Isn't it already? VR isn't huge, but it's definitely non-zero and there's a plausible case to be made for more growth in the forseeable future. AR appears to be indistinguishable from zero right now, and the case for growth in the forseeable future remains fairly hard to make. ("Forseeable" is a bit of a fuzzy term, but let's call it 10 years for concreteness. In 50 years, sure, AR everywhere, but on a timeframe even a long-term investor thinks on? Not sure I see it happening.)
> Isn't it already? VR isn't huge, but it's definitely non-zero and there's a plausible case to be made for more growth in the forseeable future. AR appears to be indistinguishable from zero right now
What are we considering AR and VR here? Pokémon Go is an AR game and seems to have a player base that’s several times larger than the playerbase of every existing VR game lumped together.
It seems he was specifically referring to wearables in this context:
> More useful for our founder readers may be Andreessen’s predictions around tech and, because he’s asked about them specifically, his predictions when it comes to wearables
Sure but I'd argue the success of Pokemon Go is not because of AR but in spite of AR.
I am very skeptical people play Pokemon Go for it's AR integration considering other AR games aren't nearly as popular and frankly the gameplay itself is pretty poor.
Pokemon Go seems popular because it's Pokemon on mobile.
And the game is also unplayable until you turn the AR off, unless you love wasting all your Pokéballs because one arm can't quite flick the balls in the right direction while the other arm awkwardly holds the phone just so.
It's just anecdotal but everyone I know who play Pokémon Go has disabled AR. I used it for a few minutes until I realized that playing the game is much easier with AR disabled. Pokémon Go isn't really an "AR game". It is a mobile game which has an optional AR feature.
The iPhone X* phones were some of the best-selling phones of the last year and they all have AR. Tons of cars have AR HUDs at least as an option, like the Toyota Camry, which you can't exactly call "niche".
The only condition where I'd see this being true is if VR leads to "good as there" telepresence, where you can feel like you're having the sort of spontaneous conversations that arise from physical presence at a workplace.
Telepresence done right would be an absolutely huge economic boon - it subsumes transportation, housing, national boundaries, and lots of education and training. If you could get the same sort of "all the web experts in the room" like you get in Silicon Valley or "all the electronics experts in the room" like you get in Shenzhen, but do so where you literally have all the experts (rather than just those who live in those cities), you'd get rid of a lot of economic inefficiencies like houses costing 40x more in Silicon Valley than Detroit.
Failing that, I see it as a niche product that'd revolutionize the entertainment industries but doesn't change much outside of them.
I love using VR, even for long (3 or more hours straight, no breaks) periods, but dear lord would I hate using a VR headset to pretend I'm in an office.
Open offices are trash in the first place (at least for me), headsets do not have enough resolution to pretend to have a screen in front of me, and even if they did, it would likely produce more eyestrain than just looking at an actual HD screen in front of you.
Maybe wearing it all day as an office is a little overkill. But being able to collaborate even in front of some kind of 3D whiteboard room would be a killer for fully remote teams like mine. Drawing on paint-like sites or with clunky web apps has been one of my biggest pains that VR controllers, if done right, could be huge for me.
Maybe with enough presence remote would become even more commonplace. A man can dream.
Two thoughts, based on evaluating remote collaboration tech.
1) Writing on virtual whiteboard in VR just doesn't feel right, there's no tactile feedback. It's doable but doesn't beat a real whiteboard (nothing beats a real whiteboard)
2) Observe people working at a whiteboard. It's predominantly an asynchronous one to many form of communication. Multiple people writing on the same board at the same time isn't how we communicate with each other.
The best in class tool I've found to date is Microsoft's Whiteboard app running on their 84" Surface Hub. Anyone who has the budget I highly recommend taking a look at it.
Are you talking about the iPhone?? That's not a virtual keyboard. Your finger knows when it's touching the screen. Also, tapping on designate target and freeform drawing are two very different things
There's no possible such affordance in virtual space. You're literally writing in air.
>Are you talking about the iPhone?? That's not a virtual keyboard. Your finger knows when it's touching the screen
But it doesn't feel that it's hitting a button (because the button it's virtual), and people then had made this point repeatedly (e.g. in favor of Blackberry).
I would've made that argument then, and it's the reason I have a Blackberry today. It's just straight up not as good, in my opinion. But yes, people in general seem to be fine with it. I just wanted to push back against the idea that "Well, everyone said it would be bad and then it was fine.". The people who thought it was awful in many cases probably still do, they're just quieter about it 'cause it's a lost cause.
There are haptic capabilities to give some feedback... and the software can place the whiteboard where there is a physical wall for you to press against if you wanted it to, it doesn't have to be "writing in air".
> Multiple people writing on the same board at the same time isn't how we communicate with each other.
Chalkboards are actually a great way to communicate and collaborate in small groups, and have been for a long time one of the main forms of communication in professional mathematics and some other technical fields.
The chalkboard is a very democratic medium, because anyone can more-or-less produce the same output, it is easy to add notes over / adjacent to other people’s writing (including formulas, diagrams, ...), and the possibilities are very free and open-ended. This stands in contrast to fancy typography and bespoke technical diagrams, which are often slow to produce, difficult to modify, and require great expertise to do well.
Using a chalkboard well as a collaborative thinking tool takes practice though.
He was saying that we don't communicate via everybody writing on the board simultaneously, not that its not a valid form of communication in groups. People take turns.
What he/she said is that “it's predominantly an asynchronous one to many form of communication”.
And it is true that this is the way many people use whiteboards, as a kind of presentation tool rather than a thinking tool. But that is largely down to lack of practice with the chalkboard/whiteboard as a personal, one-on-one, or small group tool.
There are plenty of people who successfully use white boards as a tool for routine technical conversations in small groups, with multiple participants writing on the same board.
“Not everyone is writing literally simultaneously” would be a vacuous and uninteresting statement, so I’ll give the previous poster the benefit of the doubt that he/she was saying something more substantial. No kind of conversation involves every interlocutor literally simultaneously talking/writing in the same space at the same time: that would just be a cacophony of monologues, not a conversation at all.
This observation is crucial to how we approach collaborative technology, though: the assumed goal has always been to achieve lower latency and finer granularity of changes to create the experience of simultaneous editing with instant feedback.
What this means in practice is that we have a lot of software that makes it easy to bring a group of strangers in to pseudonoymously vandalize a whiteboard by drawing dicks on it - a true "cacophony of monologues." See also: most comment threads.
Having the technical capability to all speak/write at once is wonderful. It cuts friction in the conversation. (Think of the difference between a phone call and a sequence of voice memos.)
That doesn’t mean people collaborating won’t be taking turns as a practical matter, enforced by social convention.
forget the whiteboard, imagine a regular 2D monitor with regular code on it except it wraps your field of view, so all the files of the entire codebase are open at once, let’s assume there is retina resolution everywhere, and it is collab edit like googledocs with a laser pointer attached to each cursor. Pair programming multi-cursor!
>1) Writing on virtual whiteboard in VR just doesn't feel right, there's no tactile feedback. It's doable but doesn't beat a real whiteboard (nothing beats a real whiteboard)
Well, the main benefit of writing on a whiteboard is for you to draw your thoughts and for others to see what you wrote/drew. Not to get tactile feedback.
Besides it would be trivial to actually write on a whiteboard on your office while wearing a VR headset and have it be seen by others in VR space in different offices/countries (thus getting the "tactile feedback" as well).
I think one of the issues is you're never sure what someone is about to do. There is something about seeing someone take control of the drawing space where in VR your avatar would begin motioning towards the board or pickup the writing utensil.
Sometimes I'm hesitant to start scribbling on the drawing space because I don't have the social queues to not step on someone else's thoughts. Maybe this Whiteboard app solves that?
Jane is clever, thought Greg, more clever than Jose, but not that clever.
BigCorp had introduced the VR goggles about eight months ago, and though it was initially a boon, most of the dev team had come to hate them. Sure, working at home was nice at first. You didn't have to wear pants anymore, you could cook fish in you apartment and not get death-stares, the commute over the Bay Bridge was gone along with the tolls. But it quickly became apparent that you still had to 'put ass to seat.' Initially you could skip out, take a long lunch, go to the dentist, take the dog out when you were bored stiff from the monotony.
But then that first update came out.
Thing was, in order to downplay the nausea effects from the screens, the goggles tracked your eyes' saccades, pupil dilation, and a bunch of other bioengineering stuff Greg barely knew about. It really did help with the nausea, not the Greg really suffered from it to begin with. His ex-girlfriend certainly did, making VR-sexting nearly impossible with her back in NYC.
It wasn't so much that the VR-goggles could track exactly what you were looking at, that data stream was just too much to parse, it was that they knew you were there at all. Once most of the dev team was no longer in the bullpen, and instead they were off actually living a life, productivity skyrocketed.
Well, initially.
Greg's boss, Jose, had loved it. But as the product reached it's natural limits, sigmoided to the economy, the squeeze began. At first, the number of tickets became the metric to game. Then it was peer-feedback, which naturally came to an armistice between all of them. One thing after another, as Jose was squeezed from all of this many bosses. Until eventually, you had to have 'continuous telepresence' during work hours.
Sure, when the new JK Rowling product came out, the entire virtual office became Hogwartz, complete with the ghosts and staircases. Fridays were a reliable beach scene. Mondays had that dark humor of a Dilbert strip in the skin and layout of the office. But Jose had each scene constructed so that he could monitor if you were there. Like a manager in a Cuban Cigar factory, his seat was higher. He could easily see if you were there in his goggles. A little red mark in Jose's HUD came up when you pulled out of the office. He had to, it was one of the few metrics he knew about and that he could manipulate to appease the matrix of his bosses. 'Put ass to seat'.
But Jane knew people. Greg didn't know who she knew, maybe one of the hardware guys at the VR goggle plant. But Jane was faking it. Greg has seen it, cataloged it, and studied it. The times she would message him, idly talking about some show, all of them were pulled from the NYT's RSS, easily a chatbot she'd actually paid for. The voice was just that side of choppy. And the way her head moved, that here eyes scanned across Greg's virtual face, totally scripted. He'd seen her replay the exact facial scan at least six times in one meeting. Greg knew: Jane was faking it.
Hot dogs, horseshoes, and hand grenades (essentially a shooting range simulator with almost 300 accurately modeled firearms and plenty of game modes with more content added pretty much weekly)
Beat Saber is a VR rhythm game, and I adore rhythm games
Multiple driving/racing sims, including assetto corsa, project cars, and Euro Truck simulator (though I struggle to play that one in VR)
VTOL VR is an incredible near future Flight and military simulation seemingly focusing on weapons handling
I have over 30 VR applications, and at least 10 I would consider full fledged "games", but those are what I spend most of my time in
I feel like there's a definitional problem with that for vr: you're still wearing the big black glasses/head gear, so if you can see everyone naturally, you can't actually see their faces
The software would presumably know what you look like and can record your facial expressions and map it onto your avatar in real-time. There's technology now to create faces that never existed on a real person, and there's been technology for 15 years or so to do motion-capture of facial expressions and map it onto a computer-generated texture.
Plus I would hope that the big black glasses eventually give way to something sleeker, more akin to an eyepatch or sleeping mask.
What real-world use case does putting all the [insert job function] in a single virtual room solve? This is a case of tech looking for a solution.
I pick up the phone or email people in the same building. I'm not sure jumping into a virtual room with people in different physical locations is a need.
I love my VR headset for gaming, I have a really hard time seeing it implemented in our workplace: software company with development offices in US/UK/India.
Being able to see each other's face is not how a lot of work is done imho. Collaborating using tools like MS Whiteboard on a surface hub to express and ideate on a design is where work gets done in my experience.
Business travel by airplane is extremely common. The fluidity of face-to-face communication aids cooperative work in a way that hasn’t yet been duplicated at scale, despite many efforts to date.
That’s part of what VR aims to disrupt and achieve.
Yes, but who are these people and what are they doing when they travel?
VR is just a video conference call on steroids. Business travel is 'common' but relative to the rest of productive output at an average business it's peanuts. Also what portion of those business travelers absolutely need to be there. Would you buy from (a) a salesperson who took the time to travel to your workplace or (b) some telepresence pitch?
How about option c) donate the plane ticket to buy carbon offsets so as not to act "cheap". Even better, give the client that choice and see if they readily choose to pollute the environment (twice).
Maybe I'm an outlier but I've had more productive video conferences with salespeople than I have with ones who've flown out to talk. Sure, you don't get the free steak lunch on a video call, but you also don't have to spend that lunch break being pitched on how amazingly cool their company is.
My wife is currently on a plane to NYC for a business dinner & conference, leaving me a solo parent for the next 3 days. I certainly wish she could pop on a headset during working hours, schmooze with the other investors involved, and be home for dinner and bedtime. My son can't talk yet, but he probably does too.
I'd argue a video call is worse for facial nuances. The nature of having both camera and screen is the person you're teleconferencing is never actually looking at you.
Modern VR headsets already have eye tracking, it's not too out of the picture to imagine some rudimentary face tracking to capture the rest of the foundations of expression. In my experience the sense of "thereness" is much greater in a VR room than a teleconferencing session; but it's difficult to compare since VR presupposes better audio conditions.
Her job description is basically investing several million dollars at a time into projects that a large number of participants in her industry (impact investing) believe are worthwhile, but no one fund would bankroll on its own. A key part of that job description is working to build partnerships & syndicates of investors whose goals are aligned. A key skill for that is building trust and rapport - the foundations, family offices, entrepreneurs, and hedge funds involved all need to feel like the deal is in their interest and they will be treated fairly, both if it goes well and if it goes poorly.
There's a bunch of social science that's shown that repeated in-person interaction builds trust in a way that e-mail, phone calls, written communication, and videoconferencing does not. It's not just the facial expression and emotions - there's something about interacting in real-time within a shared environment that makes us trust each other. And that's what I'm referring to by "good as there" telepresence - existing systems are not good enough, because there's still a big gulf between VCing with your coworker across the country and chatting with your officemate about a cool new opportunity. I don't know whether VR will ever be good enough to bridge this gulf, but I'm saying that if it can, that would be revolutionary.
If it were just a matter of deal terms & conditions, we could stick all that in a blockchain and let computers hash it out. That's my field, and I keep telling her that eventually the world'll move that way. But humans don't work that way; as long as we have squishy emotions and depend on a lot of subconscious cues we can't even describe, then looking at a screen is not going to change peoples' decision making. If you could somehow capture all those subconscious cues so it really is indistinguishable from physical presence, that may change, but that's a big if.
I've been thinking about this recently, and I feel that the "shared environment" aspect is the key, much more than facial expressions. Uncanny valley aside, I feel that brains have it much easier to recognize presence of a person despite a weird body. I've already had this kind of feeling with regular multiplayer 3D games on a flat screen. I feel virtual environments might alone be sufficient to do the trick of crossing the gulf you talk about.
I think you might be right. It's weird, I often felt closer to people that I played MMORPGs with or fandom folk on AIM than coworkers on VC, even though in many cases I never even knew what the former looked like. A lot of that was the sense of shared experience; while my whole experience was a chat bubble at the time, so was their whole experience.
I doubt it. If this was true, we'd already be there. We have teleconferencing and long distance communications already, and this doesn't really happen.
You would have to go beyond mere conferencing, and create specialized tools that can be interacted with in VR so people can produce something together that they couldn't before. There is little value in just having everyone pretend they're in an office.
Try something like Rec Room on the Vive or Oculus before you proclaim it no different than video conferencing. This is a human perception problem and the feeling of being there and hand signals alone makes an enormous difference. You have to try it to understand. There are all these big and small factors for why video conferencing doesn't replace all communication. VR can in the long term remove most if not all of them, except for latency.
VR Chat is one of the "killer apps" of VR. That and Beat Saber, I guess.
I think a "serious" telepresence application would be good. VR Chat is a meme-haven / non-serious location for now. But... there's that good YCombinator blogpost about non-serious apps: https://blog.ycombinator.com/why-toys/
It really does seem like VR Chat (as immature and silly as it is...) is a killer app. How to grow it into a serious application is still a major mystery to me, but I'd bet on VR Chat (or at least its successor that fixes its issues) to be a driving use of VR.
Might be a PADS (Post-Anime Depression Syndrome), but after rewatching Sword Art Online recently, I found myself thinking that a VR Chat is actually a good idea, and something I would very much enjoy. With an ability to easily enough create and modify stuff in the virtual world (preferably mostly from within world, and I mean creating and modifying interactive objects, and absolutely no "buy funny clothes for your avatar in the platform's store" bullshit), I could imagine running a collaborative ideation space in it; a kind of half-baked virtual hackerspace.
(I find this dream doubly alluring now that I found myself remote-working from a smaller town.)
I mean, what you've described is basically Second Life (except inside of a VR headset). So yeah, I could see it working out well.
3d collaborative virtual worlds are a great toy and seem to build communities relatively easily. Its not really mainstream, but Second Life is still relatively big... and has a long-term presence. It was initially released in 2003. It is kinda surprising that people still play that game. 16 years is an eternity in the video game world.
Also:
> after rewatching Sword Art Online recently, I found myself thinking that a VR Chat is actually a good idea
I'm pretty sure Sword Art Online was about how VR could be a... bad idea. Just saying. :-) Granted, I don't think we have any microwave death-triggers implemented on the back of real-world VR Headsets yet, so maybe we're safe from that particular problem.
Yeah, I've been surprised to learn recently that it's still alive and kicking. I'll check it out eventually, I'm gearing myself to do it for more than 10 years now :).
> I'm pretty sure Sword Art Online was about how VR could be a... bad idea. Just saying. :-)
Yeah, well, one of the reason I like it is that, despite every single VR and AR system presented being abused by some villain to do evil things, including just straight imprisoning and killing people thanks to mentioned microwave death-triggers, the anime series and the movie still manage to present a lot of positive sides too, and do a decent discussion of the social impact of such technologies.
I guess it's like with all anime - focused on both extremes, at the exclusion of the mundane :).
>Failing that, I see it as a niche product that'd revolutionize the entertainment industries but doesn't change much outside of them.
Entertainment is certainly not niche by any definition. If VR replaces gaming consoles alone we're talking several Billion dollars. Let alone TV, Movie theaters, internet porn etc
>The only condition where I'd see this being true is if VR leads to "good as there" telepresence, where you can feel like you're having the sort of spontaneous conversations that arise from physical presence at a workplace.
"All the tedium and productivity-killing of corporate meetings now in your telecommuting job" (tm)
Obviously he played a big role in Mosaic and Netscape back in the day, and a16z has also been quite innovative, but he gets way too much attention when he’s just talking his book.
The justification for VR is pretty depressing. Could be true, I know many people who enjoy losing themselves in digital worlds, but the idea of escaping so purposefully just doesn't sit right.
"I just think [AR as the more useful technology] is only true for people who live in a really interesting place in the real world... So for everyone who doesn’t already live on a college campus or in Silicon Valley or in a major other city, the new environments we’re going to be able to create in VR will inherently be much more interesting."
Yea, the book "Ready Player One" really made me feel queasy about the effects it could have on our lives. Already I see it, myself and other people escaping into Farming/Business/Life simulating games to simulate the success we might not find in the real world.
Success, and control. This is an unfortunate side effect of our civilization. Out there in the real world, between the laws that protect us, corporate interests that manipulate us, the haves that have more say, the neighbours of which we don't - and can't - know more than 0.1%, the jobs that are so hyperspecialized that not many of us contribute an atomic piece of value to anything - between all that, we find ourselves with little real autonomy. Little influence on the environment. Little space to grow. And we can't have that, we can't have autonomy and fun, because that would be destructive to the fragile fabric of society. This is the one aspect about progress that depresses me. We're slowly morphing into a civilization-scale organism, where an individual does not matter, and is nothing more than a single cell is for one's body.
(People from smaller towns and villages may disagree; but this is how living in a 21st century city feels to me. It's a wonderful place, but also a straitjacket.)
Given all that, I can entirely understand the kind of escapism that tries to make you feel that you matter, or that you're a part of something that matters, or that you and your friends have some meaningful control over the shared environment, don't have to deal with as many people, escapism where there's no jail time attached to half of the fun things one may do.
> the idea of escaping so purposefully just doesn't sit right.
I know this feels like a VR thing, but I have found the same sort of issues with Minecraft, Ark, Terraria, etc. It seems like escapism is a huge part of the "survival" genre. VR will obviously magnify this problem a hundred fold, but the problem already exists now.
Minecraft in VR is still one of the most immersive experiences I've had with it-- I wouldn't hesitate to pull that out on a plane, or just about anywhere else I'm stuck sitting for a while and want to shut out the world. I believe John Carmack also made comments about finding it rather compelling.
We have virtual worlds now. Second Life. Sansar. VRChat. Sinespace. High Fidelity. The technology is good enough that we can see what they're like. They're OK, but not compelling. They mostly appeal to people with too much free time. Like Everquest, in the early years.
We even know what a fully immersive full body VR experience is like. Lucasfilm and Disney have one running at Disneyland.[1] They have good cordless VR gear, good position tracking, and a custom-built space you can move around. The space is just blank walls with an occasional prop you can touch, and it lines up with the VR.
They have a neat trick to make the space seem bigger. It turns out that in VR you can get people to turn a little while they think they're walking in a straight line, if you slowly rotate the visual world. So you can make the players go in big circles and think they're covering a lot of distance.
This is close to the "holodeck". It works now. And it's just another Disney ride.
(Is Marc Andressen thinking of the Ready Player One model as a way to allow the real world to suck more while keeping the peons happy? Only the 1% have a good real life, everyone else goes on line and pretends.)
I got to try the VOID Star Wars attraction shown in the video (although it might have been set up in a smaller space than the Disneyland installation).
It was a short, scripted, minimally interactive experience. The hand and prop tracking were pretty glitchy and somewhat immersion-breaking. The equipment was heavy and ridiculously cumbersome (even compared to current consumer VR headsets). I'm sure the cost/work of setting up a system like that is basically prohibitive too.
I don't think it's a great reference point for predicting the VR market in the next 5 years or so, as the cost comes down and more polished and inexpensive mass-market systems come out (like the Oculus Quest) that are cordless with good tracking.
Millions of people spend huge amounts of time playing games on tiny rectangles they hold in their hands. I think it's overly skeptical to assume they won't want holodecks, if the cost is $400 and the HW/SW isn't terrible.
I expect it'll at least be an increasingly less-niche gaming platform as not-terrible standalone devices come out (I tried a tennis game that was pretty fun, I'm not a gamer but I could see myself playing some VR games if it was a way to get real exercise).
The current non-gaming uses like corporate/sports/military training probably will grow too as the quality and ergonomics improve.
I'd really like to try a system with good body/face/eye tracking. I think that is kind of the minimum for social applications with really huge appeal. It's hard to get an idea of if it's compelling or not (or how far away it is, what needs to be improved, etc) without trying it though.
Slightly off topic, but I can't play first person shooters--or, heck, even Minecraft--because I get motion sick from simulated motion with no actual motion. It's so bad that when I used to try to play, I'd continue to be sick if I watched, after I'd get sick and stop, someone play from across the room.
The odd thing is that I don't get seasick, which is (mostly) from actual motion with little, no, or confused apparent motion. Go figure.
It does get better with practice. Many small sessions are better than one long session. Take it off right when you feel sick and don't try to push through. Try these exercises to increase your tolerance: http://elevr.com/yoga-for-building-vr-tolerance/
I'm not sure I agree. AR is like a HUD for your life. It didn't take off with Google Glass but I still believe it will improve one's current life; only a subset of folks want to truly escape virtually. VR is still very cool, but I can't see it being as widely adopted (or practical) as AR.
> AR is like a HUD for your life. It didn't take off with Google Glass
Google Glass isn't AR. AR is not a limited look-up display, it’s 3-D overlay on your field of vision with awareness of location and, ideally, recognition of and interaction with objects in your field of vision. In the limit case it subsumes VR, since the generated imagery can replace as much or as little of the real imagery as needed for the application.
> But only something like .1 percent and 1 percent of people on Earth live in a place where they wake up every morning and think, Wow, there are so many interesting things to see. So for everyone who doesn’t already live on a college campus or in Silicon Valley or in a major other city, the new environments we’re going to be able to create in VR will inherently be much more interesting
Both AR and VR aren't just about entertainment. Also sounds kind of pretentious to say that VR will more interesting than where 99% of people live.
Oh, you mean from this article by Beau Cronin?[1] And this one? [2] "Andreesen saying Harris' thoughts reflect the "reality privilege" that elites have, and that most people don't have better experiences away from the internet."
[2] is worth a read. Andreesen on the nature of reality is strange.
> Also sounds kind of pretentious to say that VR will more interesting than where 99% of people live
Oh boy was it. If you're bored, then you're boring, imo. Every place is interesting or boring depending on how much effort you're willing to put into it.
You know, I'm usually reticent to join in with the "screw Silicon Valley and its myopic rich guy bubble" crowd, but this was kind of gobsmacking. "People here in the Valley don't see the potential of VR in all those places that aren't as wonderful as it is here, where lonely, desperate people could use to escape the tragedy of not living in Silicon Valley."
Apparently HTC's Vive division had a poor 2018, and that kind of made me afraid. I dropped $600 on my Vive kit and absolutely love it, but if the company cuts it off, I don't think I have any way to continue to play VR stuff as mine deteriorates or breaks, or no upgrade path (if I need one)
I'm not convinced the kind of VR I enjoy is going to become mainstream, and therefore I'm not sure it will be anything other than a tiny market
Hmmm...I saw another commenter mention that they think VR will go the way of 3D televisions. I really doubt that. I can't imagine anyone was really ever in love with 3D televisions. There is a modestly different experience vs 2D but nothing substantial. I've honestly always thought 3D "looked worse" than regular television. I'm not sure if there's something funny with my eyes or other people experience it but it never looked as clear.
In contrast, for some users, VR really is amazing. It is substantially different from the experience of interacting with a computer screen. Possibly oculus or the htc vive are a littler early to market but having the entire class of technology go away is unlikely in my opinion.
It is interesting to think though that 3D still seems to be popular in theaters (which I also do not enjoy). I wonder if "going the same way as 3D" could mean that VR will be something that is generally experienced at theme parks or theaters or something but not be a technology that average consumers own?
Thanks for that - I've been tinkering with a Looking Glass over the last few evenings, and had found the relationship between it and VR to be awkward to articulate.
For anyone who's had time to listen, do we know what he means by "bigger"?
To me it seems obvious that AR will be far bigger then VR as AR becomes "ambient" technology while VR remains "somewhere you go", but I'm not sure what his metric is.
Currently "AR" and "VR" are used to differentiate to separate (but mostly decoupled) distinctions:
- Hardware: VR means full eye buffer coverage of both eyes with no transparent glass, AR means partial eye coverage with all pixels sharing visual field with incoming world photons.
- UX: VR typically means full environmental replacement with basic room and body tracking and AR means real world augmentation with virtual entities.
In the long run these are separate concerns. We are either wearing headsets with transparent surfaces or we aren't in the long run. This seems clear will have a 0/1 resolution. For the UX side, it seems unrelated -- presumably you should be able to move up and down the spectrum of full environmental override at any moment.
In the hardware sense, I expect VR style opaque hardware to win (with passthrough cameras to enable them to simulate transparent glass perfectly.) In the software sense the distinction becomes irrelevant. Through the lens of hardware full eye-covering visors seem to be likely to beat glass on the capability/cost curve readily over the next 5 years so my bet is on Jordi-like visors not glasses for daily drivers.
True, he seems to be addressing high-resolution immersive AR vs VR. Is that because he's looking for something to invest in?
If so, it's definitely putting the cart before the horse for the average software dev, since AR can be very low fidelity and still be effective. It just has to add some value to reality to be a pretty big win. Mapping software is the main example to me.
But maybe mapping is not even AR anymore — it's its own thing? What about Pokemon Go? Is that AR in this context?
Imagine wearing an "AR" HMD, a nice HMD with an LCD occlusion layer so it can render black. A black dinosaur is perched on your bookshelf. Great AR. Now you turn around. Half your room is gone, replaced by the rolling hills of a Cretaceous lowland. Great VR. But your laptop seems unchanged, sitting on a Cretaceous rock shelf where your desk was, next to a tree stump where your chair was. Great...err, hmm. You turn halfway back. On your left is hills; on your right is a wall and a bookshelf with a dinosaur. Are you doing VR or AR? Both? Half and half? One eye each?
Sigh. We so need to disrupt the technology society uses for thoughtful analysis and its dissemination.
Or say I'm wearing my VR HMD. But it's showing only my laptop's desktop. Is that still VR? My custom environment has a spatial geometry, and a response to head motion, that is variously aphysical. I joke that VR is in its user-onboarding skeuomorphic UI phase, and I'm much more interested in expert UIs for XR... without the "R". Resemblance to reality as UI design smell. Is that still Virtual and/or Augmented Reality? There's a camera ducktaped to the front of my HMD, providing a video passthrough background. So is that AR? What if I cut side windows in the headset blinders so I can use the real world for balance (old laptop with integrated graphics). Is that AR yet?
Unfortunately, VR HMDs still have the unblurry resolution of a 1980's VGA monitor, so I take off the HMD and look at my laptop screen. Is that AR? No? But I'm wearing anaglyph or LCD shutter glasses, and I'm headtracking, so there's fixed-in-realspace 3D content. Is that AR? But what if my desk has several displays, all doing synced high-resolution (but gappy) 3D, across much of my field of view. Is that AR yet?
The XR+ design space seems quite broad and rich, but much underappreciated.
Well put. I think the moment of "?R takeoff" is when the first person manages to wear a consumer grade standalone VR headset for most of their day using passthrough. It will probably be an experience for nobody but those with the most hardened stomachs, but it will be an existence proof that you can then build software that can assume you have a raster buffer between your retinas and the incident world photons throughout your day that is 'full-cover' (ie every incident photon to your eyes is software proxied and modulated optionally by world photon sensor information via code, not physical properties like transparent glass.) That is basically the "final visual platform" for compute imho. Transparent AR glasses, if anything, are clearly a transitionary technology since they do not provide full software control over photon delivery to the eyes. (Also, I expect this event to happen quietly and unrecognized in late 2019 probably buried in a forum thread somewhere.)
From there, it will just take the hacker community to build apps that provide some type of 10x augmentation by a fully software-proxied visual system and a little bit of cultural normalization of it (probably within circles of teens/kids) to incentivize the acceleration of development of passthrough visor hardware that works better, is smaller, and has longer lasting batteries. But these will be mostly linear engineering problems, except perhaps the frame prediction algorithms needed to deal with camera sensor latency. Whereas the path to a set of AR glasses that mask out the world with full FoV seems a much more theoretical future that stretches the limits of known physics, this seems to be imminently becoming the problem of arranging bits not atoms with the arrival of fairly capable consumer standalone VR headsets with workable passthrough cameras.
If you think about it hard enough, if you woke up in 5 years and there was a market with good AR glasses and good VR goggles, but nobody tied the software together to enable all-day VR goggle wear via passthrough, clearly someone would do it and suddenly those devices are insanely more capable than the AR glass equivalent since they can take over your entire visual field and deliver all the same applications of the glasses. So it seems pretty inductive to me, if you buy into a few fairly simple assumptions, that this is our future, assuming that a software-proxied visual system can deliver value to daily life. The only counter argument (and in fact, one of the admitted theses for many people working on AR glasses) is that wearing a VR visor all day will make you look silly -- sometimes that's enough to tip things over for quite a while, but in the limit people are going to converge on what improves their life the most on net. (See: the segway has finally had it's day with the arrival of cheap electric scooters.)
Full-cover, rasterized vision seems to be the end game for how our visual system will interface with software systems.
Two weeks later: "Marc Andreesen Launches VR Startup _____"
Personally, I hope VR doesn't catch on. Reminds me of the humans in WALL-E. Like others in this thread have said, VR at that scale would almost certainly be founded on addiction. No thanks..
What about AR? I've heard a lot of people make the 3D/VR comparison prediction. I think it's reasonable to think VR and AR could have very different fates.
Fitness market and video game market both have ~30-40 billion in revenue in the US. That suggests that there is roughly similar appetite for real life vs. fantasy.
The veneer of innovation over the monopolies of the FAANG companies is pretty thin on most days, but VR and AR are two things that cause my suspension of disbelief to collapse entirely. Can I get up to pee while "immersed" in VR? Can I find my popcorn? Does anybody realize that the AR demos online are showing phone screens, and not the reality that you will see without a screen in front of you? (On some level, on that last, they do. But the hype seems built upon an off-by-one error in representation.)
We are no longer in an age of innovation and disruption with regard to the Internet. It has been thoroughly colonized, and any innovation will be bought by one of the big fish, in order to prevent the disruption of fairly lucrative relative monopolies that face no, or only the most glacial, threats from commoditization. VR is not it. AR is not it. From here on out, it's ML to try to improve on k-nearest-neighbor with k==1 to drive recommendation engines.
Much like the Moon Program propaganda informs outmoded (what I regret to call) virtue signaling around STEM, propaganda from the era of the rise of the FAANG group drives the same among ink-spillers around The Next Big Disruptive Innovation.
Here's a hint: Whatever the next disruptive thing is, it's not going to come to you via TechCrunch relaying Andreesen's ravings about which thing is bigger than what. If it happens at all. It's entirely possible that nothing will rise from the ashes of Facebook, for example.
If the past two years have shown me anything, it's that people are becoming skeptical of the technologist mantra that "technology will make people's lives better." Not always; and with Apple introducing Screen Time and people trying to figure out how to "break" from their cell phone and social media usage, I think anybody who believes that the mass market wants to live in some VR simulation is tone deaf.
Maybe AR will never be like Minority Report, but I think if AR could get to a point where no goggles are needed, or if the equipment is light enough to not be a burden to the user (unlike VR headsets), then I think AR will be much bigger than VR. The average user just don't want that crap on their face and they don't want to live in a simulation like so many in the Bay Area would like to believe.
When people talk about the Bay Area/Silicon Valley monoculture/hivemind, I immediately think of VR enthusiasts. I'd also throw cryptocurrencies and blockchain enthusiasts into this category as well. Both of those technologies solved "problems" that the general population wouldn't agree to being problems in the first place.
If you asked people before the age of cars how to improve transportation, they'd ask for a faster horse.
That being said, I am skeptical of the claim that VR will be orders of magnitude more popular than AR, simply because humans instinctually do not like to have their vision occluded.
As t→∞, you could imagine technology improving to the point where VR headsets don't feel like they're occluding your vision. The holy grail would plugging directly into your brain to replace your ocular input with a digital feed.
Of course I'm talking about a sci-fi future here, nothing that's on the horizon in the next 10-20 years.
> If you asked people before the age of cars how to improve transportation, they'd ask for a faster horse.
This is a made-up quote, and what they would have asked for was a faster, warmer, safer carriage (which they got with cars), a faster cart (which they got with trucks), and a lower maintenance horse (which they got with motorcycles.) Nobody wanted horses; they used horses to move carriages, carts, and themselves.
True, but the is also a flipside. Technologists solved the transportation problem, but introduced health and urban planning problems as a result. The point is that people are becoming more savvy at spotting the downsides of technologies. In particular, using VR will probably result in more sedentary hours, which is something that people seem to want to move away from.
The most popular VR games require significantly more physical activity than traditional video games (https://vrscout.com/news/man-loses-138-pounds-beat-saber/), so if VR does take off it could be a solution for sendentary hours, not a cause.
Why do we care what this guy says? He wore Google glasses while promising us Bitcoin was the way of the future. Who cares what he thinks? AR isn't that big besides SnapChat and Pokemon Go so why is this news?
VR can't do smell, touch, gravity/acceleration, body position and most importantly laziness.
After a hard day I don't want to be walking around in VR, to the couch for me.
But if I have to walk, AR won't hurt.
Even the software alone, a VR world multi-billions (GTA 5 is tiny compared to a VR world) with $10,000s in hardware per person for one offs. AR - 99% is done for you.
Whatever happened to the decentralized ideal of ad-hoc networks? Shouldn't we expect a much bigger payoff and a much better world if investments actually made the real world better for the consumer? What if VR made the wearer smarter, stronger, nicer, wiser? Is that really so hard to imagine, given that it's the bare minimum we expect from technology today?
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 289 ms ] threadWhat are we considering AR and VR here? Pokémon Go is an AR game and seems to have a player base that’s several times larger than the playerbase of every existing VR game lumped together.
Pokémon go is AR, but it’s value prop is not visual digital content overplayed on the digital world, despite sort of having it
> More useful for our founder readers may be Andreessen’s predictions around tech and, because he’s asked about them specifically, his predictions when it comes to wearables
I am very skeptical people play Pokemon Go for it's AR integration considering other AR games aren't nearly as popular and frankly the gameplay itself is pretty poor.
Pokemon Go seems popular because it's Pokemon on mobile.
More anecdotes: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSilphRoad/comments/9ic3pq/survey...
What does "have AR" mean?
Telepresence done right would be an absolutely huge economic boon - it subsumes transportation, housing, national boundaries, and lots of education and training. If you could get the same sort of "all the web experts in the room" like you get in Silicon Valley or "all the electronics experts in the room" like you get in Shenzhen, but do so where you literally have all the experts (rather than just those who live in those cities), you'd get rid of a lot of economic inefficiencies like houses costing 40x more in Silicon Valley than Detroit.
Failing that, I see it as a niche product that'd revolutionize the entertainment industries but doesn't change much outside of them.
Open offices are trash in the first place (at least for me), headsets do not have enough resolution to pretend to have a screen in front of me, and even if they did, it would likely produce more eyestrain than just looking at an actual HD screen in front of you.
Maybe with enough presence remote would become even more commonplace. A man can dream.
1) Writing on virtual whiteboard in VR just doesn't feel right, there's no tactile feedback. It's doable but doesn't beat a real whiteboard (nothing beats a real whiteboard)
2) Observe people working at a whiteboard. It's predominantly an asynchronous one to many form of communication. Multiple people writing on the same board at the same time isn't how we communicate with each other.
The best in class tool I've found to date is Microsoft's Whiteboard app running on their 84" Surface Hub. Anyone who has the budget I highly recommend taking a look at it.
The app itself is free on windows 10.
To be fair, people said that in 2007 about virtual keyboards.
There's no possible such affordance in virtual space. You're literally writing in air.
But it doesn't feel that it's hitting a button (because the button it's virtual), and people then had made this point repeatedly (e.g. in favor of Blackberry).
Chalkboards are actually a great way to communicate and collaborate in small groups, and have been for a long time one of the main forms of communication in professional mathematics and some other technical fields.
The chalkboard is a very democratic medium, because anyone can more-or-less produce the same output, it is easy to add notes over / adjacent to other people’s writing (including formulas, diagrams, ...), and the possibilities are very free and open-ended. This stands in contrast to fancy typography and bespoke technical diagrams, which are often slow to produce, difficult to modify, and require great expertise to do well.
Using a chalkboard well as a collaborative thinking tool takes practice though.
And it is true that this is the way many people use whiteboards, as a kind of presentation tool rather than a thinking tool. But that is largely down to lack of practice with the chalkboard/whiteboard as a personal, one-on-one, or small group tool.
There are plenty of people who successfully use white boards as a tool for routine technical conversations in small groups, with multiple participants writing on the same board.
“Not everyone is writing literally simultaneously” would be a vacuous and uninteresting statement, so I’ll give the previous poster the benefit of the doubt that he/she was saying something more substantial. No kind of conversation involves every interlocutor literally simultaneously talking/writing in the same space at the same time: that would just be a cacophony of monologues, not a conversation at all.
What this means in practice is that we have a lot of software that makes it easy to bring a group of strangers in to pseudonoymously vandalize a whiteboard by drawing dicks on it - a true "cacophony of monologues." See also: most comment threads.
That doesn’t mean people collaborating won’t be taking turns as a practical matter, enforced by social convention.
Well, the main benefit of writing on a whiteboard is for you to draw your thoughts and for others to see what you wrote/drew. Not to get tactile feedback.
Besides it would be trivial to actually write on a whiteboard on your office while wearing a VR headset and have it be seen by others in VR space in different offices/countries (thus getting the "tactile feedback" as well).
Sometimes I'm hesitant to start scribbling on the drawing space because I don't have the social queues to not step on someone else's thoughts. Maybe this Whiteboard app solves that?
BigCorp had introduced the VR goggles about eight months ago, and though it was initially a boon, most of the dev team had come to hate them. Sure, working at home was nice at first. You didn't have to wear pants anymore, you could cook fish in you apartment and not get death-stares, the commute over the Bay Bridge was gone along with the tolls. But it quickly became apparent that you still had to 'put ass to seat.' Initially you could skip out, take a long lunch, go to the dentist, take the dog out when you were bored stiff from the monotony.
But then that first update came out.
Thing was, in order to downplay the nausea effects from the screens, the goggles tracked your eyes' saccades, pupil dilation, and a bunch of other bioengineering stuff Greg barely knew about. It really did help with the nausea, not the Greg really suffered from it to begin with. His ex-girlfriend certainly did, making VR-sexting nearly impossible with her back in NYC.
It wasn't so much that the VR-goggles could track exactly what you were looking at, that data stream was just too much to parse, it was that they knew you were there at all. Once most of the dev team was no longer in the bullpen, and instead they were off actually living a life, productivity skyrocketed.
Well, initially.
Greg's boss, Jose, had loved it. But as the product reached it's natural limits, sigmoided to the economy, the squeeze began. At first, the number of tickets became the metric to game. Then it was peer-feedback, which naturally came to an armistice between all of them. One thing after another, as Jose was squeezed from all of this many bosses. Until eventually, you had to have 'continuous telepresence' during work hours.
Sure, when the new JK Rowling product came out, the entire virtual office became Hogwartz, complete with the ghosts and staircases. Fridays were a reliable beach scene. Mondays had that dark humor of a Dilbert strip in the skin and layout of the office. But Jose had each scene constructed so that he could monitor if you were there. Like a manager in a Cuban Cigar factory, his seat was higher. He could easily see if you were there in his goggles. A little red mark in Jose's HUD came up when you pulled out of the office. He had to, it was one of the few metrics he knew about and that he could manipulate to appease the matrix of his bosses. 'Put ass to seat'.
But Jane knew people. Greg didn't know who she knew, maybe one of the hardware guys at the VR goggle plant. But Jane was faking it. Greg has seen it, cataloged it, and studied it. The times she would message him, idly talking about some show, all of them were pulled from the NYT's RSS, easily a chatbot she'd actually paid for. The voice was just that side of choppy. And the way her head moved, that here eyes scanned across Greg's virtual face, totally scripted. He'd seen her replay the exact facial scan at least six times in one meeting. Greg knew: Jane was faking it.
Beat Saber is a VR rhythm game, and I adore rhythm games
Multiple driving/racing sims, including assetto corsa, project cars, and Euro Truck simulator (though I struggle to play that one in VR)
VTOL VR is an incredible near future Flight and military simulation seemingly focusing on weapons handling
I have over 30 VR applications, and at least 10 I would consider full fledged "games", but those are what I spend most of my time in
Plus I would hope that the big black glasses eventually give way to something sleeker, more akin to an eyepatch or sleeping mask.
HIGH-FIDELITY FACIAL AND SPEECH ANIMATION FOR VR HMDS Kyle Olszewski, Joseph J. Lim, Shunsuke Saito, Hao Li Siggraph Asia 2016 http://www.hao-li.com/publications/papers/siggraphAsia2016HF...
FACIAL PERFORMANCE SENSING HEAD-MOUNTED DISPLAY Hao Li, Laura Trutoiu, Kyle Olszewski, Lingyu Wei, Tristan Trutna, Pei-Lun Hsieh, Aaron Nicholls, Chongyang Ma Siggraph 2015 http://www.hao-li.com/publications/papers/siggraph2015FPSHMD...
(Could look like Google's nap pods but a little bit smaller.)
https://youtu.be/VUbJl_xiDFU
I pick up the phone or email people in the same building. I'm not sure jumping into a virtual room with people in different physical locations is a need.
I love my VR headset for gaming, I have a really hard time seeing it implemented in our workplace: software company with development offices in US/UK/India.
Being able to see each other's face is not how a lot of work is done imho. Collaborating using tools like MS Whiteboard on a surface hub to express and ideate on a design is where work gets done in my experience.
That’s part of what VR aims to disrupt and achieve.
VR is just a video conference call on steroids. Business travel is 'common' but relative to the rest of productive output at an average business it's peanuts. Also what portion of those business travelers absolutely need to be there. Would you buy from (a) a salesperson who took the time to travel to your workplace or (b) some telepresence pitch?
How about option c) donate the plane ticket to buy carbon offsets so as not to act "cheap". Even better, give the client that choice and see if they readily choose to pollute the environment (twice).
Not sure how VR solves the problem you describe. Your wife needs to be there in person if a skype call wouldn't suffice.
Modern VR headsets already have eye tracking, it's not too out of the picture to imagine some rudimentary face tracking to capture the rest of the foundations of expression. In my experience the sense of "thereness" is much greater in a VR room than a teleconferencing session; but it's difficult to compare since VR presupposes better audio conditions.
Her job description is basically investing several million dollars at a time into projects that a large number of participants in her industry (impact investing) believe are worthwhile, but no one fund would bankroll on its own. A key part of that job description is working to build partnerships & syndicates of investors whose goals are aligned. A key skill for that is building trust and rapport - the foundations, family offices, entrepreneurs, and hedge funds involved all need to feel like the deal is in their interest and they will be treated fairly, both if it goes well and if it goes poorly.
There's a bunch of social science that's shown that repeated in-person interaction builds trust in a way that e-mail, phone calls, written communication, and videoconferencing does not. It's not just the facial expression and emotions - there's something about interacting in real-time within a shared environment that makes us trust each other. And that's what I'm referring to by "good as there" telepresence - existing systems are not good enough, because there's still a big gulf between VCing with your coworker across the country and chatting with your officemate about a cool new opportunity. I don't know whether VR will ever be good enough to bridge this gulf, but I'm saying that if it can, that would be revolutionary.
If it were just a matter of deal terms & conditions, we could stick all that in a blockchain and let computers hash it out. That's my field, and I keep telling her that eventually the world'll move that way. But humans don't work that way; as long as we have squishy emotions and depend on a lot of subconscious cues we can't even describe, then looking at a screen is not going to change peoples' decision making. If you could somehow capture all those subconscious cues so it really is indistinguishable from physical presence, that may change, but that's a big if.
You would have to go beyond mere conferencing, and create specialized tools that can be interacted with in VR so people can produce something together that they couldn't before. There is little value in just having everyone pretend they're in an office.
I think a "serious" telepresence application would be good. VR Chat is a meme-haven / non-serious location for now. But... there's that good YCombinator blogpost about non-serious apps: https://blog.ycombinator.com/why-toys/
It really does seem like VR Chat (as immature and silly as it is...) is a killer app. How to grow it into a serious application is still a major mystery to me, but I'd bet on VR Chat (or at least its successor that fixes its issues) to be a driving use of VR.
(I find this dream doubly alluring now that I found myself remote-working from a smaller town.)
3d collaborative virtual worlds are a great toy and seem to build communities relatively easily. Its not really mainstream, but Second Life is still relatively big... and has a long-term presence. It was initially released in 2003. It is kinda surprising that people still play that game. 16 years is an eternity in the video game world.
Also:
> after rewatching Sword Art Online recently, I found myself thinking that a VR Chat is actually a good idea
I'm pretty sure Sword Art Online was about how VR could be a... bad idea. Just saying. :-) Granted, I don't think we have any microwave death-triggers implemented on the back of real-world VR Headsets yet, so maybe we're safe from that particular problem.
Yeah, I've been surprised to learn recently that it's still alive and kicking. I'll check it out eventually, I'm gearing myself to do it for more than 10 years now :).
> I'm pretty sure Sword Art Online was about how VR could be a... bad idea. Just saying. :-)
Yeah, well, one of the reason I like it is that, despite every single VR and AR system presented being abused by some villain to do evil things, including just straight imprisoning and killing people thanks to mentioned microwave death-triggers, the anime series and the movie still manage to present a lot of positive sides too, and do a decent discussion of the social impact of such technologies.
I guess it's like with all anime - focused on both extremes, at the exclusion of the mundane :).
Entertainment is certainly not niche by any definition. If VR replaces gaming consoles alone we're talking several Billion dollars. Let alone TV, Movie theaters, internet porn etc
There are many more reasons for the housing cost disparity then closeness in work spaces.
"All the tedium and productivity-killing of corporate meetings now in your telecommuting job" (tm)
http://blog.pmarca.com/2014/01/22/why-bitcoin-matters/
Obviously he played a big role in Mosaic and Netscape back in the day, and a16z has also been quite innovative, but he gets way too much attention when he’s just talking his book.
"I just think [AR as the more useful technology] is only true for people who live in a really interesting place in the real world... So for everyone who doesn’t already live on a college campus or in Silicon Valley or in a major other city, the new environments we’re going to be able to create in VR will inherently be much more interesting."
(People from smaller towns and villages may disagree; but this is how living in a 21st century city feels to me. It's a wonderful place, but also a straitjacket.)
Given all that, I can entirely understand the kind of escapism that tries to make you feel that you matter, or that you're a part of something that matters, or that you and your friends have some meaningful control over the shared environment, don't have to deal with as many people, escapism where there's no jail time attached to half of the fun things one may do.
I know this feels like a VR thing, but I have found the same sort of issues with Minecraft, Ark, Terraria, etc. It seems like escapism is a huge part of the "survival" genre. VR will obviously magnify this problem a hundred fold, but the problem already exists now.
We have virtual worlds now. Second Life. Sansar. VRChat. Sinespace. High Fidelity. The technology is good enough that we can see what they're like. They're OK, but not compelling. They mostly appeal to people with too much free time. Like Everquest, in the early years.
We even know what a fully immersive full body VR experience is like. Lucasfilm and Disney have one running at Disneyland.[1] They have good cordless VR gear, good position tracking, and a custom-built space you can move around. The space is just blank walls with an occasional prop you can touch, and it lines up with the VR.
They have a neat trick to make the space seem bigger. It turns out that in VR you can get people to turn a little while they think they're walking in a straight line, if you slowly rotate the visual world. So you can make the players go in big circles and think they're covering a lot of distance.
This is close to the "holodeck". It works now. And it's just another Disney ride.
(Is Marc Andressen thinking of the Ready Player One model as a way to allow the real world to suck more while keeping the peons happy? Only the 1% have a good real life, everyone else goes on line and pretends.)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfD28LYYwWM
It was a short, scripted, minimally interactive experience. The hand and prop tracking were pretty glitchy and somewhat immersion-breaking. The equipment was heavy and ridiculously cumbersome (even compared to current consumer VR headsets). I'm sure the cost/work of setting up a system like that is basically prohibitive too.
I don't think it's a great reference point for predicting the VR market in the next 5 years or so, as the cost comes down and more polished and inexpensive mass-market systems come out (like the Oculus Quest) that are cordless with good tracking.
Millions of people spend huge amounts of time playing games on tiny rectangles they hold in their hands. I think it's overly skeptical to assume they won't want holodecks, if the cost is $400 and the HW/SW isn't terrible.
I expect it'll at least be an increasingly less-niche gaming platform as not-terrible standalone devices come out (I tried a tennis game that was pretty fun, I'm not a gamer but I could see myself playing some VR games if it was a way to get real exercise).
The current non-gaming uses like corporate/sports/military training probably will grow too as the quality and ergonomics improve.
I'd really like to try a system with good body/face/eye tracking. I think that is kind of the minimum for social applications with really huge appeal. It's hard to get an idea of if it's compelling or not (or how far away it is, what needs to be improved, etc) without trying it though.
The odd thing is that I don't get seasick, which is (mostly) from actual motion with little, no, or confused apparent motion. Go figure.
Google Glass isn't AR. AR is not a limited look-up display, it’s 3-D overlay on your field of vision with awareness of location and, ideally, recognition of and interaction with objects in your field of vision. In the limit case it subsumes VR, since the generated imagery can replace as much or as little of the real imagery as needed for the application.
> But only something like .1 percent and 1 percent of people on Earth live in a place where they wake up every morning and think, Wow, there are so many interesting things to see. So for everyone who doesn’t already live on a college campus or in Silicon Valley or in a major other city, the new environments we’re going to be able to create in VR will inherently be much more interesting
Both AR and VR aren't just about entertainment. Also sounds kind of pretentious to say that VR will more interesting than where 99% of people live.
You can see Andreessen discussing it at the start of the recode / Code 2017 interview with Reid Hoffman:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZhBVBBBNs0
[2] is worth a read. Andreesen on the nature of reality is strange.
[1] https://medium.com/@beaucronin/unbundling-reality-fa406f66ab... [2] https://www.pcmag.com/article/354005/marc-andreesen-and-reid...
Oh boy was it. If you're bored, then you're boring, imo. Every place is interesting or boring depending on how much effort you're willing to put into it.
I'm not convinced the kind of VR I enjoy is going to become mainstream, and therefore I'm not sure it will be anything other than a tiny market
In contrast, for some users, VR really is amazing. It is substantially different from the experience of interacting with a computer screen. Possibly oculus or the htc vive are a littler early to market but having the entire class of technology go away is unlikely in my opinion.
It is interesting to think though that 3D still seems to be popular in theaters (which I also do not enjoy). I wonder if "going the same way as 3D" could mean that VR will be something that is generally experienced at theme parks or theaters or something but not be a technology that average consumers own?
To me it seems obvious that AR will be far bigger then VR as AR becomes "ambient" technology while VR remains "somewhere you go", but I'm not sure what his metric is.
VR at that scale is premised on an unhealthy addiction.
- Hardware: VR means full eye buffer coverage of both eyes with no transparent glass, AR means partial eye coverage with all pixels sharing visual field with incoming world photons.
- UX: VR typically means full environmental replacement with basic room and body tracking and AR means real world augmentation with virtual entities.
In the long run these are separate concerns. We are either wearing headsets with transparent surfaces or we aren't in the long run. This seems clear will have a 0/1 resolution. For the UX side, it seems unrelated -- presumably you should be able to move up and down the spectrum of full environmental override at any moment.
In the hardware sense, I expect VR style opaque hardware to win (with passthrough cameras to enable them to simulate transparent glass perfectly.) In the software sense the distinction becomes irrelevant. Through the lens of hardware full eye-covering visors seem to be likely to beat glass on the capability/cost curve readily over the next 5 years so my bet is on Jordi-like visors not glasses for daily drivers.
If so, it's definitely putting the cart before the horse for the average software dev, since AR can be very low fidelity and still be effective. It just has to add some value to reality to be a pretty big win. Mapping software is the main example to me.
But maybe mapping is not even AR anymore — it's its own thing? What about Pokemon Go? Is that AR in this context?
Imagine wearing an "AR" HMD, a nice HMD with an LCD occlusion layer so it can render black. A black dinosaur is perched on your bookshelf. Great AR. Now you turn around. Half your room is gone, replaced by the rolling hills of a Cretaceous lowland. Great VR. But your laptop seems unchanged, sitting on a Cretaceous rock shelf where your desk was, next to a tree stump where your chair was. Great...err, hmm. You turn halfway back. On your left is hills; on your right is a wall and a bookshelf with a dinosaur. Are you doing VR or AR? Both? Half and half? One eye each?
Sigh. We so need to disrupt the technology society uses for thoughtful analysis and its dissemination.
Or say I'm wearing my VR HMD. But it's showing only my laptop's desktop. Is that still VR? My custom environment has a spatial geometry, and a response to head motion, that is variously aphysical. I joke that VR is in its user-onboarding skeuomorphic UI phase, and I'm much more interested in expert UIs for XR... without the "R". Resemblance to reality as UI design smell. Is that still Virtual and/or Augmented Reality? There's a camera ducktaped to the front of my HMD, providing a video passthrough background. So is that AR? What if I cut side windows in the headset blinders so I can use the real world for balance (old laptop with integrated graphics). Is that AR yet?
Unfortunately, VR HMDs still have the unblurry resolution of a 1980's VGA monitor, so I take off the HMD and look at my laptop screen. Is that AR? No? But I'm wearing anaglyph or LCD shutter glasses, and I'm headtracking, so there's fixed-in-realspace 3D content. Is that AR? But what if my desk has several displays, all doing synced high-resolution (but gappy) 3D, across much of my field of view. Is that AR yet?
The XR+ design space seems quite broad and rich, but much underappreciated.
From there, it will just take the hacker community to build apps that provide some type of 10x augmentation by a fully software-proxied visual system and a little bit of cultural normalization of it (probably within circles of teens/kids) to incentivize the acceleration of development of passthrough visor hardware that works better, is smaller, and has longer lasting batteries. But these will be mostly linear engineering problems, except perhaps the frame prediction algorithms needed to deal with camera sensor latency. Whereas the path to a set of AR glasses that mask out the world with full FoV seems a much more theoretical future that stretches the limits of known physics, this seems to be imminently becoming the problem of arranging bits not atoms with the arrival of fairly capable consumer standalone VR headsets with workable passthrough cameras.
If you think about it hard enough, if you woke up in 5 years and there was a market with good AR glasses and good VR goggles, but nobody tied the software together to enable all-day VR goggle wear via passthrough, clearly someone would do it and suddenly those devices are insanely more capable than the AR glass equivalent since they can take over your entire visual field and deliver all the same applications of the glasses. So it seems pretty inductive to me, if you buy into a few fairly simple assumptions, that this is our future, assuming that a software-proxied visual system can deliver value to daily life. The only counter argument (and in fact, one of the admitted theses for many people working on AR glasses) is that wearing a VR visor all day will make you look silly -- sometimes that's enough to tip things over for quite a while, but in the limit people are going to converge on what improves their life the most on net. (See: the segway has finally had it's day with the arrival of cheap electric scooters.)
Full-cover, rasterized vision seems to be the end game for how our visual system will interface with software systems.
Personally, I hope VR doesn't catch on. Reminds me of the humans in WALL-E. Like others in this thread have said, VR at that scale would almost certainly be founded on addiction. No thanks..
The veneer of innovation over the monopolies of the FAANG companies is pretty thin on most days, but VR and AR are two things that cause my suspension of disbelief to collapse entirely. Can I get up to pee while "immersed" in VR? Can I find my popcorn? Does anybody realize that the AR demos online are showing phone screens, and not the reality that you will see without a screen in front of you? (On some level, on that last, they do. But the hype seems built upon an off-by-one error in representation.)
We are no longer in an age of innovation and disruption with regard to the Internet. It has been thoroughly colonized, and any innovation will be bought by one of the big fish, in order to prevent the disruption of fairly lucrative relative monopolies that face no, or only the most glacial, threats from commoditization. VR is not it. AR is not it. From here on out, it's ML to try to improve on k-nearest-neighbor with k==1 to drive recommendation engines.
Much like the Moon Program propaganda informs outmoded (what I regret to call) virtue signaling around STEM, propaganda from the era of the rise of the FAANG group drives the same among ink-spillers around The Next Big Disruptive Innovation.
Here's a hint: Whatever the next disruptive thing is, it's not going to come to you via TechCrunch relaying Andreesen's ravings about which thing is bigger than what. If it happens at all. It's entirely possible that nothing will rise from the ashes of Facebook, for example.
Maybe AR will never be like Minority Report, but I think if AR could get to a point where no goggles are needed, or if the equipment is light enough to not be a burden to the user (unlike VR headsets), then I think AR will be much bigger than VR. The average user just don't want that crap on their face and they don't want to live in a simulation like so many in the Bay Area would like to believe.
When people talk about the Bay Area/Silicon Valley monoculture/hivemind, I immediately think of VR enthusiasts. I'd also throw cryptocurrencies and blockchain enthusiasts into this category as well. Both of those technologies solved "problems" that the general population wouldn't agree to being problems in the first place.
That being said, I am skeptical of the claim that VR will be orders of magnitude more popular than AR, simply because humans instinctually do not like to have their vision occluded.
Of course I'm talking about a sci-fi future here, nothing that's on the horizon in the next 10-20 years.
This is a made-up quote, and what they would have asked for was a faster, warmer, safer carriage (which they got with cars), a faster cart (which they got with trucks), and a lower maintenance horse (which they got with motorcycles.) Nobody wanted horses; they used horses to move carriages, carts, and themselves.
Faster horses would have been better for civilization than cars.
1000 * 0 = 0
Maybe in 50 years when we are all flying to Mars.
VR can't do smell, touch, gravity/acceleration, body position and most importantly laziness.
After a hard day I don't want to be walking around in VR, to the couch for me.
But if I have to walk, AR won't hurt.
Even the software alone, a VR world multi-billions (GTA 5 is tiny compared to a VR world) with $10,000s in hardware per person for one offs. AR - 99% is done for you.