John Carmack Q&A
fortune.com
fortune.com
On one hand it certainly makes sense from a mass adoption perspective, if you can make it work on a mobile you immediately have the biggest computing audience in the world.
However I have to assume that there is a ton of time spent on things that just would not be issues if it were hooked up to a full fledged PC. Work in reducing power consumption, increasing framerates, etc, are all efforts that could instead be spent on the actual VR experience instead.
There's probably just too much legacy technology on the pc to make it work plus all the latency of driving the display. A self contained mobile solution that can be qa'd at the factory may be the only way to go.
Makes me wonder what it would take to graft the positional tracking from the DK2 onto something like Samsung Gear.
We've reached the amazing time when a serious VR-capable computer is, screen included, a half-inch thick and wide enough to cover your field of view. Just strap it and some thin optics to your face, and you don't have to worry about yanking your computer off your desk.
Yeah, been there done that. Having to constantly remember the wire does detract from the experience.
I got a GTX 970 for graphics. (Which is so big it won't let me close the case BTW)
I wonder if the 980 would make that much of a difference, or if the i7 is that different. You'd think CPU wouldn't matter so much, and I did get high speed memory.
There are very few companies on earth that can make the displays Oculus needs, and make them affordable. Manufacturing their own, or paying someone else to get up to speed on doing so, would cost an incredibly painful sum. $500 million still doesn't get you the displays they need without a company like Samsung behind it.
If you want the displays to be $100 or $150 of the total cost of the hardware, there are only two or three companies that can do it.
I think I know why you're confused. Carmack has personally been focused 100% on mobile. So all the interviews with him are mobile mobile mobile. But they have a lot of people working on a lot of things. Mobile is one of several pieces to the puzzle.
Now, go ahead and name some non-gaming uses of CV1. I bet you can't come up with anything compelling, like something that an average person might want to spend hundreds of dollars to get.
It sounds like you're handwaving that away as not a big deal. But if it isn't intended solely for games, then what is it intended for? What will people do with it? Movies are a social experience, and anyone who has ever cuddled while watching a love story will attest. Nobody in that situation will put on a cyborg headset to watch the movie. That's both a gimmick and a dangerous distraction from delivering on Oculus's real potential.
Hilariously, the Oculus might be the ultimate way to watch porn. That's one of the few non-gaming activities I could imagine someone being willing to drop $hundreds for. But if it's a glorified porn box, then that's an unfortunate outcome compared to what it could have been: a revitalization of the gaming industry at large.
False. I own a DK2, which I regularly show to other non-gamers. It always blows their mind and they immediately start considering possible applications in their fields (film, medicine, architecture, dataviz, installation art, etc). I've even gotten people to introduce it to their coworkers and bosses to consider using it in some capacity.
It's also obvious that you haven't used any of the Oculus headsets, but on the off-chance that you're willing to accept that you are coming from a position of ignorance, I can answer all the questions you've posed (I'm a early Kickstarter backer and have/have used the DK1, DK2, Gear VR and the Crescent Bay (CV1-quality) prototype, and have been closely following both the dev forums and /r/oculus for the past couple years.)
* Yes, the DK1 Kickstarter was "wildly successful," selling over 6,000[1] units. Oculus would go on to produce somewhere around 60,000 DK1 units. Those numbers aren't anything to sneeze at - it's probably the most successful production run of VR headsets in history, however it will be dwarfed by the future/potential market by several magnitudes.
Gaming is a logical initial target because you have a niche of users that already have powerful 3D graphics rigs (and that are willing to regularly pony up hundreds or thousands of dollars for their hobby) as well as the most robust community of developers w/ the skillset (and motivation) for developing real-time 3D interactive experiences. From the earliest interviews/discussions, there's been recognition that gaming is a foothold, but that VR's potential is far wider reaching - in this case, you're the one projecting a historical rewrite. Ask anyone on MTBS3D, or from the initial KS backers and you'll hear the same things.
Yes, there are some fantastic gaming experiences to be had. Elite, Darknet, Vox Machinae, etc are awesome - they are out/will be out when CV1 rolls around (along with tons of other indie and AAA titles). However, even as a gamer, having experienced some of what other things that VR can do, I'm pretty sure that gaming, certainly core gaming, will be a much smaller subset of usage than you probably imagine:
1) Having run through the Crescent Bay "experience" demos, I'm reasonably sure that a large number of geeks/tech/AV afficionados with disposable income would drop ($1000-1500 [cost of a headset and sufficiently powerful PC]) simply to have those experiences available. They're that good. Demoing the DK2 to people, a fair amount of them don't care for shooting things, but they're blown away by experiential demos like Titans of Space or Sensa Peso.
2) Panoramic (and pano-stereoscopic) photos and videos are extremely compelling in VR. Even just for legacy media consumption, it will probably be worthwhile to plunk down a couple hundred dollars for people who do much traveling to have a virtual cinema experience. Watching 2D/3D movies in a virtual theater is surprisingly good, certainly better than a seat-back screen on a plane, but the 3D panoramic stuff is on another level. There's a reason companies like JauntVR are getting $30M in funding. I don't know why you'd be so dismissive of it.
2a) This also ignores a whole the whole other subset of VR telepresence - in the same way that Skype and Facetime have changed things, how do you think it'll change things when Grandma can virtually experience a child's birthday party from across the country? There are a number of virtual experiences that become a lot more appealing with increased immersion.
3) My personal fav use case, and IMO one that will probably eventually (in the next 5 years) sell more headsets than gaming will be productivity-related usage. Once resolutions hit 4-8K (CV2-CV3), you will have the equivalent arc-resolution of traditional HD screens, but you know, anywhere you look. If you can't connect the dots there, I won't bother.
4) Built-in eye tracking will add expression tracking. VR will probably be a lot more social than you think, especially once you experience how convincingly present avatars are in VR (one of the most memorable Crescent Bay demos is a personal encounter with a small ET-like alien that tracks your movement and gazes back at you - it's uncanny).
These applications barely scratch the surface - just about any potential niche/market will use VR in the same way that they've adopted "mobile" or "PCs."
Gaming will be changed by VR, yes, but due to the economics of modern AAA game-making, the large publishers will only commit to creating VR games once the user-base is in the millions[2]. Even then, traditional video-game mechanics (even basic things like locomotion, character/object interaction, UIs) simply don't translate directly into VR. Either way, the broader the push, the better for gaming it'd be, so your expectations/assumption of a game industry revitalization wouldn't hold in your scenario anyway. If you've seen the surge in mobile/indie gaming, I'd say the game industry revitalization has been doing just fine and will happen on VR (as a new medium) regardless as long as the dev environment stays open, which it has.
I know it's a common thing to see here on HN, but I honestly wonder when people have such strong opinions and try to make such emphatic arguments based on assumptions that seem so off-base, and honestly, rather close-minded/unimaginitive.
[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1523379957/oculus-rift-...
[2] http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/03/20/gdc-1-million-vr-sale...
Your comment is a strange combination of mistaken and a rehash of what I've previously said. For example, I was an original backer of Oculus. It's sitting right next to me, in fact. I speak from experience, rather than from breathless fanboyism.
Telepresence has been tried. It fails. Oculus won't succeed either. Why not? Because humans value eye contact. Your Oculus won't have that, and hence it will fail for that reason.
Nobody places any weight on social interactions through VR because we can't simulate what a person actually looks like. Rendering is a crude approximation of reality. It looks noting like reality, in fact. Especially when it comes to facial features and animation. Ever read Snow Crash? You know how one of the characters was famous for developing the killer feature of the VR experience? The feature was near-perfect facial expressions, along with low latency responses, i.e. time between the user making a facial expression and that expression being projected into the VR world. It's no coincidence that the author of Snow Crash spent at least a few paragraphs explaining why this was so critical: It's absolutely crucial for immersive social experiences, and that feature is literally impossible with our current technology and rendering capabilities. Nobody anywhere knows how to make your face appear into a VR world in a convincing way.
3) My personal fav use case, and IMO one that will probably eventually (in the next 5 years) sell more headsets than gaming will be productivity-related usage. Once resolutions hit 4-8K (CV2-CV3), you will have the equivalent arc-resolution of traditional HD screens, but you know, anywhere you look. If you can't connect the dots there, I won't bother.
This makes no sense. 8K pixels? If I were a rude person like yourself, I'd take this opportunity to make a cutting remark like "You must not be very familiar with graphics programming, heh!" But I'm not the type of person to make baseless assumptions like that. Instead, I invite you to do some arithmetic about the performance characteristics of pushing 60 images per second at 8k resolution. The technology simply doesn't exist for pushing that many pixels. Not unless you're suggesting strapping on a backpack with a portable power source plus a beefy GPU.
On the other hand, if you're suggesting 8k pixels for the desktop version, then that might be possible. However, the concept of a "productivity-related feature" implies that you're talking about personal productivity, like exercise, or something, which doesn't really make sense for the desktop version. It's hard to know, since your comment was light on detail and heavy on handwaving.
Look, I appreciate that you put a lot of work into your comment, but you have a very shall we say positive outlook about what Oculus will ultimately achieve. Here's an alternate reality: Oculus V1 will fail to deliver anything that consumers initially wanted except gaming, and hopefully that gaming experience will be enough to offset the huge losses that Facebook incurred by spending so much time developing features that people neither care about nor are feasible, like telepresence. Not that Facebook is hurting for cash.
Do a search for research on "avatar eye-gaze" and look at the developments in consumer gaze tracking technology by Tobii and others if you want to understand why I and others are optimistic about VR telepresence.
As for your objections on resolution, while 8K 60Hz 4:2:2 8-bit clocks in at about 32Gb/s, 2x4K would fit comfortable under the HDMI 2.0 spec. 4K alone btw gets you to to 20 pixels/degree arc-density at 110 degree HFOV, which is perfectly cromulent for all kinds of use-cases, but as an expert on such matters, I'm sure you are fully aware of all of this already.
But: I think gaming won't actually be the 'break-through' application which brings in the masses, but instead recorded or live short 'movie experiences', stuff like helmet camera recordings from base jumpers or parachuters, or those crazy Russian kids who climb sky scrapers. A VR Google Street view where you can explore distant places, or 360 degree Rover material from Mars, a 360 degree camera attached to the outside of the ISS. All those small viral videos which drive Facebook and reddit.
For these 360 degree movies you don't need an expensive and power-hungry GPU, the simple mobile GPU in your existing smartphone will do, and you also don't have the uncanny valley effect.
I think 3D cameras will soon be common in smartphones, and full 360-degree GoPro style cameras will be standard for everything where a normal GoPro is used today.
[edit: typos]
I don't want to get in the middle of the love affair between you two, but just want to add my 2 cents that telepresence will likely play a huge role in VR over the next 5-10 years.
Technology isn't quite there yet, but there are several interesting initiatives in this area. Philip Rosedale (yes, the same Philip from Linden Labs/Second Life) has been actively researching and pushing the boundaries of facial expression with his High Fidelity project [1]. Not sure it'll ever become a consumer product, but the potential is obvious. I saw him demo'ing his alpha version earlier this year, and it was amazing. Even though it was an avatar-based chat, the fact you can see the eyes moving and the face conveying emotions, brings the experience to a whole new level, well beyond the uncanny valley.
The addition of facial expressions and other forms of body language are obvious extensions for Oculus. Case in point: they just acquired Nimble VR [2], and will likely incorporate their hand tracking technology into a future CV1 or CV2. Facial expression and eye tracking is likely a bit further down the road, but not that far.
So basically both are important and Occulus has the resources to not have to make a choice about working on one or the other.
Mobile gives mobility - even if you're just sitting in your chair. When they can get to the point where they have an all-in-one headset with computer it will be amazing.
I don't think this mobile focus is anything to do with the Facebook deal, rather it's Oculus thinking - wow, this is cool, we should head in this direction.
Samsung are due to be making the screens for the flagship Oculus model. The mobile VR headsets were potentially part of the deal to encourage closer collaboration. I'm glad the Gear VR exists even if it just gives Samsung a fuller understanding of the performance goals of the screens of the desktop device.
I suspect that stimulating the vestibular nerve is going to be the detail that makes VR.
Online gambling is bigger than the porn industry, in terms of monetary value. They'll spend a lot of money building virtual worlds to gamble in.
Video, images, and travel will also of course big massive.
Make sure to withdraw before the bottom falls out.
I wasn't excited about Mobile VR, but the experience of freedom from wires and a built-in UI convinced me otherwise. VR might work better with a fast desktop, but VR is far more accessible (and enjoyable at the moment) in mobile form.
The physical props you have to hold on to explore the virtual whatever you're looking at. If VR takes off, this will be a major peripheral market as companies form to sell everything from steering wheels to VR gloves with individual finger tracking to all sorts of stuff.
The problem of course has always been that wire going to your PC keeps you from doing lots of obvious stuff.
When I saw the early demos working off of smartphones, I saw the path to acceptance open quite a bit. It absolutely changes things quite a bit.