I'm honestly surprised by that, since it seems like just using a simple webcam to read your expression and pick it that way would be a much more natural choice, and probably the least technologically complex aspect of that entire setup. Though I guess you can't always be in an environment with a webcam pointed at your face... but if you have an Oculus on your head, my guess is a webcam isn't far away.
Nice! I hadn't seen this before. Interesting approach to capturing the facial expression. I'd bet the first commercial implementation of something like this will be based on cameras inside the helmet combined with IR illumination, We're going to want those anyway for gaze tracking and it might be that they can do double duty. This is clever, but from a practical standpoint I bet capturing expressions will be easier with cameras.
You can definitely see where this is going. My first thought was the same: 'we need eyetracking for foveated rendering anyway, so we can get realistic eyes for free', and if you can do that, you can track the eyebrows and muscles around the eye (doesn't need great fidelity), and I wonder if that gets you all the way to the rest of the face as well? Can you smile/frown without it tugging on the parts closer to the eyes which the future headsets can observe?
At SIGGRAPH 2015 there were a couple demonstration booths where groups had stuck sensors and/or cameras to VR googles and used them to render expressions on your avatar's face.
Here's a demo from one of the groups: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgKkEnaaSDc - they used strain gauges inside the goggles to track muscle movement of the upper face, and stuck a camera on a stick hanging off the googles to capture lower face movement.
Here's another one that uses photo-reflective sensors attached to a set of eyeglasses, which can be worn inside a VR headset. For this demo I had to remove my prescription glasses, so it was unfortunately quite hard to say how well it worked! https://vimeo.com/132772990
I'd read about that a while back. Seems to be shaping up pretty nicely. Although right now the most interesting feature is their issue tracker [1] and bug bounty system.
So Facebook's take on VR is that it is going to be all about people. I am not seeing their vision but I didn't 'get' Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or even Chat Roulette... I will need some persuasion that this will work for the selfie-obsessed narcissistic world, just wearing a VR headset is not a good look.
I can see how Google's take on VR works, you re-use the phone in a budget way and have apps that make sensible use of the format - games, 3D immersive stuff exhibition tour stuff and other Google goodies that are good toys. Really this brings to life what Google do anyway with StreetView, photosheres and so on, so it makes sense. I can see a large army of casual VR users making occasional use of that stuff. I can also see hi-end gaming going for VR, that makes sense too and seemed the obvious market for the Oculus product. Facebook seem to think they have some special transformative take on that, a bit like how the Wii took the games console out of the teenager's bedroom and put it in the front room for mum to do her fitness training games on. Until we see the product and applications some belief is required and even then I will not be an early adopter. This VR stuff has evolved slightly the 'cardboard' way but the fundamentals have not changed in the last 20 years. The problems have nothing to do with nausea from immersive VR, people probably had the same concerns about the horseless carriage. The problems are more to do with what exactly that use case is that compels people to be wearing VR headsets for hours every day and whether people really do want to block out their sight to wear some immersive headgear. This isn't going to happen on the commute home for a while.
"The problems are more to do with what exactly that use case is that compels people to be wearing VR headsets for hours every day and whether people really do want to block out their sight to wear some immersive headgear. "
I wear mine as much as I can (sadly I don't have hours a day to do it, but I would if i could) VR Gaming is literally just the beginning. As I mentioned in another comment, Onward is a good demonstration of the potential here. Game-play aside, the social aspect feels very different. The game, as an FPS would be very lame, but with the way it handles communication it's a really great experience. Interactions feel more "life like". I'm really excited to see how far it goes.
You're lucky you have all of your friends close to you. Some of my best friends are a 2 hour plane ride away. This would be great (if they could afford it).
I thought the demo was neat, but I don't quite get this -- how is looking at the cartoon avatars your friends chose possibly going to be more personal than (or even nearly as personal as) video chat, which has been freely available for years on every major platform and allows you to see your friends' actual faces with their actual facial expressions? Is it just anticipation of the avatars eventually getting replaced with a full realistic real-time 3D rendering of your body?
Absolutely. There was a research project last year where they uses sensors built into the visor foam and they could reproduce your emotion based on your face movement. Of course we'll eventually all be scanned into the system and at that stage you can decide to use an avatar or your normal face. The real benefit here is social VR. Being able to co-exist in VR to do your work will be ground breaking.
Why are there so much negativity? I thought the people here are supposed to be more visionary. We are one step ahead in the future than other people. Avatar with your facial expressions. This is huge and innovative. It will not be limited to just game players or geeks. Common people will be drawn to this.
To answer your question, I may just be projecting here but it's probably a mix of jealousy of Zuckerberg and spill over ill will towards whatever it is that Facebook does from their sometimes objectionable behavior (turning the Internet in third world countries into a walled garden, psychologically manipulating their users, etc).
Well as a long time deliberately non Facebook account holder for many reasons of my own, I can say I found this compelling. Partly because I bought an Oculus dev kit several years ago and was quite impressed with it at even that stage and I'm very excited to seee resources being devoted to a technology I would like to see in common use as soon as possible, especially for these basic productivity tasks.
I hate to admit that I sympathize with the slightly critical comments, I was left with a feeling of "really, that's it?" from the demo. I think it's just a case of managing expectations though, I would have been impressed if this was done by a couple of college kids, but I thought that FB was betting big on VR and was going to wow everyone with something new.
I'm probably just being ignorant and not appreciating the amount of effort that went into the app.
Multi-user VR is really, really cool. It seems that Facebook is betting heavily on headset prices coming down (which they will, obviously) which will allow their metaverse to become the de facto virtual hangout space. That two bundo FB shelled out for the acquisition seems like it was a really good deal.
Except that having been addicted to Facebook once and quitting cold turkey about a decade ago, I'll never do Facebook again. To me things like TV (particularly streaming services) is close to a drug in terms of addictiveness. Facebook was too. And this looks even more addictive. I'm sure it will be insanely immersive, and that, my friends, is a serious problem.
Placing a video call from the outside world into VR is pretty amazing.
Besides that, you can do many of the things demoed even now on AltspaceVR. I tested it out for a few nights, and turns out hanging around in an interactive VR space with random strangers is ruined by trolls and people constantly quitting and joining. We never got successfully through an entire game of "Cards Against Humanity".
Another interesting one was vTime, which focuses more on chatting. You can move your head around and sit around virtual spaces with others, but you cannot move. That felt much like grabbing coffee in real life with someone and we got into deeper conversations this way. I would rate it as perhaps the most interesting experience I had before selling my Oculus to wait another year or two to see things improve.
I tested it out for a few nights, and turns out hanging around in an interactive VR space with random strangers is ruined by trolls and people constantly quitting and joining.
I can't help but wonder what the revelations about Palmer Lucky's ties to racist "shitposting" brigades bode for the future of collaborative VR spaces. I guess at least this time we know we're wading into a cesspool, all utopian forecasting aside.
Is there some relationship between technology and the people who make it that isn't evident to normal senses? Perhaps something that would carry this taint you call out? I don't find myself noticing the politics of the people who make the things I use, but I admit to having a low amount of worry for moral standing.
No, quite the contrary. I think most technology is just an amoral multiplier of its users' intentions. But does the social and moral context in which it's created hold some predictive power about how it will be used? I think so. We can look back at the industrial revolution and see that, occuring in a time of extreme tribalism, political upheaval, and acceptability of violence, its use in war and genocide was sure to be horrific.
Before, we needed historians to tie together all the disparate threads of the record to make sense of these kinds of things, with all the time and work that entailed. But in an our era, where so much of life is lived in public, digital spaces, the time between the message and what it telegraphs is much shorter, and maybe more clear.
Being able to place a video call from the outside world into VR is pretty amazing.
Youtube and twitch are capable of doing the conference call equivalent, streaming live video of content that doesn't actually exist, such as a video game, to a video receiving device. The ability to dynamically create live video is more than a few years old, even in live chat systems, from the capability to alter the background behind you while you video chat, to being able to wear virtual hats.
There's a lot in here that is interesting, but so much of it is a different form factor and UI/UX on technology that already exists.
You're saying it's just a user experience shift, but that's exactly what the comment you're responding to is saying. User experience changes can be earth-shattering.
Yes, I said there's a lot here that is interesting, and I think the actual interesting stuff was seriously downplayed. I don't find the stuff that was presented as "earth-shattering". The ability to show a moving video in a 2d square in a 3d environment is as old as hardware accelerated first person shooters.
We saw swimming among sharks and walking on Mars, both having potential for highly informative and educational experiences. The rhetoric wasn't about how much richer viewing Mars is interactively vs with flat, composite panoramas. The Mars bit was about ~12 seconds with talk about how it was desolate and they wouldn't want to live there… quick, get us out and here and lets move on to… the Facebook offices (a more uninspired location for Zuckerberg to choose I can not imagine). Oh, let's play a card game and let's draw a sword for sword fights! The ability to draw in midair and interact with the thing drawn is the real interesting stuff, stuff that we haven't been able to do before, and this was a demo that said, to me, "Farmville is coming to virtual reality".
Where was showing us things we can't currently, easily do without virtual reality? The live walk through of a building yet to be built? The facilities engineer working with plumbers and electricians on a live, interactive 3d model of a building? The interior designer doing interactive, full-size test fits of furniture? The student walking on the surface of other planets for study prep? The inclusiveness and team building of a remote team working in the same virtual space (this was mentioned briefly in the face expressions portion)? The ability to create and dynamically reconfigure complex user interfaces that would be otherwise impossible to create in reality? Leveraging the facial expressions to read people while playing poker would have been more interesting and a step above current on-line poker playing, more so than "look, we can throw around these cards".
Most of this bit looked like it was scripted. It could have been scripted better to showcase actual advances VR enables, kept the "ooh ahh", maintained the conversational tone and gotten rid of the mundane stuff. I don't think "placing a video call from the outside world into VR" is "pretty amazing".
Does anyone remember Playstation Home. A social 3D environment with in-world purchases, in-world movies, etc.?
The experience were similar. People discovery was hard.
Yes, it was really fun, just running around the square and having conversations with strangers. I loved my Playstation 3, but Sony took away all the things I loved about it, one-by-one:
1. Folding at home. I loved letting it run and getting points and looking at the cool night time map of the world with all the yellow dots showing others running Folding at home. I felt like part of something!
2. Playstation Home went away
3. The ability to install Linux went away. There's a class action lawsuit, if I join I could get $7. Wheee.
4. They sent a firmware update that bricked it. I was never able to recover it.
I've had a great time playing with groups in BigScreen (Beta). I spent three hours playing with a free to plat smash bros style game within big screen beta. It felt like I was back in college but my roommates were from Estonia, England, and Michigan.
I remember back when Skype first launched. Very few of us were using it (few hundred, maybe a thousand?). Many of us were just calling people randomly, myself included. Trolls weren't even a thing yet thank god, and all of us early adopters were very pleasant with each other.
Oh man I have great memories of that. I made friends with some girl in California and we spent hours talking to an old man in South Africa who had hunted lions when he was younger! It really made the world feel small and we felt special. It's really hard to find connections like that. Spending a little bit of time in AltspaceVR did sort of feel like this. Within a few minutes I was talking to some kid about his life and how he was feeling that day. I hope we can preserve these anonymous experiences without trolls ruining everything. In Second Life there was gating and banning (so there would be a private owned 'night club' that you could be kicked out of, you'd literally be launched away) which seemed fairly effective. 100% public spaces with no policing don't seem to work online, unfortunately.
I've had a lot of fun with the social aspects in OnWard. Just about 10 minutes ago before I left the game, my group was standing in a circle joking around (until the enemy snuck up behind, dropped a grenade killing us in one blow.
VR is an amazing medium for remote social interactions. There's potential here. Not everything has to be about selfies, and self obsession. It's possible for random people to have a good time with each other. The internet makes it possible for you to find another person similar to who YOU are, and VR makes that interaction more personable. It's literally the best of both "Worlds".
Last week I was at a VR arcade which had a very good setup of Vives, good floor space, good hardware, instructors, etc. It was my first time with VR, and I spent about half an hour with the different VR experiences.
It was a lot of fun, and I went and grabbed the entire family and forced them to try it too. They all enjoyed it. Very different experience from anything else.
But since then, I have had no desire to go back and do it again. Nor have any of the family members mentioned it (including three boys between 5 and 12 who love gaming). Nothing about the experience was compelling enough to capture my attention in the long term.
VR has great novelty factor, but no killer apps (yet?).
It sounds like having a computer without having the internet in 1997. When they add the social factor and include things like being able to do desktop work, in high fidelity while wearing a lightweight pair of shades, its going to change a lot of things.
Ok lets call it a fad like Video Phones in the late 80s and early 90s?
This demo was literally "Skype on your face with cartoons". Where was the innovation? Pretty (pre-recorded) backgrounds?
Fake it until you make it. Backgrounds are all pre-recorded. Not live! But it's an interesting concept once they manage to get all the scenes live. I still prefer face to face though.
I wondered about that dog on the couch... Still, pretty neat (and, come to think of it, a little less worrying than giving Facebook access to a webcam in my house.)
Man that line about Timberlake was forced. And then he made his wife say it too. Hah.
Ok in all seriousness.
We little humans perceive most of our world through spatial interactions. The possibilities to make a world enhancing device are incredible and scare me.
I'm concerned that people will forget how great the real Redwood forest is. Or how great real sex is. Or how meaningful life can be apart from a virtual Reality. I'm afraid that the fake version could be so appealing that I would reject the real and choose to dive into my own Matrix. Many people already play 7 hours per day...what's to stop them from never leaving a more immersive experience?
Like I said, the positive potential to improve science/meetings/remote work/etc is pretty incredible. I don't want to sound like a Debbie downer. But sheesh we need to consider the potential risks to society of a pseudo-reality addiction that is as alluring as VR will be very soon.
The vast majority of our human experiences are already imaginary, if you count books, movies, televisions, and even song lyrics (about heartbreak, hope, depression). I think people will always strive for more variety and breadth of experience, and that will always include road trips, hikes, visits to new cities, and whatever else you might be worried about losing...
This is a classic HN contrarian point of view that doesn't address this persons actual concerns.
What you're saying is true, but AR/VR is magnitudes of scale more immersive than any tool or artform human's have had.
You talk about IRL things like trips, hikes, etc - but AR will become so integrated into those experiences that the patina of Reality (which OP is talking about) may very well all but disappear.
Virtual reality is perhaps an unfortunate moniker, because it encourages a dichotomisation of reality into the "virtual" and "real", and conceiving of these as opposing, or at least orthogonal forces. Thought of in this way, virtual reality seems to promise a compelling-but-ultimately-empty facsimile of reality, the ultimate fulfilment of the escapist dream.
Disruptive technologies are often initially viewed from an oppositional mindset, which makes sense, because any disruptive technology will steal time away from the Old Activities that existed before the technology. People who aren't early adopters will naturally focus on the decrease in the time spent on Old Activities.
We saw this oppositional reaction when the internet gained popularity:
* People are spending so much time in cyberspace that they won't know how to effectively navigate the real world
* People are having fantasy cyber-lives instead of spending time in the Real World
* He's seeing someone he met online, he must not know how to interact with Real People
* And so on.
But social networks descended on society in an incredibly short period of time, and worked their way into the furthest corners of our lives. The oppositional mindset gave way to an integrative one, where the notion of a "CyberLife", as distinct from a "life", is simply misplaced- the internet is now simply a part of life, sans prefix and with a lowercase "l", no longer boxed up in the conceptual category of "the Cyber".
There was another motifical recurrence when smartphones entered the fray. The oppositional critiques were voluminous and eloquent:
* We're spending so much time texting we're forgetting how to speak to each other
* Every crack in every interaction is plastered over with the ritualized and mutually fraudulent "notification check", signposting the way to the unravelling of the social fabric..., etc.
* You can find the Real World up there, when you hold your head high, with dignity, and not down there, with your head bowed, staring transfixed at a shining rectangle, face ghost-like, bathed in the soft pearlescent glow of vapidity.
But at some point, the integrative mindset arrived. It's hard to maintain the oppositional mindset when you get off your Uber, arrive at a restaurant that you found on Yelp, and are chatting to your friend on WhatsApp, only to have them sit down in front of you. The handoff between "smartphone life" and "real life" is seamless. Smartphones are woven so deeply into our lives that if you ask someone how their "smartphone life" compares to their "real life", they'll just give you a strange look. Smartphones are just a part of life.
I think VR/AR could go in this direction, as just another arrow in our technological quiver. If we start looking at things like social VR, which has the potential to reshape the way we interact remotely, or how architects are today routinely using VR to demo to clients, it's not impossible to believe that the integrative mindset could eventually overcome the oppositional mindset in terms of how we think about VR.
Yes, I agree, framed this way we are more or less living in VR since the days of TV, telephone and radio. But I wonder , there seems to be a difference, people can become unconsciously and unnaturally emotionally attached and dependent on this. Can they still manage themselves when the internet and VR falls away? I mean, viaiting eachother and going out walking in nature is infinitaly better (when you are in > 1h physical proximity).
Will this technology on average provide more meaningful authentic communication and activities or less? You could argue that the medium is not relevant, but the medium pushes and shapes our bodies, minds and imagination to conform to a certain way of relating which might not necessarily be 'better'. Yes playing Tabletop Simulator boardgames with people across countries is very cool and conversing and working together with dedicated people on the same project this way is as well, but it takes dedication, setting boundaries, clear rules and focus. The same goes for navigating the internet - before you know it you have aimlessly browsed hundreds of sites, send dozens of replies to forum posts, and what have you really meaningfully contributed? It takes time to learn this, just as it takes time to read books, read about and apply research, learn nettiquette and living a balanced life. Some people decided a mobile or a TV didn't add enough value and live without one. Will you be able to make that decision more easily with VR or the internet?
The key difference is that the economic distance between our bodies and VR technology is very high. Small is beautiful and less is more. How can you integrate VR in a minimal lifestyle?
Excellent--except all your examples of the "oppositional critiques" have happened, and aren't abating. So the concern is well founded. Every day I see people texting, reading, watching videos, and gaming on their smartphones AS THEY ARE DRIVING--navigating traffic, changing lanes, turning, etc. They are so hooked on their devices they're unable (or unwilling) to unplug even while driving a multi-ton death machine amongst other multi-ton death machines.
The truth is that humans have a tendency to be lazy. It's not a simple case of equal substitution; we will happily choose inferior substitutions which require less effort (or expense or time or complexity).
Will people choose to "travel" via VR? Yes. Will this reduce real-life traveling? Absolutely. The sense of having been somewhere will reduce our need to actually GO there.
I this the rise of VR will see many become thoroughly entranced (addicted?) and less productive and even alive than they were previously. We will see society split into two groups: one large, one small. The small group will be comprised of the productive, who limit their entertainment consumption in any medium (but especially VR). This group will be exponentially more affluent than the much larger group. The larger group will be comprised of the numerous people who already consume what is already available through any medium: Netflix, Xbox, cable, internet, tablets, phones, etc. These are the people who (best case scenario) have a full-time job, but they spend every other possible waking hour watching or playing something. More and more of this group are working less and consuming/playing more. And we're not talking about real life here. Just think about World of Warcraft--but on steroids. It's going to be insane how addictive VR will be once the bugs have been ironed out.
In short: I too worry that this is something the human race is not prepared for. I worry that our proclivities dispose us to losing ourselves in it at the expense of our real life and responsibilities.
The truth of the matter is that, anecdotally, I look back over my 38 years and I can see the impact on my life of the digital revolution. I want to do more with my life, but oftentimes the allure of the easy "hit" via Netflix or the internet is more of a draw than spending my free time learning languages, exercising, meditating, working on some of my app ideas, writing, or reading. Instead I choose the cognitively easy "hit" at the expense of my personal development and health.
Think about smartphones and tablets. They can and sometimes are used for meaningful and productive purposes. They can be very useful tools. But for most people they're a distraction and a time suck. Which is to say most people spend most of their time on their devices not doing anything meaningful: playing the latest hot game, Facebooking, Facetiming, Snapchatting, reading the news (as vapid as it is). I predict VR will be more of the same.
I think I was addressing attitudes towards new technologies, rather than their actual impacts, which you quite rightly focus on.
I'm less convinced that the impacts of these new technologies are as pernicious as you claim, though I'm very open to the idea that hyperrewarding stimuli can "hack" reward pathways carefully tuned for a very different environment, be it McDonalds, PornHub, cocaine, or even Netflix.
But ultimately this is an empirical question, and while I see strong evidence that the food industry exploits our evolved impulses with carefully crafted payloads of calorie-dense foods, I don't see correspondingly strong evidence for a drop in productivity with the rise of ubiquitous, frictionless distraction- if anything we see a negative correlation.
Also worryingly absent from this analysis is the smorgasbord of opportunities for self-improvement that technology has created. Through technology, millions of people have picked up hobbies, languages, instruments, careers, partners, and yes, World of Warcraft, but I don't think we could tabulate these effects into a "net-technology-induced-eudaimonia" metric and say with a straight face that the result turned out to be negative after all.
Further red flags go up with your assertion that the population will bifurcate into the productive and unproductive, which seems to posit some mechanism that AFAIK we don't have good evidence for, like a susceptibility to distraction that's bimodally distributed among the population, or the lack of/ existence of various feedback effects that would amplify small variations, etc.
Anyway, my main point is not that these general concerns are unfounded, but that they're not well-supported by empirical evidence, so we're probably in broad agreement on that front.
Remote presence tech in the form of the telephone, video chats and online gaming are all fantastic. I'm not sure what the added value of the VR bit is.
Maybe online gaming is VR and we've had it for years without realizing. Add stereo video and head tracking - but only when it's really great - and maybe we're done apart from niche applications.
I think two major things social VR and this demo highlight:
1) The amount of things you can do in VR is more expansive than any medium before. Video conferences for the most part is used to catch up or transfer information faster (or at least that's how I use it, to catch up with friends/business who are far away). However, it's tougher to use video chats to build NEW experiences, and I can only really think of Google Hangouts and playing something like WarLight/editing a doc that does that. Humans for the most part build better relationships when both parties have shared experiences, and in VR you can actually do a lot of things that you could in real life. This is why it's so different from just "videoconferencing"
2) It finds a balance in anonymity and not having to commit 100% to a conversation. For example, when you video conference you have to pay more attention/be more aware of how you're acting, which explains why many times we choose to have text convos rather than just calling the other person. In social VR you're just an avatar so you don't have to care as much about your appearance/interaction/subtle facial expressions etc. The outward behavioral bar is lower so you can relax and enjoy the environment even more.
VR is a powerful medium because it addresses the above two points - you don't have to be as concerned about your appearance/interaction when you're an avatar AND you can actually do more tangible things in VR to actually BUILD better relationships.
I agree, but there are different types of commitment. There's commitment in terms of time, energy, emotion, attention, etc.
While VR provides anonymity (taking away some emotional commitment of human expression/emotion), the actual shared experiences you're doing is more powerful than any other medium and is pushing on the multiple other levers of commitment such as time, energy, attention, etc.
So VR is creating better relationships through commitments of multiple type and strength.
> And the videophonic stress was even worse if you were at all vain. I.e. if you worried at all about how you looked. As in to other people. Which all kidding aside who doesn’t. Good old aural telephone calls could be fielded without makeup, toupee, surgical prostheses, etc. Even without clothes, if that sort of thing rattled your saber. But for the image-conscious, there was of course no such answer-as-you-are informality about visual-video telephone calls, which consumers began to see were less like having the good old phone ring than having the doorbell ring and having to throw on clothes and attach prostheses and do hair- checks in the foyer mirror before answering the door.
> ...
> The proposed solution to what the telecommunications industry’s psychological consultants termed Video-Physiognomic Dysphoria (or VPD) was, of course, the advent of High-Definition Masking; and in fact it was those entrepreneurs who gravitated toward the production of high-definition videophonic imaging and then outright masks who got in and out of the short-lived videophonic era with their shirts plus solid additional nets.
Thanks for sharing this. It's always great to reread DFW. He had such extraordinary prescience about so many things.
Another bit of gold from that excerpt:
> First there’s some sort of terrific, sci-fi-like advance in consumer tech — like from aural to video phoning — which advance always, however, has certain un- foreseen disadvantages for the consumer; and then but the market-niches created by those disadvantages — like people’s stressfully vain repulsion at their own videophonic appearance — are ingeniously filled via sheer entrepreneurial verve; and yet the very advantages of these ingenious disadvantage-compensations seem all too often to undercut the original high-tech advance, resulting in consumer-recidivism and curve-closure and massive shirt-loss for precipitant investors. In the present case, the stress- and-vanity-compensations’ own evolution saw video-callers rejecting first their own faces and then even their own heavily masked and enhanced physical likenesses and finally covering the video-cameras altogether and transmitting attractively stylized static Tableaux to one another’s TPs. And, behind these lens-cap dioramas and transmitted Tableaux, callers of course found that they were once again stresslessly invisible, unvainly makeup- and toupeeless and baggy-eyed behind their celebrity-dioramas, once again free — since once again unseen — to doodle, blemish-scan, manicure, crease-check — while on their screen, the attractive, intensely attentive face of the well-appointed celebrity on the other end’s Tableau reassured them that they were the objects of a concentrated attention they themselves didn’t have to exert.
Almost daily I do Skype calls most of them are video calls. Most of the times I have several people in the room who still can continue to communicate directly without and technical intermediary. In addition you can write down notifications, doodle, multi-task.
For games, I used to play doom in vr in 1997 and after 5 min the whole looking around thing gets stale and you just want to sit down and relax on the couch/chair. See Wiimote.
But imagine if all of your doodle and multi-tasking can be virtual. The promise of VR is you can video conference, multi-task, and doodle with many virtual apps all at once. Or with other people. Of course the problem with that is that paper is often a better medium.
If that will be good or not is a question of the user interface. I regularly sit in multi-nation phone conferences. And while there are many collaboration tools we mainly still use a simple Excel sheet via screen share to track things. Why? This abstraction layer works with most business users. In addition, in Asia internet connectivity over several countries is not good so that is the least expensive communication method in terms of bandwidth.
In a lot of ways, you're not wrong. I am a huge VR enthusiast and I admit that it's been more than once I've said to myself "Man, I really want to play VR but I just want to sit down" after a long day at work.
Thankfully, for these cases, I've got EVE: Valkyrie, which is a sit-down experience. Looking around is required as you are flying a ship in 6-degrees-of-freedom.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 198 ms ] threadI also don't see most users designing avatars that look like them. It shouldn't be too hard to do a conversion from a photo.
Also compare it to the PSVR social app:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK8tMwlZLEM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgKkEnaaSDc
Here's a demo from one of the groups: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgKkEnaaSDc - they used strain gauges inside the goggles to track muscle movement of the upper face, and stuck a camera on a stick hanging off the googles to capture lower face movement.
Here's another one that uses photo-reflective sensors attached to a set of eyeglasses, which can be worn inside a VR headset. For this demo I had to remove my prescription glasses, so it was unfortunately quite hard to say how well it worked! https://vimeo.com/132772990
https://highfidelity.com/
[1] https://worklist.net/worklist
Jacob: Yeah, I'm a prisoner. It's called "doing hard time".
Adam: Can't you be like a warrior or shaman or orc or some shit like that?" — Hot Tub Time Machine
"we can do anything we want"
Does anyone know if there are any other demos/applications available?
I can see how Google's take on VR works, you re-use the phone in a budget way and have apps that make sensible use of the format - games, 3D immersive stuff exhibition tour stuff and other Google goodies that are good toys. Really this brings to life what Google do anyway with StreetView, photosheres and so on, so it makes sense. I can see a large army of casual VR users making occasional use of that stuff. I can also see hi-end gaming going for VR, that makes sense too and seemed the obvious market for the Oculus product. Facebook seem to think they have some special transformative take on that, a bit like how the Wii took the games console out of the teenager's bedroom and put it in the front room for mum to do her fitness training games on. Until we see the product and applications some belief is required and even then I will not be an early adopter. This VR stuff has evolved slightly the 'cardboard' way but the fundamentals have not changed in the last 20 years. The problems have nothing to do with nausea from immersive VR, people probably had the same concerns about the horseless carriage. The problems are more to do with what exactly that use case is that compels people to be wearing VR headsets for hours every day and whether people really do want to block out their sight to wear some immersive headgear. This isn't going to happen on the commute home for a while.
Seing how chat apps are used so much, I think this is brilliant. They really do get social.
I wear mine as much as I can (sadly I don't have hours a day to do it, but I would if i could) VR Gaming is literally just the beginning. As I mentioned in another comment, Onward is a good demonstration of the potential here. Game-play aside, the social aspect feels very different. The game, as an FPS would be very lame, but with the way it handles communication it's a really great experience. Interactions feel more "life like". I'm really excited to see how far it goes.
Ha.
Is that the trend now?
It seemed a bit forced in my opinion.
I'm probably just being ignorant and not appreciating the amount of effort that went into the app.
Besides that, you can do many of the things demoed even now on AltspaceVR. I tested it out for a few nights, and turns out hanging around in an interactive VR space with random strangers is ruined by trolls and people constantly quitting and joining. We never got successfully through an entire game of "Cards Against Humanity".
Another interesting one was vTime, which focuses more on chatting. You can move your head around and sit around virtual spaces with others, but you cannot move. That felt much like grabbing coffee in real life with someone and we got into deeper conversations this way. I would rate it as perhaps the most interesting experience I had before selling my Oculus to wait another year or two to see things improve.
I can't help but wonder what the revelations about Palmer Lucky's ties to racist "shitposting" brigades bode for the future of collaborative VR spaces. I guess at least this time we know we're wading into a cesspool, all utopian forecasting aside.
Before, we needed historians to tie together all the disparate threads of the record to make sense of these kinds of things, with all the time and work that entailed. But in an our era, where so much of life is lived in public, digital spaces, the time between the message and what it telegraphs is much shorter, and maybe more clear.
Youtube and twitch are capable of doing the conference call equivalent, streaming live video of content that doesn't actually exist, such as a video game, to a video receiving device. The ability to dynamically create live video is more than a few years old, even in live chat systems, from the capability to alter the background behind you while you video chat, to being able to wear virtual hats.
There's a lot in here that is interesting, but so much of it is a different form factor and UI/UX on technology that already exists.
We saw swimming among sharks and walking on Mars, both having potential for highly informative and educational experiences. The rhetoric wasn't about how much richer viewing Mars is interactively vs with flat, composite panoramas. The Mars bit was about ~12 seconds with talk about how it was desolate and they wouldn't want to live there… quick, get us out and here and lets move on to… the Facebook offices (a more uninspired location for Zuckerberg to choose I can not imagine). Oh, let's play a card game and let's draw a sword for sword fights! The ability to draw in midair and interact with the thing drawn is the real interesting stuff, stuff that we haven't been able to do before, and this was a demo that said, to me, "Farmville is coming to virtual reality".
Where was showing us things we can't currently, easily do without virtual reality? The live walk through of a building yet to be built? The facilities engineer working with plumbers and electricians on a live, interactive 3d model of a building? The interior designer doing interactive, full-size test fits of furniture? The student walking on the surface of other planets for study prep? The inclusiveness and team building of a remote team working in the same virtual space (this was mentioned briefly in the face expressions portion)? The ability to create and dynamically reconfigure complex user interfaces that would be otherwise impossible to create in reality? Leveraging the facial expressions to read people while playing poker would have been more interesting and a step above current on-line poker playing, more so than "look, we can throw around these cards".
Most of this bit looked like it was scripted. It could have been scripted better to showcase actual advances VR enables, kept the "ooh ahh", maintained the conversational tone and gotten rid of the mundane stuff. I don't think "placing a video call from the outside world into VR" is "pretty amazing".
1. Folding at home. I loved letting it run and getting points and looking at the cool night time map of the world with all the yellow dots showing others running Folding at home. I felt like part of something!
2. Playstation Home went away
3. The ability to install Linux went away. There's a class action lawsuit, if I join I could get $7. Wheee.
4. They sent a firmware update that bricked it. I was never able to recover it.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/457550/
Try it out. The rooms are smaller so less people jumping in and out.
VR is an amazing medium for remote social interactions. There's potential here. Not everything has to be about selfies, and self obsession. It's possible for random people to have a good time with each other. The internet makes it possible for you to find another person similar to who YOU are, and VR makes that interaction more personable. It's literally the best of both "Worlds".
It was a lot of fun, and I went and grabbed the entire family and forced them to try it too. They all enjoyed it. Very different experience from anything else.
But since then, I have had no desire to go back and do it again. Nor have any of the family members mentioned it (including three boys between 5 and 12 who love gaming). Nothing about the experience was compelling enough to capture my attention in the long term.
VR has great novelty factor, but no killer apps (yet?).
Ok in all seriousness.
We little humans perceive most of our world through spatial interactions. The possibilities to make a world enhancing device are incredible and scare me.
I'm concerned that people will forget how great the real Redwood forest is. Or how great real sex is. Or how meaningful life can be apart from a virtual Reality. I'm afraid that the fake version could be so appealing that I would reject the real and choose to dive into my own Matrix. Many people already play 7 hours per day...what's to stop them from never leaving a more immersive experience?
Like I said, the positive potential to improve science/meetings/remote work/etc is pretty incredible. I don't want to sound like a Debbie downer. But sheesh we need to consider the potential risks to society of a pseudo-reality addiction that is as alluring as VR will be very soon.
Is anyone else concerned?
What you're saying is true, but AR/VR is magnitudes of scale more immersive than any tool or artform human's have had.
You talk about IRL things like trips, hikes, etc - but AR will become so integrated into those experiences that the patina of Reality (which OP is talking about) may very well all but disappear.
Disruptive technologies are often initially viewed from an oppositional mindset, which makes sense, because any disruptive technology will steal time away from the Old Activities that existed before the technology. People who aren't early adopters will naturally focus on the decrease in the time spent on Old Activities.
We saw this oppositional reaction when the internet gained popularity:
* People are spending so much time in cyberspace that they won't know how to effectively navigate the real world
* People are having fantasy cyber-lives instead of spending time in the Real World
* He's seeing someone he met online, he must not know how to interact with Real People
* And so on.
But social networks descended on society in an incredibly short period of time, and worked their way into the furthest corners of our lives. The oppositional mindset gave way to an integrative one, where the notion of a "CyberLife", as distinct from a "life", is simply misplaced- the internet is now simply a part of life, sans prefix and with a lowercase "l", no longer boxed up in the conceptual category of "the Cyber".
There was another motifical recurrence when smartphones entered the fray. The oppositional critiques were voluminous and eloquent:
* We're spending so much time texting we're forgetting how to speak to each other
* Every crack in every interaction is plastered over with the ritualized and mutually fraudulent "notification check", signposting the way to the unravelling of the social fabric..., etc.
* You can find the Real World up there, when you hold your head high, with dignity, and not down there, with your head bowed, staring transfixed at a shining rectangle, face ghost-like, bathed in the soft pearlescent glow of vapidity.
But at some point, the integrative mindset arrived. It's hard to maintain the oppositional mindset when you get off your Uber, arrive at a restaurant that you found on Yelp, and are chatting to your friend on WhatsApp, only to have them sit down in front of you. The handoff between "smartphone life" and "real life" is seamless. Smartphones are woven so deeply into our lives that if you ask someone how their "smartphone life" compares to their "real life", they'll just give you a strange look. Smartphones are just a part of life.
I think VR/AR could go in this direction, as just another arrow in our technological quiver. If we start looking at things like social VR, which has the potential to reshape the way we interact remotely, or how architects are today routinely using VR to demo to clients, it's not impossible to believe that the integrative mindset could eventually overcome the oppositional mindset in terms of how we think about VR.
The truth is that humans have a tendency to be lazy. It's not a simple case of equal substitution; we will happily choose inferior substitutions which require less effort (or expense or time or complexity).
Will people choose to "travel" via VR? Yes. Will this reduce real-life traveling? Absolutely. The sense of having been somewhere will reduce our need to actually GO there.
I this the rise of VR will see many become thoroughly entranced (addicted?) and less productive and even alive than they were previously. We will see society split into two groups: one large, one small. The small group will be comprised of the productive, who limit their entertainment consumption in any medium (but especially VR). This group will be exponentially more affluent than the much larger group. The larger group will be comprised of the numerous people who already consume what is already available through any medium: Netflix, Xbox, cable, internet, tablets, phones, etc. These are the people who (best case scenario) have a full-time job, but they spend every other possible waking hour watching or playing something. More and more of this group are working less and consuming/playing more. And we're not talking about real life here. Just think about World of Warcraft--but on steroids. It's going to be insane how addictive VR will be once the bugs have been ironed out.
In short: I too worry that this is something the human race is not prepared for. I worry that our proclivities dispose us to losing ourselves in it at the expense of our real life and responsibilities.
The truth of the matter is that, anecdotally, I look back over my 38 years and I can see the impact on my life of the digital revolution. I want to do more with my life, but oftentimes the allure of the easy "hit" via Netflix or the internet is more of a draw than spending my free time learning languages, exercising, meditating, working on some of my app ideas, writing, or reading. Instead I choose the cognitively easy "hit" at the expense of my personal development and health.
Think about smartphones and tablets. They can and sometimes are used for meaningful and productive purposes. They can be very useful tools. But for most people they're a distraction and a time suck. Which is to say most people spend most of their time on their devices not doing anything meaningful: playing the latest hot game, Facebooking, Facetiming, Snapchatting, reading the news (as vapid as it is). I predict VR will be more of the same.
Either way, we will see...
I'm less convinced that the impacts of these new technologies are as pernicious as you claim, though I'm very open to the idea that hyperrewarding stimuli can "hack" reward pathways carefully tuned for a very different environment, be it McDonalds, PornHub, cocaine, or even Netflix.
But ultimately this is an empirical question, and while I see strong evidence that the food industry exploits our evolved impulses with carefully crafted payloads of calorie-dense foods, I don't see correspondingly strong evidence for a drop in productivity with the rise of ubiquitous, frictionless distraction- if anything we see a negative correlation.
Also worryingly absent from this analysis is the smorgasbord of opportunities for self-improvement that technology has created. Through technology, millions of people have picked up hobbies, languages, instruments, careers, partners, and yes, World of Warcraft, but I don't think we could tabulate these effects into a "net-technology-induced-eudaimonia" metric and say with a straight face that the result turned out to be negative after all.
Further red flags go up with your assertion that the population will bifurcate into the productive and unproductive, which seems to posit some mechanism that AFAIK we don't have good evidence for, like a susceptibility to distraction that's bimodally distributed among the population, or the lack of/ existence of various feedback effects that would amplify small variations, etc.
Anyway, my main point is not that these general concerns are unfounded, but that they're not well-supported by empirical evidence, so we're probably in broad agreement on that front.
On a lower note, I wish there were real games rather than this kind of things, but I still find it amazing.
Maybe online gaming is VR and we've had it for years without realizing. Add stereo video and head tracking - but only when it's really great - and maybe we're done apart from niche applications.
1) The amount of things you can do in VR is more expansive than any medium before. Video conferences for the most part is used to catch up or transfer information faster (or at least that's how I use it, to catch up with friends/business who are far away). However, it's tougher to use video chats to build NEW experiences, and I can only really think of Google Hangouts and playing something like WarLight/editing a doc that does that. Humans for the most part build better relationships when both parties have shared experiences, and in VR you can actually do a lot of things that you could in real life. This is why it's so different from just "videoconferencing"
2) It finds a balance in anonymity and not having to commit 100% to a conversation. For example, when you video conference you have to pay more attention/be more aware of how you're acting, which explains why many times we choose to have text convos rather than just calling the other person. In social VR you're just an avatar so you don't have to care as much about your appearance/interaction/subtle facial expressions etc. The outward behavioral bar is lower so you can relax and enjoy the environment even more.
VR is a powerful medium because it addresses the above two points - you don't have to be as concerned about your appearance/interaction when you're an avatar AND you can actually do more tangible things in VR to actually BUILD better relationships.
We know that IRL we can be in physical proximity with one another, but perhaps it's the joint commitment to the experience that builds the meaning.
Better relationships probably are built on more commitment, not less.
While VR provides anonymity (taking away some emotional commitment of human expression/emotion), the actual shared experiences you're doing is more powerful than any other medium and is pushing on the multiple other levers of commitment such as time, energy, attention, etc.
So VR is creating better relationships through commitments of multiple type and strength.
On the Rise and Fall of the Videophone:
> And the videophonic stress was even worse if you were at all vain. I.e. if you worried at all about how you looked. As in to other people. Which all kidding aside who doesn’t. Good old aural telephone calls could be fielded without makeup, toupee, surgical prostheses, etc. Even without clothes, if that sort of thing rattled your saber. But for the image-conscious, there was of course no such answer-as-you-are informality about visual-video telephone calls, which consumers began to see were less like having the good old phone ring than having the doorbell ring and having to throw on clothes and attach prostheses and do hair- checks in the foyer mirror before answering the door.
> ...
> The proposed solution to what the telecommunications industry’s psychological consultants termed Video-Physiognomic Dysphoria (or VPD) was, of course, the advent of High-Definition Masking; and in fact it was those entrepreneurs who gravitated toward the production of high-definition videophonic imaging and then outright masks who got in and out of the short-lived videophonic era with their shirts plus solid additional nets.
Full Excerpt from Infinite Jest: http://declineofscarcity.com/?page_id=2527
Another bit of gold from that excerpt:
> First there’s some sort of terrific, sci-fi-like advance in consumer tech — like from aural to video phoning — which advance always, however, has certain un- foreseen disadvantages for the consumer; and then but the market-niches created by those disadvantages — like people’s stressfully vain repulsion at their own videophonic appearance — are ingeniously filled via sheer entrepreneurial verve; and yet the very advantages of these ingenious disadvantage-compensations seem all too often to undercut the original high-tech advance, resulting in consumer-recidivism and curve-closure and massive shirt-loss for precipitant investors. In the present case, the stress- and-vanity-compensations’ own evolution saw video-callers rejecting first their own faces and then even their own heavily masked and enhanced physical likenesses and finally covering the video-cameras altogether and transmitting attractively stylized static Tableaux to one another’s TPs. And, behind these lens-cap dioramas and transmitted Tableaux, callers of course found that they were once again stresslessly invisible, unvainly makeup- and toupeeless and baggy-eyed behind their celebrity-dioramas, once again free — since once again unseen — to doodle, blemish-scan, manicure, crease-check — while on their screen, the attractive, intensely attentive face of the well-appointed celebrity on the other end’s Tableau reassured them that they were the objects of a concentrated attention they themselves didn’t have to exert.
Almost daily I do Skype calls most of them are video calls. Most of the times I have several people in the room who still can continue to communicate directly without and technical intermediary. In addition you can write down notifications, doodle, multi-task.
For games, I used to play doom in vr in 1997 and after 5 min the whole looking around thing gets stale and you just want to sit down and relax on the couch/chair. See Wiimote.
Thankfully, for these cases, I've got EVE: Valkyrie, which is a sit-down experience. Looking around is required as you are flying a ship in 6-degrees-of-freedom.
I'm not sure what the solution is.