What I mean when I say "I think VR is bad news" | Hacker News Reader

What I mean when I say "I think VR is bad news"

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119 pointsjonbaer34 comments

I think there's a good discussion to be had about what the future of VR means to advertising-based social networks, even if I don't share the authors cynicism.

I think their argument about the technology is batty though. It's the same argument that gets made every time a new creative medium is created. People making early motion pictures were basically filming plays, it took a while before the specific affordances of the medium become realized.

I fully expect that there will initially be a lot of shitty VR games. First there'll be existing games "re-skinned" to have VR support, and they'll mostly be terrible. Then there will start to be games that are designed specifically for VR. And most of those will be terrible too. But eventually game designers will discover what makes VR attractive as a platform, and generations of game developers will be born into a world where VR is actual practical tech; and they will make wonderful things.

The first generations of "tablet-optimized" games are awful too. Developers spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to superimpose a control pad on a touch screen that doesn't have any feedback (and obscures the screen when you use it). There will eventually be games for tablets that make use of the benefits of tablets (I think there's actually already a few of those).

I don't know what is so special about VR tech that would preclude that same thing from happening.

>I think their argument about the technology is batty though. It's the same argument that gets made every time a new creative medium is created.

I'm not too off put by that argument, as there are plenty of technologies that have high hopes, but have always been 20 years away because it frankly the experience just sucks, or the problem is harder than anyone actually understands. Such as, 3D Pictures/TV, Paper-thin displays, Graphene Transistors.

Sure I'd love to eat my hat on most of these, but as some of these technologies are, they still just suck or don't provide a good enough experience to upgrade over the less-tech experience.

I'd agree completely, but your timing is off. We're several years into what I'd call "tablet-first" gaming (I would nominate 2011's Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery as the standard-bearer) and there is a good handful of (mostly independent) games in development that are indeed "VR-first," such as the atmospheric thriller Technolust or even the major-studio space combat title EVE: Valkyrie.

Well as far as mmorpgs go, the point isn't to sell ads. The point is to get customers hooked up and then gradually make them more frustrated so that they have to pay real money to alleviate the frustration.

I see someone has played SW:TOR recently (or something like it). It's shocking seeing my brother go through the exact same motions. Much like myself several years ago, beat for beat. Also surprising that it's so much worse. Much more aggressive with punishment of non-payers. To the point of the game design being egregiously jeopardised to make the game simply unbearable. Being quite committed at this point, you cave into this user-hating community of managers abusing design. All for the sake of selling subs.

If the future truly was anything like this, I would want out, too. Just awful.

Their argument about the technology is perfectly fine in their personal context. The point at which it gets batty is when they presume every single person is like them and will suffer the same consequences.

Personally, I feel terrified any time someone raises an argument resting upon the idea of homogeneous people. I'm me and you're you. You don't like VR and find it isn't for you. That's fine. There's this plant I can't eat - I'm not allergic, it just tastes awful to me. They say it's good for you, but I just can't stand it. I also can't socialize around sports - the kind where you sit down in front of a large screen and watch a game, whether at home or in an establishment serving food and drinks. I've never been able to understand this model. Of course that's the problem - you can't understand it, you just get it or you don't. And I don't. So I don't do that.

I do like MMORPGs though. I've made a lot of friends who I know just by their self-picked handle. For some of them I don't even know what they look like at all. I've met with a few of them though, they're nice.

Spending 5 or 6 hours per day in a virtual world might be bad for you. Or it might be all right for you. Depends on the precise you. It's definitely not "wrong", in a moral or legal sense (IANAL, IMBW). It's wrong when you give up on someone, or let them down, or tell a lie, or desert them ... when you hurt them.

The one thing you can say about all people is that they're different. When you look at them, they look all the same, but the more you look, the more different they are. Kind of like grains of sand.

further reading/tl;dr:

http://xkcd.com/1314/

http://xkcd.com/1311/

http://xkcd.com/1289/

http://xkcd.com/603/

http://bit.ly/U7tyNe

So let me get this straight, you have some cynicism towards the future of VR, which is a new platform. But you are an engineer at Valve, in on the ground floor of the platform, putting you in the top 0.001% of people who could possibly have an impact on the long term way it plays out. And you quit? Seems like you have given up before the battle has even started.

Fabian isn't a Valve engineer. He's an engineer at RAD who was contracted out to Valve. His beliefs are utterly sincere. He once threatened to quit RAD on the spot when he found out the main sales guy had gone to a predominantly military-oriented simulation conference. If you accept his sincerity as a premise, your suggestion is akin to saying that someone should continue working on an engineering project with inevitable and uniquely terrible military applications because they are in on the ground floor and should be able to influence future directions. Has that ever worked?

I share some of his concerns but not all his conclusions. Where I agree with him unanimously is in being extremely concerned about amoral engineers who are blithely pro-technology. The only thing scarier to me than an amoral engineer is an evangelical engineer for whom technological progress is not morally neutral but morally good.

I dispute the author's point that the end goal of VR for most developers is the "optimal MMORPG" or whatever you want to call it. I think most VR developers and users are actually more focused on immersive experiences that weren't possible without a headset.

AR (including wearables that are not connected directly to vision) is almost surely a better medium for non-entertainment experiences, with the possible exception of teleprescence, such as computer applications or operating systems. And as the author implied, AR doesn't necessitate a complete withdrawal from the outside world for use. So I think games are the main context that people will use VR in.

I also think the race condition between AI good enough to make VR more compelling than the real world in any case and VR good enough to become mainstream is heavily weighted towards VR: we will be seeing commercial VR headsets in the homes of non-early adopters within 3 years. My guess is any kind of life-replacing game would have to involve incredibly advanced conversational AI and/or human interaction at a fidelity orders of magnitude better than we have available right now in the context of games. And even genuine human social interaction would have to somehow be way more interesting normal, real life conversations.

I think by the time VR content compelling enough to replace a user's real life rolls around, we will have developed social structures to deal with the implications of VR. That's why I'm optimistic about things like the Oculus, from the perspective of a potential user and developer of VR games that are more focused on personal narratives than an expansive, life-encompassing MMORPG.

As someone who stayed at home as a kid playing text-only MUD games and chatting on IRC, I think your minimum requirements for interactions in VR is way too high.

I'm talking about requirements for societal collapse. I'm aware Warcraft et al have millions of happy users.

Sure, but requiring $500,000 worth of computer equipment for two people to play creates more jobs and is good for the economy! Especially when you keep pulling it off the table with the cables attached to your head that's blind to the real world.

tldr: I think VR is bad news because it will become the ad-infested oppressive MMORPG version of the cyberpunk future written about in books like Snowcrash, and not the idealized romanticized version that you remember reading about in books like Snowcrash.

The VRs of Snowcrash and Neuromancer were ad infested. It would be silly to believe that any system that gets used by millions or billions of people wont have ads. But no one's going to use VR if the ads are ultra annoying. The author doesn't mention what exactly he thinks VR ads would look like.

What is annoying? The level of intrusive advertising that the median North American is subjected to now is annoying to me, as someone born about 40 years ago.

So, no, the ads won't be annoying to people who have been slowly conditioned to think the ads aren't annoying. It's valid to ask whether we, now, want that or not.

Also this:

> It would be silly to believe that any system that gets used by millions or billions of people wont have ads.

Why? Given our current assumptions, perhaps, but why can't we try to innovate socially, as well as technologically?

Better TL;DR: cyberpunk is awful, and its tropes should be taken as a guide for what to avoid. Unfortunately, some small number of highly enthusiastic people in the tech industry haven't noticed they're the only ones who actually wanted to live in a cyberpunk novel.

This doesn't make sense because the current successful business model for MMORPGs is subscription fees, not advertisement.

If VR really gets traction it's probably just a matter of time until Facebook releases a Second-Life-like MMO VR platform tied in with their social network. There will always be good MMORPGs that are subscription fee based, but the majority of VR experiences will be ad-supported with paid premium options.

Here's some real problems I've had with it after using the Rift for over a year. Many of these things can ultimately be addressed in software (e.g. no use of your phone? mirror it or just use something like google voice):

It is more immersive than the movies. This is awesome, but also terrifying. When you sit down on your couch to play a game, do you want to be as restricted as you are when you go to the movies? Well, you are more restricted. You can't look at your phone and keep up with friends. Fine in a two hour movie you've been looking forward to, but in the game you are going to log 200 hours in this year?

You can't take a sip of your drink without learning what it means to be blind.

The movies are a bit more unforgiving in other areas--you have to block out time and get in your car and travel. But with Oculus what you end up doing is things like taking off the googles to give your long neglected and probably creeped-out-at-no-eye-contact dog some attention. Then when you put them back on, they fog up. You take them off and breath on them to get them up to the ambient temperature near your face so there won't be more condensation and wipe them off. Put them back on and opps, grease from your forehead just got on the lenses; back off again. Wipe them down, and finally back on. Sort of it's own car trip.

If you have a young kid or baby you will be seriously alienating to them and probably scar them by neglecting an internal drive for eye contact and attention. You might be pretty neglectful due to normal TV and web browsing, but this is going to bring it to a whole new level. So, many people will have to choose between making limited use of the tech or being seriously abusive towards and retarding development of their young children.

CastAR seems to solve almost all of the problems. Something like it, or pseudo-holographic displays (just a normal 3d display, with headtracking, perspective correct 3d, etc. It is a far superior experience to 3DTV viewing or gaming, which is usually viewed at the wrong field of view for the content, and goes wonky and immediately breaks the illusion with any head movement, especially tilting).

Something like a 60" 4K curved LCD with lightboost allowing shutter glasses to be "open" more than 90% of the time, and thus not darken your vision or obscure eye contact is where I think the sweet spot will be for a while for having a serious workspace/playspace, when combined with accurate low latency headtracking. Panels fast enough for lightboost currently have bad viewing angles, but if you are tracking the users head you can just correct a lot of it with a simple shader. If systems like CastAR can get the resolution up they are even better, because two people can use the same surface at once and get the correct view. If the above setup sounds underwhelming, remember that Oculus is initially targeting a seated experience.

Full-VR approaches will start to overcome a lot of the issues once they can track your eyes facial expressions, give you an optional overlaid view of the real world from high field-of-view cameras on the headset. At that point you still can't make extended use of it if you have a baby or toddler or pet (or staunch non-participant) that you care about, but plenty of people could make it work and have very social lives. I completely disagree with the author's cynicism about something like a shared virtual world being a terrible thing.

If for one reason or another some business strategy involving heavy network-effect lock-in does arise and all development efforts, content, and friends are drawn into one fascist dystopian system, yeah we're fucked. But I don't see the path there (even assuming Facebook currently has John Carmack unknowningly working towards some kind of bizarro-world metaverse), and this guy didn't really lay it out for me.

(one extra thought after having left a job a few months back... the downsides of VR I outlined sound suspiciously like the downsides of a typical desk job...)

I don't understand why you're being down-voted for giving other examples of why VR might be bad in response to an article about why someone else thinks VR is bad.

Because VR good! Microsoft bad! Ruby good! Oracle bad!

No, but seriously, VR is still in the hype stage, which means a lot of people made up their minds whether it will be good or bad years ago based mostly on emotion. They won't be swayed at this point.

Seems like most of your issues with it are to do with the particular implementation, which I can agree with. I'd wager that as the tech gets more mature, a lot of these issues will be solved.

VR goggles are like headphones. I might be devoting much of my sense of hearing to them, but not all of it. I'll still be able to hear if someone knocks on my door, prompting me to take them off. As the VR goggles tech gets smaller, this will become more convenient.

The neglecting parents probably won't hear their baby knocking, but I'd argue the VR goggles don't make a difference here. This is an issue of bad parenting. When you have a child it means you choose to devote a lot of your time to them, and VR isn't any exception. Just because you put on some fancy goggles that make yourself blind and deaf doesn't excuse you from taking care of them. You have to choose between making limited use of the tech and caring for your children. Then again, isn't that true for almost everything about your life after having a child?

Ironically, VR is a lot like leaving your house. It makes you unavailable to everyone in the house, like going to see a new movie. No sensible parent would leave their baby alone if they went to see a movie, at least not without someone else to watch on them while gone.

Of course you don't actually leave the house completely, so we could develop tech that can help detect and notify you if there's something urgent in the real world that needs your attention, but this won't help bad parents who don't care, because in their eyes the baby is only a distraction. They'd probably just disable those features.

regarding taking them off being an issue, I would presume eventually we'll have headsets you can flip up, like those flip up sunglasses people sometimes have.

Technical Illusions will supposedly have this for CastAR by using fairly new freeform optics techniques (AR/VR clip-on, don't think it has been demoed):

http://technical-illusions.myshopify.com/collections/frontpa...

If it can deliver on the low-distortion, it has a major advantage over Oculus. The distortion correction for the Rift currently requires you draw to an intermediary render target about 1.5X the resolution of the screen. This throws away a lot of pixels and has a huge performance penalty, and the geometry-shader approaches to avoiding the penalty that were attempted so far haven't worked out.

There is no reason we need to be stuck in a giant interactive advertisement controlled by a large company. We will have multiple competing open platforms taking advantage of VR in many ways.

But good warning. We do need to start focusing on those open VR platforms rather than waiting around for Facebook to launch the Adverse.

Another big part of that is making sure that we have open standards rather than being locked in to Oculus or Control VR etc. or being stuck with whatever platform comes with a particular device.

I am hoping to see Oculus clones and modified versions of Linux Mint or CoreOS or whatever that boot to a type of holodeck with nice APIs for taking advantage of VR in open application programming environments.

So copy Oculus and fuck patents. Also copy Janus VR and anything else cool and start evolving it while at the same time standardizing on certain things.

There is no giant company that can ruin VR unless we decide to let them.

Funny, I'm of the complete opposite view. I cannot wait for the day when that ultimate VR MMORPG comes. Sure, some of them may be owned by unscrupulous companies, and some may be intrusive or filled with ads, but eventually there will be a good VR MMO game by a good company, and it will be enormously successful and entertaining.

Here are three goals for "good VR" from David Levitt, with whom I work at Pantomime Corporation, and who used to work on VR at VPL:

http://pantomimecorp.com/pantomime-technology/virtual-realit...

When Pantomime co-founder Levitt was a research scientist and product manager with VPL Research, the inventors of virtual reality, they had three prerequisites for a VR system:

1) a way to reach in, in 3D

2) shared reality — support for multiple users and viewpoints

3) graphically and physically realistic worlds

VPL offered a DataGlove to provide 3D input, while its flagship Reality Built for Two VR product offered networked multi-person worlds. Expensive graphics computers and custom hardware brought the full 1992 price to $500,000, which only a few huge corporations could afford.

When Dr. Levitt joined VPL, thanks to an amazing infrastructure by lead VPL engineer Chuck Blanchard, he added realistic gravity, collisions, and throwing a ball into the VR system for physical realism.

But two decades later, the public and technologists have become so impatient that the new systems calling themselves VR have punted even on the core original criteria.

Head-mounted systems like the Oculus Rift offer no way to reach in. In demos, visitors twiddle a 1980s style game joystick. And users don’t natively network — in an Oculus demonstration you don’t see the other users in the VR world — not even the other players sitting alongside you in the demo.

David asked Facebook’s VP of Infrastructure Engineering Jay Parikh this revealing question about Facebook's acquisition of Oculus VR:

http://pantomimecorp.com/2014/06/10/facebook-vp-to-pantomime...

David Levitt: "I work in Virtual Reality, and everyone’s wondering what you can say about your acquisition of Oculus VR. In particular, I’ve had demos of it: I could look around but I couldn’t reach in. Do you have solutions for that that you can talk about?"

Jay Parikh: “You can’t interact with anything. These are big, hard problems … what you do with your hands, because you can’t do anything with your hands — or it’s hard to be using a controller when you can’t see your hands and you have the goggles on — these are problems we have to solve in a good and seamless way.”