A bunch of old people deriding VR while kids love it? Probably safe to ignore the old people at this point (yes, you, 30 year olds).
I ask every kid that comes over to baby sit for me the same thing:
1. What do kinda think of VR and do you want to try this headset?
2. What do kids think of cryptocurrencies and NFTs?
I don’t have a lot of data points, but VR excites kids, they know what NFTs are, and they are ambivalent about cryptocurrency.
The kids of today were implicitly groomed for virtual reality by way of 1.5+ years of Zoom-based educations, where they were already communicating as talking torsos displayed on a screen.
This is the same generation who is also being subconsciously prepared for greater state-sanctioned surveillance by way of their parents affixing AirTags to themselves and their belongings.
It’s not about what you catch in the wash…but what you catch in the rinse.
VR has excited kids for the last, what, 60 years? The reason adults are jaded by it is not because adults are lame but because VR continues to be lame despite all the decades-long optimism around it.
For me it's less about "sucking" or not, and more about understanding the limitations of what could be delivered even if it didn't suck. You could take every drawback of current VR and solve it and it'd still be additive, not revolutionary, because of essentially inherent limitations. Unless someone is proposing a holodeck, and even then I'm not convinced it replaces much of what we already have because there'll always be a basic efficiency to existing pre-VR control paradigms.
I own a htc vive original which I don’t really use anymore. And I think the idea is still solid, it’s just the current products are too cumbersome, expensive, and limited.
I really enjoyed Pavlov VR. A Vr shooter sort of like counterstrike combined with Garry’s mod. But I was not able to be even semi competitive with how blurry the screen is and how jittery the hand tracking is.
I could shell out thousands for the valve index if it’s even in stock, but I’m just waiting for someone to release something that doesn’t have a bunch of cables, lighthouses, etc. and doesn’t come with Facebook lockin
Same. I bought a Vive, set it up, had a lot of fun, but then I moved and I'm just not motivated enough to set it up again.
The cables are really the killer for me. I can deal with the lighthouses, but my PC is in my office and the nearest space large enough to play in is ~30 ft away. I don't really want to have a whole bundle of cables just running through the hallway, or dealing with coiling 30 ft of cable every time I want to play.
In addition to issues like motion sickness and discomfort of strapping a headset to your face for extended periods, I feel there's a bigger issue with VR: It can only be used somewhere where you have complete trust in your environment. Somewhere where you wouldn't mind going to sleep. When you're "in" VR, you're vulnerable to anyone and anything around you.
This means most public places are just not going to work. Even in your own home, you might be unwilling to disengage so completely if you have a mischievous sibling, an animal who might get underfoot or delicate/dangerous items near you that could be hit by a wayward swing of the arm. In general, you are completely reliant on others around you to warn you of danger - from wandering too close to walls or furniture, to watching out for others who might want to take advantage of your vulnerability.
Offices might work, but not open plan. Classrooms are a non-starter. Airplane seats would be good (if not great), but not public transport like a subway or a city bus, even if you disregard the nausea issue. Even sitting in a high-end cafe or a public library, you'd need to have someone actively looking out for you. Again, would you be comfortable laying down for a nap in the middle of a park? If not, then using VR there isn't going to work.
This is an unavoidable issue that can only be slightly mitigated with automated detection systems. There are inherent limits to a technical solution like that: Someone staring at you intently from a short distance away to gauge how they could best run up and grab your bag isn't something a proximity warning system would be able to counter. Already just concentrating on portable video games in public (phone, Switch, etc.) is such a distraction that you have to be wary of your surroundings - the idea of adding in complete sensory deprivation to it as well is farcical.
VR simply isn't the next smartphone in terms of technology. It will forever be a niche used at home, alone. That isn't to say this is a small market - the entire video game industry has a similar use case - but Zuckerberg has his hopes set on a revolution akin to the iPhone and it just isn't going to happen.
AR is a much more realistic opportunity. If Zuck was as smart as he thinks he is, he'd pivot and focus there. But I don't think it will happen until Apple launches their solution (whatever it may be), and by then it may be way too late.
It's already true that someone could sneak up behind you in a movie theater, at a restaurant, on a park bench and punch you in the back of the head (or worse).
It's also true that while driving on a highway you are putting your life in the hands of other drivers, some of which may be drunk or tired.
When you fly, you are at risk of the plane crashing and you have absolutely no recourse.
I can absolutely assure you there are some people who would use VR in public today and some who will refuse to ever do so, but let's not pretend that closing your eyes and ears off presents some fundamental transformation that is 10000x more dangerous than any experience humans have ever voluntarily subjected themselves to.
I'm sure you could find someone in the 1600s who would make the same claim about wearing noise canceling headphones if someone from the future were to explain the idea to them.
Pepperidge Farms might want to have their memory checked if they’re comparing this to Second Life. A company just pivoted their entire multi-hundred billion dollar business to do this and improve on this.
Sure, you can joke around that early stages look like Second Life, but it’s a really lazy way to look at it with absolutely no consideration for what the future holds.
Second Life is actually better in every way (more engaging and fun) than anything we've seen come out of the Metapharce to date.
FB was never a games company.
Games are challenging in a distinctly different way compared to the $FB specialty- Platform Scale engineering. Even with Carmack helping them they're still not doing a convincing job of pulling it off to transform themselves into .. whatever they're trying to become. I couldn't even say, perhaps they want to become like MS Xbox or Slony PS5?
Carmack never made interesting worlds, settings or themes. That was done by others. His brilliance came from making tech and tools that could bring those worlds to life in an era when the tech seemed impossible.
Yet VR is just so much harder, no one person alone can really polish to the level needed for mass market adoption. Heck even Doom (1993) era tech still makes a significant part of the population sick.
That doesn't mean the product/market fit can still fall short.
I've just never been convinced that VR, at the hardware distribution level, will hit a high enough saturation point to become ubiquitous.
AR I still feel will have a better chance at wide scale adoption, however its just my own assesment of the market now and that could change quickly if something hits that is sticky enough to get the user adoption to snowball.
AR seems to be harder to do well than VR. At least the tech for an MVP is a higher bar with AR. People expect wide viewing angles, visibility in bright environments, and alignment to physical objects or spaces.
But the question here isn't "can Meta do Second Life better than Linden did?" (maybe). Or even "can Meta do Second Life better than Linden, Sony, VRChat, IMVU, Epic, Tower Unite, etc. did?" (maybe). It's "Why is Meta presenting its vision for Second Life as being something revolutionary that cannot be discussed by analogy with existing products?"
If the pitch was "We make an already popular market segment more user friendly", that's cool. But the pitch is instead "We're making, from the ground up, a new market segment, and it's going to transform the world." followed by a list of things already done to various degrees of quality by dozens of products that already exist and that basically everyone formed an opinion on a decade ago and that at any rate aren't really revolutionary. Pitching stuff like "Universities will make virtual versions of their campus in the Metaverse and people will walk from virtual building to virtual building to take classes" or "The future of stand-up comedy is clapping as a cartoon avatar while you watch a cartoon avatar of a stand-up comedian do comedy in front of you."
If Meta pitched tomorrow that they were going to revolutionize transportation by coming up with a $1,000 self-balancing personal transportation device, I could definitely be convinced that they could spent their way to a better Segway or a better electric skateboard or a better electric skooter or a better wheelchair or a better AirWheel. But if they refused to discuss any of those existing products and their beta looked like a worse Segway and they were promising how the whole world would change because no one would ever use a car or walk up stairs again, I'd be really skeptical.
It's a little bit like Jeffrey Ketzenberg telling me Quibi is going to revolutionize television, while admitting he doesn't watch shortform video content and hasn't looked at any of his failed competitors, but saying "we've fundraised 10x what they have to make this work" and dismissing the widespread negative reaction to the concept and execution as people not daring enough to see his vision.
Reminds me of Elon Musk. I think it's a new category where a handful of people announce vapourware and billions flood in to back it with money but none of it exists in reality.
I don't know, reducing Trans-Atlantic network latency and bringing high speed internet to millions in currently un-served areas around the world while at the same time giving me an alternative to Cox seems worth while. Oh and being able to tweet that I think the benefit/cost ratio of mRNA vaccines is less than one for most people will be kind of cool as well.
>bringing high speed internet to millions in currently un-served areas around the world
Not that that's bad in itself, but in today's news: "Elon Musk personally rejected a Ukrainian request to extend his satellite internet service to Crimea"
Doing things that nobody else can gives you power nobody else has.
Alternative to Cox? I don’t think you have actually tried Starlink, otherwise you wouldn’t say that.
For me, bandwidth is between 60Mbps and 100Mbps. Latency 50-100ms. But the worst is how unreliable it is. Muktisecond blackouts many times during the day and subsecond time-outs many times per hour.
SSH over Starlink is pretty painful.
In best case it’s an alternative to wireless service providers, but otherwise I would get a stable reliable 25Mbps DSL over Starlink any day.
Just in the interest of balance I am very happy with Starlink, I usually range between 90-120Mbps and 30-60ms latency. It can be a little patchy to play latency sensitive games on (guessing these are the sub seconds timeouts you mention), I swap to tethering my phone for that but day to day (zoom meetings, etc) I have found starlink to be a massive upgrade on the alternatives available in Australia. In 12~ months as a customer I think I've tethered my phone for a zoom call once.
I know that people love to deride Zuckerberg and Facebook, but he is completely correct.
Its just not obvious to people because the headsets are bulky and awkward and the virtual reality is not very real yet.
But the new headset is a big improvement in terms of comfort and performance.
But as they shrink down and become more capable, VR/AR headsets, goggles, glasses will almost certainly be the preferred interface for a majority of people within 5 years or so.
If I had an extra $1500 to spend on the Quest Pro now I would, and would try to use it to replace my screen with virtual screens. Might still be too uncomfortable but I will try it out.
To start to understand, think about whether you would like 3 free 42" monitors that could magically hover over your desk. Or if you would like to be able to teleport to your friend's house without actually moving.
Within a decade, using completely 2d interfaces for many computing tasks will be outdated. People will interact with 3d widgets and representations. A lot of the trendiest places to meet will be completely realistic locations in virtual or mixed reality.
What can 3d interfaces do better that they replace 2D interfaces as the preferred medium for digital activity? Are those benefits worth the additional costs of producing, distributing, and interacting with 3D content?
The argument that VR/AR is a boon restrained only by current technological ability seems to be incomplete. Rather, could there be some other economic, cultural, and practical factors which make VR/AR unappetizing outside its niche use cases? (EG, why did 3D television "fail" despite being available for a long time?)
I don't personally believe that 3D will eventually replace 2D because I know I wouldn't want to develop 3D content when 2D is a chore already. If 3D will replace 2D in some point in the future there should be a greater emphasis on developing technologies to make creating 3D content as easy (if not easier) as creating 2D content.
VR could simultaneously be the freshest thing since sliced bread and Meta could do the most masterful job at baking, slicing and packaging it – I would still not use it.
Why not? Simple: I don't trust Meta. And what I mean by that is, that I do actively distrust them in the sense of: if they made it, it must be bad for me and I should not use it. It is a little bit like if Malboro tried to sell you vitamin pills all of the sudden. Maybe they are good genuine vitamin pills, who knows, but I would not be the person to try that out. And even if there was conclusive proof they were good genuine vitamin pills, I would like to give my money to someone else.
Facebook would be a decent product in the hands of people who knew how to wield it and how to earn (and keep) a users trust. Similar any VR they develop could be technologically really a masterpiece, it would howver still be a masterpiece managed by Meta.
Do you really think you could use a tool that is, by its own admission, expressly designed for collaborative experiences without giving up your implicit identity?
The answer, by the way, is no. Facebook has had highly-accurate "shadow profiles" for people who do not use their service for over a decade.
Having a basic interaction graph, geo-location data, and being in the income band able to afford a $1500 headset begins to narrow down people a lot faster than you think. Not to mention the headset is technically capable of gathering skin tone (easily mapped by the hand recognition), IP address, height, and even performing facial recognition.
Using a fake username achieves nothing. Unless you use it for sideloaded, offline, single player games and nothing else - at which point, the pro headset doesn't really make sense.
And a payment card (which you can’t get without strong identity in the USA)?
What about phone number and IP?
Your friends list also probably uniquely links the account to your shadow profile which has your real name and address bought from data brokers.
Don’t forget that Facebook has your name/phone number from all of your friends’ phones who gave FB/WhatsApp contacts permission. Friend enough of them and they’ll know it’s you.
Also, they have the plaintext of all of your chats with your friends, including that initial “hey it’s me bob” intro message.
I’m amazed at the level of distrust and fud from meta when the other side of the coin, google, is much more invasive and people generally enjoy opting into the google ecosystem.
Gmail is reading all of your emails, google maps knows everywhere you’ve been and are probably going to go to, etc
For me it's not about the collection of the data, it's about what the company does with it. I don't love that Google makes a fortune harvesting my data for targeted advertising, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make to in order to use their services sans fee. OTOH I am not willing to support a company that has been shown to use their masses of data to influence election results or engineer a behavioral addiction to social media.
Bit of both. Hard to say "they didn't do enough" when its clear that they have enabled all of their client's evil activities via their loosy goosy ruleset
i.e. choosing to not do enough to enable more revenue is worse than the potential remedy by saying "sorry, we didn't do enough" and should be penalized as such
I don't find Google invasive at all. I know Google harvests my data, but I get so so much in return for it. They make great products which have improved my life unimaginably and I choose to login to their services to reap those benefits. I am choosing to give them my data to use the services, maybe I'm doing a deal with the devil but at this point I feel the tradeoff is worth it.
I also can say confidently, that I have plenty of good, working alternatives to Google services which I can use at anytime, for example, I can open a private tab and use DuckDuckGo when I want to be a bit more anonymous.Other people get by without Google at all.
I think in the past Google made more invasive products but I feel they have moved on from that and probably learned from the negativity aimed at Facebook.
In comparison Facebook has done almost nothing beneficial for me have built a business model which doesn't give me the option to "opt out", I'd love to hear your counter arguments though.
> example, I can open a private tab and use DuckDuckGo when I want to be a bit more anonymous
That’s the thing, even if you use DDG, the resulting pages have google and other trackers who share with google your information. So even though you think you’re being anonymous, they are still amassing data on you.
Once you visit a search result regardless of the search engine, that search result can tell google Facebook or whoever everything about your connection
Google just has a much broader set of products, many of which are about as close as you can get to unavoidable infrastructure for everyday life. There are always alternatives, of course, but it's no surprise that Google is much harder to avoid when they offer either the only dominant product or one of a very small number of dominant products in so many areas: web search, email, calendar, maps, smartphone operating system, web browser, video sharing, office suite, ... what did I miss?
I did not say I trusted google any more. The only services I use by them are the search engine and youtube. I avoid everything else. And the search engine is not the only search engine I use.
It's true, few people are going to want to give themselves to Facebook and in live in their toxic platform. If Mark was smart (and honest with himself) he could've funded a completely different company appointed different management completely separate from Facebook and got started that way. I'm assuming he didn't because he sees Meta as his chance for keeping Facebook alive. Which is why I hate the idea of it even more.
I loathe Facebook. I could think of nothing worse than having Facebook strapped to my face and it's never going to happen for me.
The problem for Mark is, anything he innovates will be pretty easy to steal / copy and there will be a huge market for Apple (for example) to build something similar but more trustworthy for people to buy...this is all under the proviso that VR actually takes off. Personally, I'm not so sure it will because while I find it a fun novelty with some application, I feel there is too much value in being aware of my surroundings to go "all in".
Apple is so trustworthy that everytime they have an opportunity to adopt open web standards, they choose instead to not do that and re-implement something proprietary.
If Apple is the bellweather for tech in terms of privacy, all I need to do is point to their new revamped advertising division to say "lol"
There's a vast difference between intent and ability to make someone drink the coolaid.
Whether Apple are just as evil as facebook is immaterial. What matters is that every time someone expresses disgust at having silicon valley control and inspect every facet of their lives someone nearby will say 'what about apple, they're much hetter for privacy'.
No, seriously... Apple created WebKit (former engine for Chrome, replaced by Blink) and basically pioneered many web standards. Even some standard HTML elements are Apple's creation, like canvas. Apple is literally a founding member of WHATWG.
That's not to say Apple doesn't deserve their share of criticism for various proprietary efforts, but at least recognize they've been a pretty big contributor to the web.
You had me til Apple. For me Apple is selling the idea that they are the ones to be trusted with privacy, i.e., power. And that's a hard pill for me to swallow.
I've been an Apple customer and a Facebook user for about the same duration.
In that time, Apple has taken many measures to improve security and privacy.
Facebook on the other hand has gone in the opposite direction, to the point of leaking data to hostile third parties and needing to be reigned in by the OS platform.
It's reasonable to trust Apple more than Facebook, simply based on demonstrated behaviour.
Tiktok is the result of that meeting where someone asked: "What would be a good spiritual successor to Facebook?" and the brightest person in the room sarcastically rattles down a list of satirically bad ideas and expects a laugh — only to have the manager say: "Great! This is precisely how we are going to do it!"
Yeah I'm honestly amazed at some of the comments here about VR. It's going to be absolutely huge in the relatively near future, it's just not completely there yet.
Can you say what you think is really cool about it?
It's fine if it's hard to explain. There are lots of things I can't explain the appeal of to me, and lots of things I didn't get until I tried.
But I'll admit I don't get the appeal of VR, so if you've got a good take on it I'd love to hear it. It would be great to be excited about something new. (It's been a while.)
FPS are immersive, fun for an hour or so, but I'd rather play with keyboard/mouse/monitor anyway - I'm often tired after work and just want to chill for a bit. Actively moving in VR gear is more of an excersize.
Otherwise you can go play paintball/softball etc and it would be 100% better than any current VR tech.
I can play VR shooters at home. I don't even know how I would play paintball as they are far out in rural areas without public transport access. That's an anecdote but its not unique. VR brings accessibility to a lot of people.
I used to be a 3d modeler, so I've found sculpting and painting in VR to be excellent. Tilt Brush, SculptVR, Gravity Sketch, Medium. To scale up what you're working on, sculpt out a building while truly feeling like you're inside it. It's great.
Then there's gaming experiences. The first game I tried was Vader Immortal. It was a surreal experience, by far the most immersive gaming experience I've had. It sounds insane, but the first time you encounter Darth Vader, it actually made me realize for the first time that this is a terrifying person in front of me. It was the first time I didn't think of him as a cartoonish villain, but an actual hulking presence.
Then I tried SkyrimVR. At first I was unimpressed, as I was playing a melee character. Swinging weapons that are meant to be heavy and attack with respect to their weight felt extremely silly when I could just wiggle them around as fast as I wanted. But then I tried bow and arrow, and the game did a complete 180. I became fully immersed and played all the way through. It was indescribable the degree to which I inhabited this world for about a month, in no way comparable to my previous playthrough a decade ago in PC.
Then there's Beatsaber. Best cardio I've gotten in years. It doesn't feel like exercise because it's genuinely fun and extremely hard, and you come out drenched in sweat.
The horror experiences, like with Resident Evil 7, absolutely terrifying. There is no genre more enhanced than horror.
And finally, the gimmicks. I brought VR to a few family events where kids and adults alike were trying the gimmick games. We cast the screen to the TV so everyone could watch, and they proceeded to try Richie's Plank Experience. Again, it's gimmicky, it's not meant to be lasting fun, but it was a great introduction for everyone, and they loved it. Watching adult men crawling on the floor out on a virtual plank.
This all clicks with my experience with VR, but don't you think this is pretty small fry and additive? You've got some fun hobby-grade content production stuff, you've got a handful of good but small scale experiences, you've got a handful of things that already exist but that there are arguably benefits to doing in VR (in exchange for drawbacks), you've got an exercise video game that more or less compares to existing exercise video games, and everyone agrees it's a sort of fun novelty that fills the same kind of niche the Wii did 15 years ago. I agree all of this stuff is cool. I had a great time with some of the VR games I played on Steam including Beat Saber. But how is this totally underappreciated? I think most in the gaming community would exactly echo this level of appreciation. It just isn't and won't be a bigger deal than this.
I love my Oculus, at least for my use case, exercise, and I highly recommend it. I think exercise is the killer feature of VR, personally.
For context: I'm not much of a gamer. But I was looking for some way to do cardio exercise in my small-ish apartment. I heard from a few people about exercising in VR. so I got the Oculus.
And it's been great! There are lots of games that are purely exercise-focused, which I liked a bit. Then there are lots of games which are just games, but that you also can get a workout doing, which I absolutely love. There are enough of them that I think I can keep playing for a while before ever getting bored.
I love table tennis, but don't regularly go play anymore cause kids/family/etc, lack of time. But I can put on the headset and be playing an almost completely realistic game of ping pong with an AI or a random important anytime I want, for a quick 5 minute break or for something more.
Then there are the other games - games that are actual games. I'm most surprised by this - since I'm not a gamer, I wouldn't have thought I would be drawn to these. But apparently games in VR are just much more fun, or at least much more novel to me - and I've actually found myself using VR to play games without an exercise focus more and more.
So to summarize - if you want a way to do some cardio at home, in a relatively small space, without feeling like you're working out - a VR is a great way to do that. And let's face it, most people need to do more cardio.
(I'm also very excited for using VR as a workspace, but way more skeptical of this really being a thing.)
Edit: Oh, and this is way more out there - but if there is ever a good, affordable omni-directional treadmill thing ala Ready Player One - it will instantly make VR 100x more valuable for exercise, and I think it will be completely transformative.
Thank you. Doing cardio in VR doesn't cause motion sickness issues?
I've got a really strong stomach, and played something on an Oculus for far longer than the device's owner could, but it was still only a half hour and I was getting queasy.
I'd like to think it works. I am a runner and I hate treadmills, even with a TV. Something to make it bearable would be a big win on bad weather days.
I'm maybe not the best to ask, as I've rarely had any motion sickness issues. But the few times I have, it's been very specific games, and mostly ones in which you're "flying around" or some such.
Luckily, that means you can choose games that don't have this issue, and most fitness games are included. E.g. a lot of "fitness" games are like beat saber - you're effectively "standing still" and things are coming to you. Other games allow you to move around a little, but you're still basically "on the ground" and moving around, not flying.
So in my experience, it's fairly easy to do 30 minutes of something like Beat Saber, Pistol Whip, or similar games. And way funner to do that than do 30 minutes of just running, at least to me. (Sorry, I'm not much of a runner.)
That said, there's a reason for my belief that when a good omnidirectional treadmill hits the market, it will make VR 1000x better. It will make all fitness games instantly much better, and more realistic, and it turn many games that aren't currently fitness games into fitness games by having you walking or running around a lot. An FPS that allows you to actually walk around will instantly be the best game ever, in my mind, but right now there's no way I'm doing that for exercise.
Probably, though I don't think they're alone - I remember reading an article a few years ago above Valve Software experimenting with VR, eye-tracking and skin conductivity (i.e. sweating) to control the horde in Left 4 Dead.
Facebook has problems with browsers. Sandboxed away, no file system access, and user having full control of their browser (ad blocking, noscript, and similar).
With VR you're in full control of writing a driver (and if you go full Sony style rootkit most people won't even read the news story), you have full control of what launcher/store users must use (no troubling addons like ad blocking), you have full access to video of the room that VR is happening in (if you choose to), eye tracking as you mentioned, mouth tracking is getting popular, and have full access to anything you can fit on a fitness watch (heart rate, blood pressure, alone is enough to guess a person health especially since you have their movement logs. maybe someday in the future sweat analysis).
It’s interesting how Zuck is focused on living out his life in actual reality because he has the means to. Bought mansion in Hawaii, surfs, runs, etc. Maybe he knows there’s a huge market of people that prefer to hide from their reality and escape to a digital world. That is kinda of what is happening when someone is glued all day to social media but instead of a phone in your hand it is glued to your head. It’s a bet that as time passes more and more people will have no other choice than to see pretty colors in a screen since they have nothing else to enjoy. I’ve met people that come from heavily polluted areas and they are shocked when they see a blue river or a blue ocean, maybe VR for them would be amazing.
I was really upset when FB bought Oculus, but have to admit that they did a decent job with the acquisition (other than the FB login fiasco) and I respect taking the risk on what could be the next thing.
I don’t think they’ll ‘win’ in the end because of their reputation and business model, but I think we’ll look back and say that VR likely would have died without their investment in Oculus and various studios in the ecosystem.
VR may have been slowed, but it wouldn't have died.
It's difficult to achieve the level of immersion VR is aiming at, that is, complete immersion. A lot of people are happy with the immersion that desktop computers offer and don't want or need any more than that. That's because VR is seen as not been fully there yet.
VR is cool to think about, but as is it's dangerous and ultimately just a gimmick without a lot of expensive peripherals. AR is safe and has real-world uses other than games/porn and simulation training.
What I mean by that is: every once in a while we are promised that soon, we will all go to work in flying cars. But they never arrive. Powered flight has been a reality for more than a century- what gives?
Well, of course, the problem is that when you put wings on a car what you get is not a flying car, but an airplane. If you run out of gas in your car, you stop. If you run out of gas in your airplane, you die. So that means triple checking fuel levels and filing flight plans. Cars drive on a road, in a predictable way, so they can be packed close together. Airplanes are just traveling every which way in the sky, so you have to have air traffic controllers. There are a myriad of ways in which the concept of a "flying car" is just a misunderstanding of the constraints involved.
Same with the metaverse. The concept is reality, but virtual. And the thing is: when you take reality and put it in a computer what you get is not the same real world, just virtual. What you get is a totally different thing that has different uses. Segway made this same mistake. That's why the metaverse will fail. It's a concept based on applying the usage patterns of one system to a different system where they don't work anymore.
Sometimes the opposite thing happens: everyone else is trying to make a flying car, and someone comes along and figures out that those are really airplanes. This happened with the iphone. Everyone else was manufacturing regular cell phones, but computerized. Steve Jobs realized that when you put a touch screen and a powerful computer in a phone, what you have is a new and different thing that has new and different uses. It goes both ways.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 170 ms ] threadI ask every kid that comes over to baby sit for me the same thing: 1. What do kinda think of VR and do you want to try this headset? 2. What do kids think of cryptocurrencies and NFTs?
I don’t have a lot of data points, but VR excites kids, they know what NFTs are, and they are ambivalent about cryptocurrency.
The kids of today were implicitly groomed for virtual reality by way of 1.5+ years of Zoom-based educations, where they were already communicating as talking torsos displayed on a screen.
This is the same generation who is also being subconsciously prepared for greater state-sanctioned surveillance by way of their parents affixing AirTags to themselves and their belongings.
It’s not about what you catch in the wash…but what you catch in the rinse.
I really enjoyed Pavlov VR. A Vr shooter sort of like counterstrike combined with Garry’s mod. But I was not able to be even semi competitive with how blurry the screen is and how jittery the hand tracking is.
I could shell out thousands for the valve index if it’s even in stock, but I’m just waiting for someone to release something that doesn’t have a bunch of cables, lighthouses, etc. and doesn’t come with Facebook lockin
The cables are really the killer for me. I can deal with the lighthouses, but my PC is in my office and the nearest space large enough to play in is ~30 ft away. I don't really want to have a whole bundle of cables just running through the hallway, or dealing with coiling 30 ft of cable every time I want to play.
It'll get there eventually, I think.
This means most public places are just not going to work. Even in your own home, you might be unwilling to disengage so completely if you have a mischievous sibling, an animal who might get underfoot or delicate/dangerous items near you that could be hit by a wayward swing of the arm. In general, you are completely reliant on others around you to warn you of danger - from wandering too close to walls or furniture, to watching out for others who might want to take advantage of your vulnerability.
Offices might work, but not open plan. Classrooms are a non-starter. Airplane seats would be good (if not great), but not public transport like a subway or a city bus, even if you disregard the nausea issue. Even sitting in a high-end cafe or a public library, you'd need to have someone actively looking out for you. Again, would you be comfortable laying down for a nap in the middle of a park? If not, then using VR there isn't going to work.
This is an unavoidable issue that can only be slightly mitigated with automated detection systems. There are inherent limits to a technical solution like that: Someone staring at you intently from a short distance away to gauge how they could best run up and grab your bag isn't something a proximity warning system would be able to counter. Already just concentrating on portable video games in public (phone, Switch, etc.) is such a distraction that you have to be wary of your surroundings - the idea of adding in complete sensory deprivation to it as well is farcical.
VR simply isn't the next smartphone in terms of technology. It will forever be a niche used at home, alone. That isn't to say this is a small market - the entire video game industry has a similar use case - but Zuckerberg has his hopes set on a revolution akin to the iPhone and it just isn't going to happen.
AR is a much more realistic opportunity. If Zuck was as smart as he thinks he is, he'd pivot and focus there. But I don't think it will happen until Apple launches their solution (whatever it may be), and by then it may be way too late.
You need everyone to have VR gear at a ubiquitous level similar to monitors and I just don't see that happening.
AR is a much easier sell with a much lower cost to entry
It's also true that while driving on a highway you are putting your life in the hands of other drivers, some of which may be drunk or tired.
When you fly, you are at risk of the plane crashing and you have absolutely no recourse.
I can absolutely assure you there are some people who would use VR in public today and some who will refuse to ever do so, but let's not pretend that closing your eyes and ears off presents some fundamental transformation that is 10000x more dangerous than any experience humans have ever voluntarily subjected themselves to.
I'm sure you could find someone in the 1600s who would make the same claim about wearing noise canceling headphones if someone from the future were to explain the idea to them.
Sure, you can joke around that early stages look like Second Life, but it’s a really lazy way to look at it with absolutely no consideration for what the future holds.
FB was never a games company. Games are challenging in a distinctly different way compared to the $FB specialty- Platform Scale engineering. Even with Carmack helping them they're still not doing a convincing job of pulling it off to transform themselves into .. whatever they're trying to become. I couldn't even say, perhaps they want to become like MS Xbox or Slony PS5?
Yet VR is just so much harder, no one person alone can really polish to the level needed for mass market adoption. Heck even Doom (1993) era tech still makes a significant part of the population sick.
I've just never been convinced that VR, at the hardware distribution level, will hit a high enough saturation point to become ubiquitous.
AR I still feel will have a better chance at wide scale adoption, however its just my own assesment of the market now and that could change quickly if something hits that is sticky enough to get the user adoption to snowball.
If the pitch was "We make an already popular market segment more user friendly", that's cool. But the pitch is instead "We're making, from the ground up, a new market segment, and it's going to transform the world." followed by a list of things already done to various degrees of quality by dozens of products that already exist and that basically everyone formed an opinion on a decade ago and that at any rate aren't really revolutionary. Pitching stuff like "Universities will make virtual versions of their campus in the Metaverse and people will walk from virtual building to virtual building to take classes" or "The future of stand-up comedy is clapping as a cartoon avatar while you watch a cartoon avatar of a stand-up comedian do comedy in front of you."
If Meta pitched tomorrow that they were going to revolutionize transportation by coming up with a $1,000 self-balancing personal transportation device, I could definitely be convinced that they could spent their way to a better Segway or a better electric skateboard or a better electric skooter or a better wheelchair or a better AirWheel. But if they refused to discuss any of those existing products and their beta looked like a worse Segway and they were promising how the whole world would change because no one would ever use a car or walk up stairs again, I'd be really skeptical.
It's a little bit like Jeffrey Ketzenberg telling me Quibi is going to revolutionize television, while admitting he doesn't watch shortform video content and hasn't looked at any of his failed competitors, but saying "we've fundraised 10x what they have to make this work" and dismissing the widespread negative reaction to the concept and execution as people not daring enough to see his vision.
Not that that's bad in itself, but in today's news: "Elon Musk personally rejected a Ukrainian request to extend his satellite internet service to Crimea"
Doing things that nobody else can gives you power nobody else has.
For me, bandwidth is between 60Mbps and 100Mbps. Latency 50-100ms. But the worst is how unreliable it is. Muktisecond blackouts many times during the day and subsecond time-outs many times per hour.
SSH over Starlink is pretty painful.
In best case it’s an alternative to wireless service providers, but otherwise I would get a stable reliable 25Mbps DSL over Starlink any day.
Its just not obvious to people because the headsets are bulky and awkward and the virtual reality is not very real yet.
But the new headset is a big improvement in terms of comfort and performance.
But as they shrink down and become more capable, VR/AR headsets, goggles, glasses will almost certainly be the preferred interface for a majority of people within 5 years or so.
If I had an extra $1500 to spend on the Quest Pro now I would, and would try to use it to replace my screen with virtual screens. Might still be too uncomfortable but I will try it out.
To start to understand, think about whether you would like 3 free 42" monitors that could magically hover over your desk. Or if you would like to be able to teleport to your friend's house without actually moving.
Within a decade, using completely 2d interfaces for many computing tasks will be outdated. People will interact with 3d widgets and representations. A lot of the trendiest places to meet will be completely realistic locations in virtual or mixed reality.
The argument that VR/AR is a boon restrained only by current technological ability seems to be incomplete. Rather, could there be some other economic, cultural, and practical factors which make VR/AR unappetizing outside its niche use cases? (EG, why did 3D television "fail" despite being available for a long time?)
I don't personally believe that 3D will eventually replace 2D because I know I wouldn't want to develop 3D content when 2D is a chore already. If 3D will replace 2D in some point in the future there should be a greater emphasis on developing technologies to make creating 3D content as easy (if not easier) as creating 2D content.
You may not feel you owe $CEO better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Why not? Simple: I don't trust Meta. And what I mean by that is, that I do actively distrust them in the sense of: if they made it, it must be bad for me and I should not use it. It is a little bit like if Malboro tried to sell you vitamin pills all of the sudden. Maybe they are good genuine vitamin pills, who knows, but I would not be the person to try that out. And even if there was conclusive proof they were good genuine vitamin pills, I would like to give my money to someone else.
Facebook would be a decent product in the hands of people who knew how to wield it and how to earn (and keep) a users trust. Similar any VR they develop could be technologically really a masterpiece, it would howver still be a masterpiece managed by Meta.
The answer, by the way, is no. Facebook has had highly-accurate "shadow profiles" for people who do not use their service for over a decade.
Having a basic interaction graph, geo-location data, and being in the income band able to afford a $1500 headset begins to narrow down people a lot faster than you think. Not to mention the headset is technically capable of gathering skin tone (easily mapped by the hand recognition), IP address, height, and even performing facial recognition.
Using a fake username achieves nothing. Unless you use it for sideloaded, offline, single player games and nothing else - at which point, the pro headset doesn't really make sense.
What about phone number and IP?
Your friends list also probably uniquely links the account to your shadow profile which has your real name and address bought from data brokers.
Don’t forget that Facebook has your name/phone number from all of your friends’ phones who gave FB/WhatsApp contacts permission. Friend enough of them and they’ll know it’s you.
Also, they have the plaintext of all of your chats with your friends, including that initial “hey it’s me bob” intro message.
Gmail is reading all of your emails, google maps knows everywhere you’ve been and are probably going to go to, etc
i.e. choosing to not do enough to enable more revenue is worse than the potential remedy by saying "sorry, we didn't do enough" and should be penalized as such
I don't find Google invasive at all. I know Google harvests my data, but I get so so much in return for it. They make great products which have improved my life unimaginably and I choose to login to their services to reap those benefits. I am choosing to give them my data to use the services, maybe I'm doing a deal with the devil but at this point I feel the tradeoff is worth it.
I also can say confidently, that I have plenty of good, working alternatives to Google services which I can use at anytime, for example, I can open a private tab and use DuckDuckGo when I want to be a bit more anonymous.Other people get by without Google at all.
I think in the past Google made more invasive products but I feel they have moved on from that and probably learned from the negativity aimed at Facebook.
In comparison Facebook has done almost nothing beneficial for me have built a business model which doesn't give me the option to "opt out", I'd love to hear your counter arguments though.
That’s the thing, even if you use DDG, the resulting pages have google and other trackers who share with google your information. So even though you think you’re being anonymous, they are still amassing data on you.
I loathe Facebook. I could think of nothing worse than having Facebook strapped to my face and it's never going to happen for me.
The problem for Mark is, anything he innovates will be pretty easy to steal / copy and there will be a huge market for Apple (for example) to build something similar but more trustworthy for people to buy...this is all under the proviso that VR actually takes off. Personally, I'm not so sure it will because while I find it a fun novelty with some application, I feel there is too much value in being aware of my surroundings to go "all in".
If Apple is the bellweather for tech in terms of privacy, all I need to do is point to their new revamped advertising division to say "lol"
Whether Apple are just as evil as facebook is immaterial. What matters is that every time someone expresses disgust at having silicon valley control and inspect every facet of their lives someone nearby will say 'what about apple, they're much hetter for privacy'.
No, seriously... Apple created WebKit (former engine for Chrome, replaced by Blink) and basically pioneered many web standards. Even some standard HTML elements are Apple's creation, like canvas. Apple is literally a founding member of WHATWG.
That's not to say Apple doesn't deserve their share of criticism for various proprietary efforts, but at least recognize they've been a pretty big contributor to the web.
In that time, Apple has taken many measures to improve security and privacy.
Facebook on the other hand has gone in the opposite direction, to the point of leaking data to hostile third parties and needing to be reigned in by the OS platform.
It's reasonable to trust Apple more than Facebook, simply based on demonstrated behaviour.
Absolutely correct. There’s a meme going around saying “Meta” is short for “metastasize”
Now do TikTok!
A single company controlling the metaverse is what's stupid.
It's fine if it's hard to explain. There are lots of things I can't explain the appeal of to me, and lots of things I didn't get until I tried.
But I'll admit I don't get the appeal of VR, so if you've got a good take on it I'd love to hear it. It would be great to be excited about something new. (It's been a while.)
I can imagine VR gaming becomes the new racing wheel. Something that never dies and never becomes ubiquitous. Just another way to enjoy entertainment.
Otherwise you can go play paintball/softball etc and it would be 100% better than any current VR tech.
I used to be a 3d modeler, so I've found sculpting and painting in VR to be excellent. Tilt Brush, SculptVR, Gravity Sketch, Medium. To scale up what you're working on, sculpt out a building while truly feeling like you're inside it. It's great.
Then there's gaming experiences. The first game I tried was Vader Immortal. It was a surreal experience, by far the most immersive gaming experience I've had. It sounds insane, but the first time you encounter Darth Vader, it actually made me realize for the first time that this is a terrifying person in front of me. It was the first time I didn't think of him as a cartoonish villain, but an actual hulking presence.
Then I tried SkyrimVR. At first I was unimpressed, as I was playing a melee character. Swinging weapons that are meant to be heavy and attack with respect to their weight felt extremely silly when I could just wiggle them around as fast as I wanted. But then I tried bow and arrow, and the game did a complete 180. I became fully immersed and played all the way through. It was indescribable the degree to which I inhabited this world for about a month, in no way comparable to my previous playthrough a decade ago in PC.
Then there's Beatsaber. Best cardio I've gotten in years. It doesn't feel like exercise because it's genuinely fun and extremely hard, and you come out drenched in sweat.
The horror experiences, like with Resident Evil 7, absolutely terrifying. There is no genre more enhanced than horror.
And finally, the gimmicks. I brought VR to a few family events where kids and adults alike were trying the gimmick games. We cast the screen to the TV so everyone could watch, and they proceeded to try Richie's Plank Experience. Again, it's gimmicky, it's not meant to be lasting fun, but it was a great introduction for everyone, and they loved it. Watching adult men crawling on the floor out on a virtual plank.
For context: I'm not much of a gamer. But I was looking for some way to do cardio exercise in my small-ish apartment. I heard from a few people about exercising in VR. so I got the Oculus.
And it's been great! There are lots of games that are purely exercise-focused, which I liked a bit. Then there are lots of games which are just games, but that you also can get a workout doing, which I absolutely love. There are enough of them that I think I can keep playing for a while before ever getting bored.
I love table tennis, but don't regularly go play anymore cause kids/family/etc, lack of time. But I can put on the headset and be playing an almost completely realistic game of ping pong with an AI or a random important anytime I want, for a quick 5 minute break or for something more.
Then there are the other games - games that are actual games. I'm most surprised by this - since I'm not a gamer, I wouldn't have thought I would be drawn to these. But apparently games in VR are just much more fun, or at least much more novel to me - and I've actually found myself using VR to play games without an exercise focus more and more.
So to summarize - if you want a way to do some cardio at home, in a relatively small space, without feeling like you're working out - a VR is a great way to do that. And let's face it, most people need to do more cardio.
(I'm also very excited for using VR as a workspace, but way more skeptical of this really being a thing.)
Edit: Oh, and this is way more out there - but if there is ever a good, affordable omni-directional treadmill thing ala Ready Player One - it will instantly make VR 100x more valuable for exercise, and I think it will be completely transformative.
I've got a really strong stomach, and played something on an Oculus for far longer than the device's owner could, but it was still only a half hour and I was getting queasy.
I'd like to think it works. I am a runner and I hate treadmills, even with a TV. Something to make it bearable would be a big win on bad weather days.
Luckily, that means you can choose games that don't have this issue, and most fitness games are included. E.g. a lot of "fitness" games are like beat saber - you're effectively "standing still" and things are coming to you. Other games allow you to move around a little, but you're still basically "on the ground" and moving around, not flying.
So in my experience, it's fairly easy to do 30 minutes of something like Beat Saber, Pistol Whip, or similar games. And way funner to do that than do 30 minutes of just running, at least to me. (Sorry, I'm not much of a runner.)
That said, there's a reason for my belief that when a good omnidirectional treadmill hits the market, it will make VR 1000x better. It will make all fitness games instantly much better, and more realistic, and it turn many games that aren't currently fitness games into fitness games by having you walking or running around a lot. An FPS that allows you to actually walk around will instantly be the best game ever, in my mind, but right now there's no way I'm doing that for exercise.
Eye tracking?
With VR you're in full control of writing a driver (and if you go full Sony style rootkit most people won't even read the news story), you have full control of what launcher/store users must use (no troubling addons like ad blocking), you have full access to video of the room that VR is happening in (if you choose to), eye tracking as you mentioned, mouth tracking is getting popular, and have full access to anything you can fit on a fitness watch (heart rate, blood pressure, alone is enough to guess a person health especially since you have their movement logs. maybe someday in the future sweat analysis).
I don’t think they’ll ‘win’ in the end because of their reputation and business model, but I think we’ll look back and say that VR likely would have died without their investment in Oculus and various studios in the ecosystem.
It's difficult to achieve the level of immersion VR is aiming at, that is, complete immersion. A lot of people are happy with the immersion that desktop computers offer and don't want or need any more than that. That's because VR is seen as not been fully there yet.
What I mean by that is: every once in a while we are promised that soon, we will all go to work in flying cars. But they never arrive. Powered flight has been a reality for more than a century- what gives?
Well, of course, the problem is that when you put wings on a car what you get is not a flying car, but an airplane. If you run out of gas in your car, you stop. If you run out of gas in your airplane, you die. So that means triple checking fuel levels and filing flight plans. Cars drive on a road, in a predictable way, so they can be packed close together. Airplanes are just traveling every which way in the sky, so you have to have air traffic controllers. There are a myriad of ways in which the concept of a "flying car" is just a misunderstanding of the constraints involved.
Same with the metaverse. The concept is reality, but virtual. And the thing is: when you take reality and put it in a computer what you get is not the same real world, just virtual. What you get is a totally different thing that has different uses. Segway made this same mistake. That's why the metaverse will fail. It's a concept based on applying the usage patterns of one system to a different system where they don't work anymore.
Sometimes the opposite thing happens: everyone else is trying to make a flying car, and someone comes along and figures out that those are really airplanes. This happened with the iphone. Everyone else was manufacturing regular cell phones, but computerized. Steve Jobs realized that when you put a touch screen and a powerful computer in a phone, what you have is a new and different thing that has new and different uses. It goes both ways.