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Comment by bigiain | Hacker News Reader

I kinda feel like VR is still in the "Should I get an Amiga? Or an Atari? Or a TRS80? Or a ZX81? Or an Apple II?" stage.

One day it'll end up consolidated into some equivalent of Windows/Mac/Linux, probably categorised into the same sort of "business/professionals", "artists/creatives", and "geeks/tinkerers" approximate major demographics.

If you need some hints about which platform(s) will "win", keep an eye on what I buy. And avoid them. I have a GearVR/S6Edge - on a shelf with my Apple Newton, Sinclair ZX80, and Betamax video recorder. I think perhaps my only technology win is the turntable I bought in 1985 and still use...

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Tangent: You might appreciate the premise of "harbinger customers"[1]. The theory is that there actually are consumers who are a bit out of sync with the collective and do indeed consistently value/buy products that lose out.

I suspect I'm a fellow harbinger. I thought Apple was cool in the 90s and that Microsoft was on to something in the 00s-early 10s (including Win8/Phone), so I'm at least a solid 5+ years off (or, as a positive spin, simply much too early).

[1] https://boingboing.net/2019/12/03/harbringer-of-doom.html)

Thanks!

But:

> Harbinger households tend to be white, suburban and headed by older, less-educated single parents.

Ouch...

> I thought Apple was cool in the 90s and that Microsoft was on to something in the 00s

It's not on my shelf of bad decisions anymore, but in '95 I though I was making the best possible purchase when I bought a Mac 6100 DOS Compatible... A Mac with a daughterboard that had a 486DX2 which ran MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 and later Win95. (I paid $1200AUD for 3 8MB SIMMs for that, so the DOS board didn't;t have to share RAM with the Mac...)

> > Harbinger households tend to be white, suburban and headed by older, less-educated single parents.

Bad at picking products and life partners.

Sounds like high school me buying a zen creative and a zune because they were "better than iPods" and hating iPhones when they came out because physical keyboards would always be superior.

I still agree with your high school inner child. I never made a single apple purchase in my life and I'm glad I never fell for the marketing.

Marketing and peer pressure! See how punished you've been here for expressing a dissenting opinion!

Frankly I hate on-screen keyboards. Wish phones were a little smaller but fatter with physical keyboards.

Are you really willing to trade all that screen real estate?

I'd buy a iPhone with a slide-out keyboard—a la the HTC Dream/G1 [1]—in a heartbeat. I'm happy with the onscreen keyboard for simple things like a quick search or message, but I also really want the option for a proper, physical keyboard any time I need to dig in and write something in depth. Bonus points for slider style devices like the G1 because you still got the "full size" screen, without having to sacrifice on keyboard size either; it really was the best of both worlds, and it's still my favorite device form factor I've ever used.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Dream

That article brings back memories - I had a HTC Desire Z which had a sick slide out mechanism. That was also my first smartphone!

I remember it was great for emulation of SNES and GBA games because of its physical keyboard.

I loved my Motorola Droid. Tiny phone (3.7" screen took up the whole body !) with a slide out full qwerty keyboard. If someone was crazy enough to make it today with a snapdragon I'd be all over it. Choice quote from this review to show how 2009 it was:

> The Motorola Droid on Verizon is the first device to feature Google Maps Navigation. It’s a completely free service that offers 3D maps with voice guided turn-by-turn directions. The VZ Navigator available on most Verizon Wireless phones costs an additional $10 a month for use. A decent turn-by-turn direction App on the iPhone sells for a one time fee of nearly $80-$100. On the other hand Google Maps Navigation is entire free and is offers a lot more.

https://skatter.com/2009/11/motorola-droid-verizon-review/

Astro Slide? https://store.planetcom.co.uk/products/astro-slide

Peculiar device, I like it! Reminds me more of my Vaio C1 I had back in 2001, great laptop, got itself in the movies :)

http://www.starringthecomputer.com/computer.html?c=64

Just in case anyone reading this is considering purchasing the Astro Slide... be very wary. I backed the Indiegogo campaign over 2 years ago, still nothing. The wait isn't the issue here (COVOD and the related supply chain issues are real, I get that), but the major lack of transparency from PlanetCom is abysmal. A quick read of a few pages of the comments on the Indiegogo campaign page gives you a pretty clear picture of how many of the backers feel...

You might be interested in this https://www.fxtec.com/pro1x

They are shipping soon after many delays.

> physical keyboards would always be superior.

And they still are. I hate virtual keyboards, it's just a terrible experience. It requires a lot of attention, has low accuracy and features like swipe are too unreliable that I find them useful in the long run.

Multi lingual swipe works just fine on my iPhone with Google keyboard. If it is not it's just because I get too comfy and lazy, not actually "spelling" the words properly. With the dawn of on device language models I believe the typing experience will get even better in the upcoming years.

Language models and dictionaries will always be incomplete and out of date.

I just don't like being slowed down by a clever feature not working as expected and so for me a physical keyboard simply cannot be replaced. It always feels like a fragile crutch otherwise.

The only claim which I am making is that the p(word|swiped pattern) is inferior to p(word|swiped pattern, previous words).

Speaking of reliability, I suspect that screen keyboards are much more reliable than physical ones for a pocket device such as a phone or tablet. Much worse in usability and feel (if we ignore their ability to easily reconfigure to the task, such as a dedicated numpad where it makes sense), but likely more reliable as long as you don't break your screen, as there's less mechanical parts to break.

Based on my experience with a Blackberry phone I'd say the average physical keyboard lasts significantly longer than the phone's update support.

Sure it's got mechanical parts but reliable switches are not rocket science. Now analog sticks are a different story apparently.

> hating iPhones when they came out because physical keyboards would always be superior.

I mean you're not wrong. They're just sl8ghtly more expensive

What do you think the next big thing it? What product segments and companies look really promising?

If the correlation turns out accurate, that would explain why marketers use every possible tactics to collect data about who we are and what we purchase, as it could give them an indicator of which product will fail. Such profiling is already done for targeted advertising, although this way it means buyers are also finely categorized including data about their political orientation and other sensitive aspects of their life.

ps. I like a lot Cory Doctorow's articles; also Boing Boing was among my favorite sites in the early 2k; I'm saddened to see what it has become today: mostly a shop for overpriced crap. Suffice to say that after noticing my account was terminated during my long hospitalization in late 2020 with no warnings given, I didn't create another and removed the site from my bookmarks.

The Zune was one of the nicest pieces of tech I've ever owned, and nothing anyone says will convince me otherwise.

Did you manage to squirt a random Zuner in public transport?

Oh yeah. The soft-touch casing that still hasn't degraded and the d-circle were the peak of ergonomic satisfaction.

Thought Iridium would really be a good investment. Same with the JAZ drive.

You can count me in that group. I'm that guy who bought weird Toshiba and Archos MP3 players because they supported USB mass storage. I am now buying a Unihertz Pocket, a QWERTY phone in 2022.

I'd be beating down their door if they offered a model that swapped the keyboard for a d-pad, circle pad, and buttons.

It seems like Apple waits to see what other people do and then come out with a product that works for normal people. When I see Apple come out with iVR, then I will start to believe that VR might actually go mainstream.

VR works for me today, for what I use it for. What on earth does it mean to "work for normal people"?

I think what he is trying to say is, that different companies experiment with a concept (for example, what business phone or touch screen phone were 20 years ago) Apple is observing that and when the moment is right will launch it's own product (iPhone).

When it works for hundreds of people, if not billions of people.

That's what "normal people" means.

They might have a hard time with this one. Maybe the 3k price tag means they will release something with close to the processing power of a PC but I doubt it. Most of that cost is probably in the display they’re using plus the brand. That’s going to have a hard time competing with existing headsets that can tether to a gaming PC. The price alone will put them in a niche market where they’ll be competing with Varjo and Pimax which already have products with equivalent or better displays. Apple would have the advantage of being standalone but that is also a big disadvantage when it comes to gaming or wanting to upgrade hardware.

Nah, they'll just cripple the graphics, gaslight everyone into claiming it's better, strongarm tmsc into giving them exclusive access to the next node, and then claim that their gpu design is literal magic.

Plus it will probably break if you get a hair stuck in it or accelerate at over 0.1g, and everyone will blame the user for wearing it wrong when it happens.

VR is the "supersonic jet airliner" of computing. It will never be a thing. Give it a rest, sometimes technology is complete and doesn't need to be "disrupted" anymore.

Sorry, you’re wrong on this. If you’ve actually spent significant time on the hardware and software that is getting it right then you would know. The problem is that there is a lot of experimental hardware and software getting it wrong but that’s to be expected in the early stages of any new technology. Go find someone that has a good VR setup which is either a valve index or a quest 2 connected to a high end gaming PC and play a few rounds of Pavlov on the weekend when everyone is online. Check out habie147 on YouTube for some decent reviews of good VR games.

Flying the Concorde was also really sweet, I heard people tell. That's not the point. I'm sure the technology for VR is kickass and the games are great, but nobody wanted or asked for "disruption" in the videogame space. (Except people who get a rush of "disrupting" things for "disruption"'s sake.)

>I'm sure the technology for VR is kickass and the games are great, but nobody wanted or asked for "disruption" in the videogame space.

Nobody ever asked for disruption... that's why it's called disruption. But it turns out that VR never really disrupted games anyways. It just created a new category. Most people don't care about VR and have just continued playing normal games that are already expensive enough. VR has just added to the pie, not taken a slice.

Games are only the surface here but for me at least VR games are the only ones I play now. My steam library had been gathering dust for a few years since I had started to see the endless grind of modern games as nothing but a time sink, they had lost their flavour.

With VR and multiplayer it’s opened an entirely new world of immersive and emergent gameplay. I’ve had more fun playing silly custom maps in Pavlov than I’ve had in decades of traditional gaming.

I wouldn’t call VR a disruptor so much as a replacement for current displays and an addition of a new form of human interface device. People will probably still play pancake games in 10 years time using a keyboard and mouse or a game controller but they’ll be wearing a headset so they can have their game displayed at whatever size and fov they find optimal. There will also be a huge number of VR games and gamers and probably also a lot of mixed games where you can play in either VR or on a (virtual) screen.

>VR is the "supersonic jet airliner" of computing. It will never be a thing.

Someday VR will be there. It's not physically impossible. Supersonic passenger travel will never be efficient because aerodynamic drag exists. VR just needs a few generations of slimming down the hardware, innovating on control input, and streamlining the software. In 20 years we'll probably be in a place where eyeglass form factor full FOV AR/VR is a thing.

At this point it's easier to solve aerodynamic drag than it is to continue making hardware slimmer.

It's like 3D video, it has come back 3 times in my life time, "this time for real " and it always ends up being a fad.

I still think that while VR wont get mainstream, AR will deffinitely do.

> I kinda feel like VR is still in the "Should I get an Amiga? Or an Atari? Or a TRS80? Or a ZX81? Or an Apple II?" stage.

Exactly, we are still in early days for VR. Many of the annoying things will get better.

You needed an Amiga to play Dactyl Nightmare back in the day,IIRC.

That and “Altered State”

And lets face it, none of the other platforms ever had a Guru Meditation Error

It caught on later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation#Legacy

As a reminder for people reading this, the TRS80 & co came out around 1977. PCs reached ubiquity around 1995-1997, I would say (mass introduction in offices and schools around the world - not only in developed countries; mass purchases for at home, both for work/homework and for fun). So that would mean around 20 years.

And back then we had Moore's Law on our side.

So truly mainstream VR might be 20+ years from now.

so what’s on your wishlist right now?

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