far more interesting. Yes, there are social factors to deal with as well, but I can certainly see worn information displays becoming a thing.

I don't disagree! Rather, it's just that I expect AR glasses to have a fully-blacked-out mode when necessary, and those full-immersion times will just be one (small, I'm willing to bet) mode of the overall headset.

As a side note, my friend and I first made this bet back in the DK2 days, and I was ~60% confident I was correct. What pushed me in to the 90%+ region was playing with an Oculus Quest. The guardian mode, freedom from wires, hand tracking, pass-through mode, etc... Everything that felt like a real step forward was also something that will ultimately apply to AR glasses. It really made me think I was on the right track.

I think the other things that's happened with VR is just the quality/size of TVs generally. No that doesn't deal with a few specific aspects of VR like flight simulators and FPS. But having a high-res 75" or whatever screen in front of you basically handles "virtual reality" for anything that doesn't involve looking around.

>I'm not wearing VR to your virtual meeting.

Can we be so certain of this, especially given the events of the last year? If VR technology had been perfected at the time, it seems very likely to me that instead of a shift to Zoom at the outbreak of the pandemic, many companies, government agencies and (especially) schools would have made the move to VR. It will be interesting to see how VR is integrated into our every day lives (both voluntarily and otherwise) as it is perfected.

Because that's not how people attend meetings. Meetings are mostly not-full focus events. That's not to say that VR couldn't have a role in, say, an in-depth review of a hardware design. But, the typical meeting? People are turning their cameras on and off and are probably spending about 50% attention depending upon how relevant the current topic is to them. This of course happens in the physical world as well.

After having spent one year in home office, there is literally no household chore that I have not done during a meeting yet.

Easy tier: folding laundry, cooking, most other things

Medium tier: doing the dishes, cleaning the bathroom (need to have a towel at the ready if I need to unmute)

Hard tier: vacuuming (makes it hard to listen to what's being said, so I've only done it once very briefly until now)

Vacuum robot FTW! Can set it going from the web interface, direct drive it or detail zones.

Everyone keeps recommending vacuum robots to me, but they don't solve the hard parts of vacuuming. A vacuum robot will not move furniture around to get the dust in the corners. A vacuum robot will not clean the dust on my desk, or in my keyboard.

It is very true that a robot vacuum will not solve ALL your vacuuming problems.

It really only solves maintenance cleaning IE doing the main bits that get dirty most often like common walkways, near the front door etc.

For me, that is 90% of the work. I only live in a small place and wife and I appreciate it. In a large house, with 3 or more kids? I'd buy one for every floor if I had to.

For the other 10%, I have a dyson battery powered stick thing. Gets into the nooks, does the keyboard and the car too.

And there is something nice about being able to do the dishes, wash and dry clothes, vacuum the floor; all while playing games.

>Meetings are mostly not-full focus events. That's not to say that VR couldn't have a role in, say, an in-depth review of a hardware design. But, the typical meeting? People are turning their cameras on and off and are probably spending about 50% attention depending upon how relevant the current topic is to them.

This is true, at least in part, because Zoom meetings allow this, not necessarily because this is the behavior that an employer views as ideal. If VR technology was well-developed, I think its likely that many employers would hold VR meetings for the very reason that employees would be forced to give 100% of their attention. Certainly this is true when it comes to schools, which have done everything possible to ensure that students are paying 100% attention all the time, aren't using supplemental materials during tests (cheating), ect.

>When North Carolina A&T State University junior Arielle G. Brown took her International Marketing exam in September, a cheating-detection program analyzed her behavior through a computer webcam the entire time. After the test, her associate professor fired off a furious email ripping into her class for some “negative behavior” the software had flagged.

>“A STUDENT IN 6 MINUTES HAD 776 HEAD AND EYE MOVEMENTS,” she wrote, adding later, “I would hate to have to write you up.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/12/test-mo...

We may not all end up choosing (or be forced) to hold VR meetings in cyberspace, but to seems virtually (pun intended) certain to me that many will.

But there are already glasses like this? Google Glass, Epson Moverio, Magic Leap are the first few that enter my mind. And none of these seem to really be "taking off". Sure, there are niche applications that match the constraints of these, but it's not clear to me at what point your bet would be considered to have failed because of a lack of "taking off"...

The only thing that comes close is the Hololens, and if you ever get a chance to play with one (which I do recommend!) you'll see immediately why it Isn't There Yet™. The biggest killer is that the field of view is tiny- think a single A1/Letter sized sheet of paper held at arm's length. It feels less like AR and more like a view portal, and since it currently has no way to block light behind its projections, everything is washed out. Not to mention that it's closer to the headset side of things than regular glasses.

It's certainly a start, but there's a long way to go.

Nitpick: you mean A4. As an aside to those who don’t get to use ISO A paper sizes, they are trés cool. The x/y edge sizes are the (edit) square root of two. A0 is 1 square metre in area. Each step (A1, A2, A3, ...) just chops the sheet in half.

Edit: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-paper.html

Here's fun video about metric paper https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUF5esTscZI

Shoot, missed the edit window. Thanks for the heads up, though.

As an aside, there are also ISO B and C series paper, although I believe that the C standard was withdrawn somewhat recently. The area of B_n is the geometric mean of that of A_n and A_{n-1}, while the area of C_n is the geometric mean of that of A_n and B_n. Without context, C4 paper sounds quite scary, until you realize it's probably related to A4 paper in some way. As to why it isn't just called A3.75, I have no idea.

I think VR headsets are within a factor of 10 of the cost of a good monitor, and within a factor of 5 of the angular resolution of 20:20 vision. It seems very plausible to me as the resolution goes up and costs come down that e.g. a company would start pushing employees towards a headset instead of multiple monitors within the next decade.

I don't think people will even want to wear glasses. 3D TVs were hyped for a while a few years ago but died off quickly.

The one thing that is consistent about tech is that prices come down.

A 3d printer in 2012 was $2000... a 3d printer that can be that printer is about $300 today.

A decent drone was about $3000 back there... $400 can you get you a decent drone today.

This is true. Another thing that drove the prices down is the fact that the countries where we outsourced manufacturing have built up their own industry and know how. They are now selling the same products for half the price directly to the consumer.

And $20 can get you an amazingly fun kiddie drone. Got for my son a HS drone and was amazed at what you can get for 20. Yes, prices’ drop is a big one on technology evolution

DRAM would like to have a word with you. And I can't say laptops have improved much for a decade now (you'll see an increase in quality per euro still, but it's very marginal and not a single component made leaps), I was rather disappointed when getting a new one after my 2011 model. Back in the good old days, three years would go by and I'd love the speed of a new one, or of ssds, or the gigabit ethernet, or the 802.11n.

Smartphones too. 2011->2017 changed big time - in hardware at least. But now it doesn't really matter if you get a 250 or a 1000 euro phone. You'll get a better camera and some gimmicks like oled (objectively better, I went from oled to lcd and it bothered me for weeks, but honestly I'll use a phone for years, I'm used to it now, and don't miss it at all anymore) or usb-c. Can't do much more without reducing battery life or other aspects. And sometimes they do -- make a worse phone with better specs I mean. People don't mind because it's all the same anyway, the tech is stagnating there.

As a rule, you're right, but the exceptions and limitations are also everywhere.

> But now it doesn't really matter if you get a 250 or a 1000 euro phone.

That's the OP's point.

Sure, things that were produced by teensy niche companies got cheap when the met the economy of scale. That's true for everything, not just tech. On the other hand, phones are way more expensive today than when the original iPhone came out for 'just' $499, while wages have held steady over that time.

The iPhone SE is $399 and is a massive improvement over the original iPhone.

What has happened over that period is people's expectations have inflated (with some help from the marketers).

Oh and wage growth over that period has been reasonably strong (until 2020): https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/embed/?s=unitedstawagg...

With 3D printers, it's not so much the price that's an issue. It takes away a lot of space and it needs calibrating, adjusting etc.

To me (very occasional user) it seems like going to a fab lab and using their $3000 3d printer is the better option.

> 10 years ago, the web was dead and apps were the future... today hardly anyone believes apps are the future.

I'm still torn about this. I hope the web wins, but I don't really know if the average mobile user even uses a web browser anymore.

And PWAs have been a failure so far, maybe Svelte or WebAssembly could fix this, but I wouldn't put my money on it.

Browsers aside, a very large number of apps embed web content

I avoid apps whenever i can. A web based solution often provides better privacy.

I still use safari on an iphone6 to browse youtube, reddit, and whatever else.

I like that it saves my tabs for me. I have old ones sitting from nearly 5 or 6 years ago that I still go back to occasionally.

I also like purposefully obfuscating browsing social media and youtube so that I spend less time there and am less inclined to use it all day. I can even have a reddit account without ever getting any kind of push notifications. Its great!

That being said, I am probably going to get a linux phone once this one finally leaves me, so I do not represent a large segment of the consumer base.

I think the people who were marketing/hyping VR and self-driving cars for their own gain made it seem like those technologies were just around the corner.

And also just boring, mundane “futurists” - it’s not as hard to predict the direction of technology as the timing. Futurism is a kind of inspiration porn, I’d say.

> I imagine that travel to Mars, and a moon colony seemed like it was just around the corner in 1970 and yet here we are 50 years later and neither one of those came to fruition.

It was just around the corner. The grand arc of human life altered course, and it took the market 50 years to catch up to collective action.

Well, war and the resulting competition drove the space race. Once the Soviets and Americans decided that space wasn’t worth fighting over they spent their money elsewhere and we stopped advancing in that direction.

I usually give a lot of the credit for the recent push back into space to private companies like spaceX, but, now after making this comment part of me is wondering if I am just being naive and the real reason for space becoming a priority again is because China has started to make significant progress in their space program.

SpaceX is doing things, but I wonder if that is just result of excess capital we have on markets... Because no one honest can really calculate reasonable return of investment on things like colonisation of Mars...

I don't think so, in this case. Their initial starting capital though, that was won on tech startup lottery...

As for the Mars thing, SpaceX is funding it with their profits from boring commercial launches, and I don't think that is driven by excess capital on the market.

> today hardly anyone believes apps are the future.

oh really? what are people thinking the alternative is?

I personally think it's going to be more like Office/Emacs with lots of plugins and a distributed content-addressable data store in the background.

This is exactly what I want to build and think it's one of those foundational building blocks that we can't believe we lived without. Files stored on IPFS with their hash being their universal ID. Metadata would be associated with that IPFS hash such as name, maintainer, description, etc. The storage would be a smart contract on Ethereum with the key being the IPFS hash and the value being the current metadata. It's basically a distributed web app store. Throw on a Sybil resistant voting mechanism and you have a discoverable shared and programmable dataset of applications and modules.

If a project like this exists I unfortunately haven't come across it.

I doubt anything like Emacs will be the future. Emacs was a fluke as were the PCs of a peculiar time where the stars aligned for brief moments.

Commercial interests play opposite to creation of anything like Emacs, where everything is customizable and anything can interact with everything.

Unless interoperability is mandated somehow, I do not see anything like Emacs in our future.

I vividly remember in high school in the late 90s...the Prius was out. I thought the first car that I buy (with my own money) would be an electric vehicle. Though EVs have been around, they aren't mainstream.

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