> When Iribe said, Yeah, it’s pretty much just about gaming, at least for now, Zuckerberg seemed to lose interest. Facebook was not a video-game company and over the years had moved to make games a smaller part of what users saw when they logged on.
I've seen Mark's vision for Oculus described as the next step in connecting all of the people on the planet in a few pieces now. What interests me about this position is that it implies:
1) gaming and entertainment braodly are not the end game. Instead, the social interactions.
2) VR hardware will see broader consumer penetration in the population not yet reached by facebook than mobile phones
You have to include that in the price though. Most people don't have pc's capable of running it as very low %'s of people need a 980+. And that performance curve is likely to stay there for quite a few years as people try to eek more and more out of it, so I think it'll mirror game requirements.
I would also ask, what's the market penetration of a $600 smart phone that you can take everywhere and do tons and tons of useful things with? No where near facebook's total penetration. Sure they're becoming more and more ubiquitus but remember that most people don't have a need for a upper end gaming pc and convincing them that they have to have it so they can virtual-skype with their friends from only one room in their house makes it seem a lot like the original telephone for quite a while. Expensive, and tied to a single place.
Don't get me wrong, it's SUPER COOL to demo (I went onsite at valve).
My bet is FB's end game with VR only starts to be realized once hardware is much smaller, much cheaper, performs better, and is ubiquitous.
Imagine how kids are glued to their cell phones today. Not
I true a slim, always on VR/augmented reality device that allows them to connect with their friends virtually. Add cameras and mics for shared experiences and streaming their lives and it is clear this is in its infancy.
"Rainbow's End" by Vernor Vinge starts to get into this a bit and provides great insight there. Functional "telepathy" seems almost reachable with how fast this has moved.
I agree. Many people (30% apparently) prefer text messages over voice calls. I don't see 360° VR video being convenient or worth the bother for casual communication.
Our home use has really diverged away from voice calls and towards messaging and FaceTime. Where FaceTime is reserved for special occasions (kids chatting to grandparents, long distance relatives, calling home when on a business trip).
I wonder if VR as a communication tool could supplant video calling? Although it lacks the ability for a family to physically gather around a screen and communicate as a group.
Dk1&2 owner here, I've slowly soured on VR over the past year as my 'reptile brain' has come to associate the headset with motion sickness and I would say I have a pretty steely stomach. I'm an avid FPS player, spent 4 hours in the HL2 VR mod about 18 months ago with minimal sickness. But the killer for me has been the slow buildup of aversion to VR over time. I've never been more excited for a technology but I fear there are some impossible problems to solve.. Any other dev kit developers feel the same way?
Kickstarter DK1 backer here (and have used DK2). I got burnt out on the hype a long time ago. Ignoring the problems that cannot possibly be solved by next year (eye tracking etc...), I'm not even sure that I'll even buy the first consumer version for Oculus or HTC. We need more games/experiences and time to see if there are software wars between Valve+HTC and Oculus.
DK1&2 owner. I felt the same, but the Crescent Bay demo blew me the heck away. More amazing than experiencing the DK1 for the first time.
Then, recently, I tried the Oculus Touch demos. For an hour or so afterwards, I felt like reality was less real than the simulation, even despite its limitations. I felt like the realm of possibilities within that box was infinite, and real-life was limited in comparison.
The root cause of sickness in VR seems to be either a) slow hardware/slow software, causing judder or b) poor design which moves the player in ways that cause discomfort. The combination of these two is a one-two punch. I'd encourage you to pick up CV1 or Vive in 6 months with a modern rig and take it for another spin with an experience that's been properly designed for VR, I'd be really surprised if you continue to have any problems with sim sickness.
> Couldn't it just as likely be the inherent conflict between proprioceptual cues and visual cues causing sickness?
Sure, that's the general concept. OP's two points are specific examples of the causes of mismatch - examples which are well known, and can be mitigated.
a) When a program's framerate is high enough, moving your head causes a corresponding change in visual cue. When the framerate is too slow, the visual cue update is delayed from the motion. A mismatch.
b) When a game allows you to walk forward in a virtual world, your eyes get visual cues that you're walking forward, even though your body knows you're not. VR applications that instead simulate you sitting in place, and give you visual cues to that effect, limit that mismatch.
VR-wise, b) can definitely be mitigated. There seem to be two current strategies - either you design the experience to be primarily stationary, or you set up a room that people can actually, physically walk in.
stationary-only experiences might seem like a tight constraint, but constraints breed creativity :).
Rooms to walk around in have also been done, but they're obviously more effort to set up and maintain, and are typically done by larger institutions.
Same. There is one major hurdle for me: it's too big of a pain in the arse to get up and running. In order to work on my game I have to muck about with NVIDIA Optimus (which they still don't have a fix for), take the headset off, change a Windows setting, put the headset back on. No it doesn't work, do it all again ad nauseam.
It's got to be a dream to make and play games on and right now, it's not.
I think a lot of this comes down to your setup. I've been messing around in Unreal Engine with DK2 and don't have those issues because I'm not using a laptop with Optimus. Now, granted, I also have a laptop and it does use Optimus so I'd love for a fix so I could use that laptop as a mobile demo setup but either way, I think it's just a matter of the current implementation requiring you to use supported hardware in order to develop for it or just use it.
OK, NVIDIA Optimus issues aside, one still must take the headset off to work on their game then put it back on to test it. It'd be much easier to develop the game with the headset on.
Yeah. DK2 owner here. My DK2 only comes out to demo to friends these days.
It's not so much the motion sickness for me though. It's just that the novelty wore off and it became a chore. Elite Dangerous with a DK2 was incredible for a quite a while. I used to just fly around space stations and look around. Now after the 100th trading run i prefer the monitor as it doesn't require me to clean lenses or deal with a tangle of cables.
Don't forget you're using a Dev Kit which is basically 2 years old - personally, although I agree with your DK2 assessment, I am reserving judgement for the consumer version.
You should not be playing a FPS in VR, especially on anything pre-release like the DK2. Acceleration without some kind of cockpit to ground you is one of the worst offenders, and virtually all FPS games do that by design/necessity.
This is one of my worst fears about VR adoption: gamers, especially the kind who will be on the leading edge of this stuff, want badly to play FPS games and they'll find ways to do it and they're all going to hate VR.
I'm glad Oculus is putting their "comfort ratings" front and center, and being really vocal about the principles of sickness-free VR, but I'm worried people are going to skip all the warnings and advice and ruin this for everyone.
I appreciate that and I only ever played about 8 hours of HL2 VR, I stopped when I beat the campaign and moved on to playing WarThunder for a couple months then slowly tapered off.
>>This is one of my worst fears about VR adoption: gamers, especially the kind who will be on the leading edge of this stuff, want badly to play FPS games and they'll find ways to do it and they're all going to hate VR.
Part of the promise of VR is being able to negotiate a virtual world on foot which currently has too much of a mismatch to work without sickening the user. So what are the long term solutions to this? To me they are really hard if not impossible problems.
Another idea is something called redirected walking, which basically tricks you into walking in circles even though you think you're walking in a straight line.
Someday we may have electronic solutions to sim sickness -- they've discovered that by sending tiny amounts of electricity through our inner ears, they can programmatically control how you feel you're moving.
I've often wondered if the feeling of acceleration/deceleration could easily be simulated with a simple tilting chair. Tilt the chair back to simulate forward acceleration (like a car speeding). Gravity pulls you 'backwards', similar to the feeling of being pressed back in the seat. Opposite for deceleration. I hereby donate this idea to the world.
We can't expect great PC experiences to be great VR experiences. Great VR experiences are built for VR and rely as much as possible on 1-to-1 mapping of actual motion to virtual motion.
I see a lot of parallels with early mobile app development. Early mobile games often plastered the screen with virtual buttons, poorly replicating controller-based UI's onto a touch screen. The experience was bad and plenty of people wrote off mobile gaming as impossible. Then we learned how to build mobile games with a touch-centric UI.
I agree completely. The FPS "model" was a great way to translate realistic environments to flat, 2d screens but the typical run-and-gun style of FPS is just terrible in VR. Every time I read about these elaborate workarounds (omni-treadmills and the like) I can't help but think that people are missing the point and trying to shoehorn what works in 2d into the VR realm.
I get that FPS-style games seem like perfect contenders for VR since they are already pretty realistic and immersive for 2d constructs. Still, the conventions of FPS evolved to fit the flat world of computer monitors and TV screens. Once you're immersed, running around can be quite nauseating even if you're experienced with VR or have a decent resistance to VR motion sickness.
I'm more interested in trying out (and building) new conventions that are a natural fit for VR. Seated experiences and, eventually, ones that allow for walking around 1:1 in the room you're actually in will beat running around with a controller while looking through a HMD.
As a DK1&2 owner, I had a similar experience, but what brought VR back to me was Elite: Dangerous, a space sim. FPS's are a horrible VR experience currently and likely will remain so until we redefine FPS for VR. With Elite + joysticks, I've not experienced any of the motion sickness in the DK2.
Few months ago, I was very excited about vr. I want to invest myself in vr, develop for it, learn it.
I'm also worried about the impossible problems to solve. For me, the biggest issue is the screen door effect. it is said that only 8k per eye resolution can solve this.
I think there are still 10 more years before vr becomes small, cheap and good enough.
Screen door doesn't depend solely on resolution. If a screen at the same resolution has a better "pixel fill factor", meaning smaller gaps between each pixel, it will have less screen dooring.
It may still look pixelated, but that's easier to ignore IMO.
Have you tried the HTC vive? I felt like moving around could be the solution. It was definitely the experience I was expecting with VR. Oculus was just weird when I tried it.
Dk2 really needs a beefy computer. My concern about cv1 is that people will cheap out on computers or run the wrong games and blame oculus for motion sickness.
Ovr might want to restrict what apps can be run on what computers. Their mobile version has this benefit. Carmack had real vision leading the charge on their Samsung partnership.
I’ve watched more V.R. than most people, and I don’t feel like I have brain damage,” says Chris Milk, a former music-video director whose company produces and distributes short, 360-degree movies watched on a headset.
that's one of the best example of confirmation bias I have seen in a while. Chris is assuming because he doesn't feel brain damage he doesn't have it! (I have no opinion on if VR causes brain damage - just pointing out the absurdly of that quote)
This not an example of the confirmation bias at all. More like possibly biased, anecdotal evidence that might have not been verified. You can very well notice signs of your own brain damage.
Eh, no so sure about that. His work meticulously avoids the things that don't work in VR, which indicates a strong sensitivity to the effects of bad VR.
My guess is that he'll simply stop watching the moment he realizes that whatever he's looking at was made by a clueless developer. It doesn't take a whole lot of experience before you can distinguish the good from the bad within a few seconds.
It was when the DK2 first came out that I realized VR was not the slam dunk it is often portrayed as. The DK2 was bought by many people, many more than the DK1. And once all of those customers started posting feedback on the internet it became clear that motion sickness was still a huge problem. And motion sickness will not be resolved with higher frame rates or lower latency as most of us believed prior to the DK2. Oh well.
Since the above is anecdotal (or at least, not well referenced), I feel comfortable in adding a personal anecdote to the contrary.
I bought a DK2, played with it and developed some prototypes with it. I have a very wide IPD (Interpupillary Distance), which meant that I couldn't focus cleanly on the image of the DK2. I experience some mild to moderate motion sickness when I use the DK2 in most titles.
However, there are some experiences -- particularly those with a cockpit or a third person camera -- that significantly reduce or eliminate the sickness. At PAX this year, I tested both the HTC Vive (Call of the Starseed -- a Myst-like title) and the Oculus CV1 (Eve Valkyrie -- a space superiority dogfighter) with absolutely no motion sickness at all, despite some rather hectic motion in Eve. Both demos were approximately 15 minutes of VR time. The higher frame rates and resolution, along with better accommodation of my wideset eyes absolutely improved the 'presence' in the demo. It was absolutely a material change from the DK2, which I've shelved until the consumer ready hardware is available.
Additionally, DK1 and DK2 content is still generally content under development. We're still learning which experiences are good or bad in VR, and how to move the player without disturbing their equilibrium. Games like Eve Valkyrie and Call of the Starseed were both designed from the ground up with VR in mind, which also helps.
The big difference is that those people don't have any VR games so they are playing non-VR games on a VR headset. When Oculus is released, it will have a whole library of VR games.
> Before I met them, I’d assumed that Zuckerberg and Luckey would have much in common. They’re both hackers who started valuable companies before they turned 20, but the similarities pretty much end there.
> ...
> Luckey does not come from money, nor did he have access to the prep-school, Ivy League fast track that Zuckerberg and so many of Silicon Valley’s young masters started on.
People are still surprised that poor white people and rich white people are not the same. Wealth divides far more than race in America.
What makes Palmer Luckey all the more badass is that he created a product from scratch that changed the world. Zuck cloned Friendster and leveraged the exclusivity of a "Harvard social network" to bootstrap his site.
John Carmack, also from a poor background, is the one who believed in Oculus first. He is most responsible for helping Palmer Luckey make VR happen. They're the big heros here, not the rich kid who bought it for $2 billion.
If he wasn't a billionaire and didn't behave like a rich kid buying himself the hottest toys I would use a different phrase.
Why can't Zuck actually compete with Snapchat, WhatsApp, or Oculus? His response to competition is to spend $30 billion buying these companies instead of actually contributing something new in the world himself.
Zuckerberg, Chris Dixon, and Andresssen Horowitz dismissed Oculus. Many thousands of regular people could see that Oculus was special but these Titans of Silicon Valley believed "bad intel" about Microsoft (of all companies) having something better. Better than what John $#U*%# Carmack had chosen to work on!
Yes, the divide between the poor and the rich is wide. Though I don't know how it compares to race. That's really subjective.
My friends make anywhere from 10 bucks an hour to over half a million every year. My wealthy friends are incredibly nice but sometimes they are awkward. Multiple rich people have asked me about the kind of boat I own. I don't have a boat. Sometimes I make my poor friends feel the same way. They are jealous that I can afford a mortgage.
I also have white co-workers and black co-workers. My white co-workers are incredibly nice but sometimes they are super awkward. They ask me questions about chopsticks and interment camps. As for my black friends, well, sometimes they deal with worse.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is obviously an amazing person. He was also born into a nurturing, educated, well off household. He received a credential costing a fortune from an elite university which served as his entrance ticket into the professional world. Poverty and elitism are what prevent there from being more like him.
Not to trivialize Luckey's accomplishments, but he in no way created a product "from scratch". The product would not exist without the amazing displays and sensors within it, which thousands of engineers worked on tirelessly.
Palmer did not make oculus from scratch. He took what was already there and used better optics and some nice mobile screens. Carmack was largely responsible for much of his success by helping show him its potential. He was rounded out by Iribe who provided leadership.
Palmer was more innovative, sure, but Zuck showed much more leadership and vision. Sort of like woz versus jobs.
As for changing the world, I think that might be a stretch at this point.
What's the killer app for the Oculus Rift? So far, there are roller coaster simulators and first person shooters. Those are fun, but the market is limited. (The roller coaster thing is fun for about half an hour, tops. The FPS market is bigger, but will only catch on if you can kill more effectively wearing the headgear.)
In the last go-round of VR, the killer app was supposed to be the Multiverse (as in "Snow Crash"). Now that Second Life is available but slowly sinking, that doesn't seem as compelling. The problem with Second Life doesn't seem to be graphics resolution, lag, or anything technical; it just isn't worth the trouble. There's an Oculus Rift client mod for Second Life, not that anybody cares. (The Second Life people should do a WebGL client; more people might try it.)
Interestingly, in the first round of VR, back in the 1980s, it was "gloves and goggles", so you could actually do something while in there. This time, the gloves seem to have disappeared. The stock controller is the XBox game controller, although there's an optional wrist-tracking controller. Full finger tracking, no.
This is something I see mentioned a lot, and would be great (as a remote employee). However, either the people are 3D renders or wearing headsets themselves. Maybe I'm picturing it wrong though.
This is worth more than you'd think. The multiplayer demo I tried at PAX 2014 had me and a friend sitting maybe three feet from each other, and generic blank avatars in-game, but seeing him nod and nodding back myself was a hugely intimate experience. It's tough to describe, a purely emotional experience.
I think an MVP could even just represent people as a simple ball of light. I think just 3d audio with any 3d representation of position might be enough to give people a "fix" of presence with their loved one.
I actually think you could probably make a standalone stereo Bluetooth headset/glasses with clear lenses and two lasers that project a single 3d stereo positioned dot onto each lens. You'd just need a chip to position the audio and the two dots so I think you could do a really compact low power device and sell them for <$100.
You could just walk around your house, and the dot would stay close to you and talk to you and you would feel like they were in the house with you, rather than inside a little phone.
I agree on this one. For now it's stuff like Riftmax where you can run around and chat with people's avatars or watch a movie in the same virtual theater with others. Eventually, with better and cheaper/more common depth cameras we'll start to see recording and live streaming of environments and users for the first real VR telepresence. It's a ways off but communication, VR movies, and live entertainment are my bet for the things that will drive mass adoption.
Just like smart phones, it wasn't the early devices with clunky hardware, high price tags, and cool features that drove mass adoption. It was the move toward ergonomics and ease of use with a core set of common functions that turned it from a techie thing into something ubiquitous.
> As the Oculus Rift is about to hit the market, Zuckerberg is cautious. “It’ll ramp up slowly,” he says. “The first smartphones … I don’t know if they sold a million units in the first year. But it kind of doubles and triples each year, and you end up with something that tens of millions of people have. And now it’s a real thing.”
I'm sceptical and not least because of Zuckerberg's involvement. Mark Zuckerberg reminds me most of Bill Gates and has so far displayed the same level of vision and imagination as Gates (i.e. almost none).
It fits then that Oculus partnered with Microsoft, cut out support for all operating systems except windows, cut back their source code releases and are working with Microsoft, AMD and nvidia on windows-exclusive proprietary (and as of now secret NDA'ed) APIs.
I think a world in which technology is a black box that is controlled by corporations by means of proprietary software WAS Bill Gates' vision for Microsoft.
It's really sad to see no mention of Valve anywhere in the article. The work that was done at Valve in 2012-2013 on VR hardware and software was critical to the success of Oculus. Valve created a complete VR demo that was shown to Andreessen-Horowitz near the end of 2013, and was a deciding factor in their decision to invest, as well as Facebook's decision to buy. At that time, the best hardware created by Oculus did not have 6DOF, high-resolution tracking. It did not have low-persistance, globally-illuminated displays. It did not have proper lens distortion correction. It did not have presence. Basically, all of the hardware factors that have made modern VR exciting were discovered and developed by the team at Valve. Unfortunately, Valve was not able to capitalize or commercialize all of this work, and basically just gave it away through a very awkward interaction. Source: I worked there on VR. Of course, they are now working with HTC on the Vive, which is really great, and is going to give Oculus major competition.
> Our mission isn’t to connect a billion people, it’s to connect everyone in the world.
I wonder whether he is aware that Oculus has been moving away from that goal for a while now. They are now a company that works with Microsoft, AMD and nvidia on Windows-exclusive APIs and have dropped support for all other operating systems.
That's why all "social" VR applications for the Oculus Rift are a joke. Sure, you can get together in VR. But only when you use windows and only with other windows users. Zuckerberg says he wants to connect everyone. Right now Oculus is working on connecting Windows users exclusively. I wonder what Zuckerberg thinks about his newly acquired company acting this way.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadI've seen Mark's vision for Oculus described as the next step in connecting all of the people on the planet in a few pieces now. What interests me about this position is that it implies:
1) gaming and entertainment braodly are not the end game. Instead, the social interactions.
2) VR hardware will see broader consumer penetration in the population not yet reached by facebook than mobile phones
Not sure what I think yet.
I would also ask, what's the market penetration of a $600 smart phone that you can take everywhere and do tons and tons of useful things with? No where near facebook's total penetration. Sure they're becoming more and more ubiquitus but remember that most people don't have a need for a upper end gaming pc and convincing them that they have to have it so they can virtual-skype with their friends from only one room in their house makes it seem a lot like the original telephone for quite a while. Expensive, and tied to a single place.
Don't get me wrong, it's SUPER COOL to demo (I went onsite at valve).
Imagine how kids are glued to their cell phones today. Not I true a slim, always on VR/augmented reality device that allows them to connect with their friends virtually. Add cameras and mics for shared experiences and streaming their lives and it is clear this is in its infancy.
"Rainbow's End" by Vernor Vinge starts to get into this a bit and provides great insight there. Functional "telepathy" seems almost reachable with how fast this has moved.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/22/tech/mobile/americans-prefer-t...
I wonder if VR as a communication tool could supplant video calling? Although it lacks the ability for a family to physically gather around a screen and communicate as a group.
DK1&2 owner. I felt the same, but the Crescent Bay demo blew me the heck away. More amazing than experiencing the DK1 for the first time.
Then, recently, I tried the Oculus Touch demos. For an hour or so afterwards, I felt like reality was less real than the simulation, even despite its limitations. I felt like the realm of possibilities within that box was infinite, and real-life was limited in comparison.
Couldn't it just as likely be the inherent conflict between proprioceptual cues and visual cues causing sickness?
Sure, that's the general concept. OP's two points are specific examples of the causes of mismatch - examples which are well known, and can be mitigated.
a) When a program's framerate is high enough, moving your head causes a corresponding change in visual cue. When the framerate is too slow, the visual cue update is delayed from the motion. A mismatch.
b) When a game allows you to walk forward in a virtual world, your eyes get visual cues that you're walking forward, even though your body knows you're not. VR applications that instead simulate you sitting in place, and give you visual cues to that effect, limit that mismatch.
VR-wise, b) can definitely be mitigated. There seem to be two current strategies - either you design the experience to be primarily stationary, or you set up a room that people can actually, physically walk in.
stationary-only experiences might seem like a tight constraint, but constraints breed creativity :).
Rooms to walk around in have also been done, but they're obviously more effort to set up and maintain, and are typically done by larger institutions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOFgAfuTtyo
It's got to be a dream to make and play games on and right now, it's not.
It's not so much the motion sickness for me though. It's just that the novelty wore off and it became a chore. Elite Dangerous with a DK2 was incredible for a quite a while. I used to just fly around space stations and look around. Now after the 100th trading run i prefer the monitor as it doesn't require me to clean lenses or deal with a tangle of cables.
This is one of my worst fears about VR adoption: gamers, especially the kind who will be on the leading edge of this stuff, want badly to play FPS games and they'll find ways to do it and they're all going to hate VR.
I'm glad Oculus is putting their "comfort ratings" front and center, and being really vocal about the principles of sickness-free VR, but I'm worried people are going to skip all the warnings and advice and ruin this for everyone.
>>This is one of my worst fears about VR adoption: gamers, especially the kind who will be on the leading edge of this stuff, want badly to play FPS games and they'll find ways to do it and they're all going to hate VR.
Part of the promise of VR is being able to negotiate a virtual world on foot which currently has too much of a mismatch to work without sickening the user. So what are the long term solutions to this? To me they are really hard if not impossible problems.
Another idea is something called redirected walking, which basically tricks you into walking in circles even though you think you're walking in a straight line.
Someday we may have electronic solutions to sim sickness -- they've discovered that by sending tiny amounts of electricity through our inner ears, they can programmatically control how you feel you're moving.
Edit: Here's a video of Palmer Luckey talking about that inner ear stuff (GVS): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CRdRc8CcGY&feature=youtu.be...
I see a lot of parallels with early mobile app development. Early mobile games often plastered the screen with virtual buttons, poorly replicating controller-based UI's onto a touch screen. The experience was bad and plenty of people wrote off mobile gaming as impossible. Then we learned how to build mobile games with a touch-centric UI.
I get that FPS-style games seem like perfect contenders for VR since they are already pretty realistic and immersive for 2d constructs. Still, the conventions of FPS evolved to fit the flat world of computer monitors and TV screens. Once you're immersed, running around can be quite nauseating even if you're experienced with VR or have a decent resistance to VR motion sickness.
I'm more interested in trying out (and building) new conventions that are a natural fit for VR. Seated experiences and, eventually, ones that allow for walking around 1:1 in the room you're actually in will beat running around with a controller while looking through a HMD.
As a DK1&2 owner, I had a similar experience, but what brought VR back to me was Elite: Dangerous, a space sim. FPS's are a horrible VR experience currently and likely will remain so until we redefine FPS for VR. With Elite + joysticks, I've not experienced any of the motion sickness in the DK2.
I'm also worried about the impossible problems to solve. For me, the biggest issue is the screen door effect. it is said that only 8k per eye resolution can solve this.
I think there are still 10 more years before vr becomes small, cheap and good enough.
It may still look pixelated, but that's easier to ignore IMO.
Ovr might want to restrict what apps can be run on what computers. Their mobile version has this benefit. Carmack had real vision leading the charge on their Samsung partnership.
http://assayviaessay.blogspot.com/2014/03/virtual-spaces-rea...
that's one of the best example of confirmation bias I have seen in a while. Chris is assuming because he doesn't feel brain damage he doesn't have it! (I have no opinion on if VR causes brain damage - just pointing out the absurdly of that quote)
My guess is that he'll simply stop watching the moment he realizes that whatever he's looking at was made by a clueless developer. It doesn't take a whole lot of experience before you can distinguish the good from the bad within a few seconds.
I bought a DK2, played with it and developed some prototypes with it. I have a very wide IPD (Interpupillary Distance), which meant that I couldn't focus cleanly on the image of the DK2. I experience some mild to moderate motion sickness when I use the DK2 in most titles.
However, there are some experiences -- particularly those with a cockpit or a third person camera -- that significantly reduce or eliminate the sickness. At PAX this year, I tested both the HTC Vive (Call of the Starseed -- a Myst-like title) and the Oculus CV1 (Eve Valkyrie -- a space superiority dogfighter) with absolutely no motion sickness at all, despite some rather hectic motion in Eve. Both demos were approximately 15 minutes of VR time. The higher frame rates and resolution, along with better accommodation of my wideset eyes absolutely improved the 'presence' in the demo. It was absolutely a material change from the DK2, which I've shelved until the consumer ready hardware is available.
Additionally, DK1 and DK2 content is still generally content under development. We're still learning which experiences are good or bad in VR, and how to move the player without disturbing their equilibrium. Games like Eve Valkyrie and Call of the Starseed were both designed from the ground up with VR in mind, which also helps.
> ...
> Luckey does not come from money, nor did he have access to the prep-school, Ivy League fast track that Zuckerberg and so many of Silicon Valley’s young masters started on.
People are still surprised that poor white people and rich white people are not the same. Wealth divides far more than race in America.
What makes Palmer Luckey all the more badass is that he created a product from scratch that changed the world. Zuck cloned Friendster and leveraged the exclusivity of a "Harvard social network" to bootstrap his site.
John Carmack, also from a poor background, is the one who believed in Oculus first. He is most responsible for helping Palmer Luckey make VR happen. They're the big heros here, not the rich kid who bought it for $2 billion.
Why can't Zuck actually compete with Snapchat, WhatsApp, or Oculus? His response to competition is to spend $30 billion buying these companies instead of actually contributing something new in the world himself.
Zuckerberg, Chris Dixon, and Andresssen Horowitz dismissed Oculus. Many thousands of regular people could see that Oculus was special but these Titans of Silicon Valley believed "bad intel" about Microsoft (of all companies) having something better. Better than what John $#U*%# Carmack had chosen to work on!
Such are the brave risk takers of Silicon Valley.
My friends make anywhere from 10 bucks an hour to over half a million every year. My wealthy friends are incredibly nice but sometimes they are awkward. Multiple rich people have asked me about the kind of boat I own. I don't have a boat. Sometimes I make my poor friends feel the same way. They are jealous that I can afford a mortgage.
I also have white co-workers and black co-workers. My white co-workers are incredibly nice but sometimes they are super awkward. They ask me questions about chopsticks and interment camps. As for my black friends, well, sometimes they deal with worse.
Bonus: Everyone's favorite astrophysicist on the challenges of being black https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inz1sdhsMCU
It has also not changed the world yet.
Palmer was more innovative, sure, but Zuck showed much more leadership and vision. Sort of like woz versus jobs.
As for changing the world, I think that might be a stretch at this point.
>"Zuck cloned Friendster and leveraged the exclusivity of a "Harvard social network" to bootstrap his site."
Ah, I wish it were that easy to create a $250+bn company.
In the last go-round of VR, the killer app was supposed to be the Multiverse (as in "Snow Crash"). Now that Second Life is available but slowly sinking, that doesn't seem as compelling. The problem with Second Life doesn't seem to be graphics resolution, lag, or anything technical; it just isn't worth the trouble. There's an Oculus Rift client mod for Second Life, not that anybody cares. (The Second Life people should do a WebGL client; more people might try it.)
Interestingly, in the first round of VR, back in the 1980s, it was "gloves and goggles", so you could actually do something while in there. This time, the gloves seem to have disappeared. The stock controller is the XBox game controller, although there's an optional wrist-tracking controller. Full finger tracking, no.
Here's my guess: Feeling like you're in the same room with someone who is far away.
I ask because I wonder whether the overhead of using the device is outweighed by its value as a communications tool.
I actually think you could probably make a standalone stereo Bluetooth headset/glasses with clear lenses and two lasers that project a single 3d stereo positioned dot onto each lens. You'd just need a chip to position the audio and the two dots so I think you could do a really compact low power device and sell them for <$100.
You could just walk around your house, and the dot would stay close to you and talk to you and you would feel like they were in the house with you, rather than inside a little phone.
Just like smart phones, it wasn't the early devices with clunky hardware, high price tags, and cool features that drove mass adoption. It was the move toward ergonomics and ease of use with a core set of common functions that turned it from a techie thing into something ubiquitous.
100 years ago: "Risque" was defined as the lingerie section of a J.C. Penney mail-order catalog.
Tomorrow: A pioneering generation of habitual VR wankers.
I'm sceptical and not least because of Zuckerberg's involvement. Mark Zuckerberg reminds me most of Bill Gates and has so far displayed the same level of vision and imagination as Gates (i.e. almost none).
I think a world in which technology is a black box that is controlled by corporations by means of proprietary software WAS Bill Gates' vision for Microsoft.
http://media.steampowered.com/apps/abrashblog/Abrash%20Dev%2...
I wonder whether he is aware that Oculus has been moving away from that goal for a while now. They are now a company that works with Microsoft, AMD and nvidia on Windows-exclusive APIs and have dropped support for all other operating systems.
That's why all "social" VR applications for the Oculus Rift are a joke. Sure, you can get together in VR. But only when you use windows and only with other windows users. Zuckerberg says he wants to connect everyone. Right now Oculus is working on connecting Windows users exclusively. I wonder what Zuckerberg thinks about his newly acquired company acting this way.