I think that is the reason why I don't feel anything towards VR headsets. While I am totally into technology, I'm just not interested in games.
Actually, I am not interested in entertainment at all.
I wonder what makes people different, so that some are very much into entertainment and some are not?
This makes no sense to me. You don’t enjoy music? Movies? Books? Dance? Sports? Plays? Museums of any kind?
Have you always been that way? When I was very young I could entertain myself for hours in my backyard looking at shadows and insects.
Books? Loooooove books. But they are usually about the real world. Science, biographies, theories ... I wouldn't call them "entertainment".
Never been much into dancing.
Doing sport is super awesome. But is that really counted as "entertainment"? Or do you mean watching sports? I find watching sports pretty boring.
Plays - whats that?
Museums? Hell yeah! But I never heard someone call museums part of the entertainment industry.
The google definition of entertainment: the action of providing or being provided with amusement or enjoyment.
So reading, museums, and whatever you do for enjoyment is still entertainment.
I used to think this, turns out I was watching bad movies. Use time as a filter and watch old movies by directors that are still talked about (Kubrick, Tarkovsky, etc)
it's like a movie but with real people in real time. you may have heard about something called 'theater'
But I like other things more. Like watching people in a cafe. Gives you more opportunity to join the action :)
Well, there are some good fitness-oriented VR games around. Beat Saber is rad, that's the main one people know about, and there's a bunch of other ones too.
There are a lot of good VR sport apps. I am part of a VR cricket league which I play in every morning before breakfast. It's awesome!
I get a lot of fulfillment in life from fairly mundane things: work, socializing, exercise, reading about whatever niche I am interested in the moment. I don't think it's abnormal either.
I'd be surprised if Apple doesn't lean into that angle with their new headset. Pixel density on phones was a problem before the iPhone 4, and they sold the heck out of the retina display. If Apple can make small text readable in VR they'll enable a whole world of new VR applications.
I understand what you're saying, and I agree, but it's like saying a party is boring because there are no books.
The whole "meta" concept is that you're socializing in VR and it feels as if you're talking to your friend directly. I'm sure the resolution has improved in the new model, but even still, super sharp text isn't as important as you'd think to make the fundamental social use cases work
Lots of people don’t grok this but the endgame for VR/AR is replacing every monitor in every office and home. Probably ditto TVs when every person owns a headset.
It’s going to be a massive game-changer (and a rapid transition) when VR gets good enough to work in.
The question is just whether this is a 5-year timeline or 50. Mark is obviously betting he can get traction in the 5-10 year timeframe.
But I think once the VR headsets get miniaturized a bit more (give it a generation or three) people will laugh when they think about the current models, just like we do about cell phones vs. the first satellite phones that were bigger than your head. At some point these will be as light as a pair of plastic sunglasses or goggles.
There is nothing forcing you to use VR for something like a call, where you don’t currently need a monitor. But I think we’ll see a tipping point where the face tracking gets across the canny valley and people stop saying “you need to meet someone in person to really connect”. At that point VR calls substitute for in-person meetings, not VCs on a screen.
Consider the move to remote work; if we can get a virtual meeting room to feel like whiteboarding in person, including gaze and expression detection, then you could bounce between meeting room with your distributed team and perfect immersive dev setup without leaving your seat.
For the median worker using a monitor I think the requirements to beat monitors are just good enough resolution for spreadsheets/email (we may be there next gen?), comfort (currently the crux), and a decent story on input passthrough (your physical keyboard rendered in VR? Something else? Seems tractable, we just haven’t standardized any options.)
* Headsets will have good enough resolution and be generally comfortable enough to replace monitors for office space.
* There is a solution to the pass through input problem that is acceptable for the average office worker. I don't think there is a solution of the passthrough problem that beats a keyboard/mouse, or even a laptop in a cafe. I think it's more likely the average office worker will accept a worse form of text input given the right conditions.
* It's possible to project a 3d image of myself while wearing a headset that doesn't include the headset and passes the uncanny valley. The uncanny valley is wide, and even AAA video games haven't cleared it yet.
For 2, there are demos already; Immersed (and maybe Meta natively?) has a mode where it recognizes your keyboard (like 2 specific models, prototype) and positions the keyboard in VR. Not good enough for hunt and peck but if you touchtype this works. The Quest 3 seems to have better passthrough so again, this generation will provide a good steer. This one seems pretty easy though.
For 3, if we can do deepfakes we can do 3d photorealistic avatars. Can’t be more than 5-10 years away to render a face in real-time. Unreal already has some crazy tech with MetaHuman that would work here already I suspect, given enough compute.
It's very, very hard to see how VR/AR would be a good replacement for monitors in general, even if it was perfect.
There are maybe some information-radiator type use cases. Probably things like big screens at live events / shows.
But for individual users, I think anything a monitor can do, an endgame AR display can do, and more flexibly.
Why would you (personally, I’m interested in your viewpoint) want a monitor if you had a perfect AR display that you could dismiss into thin air when you didn’t need it, or conjure up a 6-screen dev environment when you did need it? You could put your keyboard and mouse down at any comfortable chair and be as productive as your current dev setup with your optimal monitor count.
(My claim was even stronger than yours, I don’t think they need to be perfect to be better, but since you volunteered it, let’s explore that extreme.)
I’m assuming “perfect” is something completely unnoticeable like lightweight glasses or contacts BTW, and I think there is a bunch of good stuff before perfect.
If that's the case, and if your perception of your real environment is in no way hindered, then I agree -- monitors wouldn't have an advantage.
Short of that, though, I would strongly prefer monitors over VR.
> you can call up arbitrary number of windows anywhere in your visual field?
This is not something I personally would want to do. I want my computer/user interface to be constrained to a specific part of my visual field. Even if it's all in VR, that's how I would use it anyway.
For my part, I think the notion of putting down giant expensive phyiscal rectangles that are geolocked to one physical position just to use computers is going to seem like a quaint artefact of history in a few years.
This aspect is way to early to be touted as something worth 500$ to a regular user.
People have been playing with it - but it's got a ways to go still. I would love working in VR with many, many floating windows all around, instead of contained within the 2 viewing panes in front of me IRL.
Or a collection of retro games could display in mixed reality as if it were real boxed games on a shelf along your real wall.
Or it could be integrated with a smart home control system so you could just point at a light to turn it on.
...And then mothballing it, because they couldn't figure out how to make mountains of money off it.
> I could see Microsoft making this.
The first quoted part is actually similar to part of the old Microsoft BOB concept. Indeed some Later version of Packard Bell Navigator (which was basically a Bob clone) literally had general programs presented as box software sitting on a shelf.
In real life I do not have issues with motion sickness or claustrophobia. Both of these hit me when wearing the headset, particularly the claustrophobia. The nausea was mild but definite.
Even so it was an extraordinary experience, and I may be more excited about the potential of AR than before.
I was really into it ~10 years ago when I was a shut in nerd, back then they were announcing the revolution, fast forward 10 years and literally nothing changed, it's still a gimmick for 99.9% of people.
I wish they would focus more on software rather than making us all wait for their super expensive hardware. And yeah I know it's a whole PC you're buying. But I don't really buy expensive PCs in a form factor that has yet to prove its usability.
Pretending it doesn't exist doesn't help their metaverse ambitions nor their bottom line.
The urban legend is that Betamax eschewing NSFW content lead to their demise in favour of VHS and while that is not entirely true there is certainly some worth to that story.
For PCVR users, there's DeoVR.
Download the videos from PornHub/xvideos/etc., then play in DeoVR.
Only issue is that only a small subset of content is streamable for free.
I remember a long time ago Silicon Graphics used to build Reality Centers. Their best sales pitch was some Oil company was building an Oil rig and using VR they could find - from blueprints - some valves were installed too high and that saved them a lot of money.
I worked for a company that had a software to scan train tunnels for inspection. It was cheaper and quicker than sending technicians there, but the interface -built on PowerBI was a pain. VR could be much better...
... but you need an easy way to build that App.
(btw if someone knows about it, just drop me message)
Dont get distracted by labels. Human talent gets expressed in many ways.
The important skill is to filter the crap.
But I wouldn't call Hacker News part of the entertainment industry.
I guess I'm one step closer to understand how the phrase "play-to-earn" was ever born without being stopped by an interlocuter.