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Comment by sixQuarks | Hacker News Reader

I'm really surprised at the negative comments regarding VR. It just seems so obvious to me that VR is going to impact the world in a huge way.

Many of you are caught up in the small technical details. Forget about that and look at the big picture. We are finally going to replicate experiences and our brains will really think we're there.

This will have repercussions on things that may not be so obvious right now. Things such as traveling for meetings or entertainment. Why go through the hassle of getting ready, driving through traffic, looking for parking, etc when you can just put on VR equipment and experience the same thing instantly?

I can't say for sure that VR will be as big as I think it will be, but I'm pretty confident that it's an either/or thing. Either it's going to be the most impactful technology since the internet (perhaps greater), or it's going to be a flop. I don't think there will be a middle ground.

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I'm really surprised at the negative comments regarding VR. It just seems so obvious to me that VR is going to impact the world in a huge way.

That seemed really obvious to me in the early 90s, too. I don't mean that to sound dismissive or get-off-my-lawn-ish, just to point out that there's a history of VR overhype which makes skepticism understandable.

I disagree. Back then, the hype was was just random people making those claims. Today, we have some of the most respected voices in the industry verifying that we've hit the magic threshold where you really feel you're in a virtual world.

That's true. This is also a good opportunity for those of us that remember the early days of the Internet. If you believe, as I do, that VR will have a significant impact then today is the equivalent of the pre-Mosaic days of the Internet. The calm before the storm. Anyone creating a business in this space has the opportunity to be the next Jeff Bezos or Marc Andreessen within 10 years. It could all be a nerd's pipe dream, of course that's what they said about the Internet and before that computers in general.

Speaking of lawn, in the early 90s this was an impressive 3D sequence in a movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I33u7P-XokE#t=49 I wasn't sure if I could ever get to enjoy that level of graphics in real time on a home computer.

To think that now I could probably purchase an Oculus and code that myself. Makes me excited to see where we are going from here.

If you tried the best available devices for consumers and the 90s and then the Oculus dev kit, you can see that the latter is way better, even if it isn't in final consumer shape yet

tbf, I was old enough to be aware of the hardware limitations even back then in those Virtuality™ days.

Now though, we're at one of those Singularity-like points of convergence which makes the plausability of mass usage of this kind of tech quite conceivable.

We have the resolution, the processing power, apparently the response times and positional-tracking too. None of these were practicable back in the 90s.

I, for one, am getting a wee damp at the whole idea.

At least the graphics performance and cheap hardware is there now.

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