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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of unanswered questions in there, though. If I'm sat in a living room with my loved ones, what am I looking at? A live 3D video of them? What is capturing that video? Will I see them wearing a headset? Because that's going to look pretty bad.

Something I think people often forget about VR - it's going to be really weird to be totally disconnected from the environment around you. If you're plugged into a meeting and your kid runs into the room to get your attention, how will they do it? Probably by poking you, scaring the bejesus out of you.

I just don't buy the idea that VR will make our lives more "real". It'll lead to living in weird bubbles.

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That's because you treat VR vs AR vs reality as three different extremes.

They're not.

Think of them as a spectrum. VR + stereoscopic image passthrough gets you an AR-like view of the real world around you. These overlays allow you to pick up coffee cups, see when your kid is poking you, etc.

Here are some of my thoughts on your questions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9938332

Valve is solving walking into walls by showing you a holodeck-like barrier inside the headset, so something like that could work with moving objects like kids or the dog over time too. Still, you are quite disconnected from the world that's actually around you.

In terms of making technology more human, I see VR as a stepping stone to Augmented Reality, which will eventually allow us to interact with our hands and instead of being in another world, you'll see things brought into your own world. That is an improvement over a screen too.

But VR can also transport you to places you've never been through 360 video, which is a powerful opportunity to create empathy through journalism and documentaries that can help us better understand how people live halfway across the world. I'm rather excited for that.

While any technology has the potential to further divide or distract us, VR has made me feel things that no other technology has even come close to feeling.

It may very well be that this iteration does not solve those challenges.

But if you look 5-10 years out, I wouldn't be entirely surprised to see drastically miniaturized components, perhaps a headband of sorts, a Glass-like eyepiece with a projector, maybe contact lenses, or something that provides a strong level of immersion without hiding the face.

In terms of recording the space, the Kinect is able to determine an astonishing amount about a physical space that I imagine would go hand in hand with this.

Isn't the solution obvious? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/Googly.j...

It isn't difficult to connect the external world to an otherwise external sensory deprived VR environment, either with external cameras or smart overlays. I suspect Facebook may try something similar to how Steam functions within games.

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