David Chalmers considers the possibilities of VR
lithub.com
lithub.com
For a view from the other direction, "How to be a God", by Battle. This is a game dev who became an academic and spent too much time thinking about philosophy.
If you want some good metaverse questions to think about, here are a few, based on experience with mature systems such as Second Life.
* Games, like most forms of entertainment, must be interesting. So they have a much higher frequency of interesting events than people usually experience in real life. Much effort is expended in game design to make that happen. User-built virtual worlds, where the world itself is mostly passive, are more like real life. The frequency and density of interesting events is comparable to real life. That indicates the virtual world is doing a good job of simulating the real one. But it can be boring. It results in the standard Second Life new user question, "What do I do now?". The answer is "What do you want to do", which may lead to them being directed to an area where something that fits their interest is happening. But the world itself is indifferent to the players and does not try to engage them.
* How do we govern this thing? Almost everybody seems to assume the existence of some unchallengable authority. That is not only obnoxious, but has scaling problems. Second Life uses property rights to allow property owners to control much of what visitors can do on an owned parcel. This reduces the need for "moderators", who, in practice, are minimum wage workers in some outsourced call center. It's disappointing that democracy is out of fashion. The crypto people's idea of democracy is "one dollar, one vote". That lacks something.
* How "safe" does the virtual world have to be? Roblox takes a very hard line on this. Facebook claims to but has trouble delivering. Decentraland is too empty for it to matter. Second Life takes the position that they don't get involved with disputes between residents, and "safety", if desired, is the problem of the property owner.
* Are you your avatar, or are you puppeteering your avatar? This is a big issue in game design. If someone annoys your avatar, are they annoying you?
* What are we going to do about identity in virtual worlds? "Real Names"? Cross-system identities? Face recognition? Crypto wallets?
* How much of the user do we want to project into the virtual world? Typing only? Voice? Facial feature tracking? Full body tracking? All of those are available.
One of the challenges VR has at the moment is that games are a bit of a dead end. There are some specific exceptions, but the key is that by and large, VR is more limiting as an environment for gameplay not less constrained as people naively assume. So if you are trying to make some interesting and challenging game play mechanisms, you have all the challenges from pancake games, but now you actually many more constraints to make the game work in VR. And in exchange for that, you aren't actually getting a lot more ways to make the game interesting and challenging. You can do some stuff with 3d space that is not there for 2d. But beyond that its just all the same things you would have access in 2d but harder to implement because you can't nauseate or disorient the user, the screen is effectively low resolution, you are limited by what the user can phyiscally do and breaking that often just leads to loss of immersion which frustrates the user.
The actual longer term potential for VR sits mostly outside gaming but it's currently stuck in a local optimum where engaging a subset of gamers who enjoy it is the most lucrative market available, but doesn't lead anywhere useful longer term.
As for low res screens, looking at tech history it’s only a matter of time before it gets “faster, better, and cheaper”.
It'd be nice at least in VR if you were sitting in your virtual living room and the door bell would ring. Oh, whose that. It's a white rabbit. I should probably go with, because I'm really bored here. He's running off! I better chase him.
Something to do in VR that you can't do in real life. Something fun, exciting or an AI adventure tailored just for you based on what the AI knows about you.
> Are you your avatar, or are you puppeteering your avatar? This is a big issue in game design. If someone annoys your avatar, are they annoying you?
I read an interesting article earlier that speaks to this. Ram Dass imagines your ego as the coachman, but he's not in charge. He's the servant of you riding in the coach. Anyway, I thought that connection was interesting. In Ram Dass' view, we are puppeteering our avatar, we are not the avatar.
Some of the stuff that’s done well today (e.g. some of the Oculus originals) I already find to be far more immersive and engaging than sitting 20’ away from a screen on the wall.
I think the tech to make AR mainstream for consumers is still years away, and in the meantime, entertainment in VR is the killer app.
I expect this is where Apple may be the main (only?) threat to Oculus. They have the AppleTV+ studios to turn out great original content, and a core skill set in performant and beautiful mobile devices will killer displays. (Not to mention a lot of brand loyalty with folks already in their ecosystem). We’ll see what the price is though…
The big issue is that VR is meant to be social. I find multiplayer VR a lot more enjoyable than single player VR or multiplayer on other video game platforms.
It is not just what you can do in VR that you can't do in real life but what you can do in VR with missing most of your senses.
I suspect in 50 years people will look at this time in VR as not much different than VRML 20 years ago. Obviously, that was never going to work with the technological limitations of the time.
It is really hard to deliver when the expectation is 'virtual reality'.
For anyone else who was struggling to locate this reference, the author is Bartle, not Battle.
https://www.amazon.com/How-Be-God-Would-Be-Deities/dp/095564...
It's quite weird at the moment how we have a mix of people with completely discordant views about VR: still lots of people viewing it as a failed experiment from 10 years ago, written it off as having no interest and no future ("I have a VR headset; I got bored with it after a few days and now its in the closet" - most tech journalists); vs those who have pretty much factored in that VR will take over and become a mainstream if not dominant computing experience in a meaningful timeframe.
One thing is clear: with Facebook all in on the Metaverse, Microsoft purchasing Blizzard with one of the core stated reasons that it will empower their "metaverse", and Apple on the brink of releasing a VR product - the hype is back and a huge amount of cash is going to get sunk into VR. Whatever that means for the long term, I'm glad it probably will mean there are some short term dollars to propel the fundamental tech along. Whatever happens, it will be fun to play with that.
Agreed. I think the Metaverse will be a niche, but it will soon become a much higher quality niche.
One big reason for this is some strange social stigma surrounding VR. Yes, there are many other issues like cost (minimum $2000 investment for a VR ready PC and headset) and complexity if you’re not using Oculus / Meta. Then there’s also Facebook’s toxic brand, which drives away many early tech adopters; but what if we were able to take them out of the equation?
Anyways, I did an experiment last Christmas. I got several family members Oculus Meta Quest 2 headsets. At the same time Meta was offering a $60 referral credit where both you and the new Quest user would get $60 in store credit.
To summarize, I removed the barrier of monetary cost, and Meta removed the barrier of complexity from VR (ie no wires, or PC setup). None of these people had a bad opinion of Facebook either. What was the result?
They tried the free demos once and stopped using it. It wasn’t until I constantly pestered them, that they actually tried apps with free credits and games and started to understand VR and use it more regularly, namely the fitness and social apps. I even recently talked to Meta contractor who mentioned that she wasn’t interested in a free Quest 2 headset even though she held the company in high regard. I feel for VR marketing teams. Until Apple helps make this mainstream, XR will have a very big hill to climb.
There’s nothing particularly interesting in VR, at least not yet. Most games suck. The ones that don’t are largely stationary with little rotation if at all. There’s a fundamental problem that humans, even when not constrained by space, aren’t very agile, and much less so wearing a vr headset. It still sucks.
I have an index.
VR is a huge paradigm shift. It’s just still in its infancy. Similar to the internet in the mid 1990s.
- Alyx
- Boneworks
- Blades & Sorcery / GORN
- Skyrim / Fallout 4 VR
- Onward, Zero Caliber, Population One, Contractors
- Racket NX
- Minecraft
- Lone Echo
- holopoint
There's really too many games to name, and I can name more. A huge pain point for me prior to getting the Quest 2 was tangled wires from too much turning.
The only games where there's no turning involved are fitness apps like Fit XR and ping pong. Even Beatsaber and SuperNatural have 360 degree levels. Your comment makes me wonder if you've ever used your Index, or if you even own a VR headset because it sounds bizarre.
It’s a thin layer of game design tricks to make you think you’re in something intricate but it’s actually dumb as rocks. The lightning dogs are the peak of this. Even on the hardest difficulty they telegraph their attacks for like… 10 seconds. It’s not clear if it’s possible to dodge it by physically walking 5m. The game wants you to teleport pretty much anywhere to “dodge” it. I don’t blame valve for this. What they almost certainly realized is that humans are incompetent in vr so the enemies need to be dumb as rocks. Not that the AI is bad or anything, but the principles behind their behavior are built for the fact that humans are slow, have low situational awareness, and and especially in vr don’t have a good intuition for where their body is exposed. The electric dogs are still decently challenging. But the limitations on it were incredibly immersion breaking to me, much more than having a helmet benefited.
Superhot solves this the other way by having very short high failure levels and just letting you lose due to human incompetence at your own pace. It works pretty well but it’s not a generalizable strategy for other games. I’m looking to do boneworks next. I’ve never felt wires were a real problem. Mostly because the games I play don’t involve moving around much. I have tried wireless.
I have also done one of those vr domes with a huge open warehouses and multiplayer vr shooters with mild graphics but big gun peripherals. This is the biggest freedom you could possibly have. In my experience playing and watching others, people just slowly walk from place to place, rotate in place, and stand still shooting while monsters get too close and “hit” them because melee attacks feel unintuitive still. They move like they’re an old resident evil tank control character lol.
It was never sold as an open world game so I’m not sure why you’re referencing that.
If you could go to a real virtual gym and lift virtual weights that was no different than lifting real weights, that would be amazing. That would be revolutionary because so many problems would have to be solved.
Instead, the headset has literally solved nothing in the last 30 years. There is a video of Jaron Lanier on youtube showing a vr headset and vr glove in 1990. It could literally be a VR advertisement next year and you wouldn't know the difference.
The fitness apps and communities are real ... there are subscription services with virtual coaches etc. I myself workout at least 45 mins a day. It's the best workout I've ever had - Synthriders, Crazy Kung Fu, Pistol Whip ... they have you dripping with sweat and surprisingly good strength training (as in, my arms are bulking up more than they ever did with actual weights).
And nothing has been solved in 30 years? Do you understand the Quest is a wireless fully stand alone mobile device? Just that alone is a revolution. It does fully controller free hand tracking. It does 6DoF positional tracking with no base stations or external equipment.
I can't really conclude anything other than that you simply have not even looked in real life at modern VR and have no idea what you are talking about.
The only thing absent would be weight lifting. That probably will be integrated with AR and not VR due to safety issues.
> started to understand VR and use it more regularly, namely the fitness and social apps
This is the interesting thing that I observe : beyond the hype there are some genuinely valuable quite mainstream applications. Fitness, e-sports, and virtual monitors being some of the key ones. I regularly use VR for 1-3 hours a day doing these.
The problem is that the hype actually gets in the way of people experiencing those. They all require some skill acquisition or semi-non-trivial setup. So instead of someone getting introduced to VR in the form of one of these more sustainable ways, they are shown a glitzy experience that dazzles them with 3d effects that is interesting for a few minutes but has no longer term value. It's like a sugar hit that lasts a short time but actually leaves you feeling worse afterwards.
I think Facebook et al need to work out how to bridge people between these experiences to make it get more mainstream uptake.
For example there are table tennis apps so realistic that pros use them to train. I will never ever be able to own a table tennis / ping pong table due to lack of space in my house but I can have it with VR. Not only that I don't need to find a comparably skilled player and line up schedules every time I want to play. And just the price of a real a table alone is more than buying a Quest!
So what's the issue? Well these apps intrinsically take a bit of getting used to. There's a specific technique for serving that relies on some use of the controllers that is not hard but not obvious to someone who started using VR 5 minutes ago. So nearly 100% of people fail at using this app first time they play. Very few people can do this well until they've spent a bit of time in VR, getting used to how you can open and close your grip in the right way to pick things up and put them down etc. We may eventually get there with hand tracking etc where this is not such a problem, but its far from that point now.
So this is what I mean when I say, the "cheap" experiences that are easy for people to experience actually work against - in some ways - VR fulfilling its potential, because typically that is all they get shown and they never get a chance to learn to do the more "high value" activities.
Imo the main friction is still mainly the social perception of VR.
Matthew Ball, the venture capitalist, argued last year that the social stigma ended during the pandemic.
People are walking around looking at phone screens while wearing iDweebs hanging out of their ears without being laughed at. VR is just the next step.
As for “iDweebs”, they look fashionable and have been deemed socially acceptable by fashion house Apple. They’re also not some giant, novel monstrosity that covers your face and head; AirPods are new yet familiar. They’re just a hybrid of earrings and headphones.
From my personal experience, the pushback against VR is both subtle and strong and it’s not limited to cost or tech complexity (setup). I mean how do multiple people with no ties to each other in different geographical areas reject free revolutionary hardware?
In the wild, I’ve also repeatedly seen claims that VR sucks made by people who’ve never tried modern VR, to the point where they start fabricating their experience. It’s a strange phenomena. It would be nice to see a more formal study on this. I’m guess that form factor matters, and that mass adoption won’t happen until the headset transitions into a glasses form factor.
There is just not that many situations that a VR headset is a better UI than a hand held computer.
The opposite is actually true. If everyone was using VR headsets then it would be obvious that the hand held computer is the next big thing. You are finally free to not have to wear this goofy headset and still do 99% of what you would have done outside of gaming in VR.
I wonder how he squares that with his enthusiasm for zombie arguments, which purport to show that no mere simulation of a conscious human would have all that is necessary for it to be conscious itself?
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/26/opinion/virtual-reality-s...
An under-specified question meant that there were good arguments for different answers, depending on how the question was interpreted.
In the complementary video supporting the discussion, I found Sanderson's discussion pretty interesting. -- One of the suggested arguments was even "let's take the average of the other answers", although Sanderson wasn't sure if this was meant to be a joke or not. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJyKM-7IgAU
It's very much everywhere now, not just in abstract philosophy like this but even in a lot of real world scenarios like the pandemic. Instead of giving a qualitative narrative and leaving space for human intuition people try to present arguments as more certain than they are by slapping some numbers / models onto them.
Ok, but one cannot do science in virtual reality. Is that not a necessity of "genuine" reality?
(Certainly some science can be done entirely in a virtual world, but I would say definitionally not all of science.)
It's clear that what he seems to be saying is "there is no reason VR won't be an acceptable place to live". Which is fair enough, but that seems like a much weaker claim than that VR could be on par with "genuine reality" as a blanket statement.
I’ve read this kind of article so many times. Great if you have insomnia.
> A historian might study what would have happened if Hitler had chosen not to start a war with the Soviet Union. Scientists might simulate whole universes from the Big Bang onward, with small variations to study the range of outcomes: How often does life develop? How often is there intelligence? How often is there a galactic civilization?
Uh huh.