Oculus, Vive, Index - these are like the pre-iPhone smart phones. They're bulky, slow, they kind of do their job, but they're not something everybody wants.
VR has to get better. The resolution and FOV are terrible. The gameplay paradigms kind of suck because movement is such a pain.
AR honestly seems even further away. Pokemon Go and all the other AR trinkets are clunky toys. I can't ever see holding up a device for anything other than picturing furniture in a space, and none of these apps even work well.
An AR headset outside of industrial/military uses is a pipe dream that will rely on miniaturization and being fashionable. Google Glass wasn't cool, and nobody is going to wear a bulky HoloLens anywhere. There's a lot of work that needs to be done.
I think you are wrong about AR, once a decent set of AR capable glasses hit the market I think we will see a very large market adoption. Very much like the smart phone and smart watch and tablet it will be a toy for techies until a company with real design chops and solid software/hardware gets behind it. I also believe that Apple is the most likely to be that company, solid design and a well liked ecosystem, plus a proven history at creating/shaping new consumer tech device markets. Apple AR Glasses have will likely be a huge success. It helps a ton that ARKit 4 and the new Lidar sensors on the pro level devices are next level good over the current AR software.
This might not be a tech or business problem. Remember Google tried AR with Glass -- decent hardware and UI -- and ran into an uncomfortable social valley, eg "glassholes". Turns out people don't want pervasive video recording in every social situation.
That said I think there are still unexplored workplace markets like medical, mechanical etc.
There seem to be a very, very small number of consumer applications: heads up nav display for bicycle/motorcycle operators comes to mind.
To me, AR seems further away simply because "decent set of AR capable glasses" is further away than decent VR hardware, so the AR market adoption you expect would happen a couple years after VR has sufficiently good hardware to go mainstream.
It started to take off in October, with the release of the Oculus Quest 2, which is out of stock all over the place. It has nearly doubled Oculus' userbase on Steam in just 2.5 months despite their various other headsets having been out for years.
Still on the same old tired track with this. Stores can't keep Quest2s in stock and have you tried to actually buy an HP Reverb2 lately? Developers are making decent amounts of money out of VR titles. Users who have the headsets love them, and the various reddit VR groups are extremely active. Still, nothing to see, and it's not getting adoption. Pls ..
Quest 2 and Reverb2 have low production numbers compared to the PS5 and XBox, so it's not surprising they are quickly out of stock.
And VR is missing the you-do-not-want-to-miss App.
Here in Japan, we have enough Quest2 stock over a month. I believe FB assigned too much volume dedicated for Japan. (Quest2 sold in Japan has special packaging for Japan)
I have a Quest2 and motion tracking is great, but the resolution/blurriness bothers my eyes a lot, to the point where it gives me a headache. Now it could be with not wearing glasses, but I tried it with contacts and it still bothered me. My wife meanwhile has no issues. Is this a common issue?
It's likely that the resolution/blurriness are not responsible for your headache, but rather the lenses and lens spacing, and your particular IPD. Quest 2 has low-granularity control over IPD settings, so you may just be a bad fit for the device. Check your IPD online using a webcam and credit card and see if its close to one of the three available settings on Quest 2.
I haven't tried Quest 2 specifically but had similar issues with Rift and HTC Vive (we had them at work). I have different prescription for right and left eye and was seeing blurry no matter how I adjusted the lenses, to the point of losing stereoscopic vision rendering the headset pretty much useless.
You might need a VR headset with better IPD adjustments. Going that route is more expensive and complicated and requires a PC. It also requires wires which kill the immersion.
It's a hard sell for an older (early 40's) gamer like me. I have far more games I want to play on my expensive PC than I have time for (or likely ever will). To consider investing in a new gaming technology it would have to be more enticing than the abundance of stuff I already have! And a lot of the games I'm eager to play are sequels/remakes of things I already know I enjoy immensely, so to draw me away would take something big.
As a late 20s gamer, some of my earliest gaming memories were formed during the flight/space flight sim boom of the 90s, so I absolutely adore my Vive for Elite Dangerous, Star Wars Squadrons, and No Man's Sky.
Put it this way, for simulation gamers it's a godsend compared to a 3 or 4 monitor setup with head tracking.
Right, the type of games matter a lot. I do like first-person RPGs, but those are only a little appealing to me in VR so far. And most of my gaming (4x, strategy, builder) don't benefit much from VR as far as I can tell.
For the most part, that's true. There's a couple of strategy/card games for VR that are nice since they're in sort of a "You're a god looking down at the table with the battle on it" perspective. Likewise Tabletop Simulator has decent VR support, so for tabletop strategy games it can be fun. It doesn't add much to the experience, though, aside from the ability to move your head to control the camera being very intuitive.
I just turned 43 and Eleven Table Tennis and also the bowling game on Oculus Quest are my main avenues for exercise.
And I also have more video games than I could ever play but I have spent quite a lot more time in VR table tennis. It's very realistic and fun. And a lot easier to figure out than most of the games now which seemed to be designed to be as intricate as possible.
Flashback to 1995. I'm a 17 year old PFY invited to beta test a VR headset from a local company. My Uncle was an investor and I was technically savvy and the target market.
I had a copy of Descent that supported VR, and while it was a bit of a hassle to get setup, I got it working. The experience was incredible. After the first use I said to myself "this is the future". I had permission to test the headset for two weeks, and I wanted my friends to see it as well.
So I invited them over that weekend. And that's where the problem set in. When one person was using the headset, they were gone. You couldn't interact with them in any way. They might as well have been in a different room. Then I said to myself "this is not the future", and haven't touched VR since.
There is no amount of technology that can get over this problem. It's not about FOV or resolution or immersion. It's a social problem. If you live alone at home, and want to plugin then great. But if you live with someone, its distant, weird, and kinda creepy, to have the other person in a headset and unreachable.
It's a great opportunity to prank people though. There was someone testing some kind of VR app in a co-working space I used to frequent, and people would do things like sprinkle confetti on them or move things around on their desk while they were jacked in.
There are all kinds of technological solutions to that:
Both have headsets (used to be a cost issue, gradually getting solved) and play the same thing.
Or one has AR glasses and can peek into what the other is doing and communicate with them.
An internal camera captures the face under the headset and presents it on the outside with correct parallax (could be presented with AR or with auto stereo display), AI in the headset can tell when someone is wanting attention etc. and use other cameras with depth reconstruction or depth sensors to fade them into the VR player's world.
We’re talking about widespread adoption of consumer technology. Everything you just mentioned is a niche workaround, and to be blunt, not very good ones. Sure, there are always going to be people who love VR, and it’s really cool! But there’s no way it becomes as popular as TVs or smartphones.
Most multiplayer video games today don't ship with splitscreen co-op, people just play with their friends remotely over the internet.
I agree VR isn't great for a party game or hanging out with your friends in your living room, but that's OK because that's not the experience most people are having today.
The Oculust Quest 2 is my first VR headset, and it can cast to the TV. That helps tremendously with the social aspect, rest of the room can see what you're doing and give feedback. In addition we've been playing Eleven - a table tennis game - in multiplayer with two people in the same room (with two headsets) which is tremendous fun, but requires a second headset.
Try Echo VR, Population One, Blaston, Hyperdash, and Walkabout Mini Golf. There's no real advantage to being in the same physical space to any of these games, but they are all great multiplayer titles.
Im surprised at how much time Ive clocked in this game. I've been playing it with a friend who lives a few hundred miles away, and we just put around for hours while catching up in virtual space. Highly recommend, if you know someone with an Oculus Quest 2 (not you, OP, just anyone reading this.)
That depends entirely on your living situation. If you live on your own, a VR headset becomes just the opposite - you go from being isolated to being in a room full of people. Those people can be on the opposite side of the world, but you're carrying on a conversation and playing mini-golf with them.
Or for local play, there are one-vs-many party games where one player wears a headset and interacts with a group of people in the same room who aren't in VR.
Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes is a great example of this where the other players are referring to a paper manual to help you defuse a bomb. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqelfBKuiic
There's Acron: Attack of the Squirrels where one person has a headset and other people play against them as the squirrels with their phones. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP29BxhvHfc
Or Davigo, maybe a less social one because it's VR vs PCs and not likely to be in one room, where the VR player is a giant trying to swat at the tiny humans who are playing a 3rd person game where they team up and throw bombs at the giant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL7a63MMx6Q
Even if you don't have a game where other people can be involved, you can still cast the headset view to TVs and tablets. It can be plenty of fun to pass a single headset around taking turns in Beat Saber if everyone else can see what's happening.
I'm guessing none of that was the case in 1995, so I wouldn't be so quick to stick to a 25 year old judgement of what the technology can do.
And on the other end of the spectrum, sometimes you just accept that isolation for a while because you get to fly an X-Wing. A Quest V1 with Oculus Link is far from an optimal PC VR setup, but even with that Star Wars: Squadrons is an experience I’ve been waiting for since I first saw A New Hope. It’s hard to convey how cool it is to be sitting in a spaceship cockpit, dodging through asteroids and chasing down TIE fighters with the pew pew pew of four KX9 laser cannons on your wingtips. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vE90KIBlWyk
Would I play it in VR mode for hours on end every night and stop talking to real people? No. But not all my activities need to be social either. I can go for a four hour hike in the woods by myself and no one gives me a hard time for being too isolated. Or maybe they do, but I don’t care because sometimes that’s how I want to spend my time. To each their own.
One other feature of the Quest that I should mention - you can double-tap the side of the headset at any time to turn the game world off and immediately switch to "passthrough" mode where you see through the headset's tracking cameras. This obviously works best with single player games that can pause themselves until you tap back in, but in those games it makes it no big deal to drop out of the game for a moment to interact with people and things in the real world. A bit weird to talk to you while you have a big headset on your face, sure. But this was added in a software update well after launch, and it's way better for staying available to the real world than needing to take the headset on and off.
>That depends entirely on your living situation. If you live on your own, a VR headset becomes just the opposite - you go from being isolated to being in a room full of people.
That is a really depressing and dystopian future that I am not sure if I want to live in. Yes, MMOs and games like GTA-O, Roblox, or Fortnite are in the same area already now available. But in my opinion this only increases the actual isolation and I would believe that the post VR experience emotional drop down could be severe. It also brings up the backdrop of Ready Player One, where everybody is occupied by the VR while living in decrepit containers seemingly without a desire to fix it.
Even single player VR games can be fun in a party setting. In our group we sometimes let one person play VR and mirror it on a TV. The rest of us continue talking while casually watching and taking turns.
The player is not isolated because they know they are being watched. Works good with BeatSaber, SuperHot, etc.
It's basically the same as a group taking turns at an arcade machine — not solitary.
When I had a headset, I think the main thing that kept me from using it was the inconvenience. You have to keep part of a room clear, deal with a mass of cables, the weight of the headset, its positioning on your head, finding somewhere in reach to store it, etc. The lightweight wireless headsets of the future will help a lot. Smartphone vr is promising from this angle
Honestly, the privacy policy made me a bit uncomfortable too
I was playing VR shovelware and pavlov pretty regularly for a while, we just put mirror the game to the monitor so the spectators can spectate, and the headphones float off the ear a couple inches so they can hear us.
It helps to have at least two friends for that scenario. for Just one friend you're probably better off playing a non-vr game and trading the controller.
these days we're farther apart and one friend has a child so he's worried about covid. we play "ghosts" (Phasmophobia) once in a while.
in summary:
2 friends required (minimum)
mirror the screen
headphones off the ear
That's an interesting take. I have some contradictory anecdata, though, in that my friends and I love getting together and taking turns playing VR games. And I'm not talking about nerdy hard core gamer friends. Pre-COVID we used to get together every few months or so for a "VR Night" at my buddy's place because he owned an Oculus w/ a living room TV set-up. And we'd just spend a few hours taking turns cycling through the game library and playing all sorts of stuff, and everybody loved it.
Ha, the first time I tried VR it was a multi-person experience. Back in the early 90s, I played Dactyl Nightmare at some tourist location. All 4 members of my family were in the same "world" and could see each other. It was, like most VR games today, fun for about 10 minutes. There's still some interesting experiences being developed at portable venues (ie, thevoid.com).
But I'd also say that FOV is really, really important. Right now the experience is just like putting a little TV on your face with an IMU. Immersion requires peripheral vision and spatial audio.
That's a great story. I remember being blown away by Descent - probably the second 3D-type game I played after Doom. The thought of free spaceship movement through caves with 6-axis control was amazing - though IIRC the level design was carefully done to keep mostly 2D-ish with a clear up-down orientation. Must have been mind-blowing in VR in 1995.
All that said, I think people playing alone is a big enough demographic to support a VR breakout, if the killer app comes along.
I agree that technology isn't the problem. I don't know if the problem is exactly what you describe or something else along those lines. But I think you are on the right track.
My experience is that people are getting increasingly isolated anyway, so VR is great in this regard for more and more people. Even when people are social they're increasingly glued to their phones, and distant from each other.
A friend and I bought quests and we both loved them except for one really annoying problem: space
At least as of early 2020, there was a huge market mismatch with VR: the people that have 6'x6' or more space to play in live far out in the suburbs, but the people that have the disposable income to just by a quest just for fun tend to live in apartments in the city. My friend and I both had pretty spacious living conditions for living in a city, but we perpetually joked about the dream of one day having enough room that the occulus didn't warn about having less space than required.
But with the sudden migration of many people out of cities and into more spacious suburban housing I'm curious if this will create an increase demand for VR. If you have an extra 10'x10' room that can dramatically change how fun the VR experience is.
Yes, and even if the room is large there are tables and break-y things that invariably interact with shins, swinging controllers and your ability to just fully immerse.
I stopped playing VR mostly because I was tired of re-arranging furniture and re-calibrating the Index when I did so.
I guess if you live in a house and have a basement or 'rec room' with no furniture, it's less of a hassle to play ping pong or Beat Sabre in VR. Otherwise it's VR Poker with its random social toxicity where I can sit on the couch and interact with people if I find a table without kids or mean people in it.
I live in house with larger room, but I don't want to use the room now because the room is cold and I need to warm the room before I use Quest. So I use Quest in my small room.
> Then I said to myself "this is not the future", and haven't touched VR since.
Yeah, nothing has changed in social VR in 25 years.
/s.
There are multiplayer async party games that can be played with 10 people (I've done this a lot!). There is online multiplayer. Dismissing VR because you played descent on a 3dof box 25 yrs ago is kind of lame.
> There is no amount of technology that can get over this problem. It's not about FOV or resolution or immersion
This is frustratingly dismissive and easily disproven. Look at Acron: Attack of the Squirrels! Look at Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes!
There's a basic usability problem I found with my VR experience that I cannot see what I am doing in my room, unless you have a large dedicated space its easy to injure yourself by accident because the real world is still there with AR you can literally still see what you are doing in the physical world while interacting with the tech.
Now compared to 1995, gaming in general seems a lot closer to the VR experience you describe. Local multiplayer is uncommon, shared gaming spaces like arcades and LANs are gone and people are playing games on their own devices alone.
I'm as isolated playing Counter-Strike on my PC as when I am on the Oculus Quest.
You can do have a sort of VR studio akin to a gym. The spots in these "gyms" would accommodate for everything that is needed, space and equipment wise.
That would solve the problem the parent is stating.
Monthly membership. You go there to play, later to socialize at the "space bar" exchanging tales of lore with other like-minded people.
> So I invited them over that weekend. And that's where the problem set in. When one person was using the headset, they were gone.
That sounds like a "not enough headsets" problem.
Also, that is like lamenting the lack of co-op split-screen games. Many games supported that mode back in the day, they don't anymore. Because people are either playing over the internet OR bringing their own consoles.
I did a bit of VR around 1995. I added CAVE support for the molecular visualization program VMD and had a key to UIUC's CAVE to test it out.
The CAVE approach projects images onto wall-sized screens (eg, via back-projection), and can be 1-wall up to 5- or 6- walls, if the floor/ceiling is categorized as a "wall".
This is massively expensive compared to the VR that's widespread/affordable these days.
But it's also far more social, where multiple people can be present, though at least in the 1990s the head-tracker only followed one person. And they could easily see each other.
Handwaving, with the right synchronization on the glasses and high frame rates, I could imagine multiple head-trackers. Back then our frame rate was limited by the decay rate of the green phosphor in the projector. These days I suppose a wall of large displays, edge-to-edge, with very high frame rates interleaved for multiple users, might work. Again, I haven't followed what's going on in VR, but it might be a technology which addresses at least some of what you correctly point out.
Carolina Cruz-Neira, the developer of the CAVE (and at the time with the email address "cavewoman"), has some lectures on the social VR and her research, on YouTube. Don't remember which ones specifically talk about it, and couldn't find one in a quick look.
Physically sitting in the same room with a bunch of people who are not in VR is not the use case for VR. You might as well say that telephones are useless unless they are speakerphones.
I've logged over 200 hours in Beat Saber, mostly playing with friends. What you're talking about is definitely a real problem, but the solution is to just have the game rendered to the TV as well as the headset. Everyone sees and hears what the person is doing, even though they're the one in VR.
My wife watched me play the entirety of Half Life Alyx that way, and she enjoyed it a lot. And were were able to talk and share the experience the entire time.
I think VR will become mainstream when it's good enough to replace large screens in productive work. It should leave large screens in dust, if done right.
Productivity is quite strongly correlated with screen size, so I'm expecting quite a leap in this regard when the right software is matched with the right hardware.
The resolution is pretty good already and rapidly getting better.
What I'm excited about is hand tracking [i] so that I can use a real keyboard (and interact with real objects e.g. coffee cup) to type while I'm wearing a headset.
thats true, but for most headsets, resolution still isn't high enough to read bodies of text without eye fatigue. until that is solved, I don't think VR will move from entertainment to productivity.
Varjo is getting closer to that resolution level, but their headsets are priced for enterprise ($8k i think?)
I pulled my neck last week and spent the weekend working, watching amazon prime and playing xbox cloud streaming flat on my back on a 10 foot virtual screen. I was working for multiple hours at a time reviewing programming specifications and taking notes. The display tech is pretty much there, even for text. Keyboard input is still unsolved, though I was using Office 365 dictation and that was working well for taking notes. This was on the Quest 2. The fresnel lenses are actually a bigger downside than the screen resolution, which is not retina, but still better than the 24" 1080p external display I use all day.
When I tried it, it wasn't that good. The screens on the Q2 felt like a resolution of something between 720 and 1080p, which isn't that good compared to my dual 4k monitors. Same with a 8k & 6k 180 & 360 video.
Overall VR feels like it needs a 4x resolution bump. Basically a 16k 360 video rendering and 4k x 4k per eye vs the 1832x1920 per eye that the current q2 has. To do that well you probably need something like a two 3080 GPUs, one for each eye.
Even after that, maybe even an 8k x 8k would give a big improvement. We don't have GPUs that can render that today.
Foveated rendering is definitely needed for this to become possible.
If you have $4000 to spend, you can get the new Varjo VR-3. It has a 27° by 27° display with 71 pixels-per-degree resolution embedded in a 115° wide display at 30 PPD. 20/20 vision is ~60 PPD for ~210°.
> but for most headsets, resolution still isn't high enough to read bodies of text without eye fatigue.
Most? Is there anything, no matter how expensive, which is currently capable of clearly presenting large bodies of text? The moment something like this appears I'm going to buy it even if I had to sell my kidney for it!
EDIT: forgot about input. I'd probably be willing to finally learn to touch-type, if that would be enough. I'd probably be happier with being able to see the keyboard once in a while, though.
I actually considered this when I was buying a new monitor. "This thing will be obsolete pretty soon".
Headsets are still a little bulky (and not enough resolution) for that to happen. Once that's fixed (and more importantly, with many people shifting to work from home, so they don't have to care about people staring), I expect it to become a pretty popular thing.
If the virtual monitor is overlaying a camera feed of your environment(AR style), this will be amazing. Imagine a headset not much heavier than sunglasses sitting on your desk, rather than a big (or multiple!) monitors. Put it on, you have as much screen real state as you would like, and can be made to look like an actual monitor.
That's with our current 2D thinking. We can probably do more useful visualizations in 3D.
Exactly. And you can fill your whole room with interactive information. You could have hundreds or more files open at the same time and see how they interact. Human brain is pretty good at complex visual/spatial things and I don't think we are aware of the limits yet.
Yep, this is one of those threshold type things that makes future predictions wrong all the time. Currently the resolution is just too low - I really gave it a good try with a lot of motivation but it just doesn't cut it. You can make text readable but only if you size the virtual monitor to be huge and the effective resolution is way less in the end than a pretty cheap external monitor.
But once it hits the point of being usable I don't see why we won't see a complete domino effect where people start setting up complete virtual offices in VR. And that will ripple through whole teams flipping to VR a sa way of working. Putting aside sheer "size", you can make VR monitors any shape and in any position you want. So I can actually have a gigantic monitor with a complex technical diagram on it, then a vertical one next to it with a code listing - and these can be floating in space in a totally unrealistic way. Then I can have email floating in the air behind me ...
I bought my Dell Visor (Windows Mixed Reality) headset for ~$230 in early 2018. It's fun, but my computer can only run things at low/medium quality (i7-7700, gtx 1060 3gb). I'm in a situation where there is literally no reason for me to buy a new headset until I have at least a new GPU.
It really doesn't help that you're basically stuck buying the facebook-locked Oculus (either the Quest with a more limited game selection or the Rift S which requires a good PC), spend a bit more and get a Vive Cosmos, or you can spend boatloads of money and buy the Index (or buy an old Vive and piecemeal the Index parts you want since the lighthouses are compatible).
Any VR that is not roomscale will feel limited, and any VR that doesn't use some sort of tracking for the headset/controllers (IR based, usually) will feel clunky and will lose track of the controllers constantly. I tried (and loved, despite its limitations) Google Cardboard and Daydream, but those definitely never took off. Playstation VR isn't roomscale so you can't move around in the environment, so it's inherently limited.
The Windows Mixed Reality inside-out tracking works for 95% of what you need to do -- overhand throws don't work reliably since your controller leaves the tracking area, so you have to throw things by doing awkward pushing motions most of the time.
So again -- I'm faced with:
- Upgrade to a more expensive headset to get better tracking but still have low/medium quality ($300-1000).
- Upgrade my GPU to max out the quality on my current headset ($300-1000).
- Do both ($600-2000).
In all honesty, for the limited amount of time I spend in VR (1-2 hours once or twice a week, mostly for exercise with Beat Saber or BoxVR) -- None of those options appeal to me. I'll just keep using my headset until it dies, and then we will see where we are at. There's not enough new features coming out (or enough new VR hardware in general coming out) to justify an upgrade every year or two, especially when it relies on my PC having sufficient specs to power it.
I think it would have had Oculus not been owned by a shitty company. I have a hard time directly giving FB money. I'm not going to reward FB for anything.
When there is a desktop OS used for being work-level productive that can be used at high resolution to accomplish actual work in a manner that is cost-competitive to a multi-monitor setup.
I left vr in 2010 because there was no commercial opportunity except video games and even that was not getting more than niche traction. If you google be headsets you'll see that the occulus is basically a redo of 20 year old tech. It's still baffling why Facebook paid so much for this.
I wonder how many people, like me, tried it on a friend's equipment and found that the motion sickness is just impossible to get past.
I had motion sickness when I tried the early first-person shooters, but got over it when I learned to keep the (non-moving) screen bounds in mind. That' just impossible in VR, and when the motion in my eyes doesn't match my vestibular system, wow, it's bad.
Things like motion sickness and the screen-door effect are results of lower refresh-rate/resolution than what should be used for VR.
It's very sad that as of right now, you're forced to choose movement freedom (e.g. Vive Wireless) OR the highest refresh rate / highest resolution (Valve Index). And don't get me started on the proliferation of low quality "mixed reality" headsets. Honest enthusiasts have no options for high quality "world scale" VR. The best VR experience is STILL found this way, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DvB07X84HM - but it requires a shitty headset compared to the Index.
VR most likely would have ended up with the same experience (but better quality) if the manufacturers built better quality headsets with wireless and higher resolution (most likely attached to a high quality laptop in a backpack), priced it more highly (1500-2000$+ in kits like the youtube video), and then let VRs merits sell itself, rather than allow half-baked headsets to frustrate and dissuade people.
> Things like motion sickness and the screen-door effect are results of lower refresh-rate/resolution than what should be used for VR.
I disagree -- it's the same principle that makes me motion sick on boats, when I can't see the horizon for reference. It's a vestibular thing, not just a vision-system thing.
I have to simultaneously agree with you (and even go further and state that the existence of 3-degree-of-freedom devices like Samsung GearVR which was cheap enough to be passed out and demo'd everywhere) really gave people terrible first experiences, both in terms of giving them low expectations in terms of motion sickness and also resolution.
But the reason it's really bittersweet is you _don't_ have to get motion sick in VR, if you just try experiences that don't take control of your in-game/in-experience "camera" and move it without any input from your physical head. In other words, as long as the camera in-game only corresponds 1 to 1 to your real life head movements, there is no motion sickness for the vast vast majority of users. I've given tons of demos and beat saber won't make new users sick. Superhot won't make new users sick. Echo VR, Skyrim VR, anything that doesn't map head movement -> camera movement 1:1 has a 75% chance of making a new user sick, whether immediately and badly or after a medium duration experience and mildy.
But people who are early adopters and have overcome the hump of nausea and forgotten how it feels continue to expose new users to poorly chosen first experiences with joystick movement or even worse - just straight up camera movement entirely unmapped to user input. That and naive users not realizing they need to limit their first experiences to non-joystick locomotion experiences.
It's a bit like if everyone who tried alcohol for the first time took 10 shots of vodka and then span in circles for 10 minutes straight instead of sipping an alcopop or a beginner wine or beer.
There are also hardware solutions like vibrating motors you place on your wrists (or neck/near-the-ear?) that could help as well.
And vignetting and tunneling approaches to keep a fixed frame of reference in the users field of view for those that are advanced enough to begin with joystick movement.
But anyway, in 2020 the most compelling use-case is still porn. And laughably, many people who may have tried VR porn in 2016 or who only viewed free/old/poorly-made files have also had that well poisoned for themselves as well, while newer, higher quality VR film (and porn) is incredibly more realistic and immersive than early attempts or that which you could find on pornhub.
Yup, I was fine with games like Beat Saber, and (initially!) Vader Immortal, that uses the teleport movement system... until you're put on a moving platform, or (worst) have to climb up and down... and OH YEAH that triggered it. Bad.
> It's a bit like if everyone who tried alcohol for the first time took 10 shots of vodka and then span in circles for 10 minutes straight
Okay, that made me laugh, and I think I see where you're going, but I really think it's different.
Alas, one of the first things I tried was RecRoom, which has thumb-stick navigation that was set to super-fast movement, so that was the first thing that really got me.
Where I disagree with your idea is that days later, in simple, slow, self-controlled movement (such as the ladders in Vader Immortal) it got me again.
> There are also hardware solutions...
Yeah, if someone came up with some non-drug way to take this away, I'd probably get a VR system right away (after testing it with my friend's system, of course!)
I have a pretty high tolerance for motion sickness in VR. However, if I play something like No Man's Sky for one hour, in the normal locomotion mode, my mouth will start to water, which for me is a prelude to nausea, so I have to stop. That's goes for other games too, even if the blank the peripheral vision(although that helps).
I can play for 10 hours straight (and I have) if I use the teleportation mechanism.
I'll get nauseous in Subnautica.
A few people have tried Beat Saber, they all seem to have been ok.
Planes, cars, spaceships don't bother me. My wife threw the headset away in Elite Dangerous when the ship banked. But I feel perfectly fine. Shouldn't that make me nauseous too? After all, things are moving and the vestibular system is not registering anything.
Maybe that's because we are used to cars? And could it be that the nausea can be "trained" away?
As I understand it, cockpit movement is not as bad because your brain doesn't think your body is moving when it isn't. It thinks the vehicle you are in is moving and is ok with that.
Motion sickness in games where you have thumbstick movement is common, but for games where your movement is only based on IRL movement, like Beat Saber, motion sickness is much more rare (and severe motion sickness almost unheard of).
That matches my experience -- I could play Beat Saber with no problems at all.
The sad thing is that it's like saying, "You can play any game on this system, as long as the game's name starts with the letters A-D. You can't play any game whose name starts with E-Z, though!" You're going to miss out on a lot of great stuff, and frankly, there's tons of non-VR games to keep me busy forever.
I think mobile phones will become the standard VR devices most people will opt to use with a headset that you insert the phone into, esp as phones become increasingly advanced, due to it being the cheapest option for most people.
I doubt it because I think a successful VR headset will have 6dof room scale tracking, hand controllers, and facial expression tracking. That will takes several well positioned cameras, plus additional cameras for eye and face tracking. I think they will be standalone devices that will potentially include AR at some point and even replace phones.
The quest 2 is pretty much a revelation. Untethered, light, cheap, high quality display and inside out tracking and connects wirelessly to a gaming PC allowing you to play virtually any title if you pay $15 for vrdesktop. Obviously you have to be comfortable with facebook but it's just a better end to end experience than any other headset I've tried, although it would be better if VR desktop or something similar was included out of the box instead of them trying to flog you the kludgy occulus link cable that doesn't work as well and which tethers you to a pc. It feels like VR done right for the first time in the same way as the iPhone was a smart phone done right for the first time.
No, the resolution and refresh rates were increased but the field of vision was actually REDUCED from the already narrow oculus quest which had a fov of about 90 degrees. Think about that for a minute, the normal fov for a human is about 200 degrees.
It's like looking out of a damn periscope on a submarine, which is the first VR experience I would develop for the oculus quest.
I liken where we are with VR right now as to about 5 yrs ago with IoT. Arduino and Rpi began to gain huge momentum due to the low cost of entry and availability of more and more useful tools. Quest hopefully is just the start.
> Obviously you have to be comfortable with facebook
Interestingly enough this is the primary reason that my quest is collecting dust. Once they forced a facebook login for accounts I decided it was no longer worth me clearing an open space in my apartment.
I don't know if you know this but, existing Quest users are grandfathered in (no fb account needed) for the next 3 years so you dont have to let your device collect dust.
Never, it will forever be a niche product. It doesn't solve almost any problem better than what we actually have but keep the mind engaged in the future of virtual reality.
VR is the flying car of software: so amazing to imagine, so impractical in real life.
And color film doesn't solve anything that black and white film can't do. Besides, why watch film at all when you can look around the real world instead of looking at a moving picture on a screen.
What? Color film can do color, and took off because a lot of people wanted to see their memories in color.
Infrared film can do infrared colors, and people who need to see those colors use it and to them is invaluable, but that need is not a mainstream need. VR is infrared film.
When VR starts delivering on the "virtual" part of the "reality" concept whereby my girlfriend, uncle, or neighbor can put on a headset and say "why go back?"
or
When VR doesn't merely solve for an "immersive" experience, but rather provides for a better way to interface with 3D "space" than does a 2D monitor.
The mod community have made beat saber incredibly immersive in the way of light shows and "wall maps" which go beyond just hitting blocks with your sabers. I'd recommend checking out an example like this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZd_I86i8eQ - which is like being inside your own personal rave
I'm with you there, but that's one application to one sphere (gaming)of VR application.
That being said maybe that's all "3D interface with 3D objects" is right now?
So might be more accurate to say: When our current 2D interfaces like file systems/operating systems, entertainment (movies/tv), socializing, etc are addressed a 3D objects in a 3D space.
I worked for a VR/AR platform helping 3rd parties port apps onto the platform for a couple of years. Low traction seemed to be a combination of the following related problems:
1) ROI for the platform's premium was not worth it, due to...
2) lack of must-have apps, due to...
3) poor ratio of difficulty designing a great user experience vs low number of outfits trying to build that software, due to ...
4) fragmentation in technology (AR & VR) which results in different user experience in each platform, and low rates of adoption especially given dispersion over different platforms, consequently there was far less financial motivation for a company to invest long term resources.
With VR/AR, the obvious killer app is 3D model generation, because you could turn efficient workflows into money, but the amount of effort that has been thrown into desktop publishing is so much that the bar for a VR/AR app to get over is very, very high. If your audience is professional 3d modelers. The mouse is such an excellent precision instrument, it's going to be a long time before we have a 6 degree-of-freedom input device that can match it for precision and ease of long term use. The existing CAD companies with funds sit on large portfolios of software, and a fantastic VR/AR experience would devalue them, so they don't have a lot of motivation.
Long story short, it's going to take longer than the PC revolution, because the adoption-conformity numbers are not as good. I'd guess another ten years?
> The mouse is such an excellent precision instrument, it's going to be a long time before we have a 6 degree-of-freedom input device that can match it for precision and ease of long term use.
From my experience don't most professional 3D modelers use some sort of pen tablet like a Wacom? Now I'm thinning I would love if Wacom pivoted to the VR/AR space and made a special 6 DOF pen you can use. I hope they don't go the way to Kodak and just get stuck being a pen tablet company while artists make the jump the VR (eventually?)
Unfortunately in the future electricity prices will mostly limit VR to non-realistic graphics, f.ex. Cyberpunk 2077 can't render (full blast) at 60 FPS on a 350W 3090, so to get 90FPS on both eyes you would need (if it was possible, it's not) more than 3x 3090 at a whopping 1000W!
And this is at peak everything: memory speed and litography; with cheap- energy, hardware, (food, rent too) etc.
The final medium is not VR, it is regular 3D MMO action potentially with server-side neural-network brained mobs/npcs! How is that progressing Mr Carmack?
Last time I did a napkin math, cone size required for foveated rendering with current latency and framerate to match slew rate of human eyes basically equals to the whole FOV of typical headset that it’s pointless to implement.
Considering the ridiculous pace of progress for GPU performance we've seen in the last few years, coupled with NN-based upscaling of frames, foveated rendering with eye tracking, and the fact that you've cherry-picked a game whose performance is wildly unoptimized with graphics that are on the absolute cutting edge of what PCs can handle, I imagine there are still many possible scenarios that could play out over the next decade or so where VR with reasonably realistic graphics by today's standards is not only possible to do on a normal PC power budget, but even with a mobile/tablet chipset, as in the Oculus Quest or some similar standalone headset.
Things would get really interesting if Apple decided to enter the standalone VR/AR arena with their cutting edge ARM chipsets
Honestly, I think a large barrier here is there's no pre-existing platform yet. When developing an application for a computer with a regular screen, you have all sorts of supporting software (e.g. window managers, browsers, ui frameworks, etc). When developing for VR, you have to start over almost completely: you have to deal with controller input, different kinds of headsets, designing a UI.
For XR to take off, I think something akin to the metaverse needs to exist first, so applications can develop within its framework.
Would you do engineering interviews in VR as a candidate?
I had wondered if larger companies would do VR technical interviews to remove biases in their quest to "hire the best". You can have a whiteboard, and the usual schtick, but you can disguise the voice, height, gender, ethnicity, etc of a candidate, so the interviewer can focus on the communication and the solution.
And then the interpersonal part of the interview can be done in person and unmasked. After that, both parts of the interview can be conjoined during the committee evaluation.
I never went down this avenue, because I thought sourcing candidates was a bigger problem than evaluation accuracy, and all but the biggest companies don't worry so much about their interview methods.
I tried a Oculus DK2 and got motion sick, and that's burned into my memory like a drink that gave you a hangover. I'm only going to try it again in the 5th gen after they've eliminated all issues.
I used to get motion sickness with previous gen VR headsets. Not so much with the higher resolution models with better lenses. There's also feet based movement that help
With so many schools under lockdown, kids staying at home. I think one application would be a virtual school. Right now when teachers teach over google classroom, the kids have their cameras and mikes turned off. And basically there is almost no interaction, and feedback as the teacher teaches. Kids don't like showing their living room environment. Also, the social interaction between kids in a school is basically non existent now.
There's probably a real need for a virtualized environment of a school, or even a church if the lockdowns continue. And background replacement for video calls, in general.
I agree, you can't beat the real thing. I think we will probably have both though, going forward. Online classes will be a lot more popular even if the lockdown ends, and teachers will live stream by default.
And kids interacting in a virtual school would be a nice addition to a real school too.
Everything I’ve heard about online classes for K-12 has indicated that it’s been a disaster. Which is really not a surprise, considering that teaching is only a tiny portion of the function of a school. It’s also a daycare, lunchroom, social hall, and a million other things that can’t be replicated on a laptop screen.
This is really a situation where “more technology” is not better.
On same note, developing VR from inside is incredible and it quickly turned into my #1 hobby. At first you are surrounded with blank space, then you slowly fill it out with whatever reality rules you can think of.
I went with code-only approach (no binary assets) and built a primitive development environment that works in VR. Now I have a neat little virtual shed with different experiments and demo projects. Geometrical landscapes, driving & flying, teleporting, various gizmos...
Currently I'm tweaking physics engine to work with hand tracking skeleton. Masses connected with springs turn out to be amazingly palpable even without any haptic feedback and with simple cartoonish visuals.
VR is already fun and we're in for a wild ride once AR hits the market.
Or you could build actual things in an actual shed? This is the same impulse that drives people to build furniture, boats, and model train layouts. To me, the real physical objects are much more fulfilling.
Yeah, why weave animate things out of pure thoughtstuff in cyberspace, bounded only by your imagination and compute resources, when you could be messing with plywood in a shed?
Exactly, the fun is accidentally destroying your laboriously constructed circuit because you misread the resistor bands, or reversed the polarity. What's the point if I can just Ctrl-Z that shit and recompile?
I like making furniture too (it's a stereotype for many devs), but I don't look down my nose and pretend that there's some objective reason that my hobby is "more fulfilling" than someone else's (particularly when that person's hobby also involves being creative and using their brain). I mean, sheesh.
I was an early video game developer, publishing games in '82. I found then that making the games was far and away a more creative and productive and lucrative way to spend my time. Beyond the while developing testing of the several dozens games I made when I made games professionally, I've not played a video game out of interest in the game itself since "Robotron 1984".
> VR is already fun and we're in for a wild ride once AR hits the market.
I, personally, see VR as being much more exciting than AR, from an entertainment and capabilities perspective. I don't want to be limited to my small living room or whatever setting I'm in. When I'm in the real world outside of my house, I can't imagine what AR would bring that wouldn't be completely utilitarian, like replacing my phone/watch with a virtual device, holochat calls, maybe add more trees, etc. But, I'm also not very imaginative.
VR is simply a stepping stone. AR is the real future.
But that's not to say that fully immersive experiences have no future. I just don't think VR will fully take off until it's available in a small form-factor, and likely combined with AR in the same device.
For a long time I've wanted VR-like games, but played in the freedom of AR, where it maps and adapts to your environment. This would allow you to actually move around and interact with your space.
I briefly played the HoloLens AR game where you have to shoot at robotic bugs that crawl out from your walls.[1] The fact that I could duck behind my office partition was awesome. The fact that when I blew a hole in my wall I could see the "studs" behind it was similarly cool.
In an ideal world, I could trace out my house and play up and down the stairs. Or go to a field or forest and play in a whole other world.
Custom Home Mapper is a current Quest project in this vein. It’s VR rather than AR, you map out your whole area (with walls and furniture) and then play some mini-games in it.
To focus on positive potential: Augmented hearing, like tuning into parts of frequency spectrum and directional amplification. Augmented vision with integrated maps, 'scouting' around with street view. Visualizing music with colors. Remote socializing with even less friction. Surrounding yourself with contextual spatial information - food recipes next to stove and PDFs around working desk. Completely new forms of media content, like TV series that follows you around.
It's predictable that big players will want to control every aspect of AR because it gets them complete attention while device is on. Facebook has already pounced. I'm more interested in VR/AR that is in service of user and that means open source.
We won't get VR force feedback for a long time. With AR you could turn a laser tag arena into almost any scenario and incorporate a lot of physical elements.
AR lets you bring virtual experiences into a more ad hoc setting. You can't really play a VR game while waiting for the bus but you could be feeding your AR pet.
I don't think the current incarnation of VR will ever take off. It's too inconvenient to need to block out everything around you with a headset. It's fundamentally incompatible with human behavior. Until VR is as convenient as picking up a phone or tablet, it's not going anywhere.
Oculus has a cool pass-through mode where it displays what the cameras are seeing in black and white. I think this sort of feature will become widespread in future generations.
That's my problem with it as well. You need to have a space set up where you can use it, and you also have to have the VR headset/equipment available to just grab and put on in an instant, otherwise I think it will just languish in the closet.
VR is competing with phones, tablets, and TVs today, which are in my opinion good enough and way more convenient. The experience within VR might be amazing, but it has to be so good that you forego other more convenient devices available to you.
For me, the Quest is pretty much like that. It's so small I just keep it on a shelf and I don't need a dedicated space. I'm just playing in the living room or in the office (you paint a Guardian for the play area in AR, and it remembers it unless you put it on another place).
Been playing almost every day for more than a year now. I'm still amazed of how low friction it is to start using. I just grab it, put it on my head and all of a sudden I'm in the VR world.
Well, "dedicated" means different things to different people. I have a two year old kid. For VR, my space would have to be properly "dedicated" as it were...
> It's too inconvenient to need to block out everything around you with a headset.
Is it? That's the main selling point to me. I don't want to stare at a screen, I want to look around a cockpit. Even outside light bleed is bothersome - I'm in freaking space, my brain is like where's this light coming from?
It still takes some time to put a headset on and remove it. That can be improved. The Quest also has cameras if you need to see the outside world right now for whatever reason, which is a compromise.
I don't understand this argument at all. As someone using VR on a daily basis ever since Quest 1 the whole point is to block out the outside world and immerse yourself in the VR world. Even days I don't feel like playing (I have a schedule for VR fitness) I instantly feel at home and get excited the moment I step inside.
Perhaps but that's not the same thing as being "fundamentally incompatible with human behavior". The statement packs a lot of assumptions that don't resonate with me at all.
> Until VR is as convenient as picking up a phone or tablet, it's not going anywhere.
It is now with the Oculus Quest. Put it on your hands and head and you're good to go. You should try it. For me this was the biggest game changer. I use this multiple times a day for my workouts / game sessions.
Prior to that, it was really annoying with PCVR. It felt like a ritual setting up PCVR prior to playing and it was a chore cleaning up.
For me (and many) when Facebook doesn't have a controlling stake in hardware and requires you to register said hardware with an account in good standing in order to use that hardware.
It's truly unfortunate. I would love to try the Quest 2, I've heard some pretty great things.
The requirement to have a Facebook account makes it a complete nonstarter by itself. The fact that I can get locked out of my hardware that I purchased because Facebook's software decides my account isn't 'legit' enough? Gonna be a serious nope from me.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 283 ms ] threadGilmore and Pine “Experience Economy” suggests that we are now in the transformation economy. Maybe VR needs to be transformative?
Oculus, Vive, Index - these are like the pre-iPhone smart phones. They're bulky, slow, they kind of do their job, but they're not something everybody wants.
VR has to get better. The resolution and FOV are terrible. The gameplay paradigms kind of suck because movement is such a pain.
AR honestly seems even further away. Pokemon Go and all the other AR trinkets are clunky toys. I can't ever see holding up a device for anything other than picturing furniture in a space, and none of these apps even work well.
An AR headset outside of industrial/military uses is a pipe dream that will rely on miniaturization and being fashionable. Google Glass wasn't cool, and nobody is going to wear a bulky HoloLens anywhere. There's a lot of work that needs to be done.
Modsy works well, but it is a curated hands on experience.
That said, the end product is really nice.
That said I think there are still unexplored workplace markets like medical, mechanical etc.
There seem to be a very, very small number of consumer applications: heads up nav display for bicycle/motorcycle operators comes to mind.
5m sales/year isn't a lot, but it's a lot more than nothing.
Put it this way, for simulation gamers it's a godsend compared to a 3 or 4 monitor setup with head tracking.
Everyone interested in the potential of VR should check this out: https://youtu.be/LQT6sQ6o0uY
And I also have more video games than I could ever play but I have spent quite a lot more time in VR table tennis. It's very realistic and fun. And a lot easier to figure out than most of the games now which seemed to be designed to be as intricate as possible.
Flashback to 1995. I'm a 17 year old PFY invited to beta test a VR headset from a local company. My Uncle was an investor and I was technically savvy and the target market.
I had a copy of Descent that supported VR, and while it was a bit of a hassle to get setup, I got it working. The experience was incredible. After the first use I said to myself "this is the future". I had permission to test the headset for two weeks, and I wanted my friends to see it as well.
So I invited them over that weekend. And that's where the problem set in. When one person was using the headset, they were gone. You couldn't interact with them in any way. They might as well have been in a different room. Then I said to myself "this is not the future", and haven't touched VR since.
There is no amount of technology that can get over this problem. It's not about FOV or resolution or immersion. It's a social problem. If you live alone at home, and want to plugin then great. But if you live with someone, its distant, weird, and kinda creepy, to have the other person in a headset and unreachable.
Both have headsets (used to be a cost issue, gradually getting solved) and play the same thing.
Or one has AR glasses and can peek into what the other is doing and communicate with them.
An internal camera captures the face under the headset and presents it on the outside with correct parallax (could be presented with AR or with auto stereo display), AI in the headset can tell when someone is wanting attention etc. and use other cameras with depth reconstruction or depth sensors to fade them into the VR player's world.
I agree VR isn't great for a party game or hanging out with your friends in your living room, but that's OK because that's not the experience most people are having today.
Or for local play, there are one-vs-many party games where one player wears a headset and interacts with a group of people in the same room who aren't in VR.
Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes is a great example of this where the other players are referring to a paper manual to help you defuse a bomb. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqelfBKuiic
There's Acron: Attack of the Squirrels where one person has a headset and other people play against them as the squirrels with their phones. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP29BxhvHfc
Or Davigo, maybe a less social one because it's VR vs PCs and not likely to be in one room, where the VR player is a giant trying to swat at the tiny humans who are playing a 3rd person game where they team up and throw bombs at the giant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL7a63MMx6Q
Even if you don't have a game where other people can be involved, you can still cast the headset view to TVs and tablets. It can be plenty of fun to pass a single headset around taking turns in Beat Saber if everyone else can see what's happening.
I'm guessing none of that was the case in 1995, so I wouldn't be so quick to stick to a 25 year old judgement of what the technology can do.
Would I play it in VR mode for hours on end every night and stop talking to real people? No. But not all my activities need to be social either. I can go for a four hour hike in the woods by myself and no one gives me a hard time for being too isolated. Or maybe they do, but I don’t care because sometimes that’s how I want to spend my time. To each their own.
One other feature of the Quest that I should mention - you can double-tap the side of the headset at any time to turn the game world off and immediately switch to "passthrough" mode where you see through the headset's tracking cameras. This obviously works best with single player games that can pause themselves until you tap back in, but in those games it makes it no big deal to drop out of the game for a moment to interact with people and things in the real world. A bit weird to talk to you while you have a big headset on your face, sure. But this was added in a software update well after launch, and it's way better for staying available to the real world than needing to take the headset on and off.
That is a really depressing and dystopian future that I am not sure if I want to live in. Yes, MMOs and games like GTA-O, Roblox, or Fortnite are in the same area already now available. But in my opinion this only increases the actual isolation and I would believe that the post VR experience emotional drop down could be severe. It also brings up the backdrop of Ready Player One, where everybody is occupied by the VR while living in decrepit containers seemingly without a desire to fix it.
The player is not isolated because they know they are being watched. Works good with BeatSaber, SuperHot, etc.
It's basically the same as a group taking turns at an arcade machine — not solitary.
Honestly, the privacy policy made me a bit uncomfortable too
Wouldn’t each person in the room having a VR head seat solve this problem?
It helps to have at least two friends for that scenario. for Just one friend you're probably better off playing a non-vr game and trading the controller.
these days we're farther apart and one friend has a child so he's worried about covid. we play "ghosts" (Phasmophobia) once in a while.
in summary: 2 friends required (minimum) mirror the screen headphones off the ear
But I'd also say that FOV is really, really important. Right now the experience is just like putting a little TV on your face with an IMU. Immersion requires peripheral vision and spatial audio.
All that said, I think people playing alone is a big enough demographic to support a VR breakout, if the killer app comes along.
A friend and I bought quests and we both loved them except for one really annoying problem: space
At least as of early 2020, there was a huge market mismatch with VR: the people that have 6'x6' or more space to play in live far out in the suburbs, but the people that have the disposable income to just by a quest just for fun tend to live in apartments in the city. My friend and I both had pretty spacious living conditions for living in a city, but we perpetually joked about the dream of one day having enough room that the occulus didn't warn about having less space than required.
But with the sudden migration of many people out of cities and into more spacious suburban housing I'm curious if this will create an increase demand for VR. If you have an extra 10'x10' room that can dramatically change how fun the VR experience is.
I stopped playing VR mostly because I was tired of re-arranging furniture and re-calibrating the Index when I did so.
I guess if you live in a house and have a basement or 'rec room' with no furniture, it's less of a hassle to play ping pong or Beat Sabre in VR. Otherwise it's VR Poker with its random social toxicity where I can sit on the couch and interact with people if I find a table without kids or mean people in it.
Yeah, nothing has changed in social VR in 25 years.
/s.
There are multiplayer async party games that can be played with 10 people (I've done this a lot!). There is online multiplayer. Dismissing VR because you played descent on a 3dof box 25 yrs ago is kind of lame.
> There is no amount of technology that can get over this problem. It's not about FOV or resolution or immersion
This is frustratingly dismissive and easily disproven. Look at Acron: Attack of the Squirrels! Look at Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes!
I'm as isolated playing Counter-Strike on my PC as when I am on the Oculus Quest.
That would solve the problem the parent is stating.
Monthly membership. You go there to play, later to socialize at the "space bar" exchanging tales of lore with other like-minded people.
That sounds like a "not enough headsets" problem.
Also, that is like lamenting the lack of co-op split-screen games. Many games supported that mode back in the day, they don't anymore. Because people are either playing over the internet OR bringing their own consoles.
You just need a VR headset for everybody...
The CAVE approach projects images onto wall-sized screens (eg, via back-projection), and can be 1-wall up to 5- or 6- walls, if the floor/ceiling is categorized as a "wall".
This is massively expensive compared to the VR that's widespread/affordable these days.
But it's also far more social, where multiple people can be present, though at least in the 1990s the head-tracker only followed one person. And they could easily see each other.
Handwaving, with the right synchronization on the glasses and high frame rates, I could imagine multiple head-trackers. Back then our frame rate was limited by the decay rate of the green phosphor in the projector. These days I suppose a wall of large displays, edge-to-edge, with very high frame rates interleaved for multiple users, might work. Again, I haven't followed what's going on in VR, but it might be a technology which addresses at least some of what you correctly point out.
Carolina Cruz-Neira, the developer of the CAVE (and at the time with the email address "cavewoman"), has some lectures on the social VR and her research, on YouTube. Don't remember which ones specifically talk about it, and couldn't find one in a quick look.
My wife watched me play the entirety of Half Life Alyx that way, and she enjoyed it a lot. And were were able to talk and share the experience the entire time.
https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/2345082335516570
https://takelings.com/
You can also stream the VR game to your television if it's a single player experience.
You're also discounting the fact that we have the internet now and we can do multiplayer online.
Productivity is quite strongly correlated with screen size, so I'm expecting quite a leap in this regard when the right software is matched with the right hardware.
The resolution is pretty good already and rapidly getting better.
What I'm excited about is hand tracking [i] so that I can use a real keyboard (and interact with real objects e.g. coffee cup) to type while I'm wearing a headset.
[i] https://youtu.be/XnG1l0qQW9k
Varjo is getting closer to that resolution level, but their headsets are priced for enterprise ($8k i think?)
Overall VR feels like it needs a 4x resolution bump. Basically a 16k 360 video rendering and 4k x 4k per eye vs the 1832x1920 per eye that the current q2 has. To do that well you probably need something like a two 3080 GPUs, one for each eye.
Even after that, maybe even an 8k x 8k would give a big improvement. We don't have GPUs that can render that today.
Foveated rendering is definitely needed for this to become possible.
https://www.roadtovr.com/varjo-xr-3-vr-3-announcement-specs-...
Most? Is there anything, no matter how expensive, which is currently capable of clearly presenting large bodies of text? The moment something like this appears I'm going to buy it even if I had to sell my kidney for it!
EDIT: forgot about input. I'd probably be willing to finally learn to touch-type, if that would be enough. I'd probably be happier with being able to see the keyboard once in a while, though.
VR headsets are generally stuck in the mud at about 15 pixels per degree.
But it makes sense when you consider how crippling the hololens field of view is... https://mk0uploadvrcom4bcwhj.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/upload...
Headsets are still a little bulky (and not enough resolution) for that to happen. Once that's fixed (and more importantly, with many people shifting to work from home, so they don't have to care about people staring), I expect it to become a pretty popular thing.
If the virtual monitor is overlaying a camera feed of your environment(AR style), this will be amazing. Imagine a headset not much heavier than sunglasses sitting on your desk, rather than a big (or multiple!) monitors. Put it on, you have as much screen real state as you would like, and can be made to look like an actual monitor.
That's with our current 2D thinking. We can probably do more useful visualizations in 3D.
But once it hits the point of being usable I don't see why we won't see a complete domino effect where people start setting up complete virtual offices in VR. And that will ripple through whole teams flipping to VR a sa way of working. Putting aside sheer "size", you can make VR monitors any shape and in any position you want. So I can actually have a gigantic monitor with a complex technical diagram on it, then a vertical one next to it with a code listing - and these can be floating in space in a totally unrealistic way. Then I can have email floating in the air behind me ...
It really doesn't help that you're basically stuck buying the facebook-locked Oculus (either the Quest with a more limited game selection or the Rift S which requires a good PC), spend a bit more and get a Vive Cosmos, or you can spend boatloads of money and buy the Index (or buy an old Vive and piecemeal the Index parts you want since the lighthouses are compatible).
Any VR that is not roomscale will feel limited, and any VR that doesn't use some sort of tracking for the headset/controllers (IR based, usually) will feel clunky and will lose track of the controllers constantly. I tried (and loved, despite its limitations) Google Cardboard and Daydream, but those definitely never took off. Playstation VR isn't roomscale so you can't move around in the environment, so it's inherently limited.
The Windows Mixed Reality inside-out tracking works for 95% of what you need to do -- overhand throws don't work reliably since your controller leaves the tracking area, so you have to throw things by doing awkward pushing motions most of the time.
So again -- I'm faced with: - Upgrade to a more expensive headset to get better tracking but still have low/medium quality ($300-1000). - Upgrade my GPU to max out the quality on my current headset ($300-1000). - Do both ($600-2000).
In all honesty, for the limited amount of time I spend in VR (1-2 hours once or twice a week, mostly for exercise with Beat Saber or BoxVR) -- None of those options appeal to me. I'll just keep using my headset until it dies, and then we will see where we are at. There's not enough new features coming out (or enough new VR hardware in general coming out) to justify an upgrade every year or two, especially when it relies on my PC having sufficient specs to power it.
I had motion sickness when I tried the early first-person shooters, but got over it when I learned to keep the (non-moving) screen bounds in mind. That' just impossible in VR, and when the motion in my eyes doesn't match my vestibular system, wow, it's bad.
Sigh... some of the games were amazing.
It's very sad that as of right now, you're forced to choose movement freedom (e.g. Vive Wireless) OR the highest refresh rate / highest resolution (Valve Index). And don't get me started on the proliferation of low quality "mixed reality" headsets. Honest enthusiasts have no options for high quality "world scale" VR. The best VR experience is STILL found this way, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DvB07X84HM - but it requires a shitty headset compared to the Index.
VR most likely would have ended up with the same experience (but better quality) if the manufacturers built better quality headsets with wireless and higher resolution (most likely attached to a high quality laptop in a backpack), priced it more highly (1500-2000$+ in kits like the youtube video), and then let VRs merits sell itself, rather than allow half-baked headsets to frustrate and dissuade people.
I disagree -- it's the same principle that makes me motion sick on boats, when I can't see the horizon for reference. It's a vestibular thing, not just a vision-system thing.
But the reason it's really bittersweet is you _don't_ have to get motion sick in VR, if you just try experiences that don't take control of your in-game/in-experience "camera" and move it without any input from your physical head. In other words, as long as the camera in-game only corresponds 1 to 1 to your real life head movements, there is no motion sickness for the vast vast majority of users. I've given tons of demos and beat saber won't make new users sick. Superhot won't make new users sick. Echo VR, Skyrim VR, anything that doesn't map head movement -> camera movement 1:1 has a 75% chance of making a new user sick, whether immediately and badly or after a medium duration experience and mildy.
But people who are early adopters and have overcome the hump of nausea and forgotten how it feels continue to expose new users to poorly chosen first experiences with joystick movement or even worse - just straight up camera movement entirely unmapped to user input. That and naive users not realizing they need to limit their first experiences to non-joystick locomotion experiences.
It's a bit like if everyone who tried alcohol for the first time took 10 shots of vodka and then span in circles for 10 minutes straight instead of sipping an alcopop or a beginner wine or beer.
There are also hardware solutions like vibrating motors you place on your wrists (or neck/near-the-ear?) that could help as well.
And vignetting and tunneling approaches to keep a fixed frame of reference in the users field of view for those that are advanced enough to begin with joystick movement.
But anyway, in 2020 the most compelling use-case is still porn. And laughably, many people who may have tried VR porn in 2016 or who only viewed free/old/poorly-made files have also had that well poisoned for themselves as well, while newer, higher quality VR film (and porn) is incredibly more realistic and immersive than early attempts or that which you could find on pornhub.
> It's a bit like if everyone who tried alcohol for the first time took 10 shots of vodka and then span in circles for 10 minutes straight
Okay, that made me laugh, and I think I see where you're going, but I really think it's different.
Alas, one of the first things I tried was RecRoom, which has thumb-stick navigation that was set to super-fast movement, so that was the first thing that really got me.
Where I disagree with your idea is that days later, in simple, slow, self-controlled movement (such as the ladders in Vader Immortal) it got me again.
> There are also hardware solutions...
Yeah, if someone came up with some non-drug way to take this away, I'd probably get a VR system right away (after testing it with my friend's system, of course!)
I have a pretty high tolerance for motion sickness in VR. However, if I play something like No Man's Sky for one hour, in the normal locomotion mode, my mouth will start to water, which for me is a prelude to nausea, so I have to stop. That's goes for other games too, even if the blank the peripheral vision(although that helps).
I can play for 10 hours straight (and I have) if I use the teleportation mechanism.
I'll get nauseous in Subnautica.
A few people have tried Beat Saber, they all seem to have been ok.
Planes, cars, spaceships don't bother me. My wife threw the headset away in Elite Dangerous when the ship banked. But I feel perfectly fine. Shouldn't that make me nauseous too? After all, things are moving and the vestibular system is not registering anything.
Maybe that's because we are used to cars? And could it be that the nausea can be "trained" away?
The sad thing is that it's like saying, "You can play any game on this system, as long as the game's name starts with the letters A-D. You can't play any game whose name starts with E-Z, though!" You're going to miss out on a lot of great stuff, and frankly, there's tons of non-VR games to keep me busy forever.
It's like looking out of a damn periscope on a submarine, which is the first VR experience I would develop for the oculus quest.
I liken where we are with VR right now as to about 5 yrs ago with IoT. Arduino and Rpi began to gain huge momentum due to the low cost of entry and availability of more and more useful tools. Quest hopefully is just the start.
Interestingly enough this is the primary reason that my quest is collecting dust. Once they forced a facebook login for accounts I decided it was no longer worth me clearing an open space in my apartment.
VR is the flying car of software: so amazing to imagine, so impractical in real life.
Infrared film can do infrared colors, and people who need to see those colors use it and to them is invaluable, but that need is not a mainstream need. VR is infrared film.
or
When VR doesn't merely solve for an "immersive" experience, but rather provides for a better way to interface with 3D "space" than does a 2D monitor.
The mod community have made beat saber incredibly immersive in the way of light shows and "wall maps" which go beyond just hitting blocks with your sabers. I'd recommend checking out an example like this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZd_I86i8eQ - which is like being inside your own personal rave
That being said maybe that's all "3D interface with 3D objects" is right now?
So might be more accurate to say: When our current 2D interfaces like file systems/operating systems, entertainment (movies/tv), socializing, etc are addressed a 3D objects in a 3D space.
1) ROI for the platform's premium was not worth it, due to... 2) lack of must-have apps, due to... 3) poor ratio of difficulty designing a great user experience vs low number of outfits trying to build that software, due to ... 4) fragmentation in technology (AR & VR) which results in different user experience in each platform, and low rates of adoption especially given dispersion over different platforms, consequently there was far less financial motivation for a company to invest long term resources.
With VR/AR, the obvious killer app is 3D model generation, because you could turn efficient workflows into money, but the amount of effort that has been thrown into desktop publishing is so much that the bar for a VR/AR app to get over is very, very high. If your audience is professional 3d modelers. The mouse is such an excellent precision instrument, it's going to be a long time before we have a 6 degree-of-freedom input device that can match it for precision and ease of long term use. The existing CAD companies with funds sit on large portfolios of software, and a fantastic VR/AR experience would devalue them, so they don't have a lot of motivation.
Long story short, it's going to take longer than the PC revolution, because the adoption-conformity numbers are not as good. I'd guess another ten years?
From my experience don't most professional 3D modelers use some sort of pen tablet like a Wacom? Now I'm thinning I would love if Wacom pivoted to the VR/AR space and made a special 6 DOF pen you can use. I hope they don't go the way to Kodak and just get stuck being a pen tablet company while artists make the jump the VR (eventually?)
https://developer.wacom.com/en-us/wacomvrpen
[1] https://3dconnexion.com/spacemouse/
- Fresnel lenses!
- No haptic feedback?
- Closed hardware/software.
Unfortunately in the future electricity prices will mostly limit VR to non-realistic graphics, f.ex. Cyberpunk 2077 can't render (full blast) at 60 FPS on a 350W 3090, so to get 90FPS on both eyes you would need (if it was possible, it's not) more than 3x 3090 at a whopping 1000W!
And this is at peak everything: memory speed and litography; with cheap- energy, hardware, (food, rent too) etc.
The final medium is not VR, it is regular 3D MMO action potentially with server-side neural-network brained mobs/npcs! How is that progressing Mr Carmack?
Things would get really interesting if Apple decided to enter the standalone VR/AR arena with their cutting edge ARM chipsets
For XR to take off, I think something akin to the metaverse needs to exist first, so applications can develop within its framework.
I had wondered if larger companies would do VR technical interviews to remove biases in their quest to "hire the best". You can have a whiteboard, and the usual schtick, but you can disguise the voice, height, gender, ethnicity, etc of a candidate, so the interviewer can focus on the communication and the solution.
And then the interpersonal part of the interview can be done in person and unmasked. After that, both parts of the interview can be conjoined during the committee evaluation.
I never went down this avenue, because I thought sourcing candidates was a bigger problem than evaluation accuracy, and all but the biggest companies don't worry so much about their interview methods.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/798810/Natural_Locomotion...
And kids interacting in a virtual school would be a nice addition to a real school too.
This is really a situation where “more technology” is not better.
I went with code-only approach (no binary assets) and built a primitive development environment that works in VR. Now I have a neat little virtual shed with different experiments and demo projects. Geometrical landscapes, driving & flying, teleporting, various gizmos...
Currently I'm tweaking physics engine to work with hand tracking skeleton. Masses connected with springs turn out to be amazingly palpable even without any haptic feedback and with simple cartoonish visuals.
VR is already fun and we're in for a wild ride once AR hits the market.
I for one can't wait for full field of vision pop up adds to infest our daily lives. How exiting.
I'll take advantage of it just as soon as uBlock Origin VR is released.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs
I saw similar thing from Mr.doob[3]. Few years ago Carmack talked about live-coding VR[4], but code was on 2D monitor.
[0] https://twitter.com/j_miskov/status/1312701109232902144 [1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/mqw1s04z70dm3y4/vr-physics.mp4?dl=... [2] https://github.com/jmiskovic/indeck [3] https://twitter.com/mrdoob/status/1263498538316636162 [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30wNPgx6D8E
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWbm9AzgDxw
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqI_j6pDdjg (start here if you're a developer)
3. https://youtu.be/STZN6qTGRbQ
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XafA4WeppxM
I, personally, see VR as being much more exciting than AR, from an entertainment and capabilities perspective. I don't want to be limited to my small living room or whatever setting I'm in. When I'm in the real world outside of my house, I can't imagine what AR would bring that wouldn't be completely utilitarian, like replacing my phone/watch with a virtual device, holochat calls, maybe add more trees, etc. But, I'm also not very imaginative.
What do you see in the future with AR?
But that's not to say that fully immersive experiences have no future. I just don't think VR will fully take off until it's available in a small form-factor, and likely combined with AR in the same device.
I briefly played the HoloLens AR game where you have to shoot at robotic bugs that crawl out from your walls.[1] The fact that I could duck behind my office partition was awesome. The fact that when I blew a hole in my wall I could see the "studs" behind it was similarly cool.
In an ideal world, I could trace out my house and play up and down the stairs. Or go to a field or forest and play in a whole other world.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29xnzxgCx6I
It's predictable that big players will want to control every aspect of AR because it gets them complete attention while device is on. Facebook has already pounced. I'm more interested in VR/AR that is in service of user and that means open source.
AR lets you bring virtual experiences into a more ad hoc setting. You can't really play a VR game while waiting for the bus but you could be feeding your AR pet.
VR is competing with phones, tablets, and TVs today, which are in my opinion good enough and way more convenient. The experience within VR might be amazing, but it has to be so good that you forego other more convenient devices available to you.
Been playing almost every day for more than a year now. I'm still amazed of how low friction it is to start using. I just grab it, put it on my head and all of a sudden I'm in the VR world.
Is it? That's the main selling point to me. I don't want to stare at a screen, I want to look around a cockpit. Even outside light bleed is bothersome - I'm in freaking space, my brain is like where's this light coming from?
It still takes some time to put a headset on and remove it. That can be improved. The Quest also has cameras if you need to see the outside world right now for whatever reason, which is a compromise.
What behavior is it not compatible with?
Perhaps there isn't a desire from mainstream consumers to entirely block out the outside world in the first place.
It is now with the Oculus Quest. Put it on your hands and head and you're good to go. You should try it. For me this was the biggest game changer. I use this multiple times a day for my workouts / game sessions.
Prior to that, it was really annoying with PCVR. It felt like a ritual setting up PCVR prior to playing and it was a chore cleaning up.
The requirement to have a Facebook account makes it a complete nonstarter by itself. The fact that I can get locked out of my hardware that I purchased because Facebook's software decides my account isn't 'legit' enough? Gonna be a serious nope from me.