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Comment by dougmwne | Hacker News Reader

I love VR and AR. I think it’s incredible and will eventually replace phones as the primary UI. It’s just too versatile, ambient computing around you all the time, anywhere from a single button to a virtual interactive world.

I think though that the tech won’t exist properly till display tech catches up and can give you 10 times more than the Quest 2 gives in a pair of standard eyeglasses. I think we are two decades off still, so all of Meta’s pioneering efforts are way early.

A pivot into AI and spinning off the VR division would make investors very happy and probably be the best move for the company.

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> It’s just too versatile, ambient computing around you all the time, anywhere from a single button to a virtual interactive world.

I just watched Dan Harmon's new doc on Decentraland[0] and he raises some really good points about the functional impedance that exists in virtual worlds alongside of all of the grifting that currently exists. Grifting aside, so many applications of VR just don't make sense as a direct virtual representation of the world, at that starts with our inner ear our ability to process visual motion without actually moving.

He shows how these virtual storefronts that your character can walk through are much less efficient at actually allowing you to transact as opposed to a search page on an e-commerce site.

I think it's easy to have romantic visions of how a VR world will look in the future. But if it's driven primarily by profit, as all of the most mainstream attempts have so far, it's going to be an empty crypto hell.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiZhdpLXZ8Q

I think the biggest hurdle for VR is being able to use the device for long periods of time. We can view our phones for essentially a full day with some inconvenience, but I can barely stand VR for more than a couple hours without needing to rest my eyes.

Makes a big difference what you're doing. I'm extremely prone to motion sickness but can do vrchat for basically unlimited amounts of time. I think that's because your avatar is mostly synced with your body. That said I can hardly play anything that involves moving your avatar independently of your body, e.g, most games

I hope not. I get extremely motion sick from VR.

That's because VR / AR still has a ways to go. It needs to be indistinguishable from real life (moving your head should have a VR object appear in the same real-world spot without a hint of wavering, lighting/shading, etc). The one thing I don't know how they will solve is changing the optical focal point of an object. Your eyes change focus looking at close items (background becomes blurry) or distance (foreground is blurry). Not sure how to have multiple items on one display that are different focal distances.

How would VR solve the problem with the visual motion not matching motion from the rest of my body? Flight simulator games on a monitor can make me sick.

By not moving the environment around you, placing virtual objects in your real environment is still a compelling use case for VR

That's AR (augmented reality), not VR (virtual reality). :)

In theory an array of tiny, low power lasers in the goggles frame shining into your eyes could detect a focus change. This will be a very challenging engineering problem.

I worked on VR in the late 201x. The motion sickness went away with time, and I stopped getting motion sick as a car passenger.

> A pivot into AI and spinning off the VR

yeah but that would require a vision of something new and AI-based that is actually relevant to the users, and they seem to have trouble in that department.

AR and VR are just a solution in search of a problem right now.

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