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Virtual Reality Predictions For 2016 and Beyond (medium.com)
An anonymous reader writes: 2015 was an undeniably huge year in Virtual Reality, breaking down the doors and setting the stage for an all-out 2016 consumer VR frenzy. The adoption of VR is not simply like ‘just another’ new device, not like a new aspect ratio for display panels, not like just an upgraded generation of gaming console, but a fundamentally new kind of technology that enables a new kinds of experiences that haven’t before been possible or comparable to anything else we’ve had (in the consumer market at least). Here is an article of some of my predictions for the coming years. What are your predictions?
There...I said it.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
I wonder if VR stuff will wind up like quadrophonic sound, the Virtual Boy, Smellovision, or 3D TVs... interesting and cool, but winds up dead eventually just because it doesn't get acceptance by the mainstream.
Google Glass was a good judge of this, and the negative reactions of it. I have not seen many devices viewed with the amount of negativity that Google Glass has. Will more VR technology be as in-your-face and cause as big negative reactions?
If more headsets appear, I wouldn't be surprised to see bouncers be given training to grab people from behind with the VR headsets, forcibily remove them, then remove the offending person. Replacing someone's $2000 toy is a lot less than paying millions due to video footage hitting YouTube.
If it were a viable technology, this conversation might be worth having. VR now isn't dramatically different from what we had back in the 90s. Sure, the graphics are better, but it still induces vomiting/migraines for most people and is utterly useless to anyone with epilepsy, the visually impaired, etc., etc. Waste of money and time.
I see VR as having some success for certain medical applications. For example, VR can be used to make a micropenis appear to be a normal-sized penis. This could be used to treat the many Stack Overflow moderators who feel the need to interfere with normal discussion due to having extraordinarily small cocks.
That's my prediction.
I predict I will get a new video card + CV1, run castle coaster and have a lot of fun with it. Might play a few other games (Elite) and demos (Apollo SIM) and really like it. Hope by then stellarium works with the rift. Who knows if I get enough shit done maybe I'll learn an engine enough to make my own crappy game. I had a half-baked idea of using data from head tracker standing to control a "hoverboard" but it will probably not be fun or if it is it will make everyone puke.
Sometime later in 2016 Zuck will find a way to fuck it all up.. make the Oculus drivers require a facebook login or abandon PC platform for mobile phones or lock down the SDK or push ads to everyone's displays or uses the tracking camera as a 1984 telescreen to spy on everyone... There will be some annoying scheme that fucks everyone over and makes the whole thing no longer fun. The other shoe will drop because the tech industry is full of angry mean people who only care about short term maximizing profits regardless of the consequences.
The only out I see is if VR has the affect of more people wanting to get their hands dirty and get involved with making cool shit instead of just consuming crap.
...Slashdot users will use VR to enjoy gay porn without a partner of the same gender...
...Slashdot users will use VR for two or three seconds to experience sunlight, after which they will become incredibly terrified and retreat to a dark corner of their parents' basements...
...Slashdot users will not use VR for an experience with the opposite gender because it's too scary and most Slashdot users are men who are terrified of women or disgusted by them...
...Slashdot users will generally continue to believe the lie that Linux did not steal large amounts of source code from SCO...
...Slashdot users will still be deluded into believing that it will be the year of Linux on the desktop...
...Slashdot users will continue to whine that governments are invading their privacy and spying on them when, in fact, nobody cares or wants to know what perverted things they are doing in their parents' basements...
the same year as the "year of the Linux desktop". ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
When Mario VR comes out everyone will go "Oh yeah, that's how to do it". Nintendo's real strength is gameplay. Stories and graphics were never their focus. But they showed the world how to control a character in 3rd person, how to z-lock, and about every other thing that makes gaming work.
They are never the first. But there is just something about them that makes games respond how you think they should. VR will be no different.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Augemented Reality will be the thing that kicks VR into high gear. Useful AR, with things like mapping, or product lookup, or other sueful abilities overlaid on our real world surroundings will make ugly headsets far more acceptable to us than silly games that honestly suck donkey balls.
VR is over 20 years old by this point. It is in no sense of the word a "new technology."
waves hands This is not the year for VR you are looking for!
Really amazing, utterly astounding VR will arrive in all its glory when it's powered by nuclear fusion. ;-)
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
So they connected 2 small monitors with lever, after that they told everyone that's MUST HAVE product so they can make some money of it. And message is spreading like a virus. Really it's getting worse every year with this hype about everything.
Case in point, I have a fused neck and bad arthritis due to AS. So for me, VR is just a reminder of my own limitations which translate into the very thing im trying to escape from in video games. So, for some, I don't see VR being the end all be all at all, I'll stick to my primitive analog controls, because with those I can achieve full range of motion effortlessly...the sort of motion my own body is incapable of in the real world.
Not trying to play the fiddle, just bringing up a valid point.
Ready to buy. This looks like the beginning of VR future to me.
Seriously, VR, even if it eventually will work well (not in 2016, that is certain), is just a gradual change, and for many things not even an improvement. The thing is, VR takes a lot out of you with regards to concentration. Some "realistic" games have people tired out after 5 minutes. The other thing is that VR does not mitigate bad writing, boring content and non-engaging characters at all. Hailing it as the the second coming is just unmitigatedly stupid. Also, like for example 3D content, VR has failed several times before. It will do so again.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I'm one of these that will grab the consumer model of Occulus Rift and build a brand new spanking rig to fit it. I figure Intel, nVidia, AMD and PC hardware vendors will be happy as it will drive hardware sales of new PC gear like crazy. VR will put good use of latest stuff like AVX-512, DDR4, etc.
Flying a drone with VR headset would be awesome, should feel like being superman flying around the city. Better get one of these gas powered ones running on ethanol RC engine that can stay up in the air for hours.
Horror games that will scare the shit out of you. Almost real LSD trips to wreck your brain. ;-) ;-)
Lots of uses in education, medical and mechanical engineering, etc. Social VR applications will be huge, app that allow one to hang out with your friends at a bar or nightclub. Watching 2D movies and TV series would rock, like going to a big screen teater but even better, should provide for a good movie experience as it shields the viewer from distractions. One can watch porn on the airplane, no one would ever know.
... as 3D TVs.
Yaaaaawn.
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
I can't wait for Trump to win, I'm definitely joining the Homeland Deportation Agency.
The article presents the most optimistic possible scenario, in which VR catches on like wildfire (or like smartphones did!), followed by massive investment and rapid technological progress. It's a scenario at one end of the spectrum of possible outcomes -- but it's not implausible, it's not crazy. We've seen this kind of shift before.
At the other end of the spectrum, it's possible that the awkwardness and expense of VR headsets (especially the high-spec ones for PCs) may hold things back, and VR may not explode into the mainstream. Even if this happens, though, I can't see it flopping completely. VR technology is simply too useful, and useful for too many things (beyond games), to just go away.
Interesting mention in TFA of Second Life. . . QUOTE: "In 2017 a clear leader will emerge in the field of social VR platforms, and it will look something like Secondlife but in VR. If it’s not facebook itself as the platform, then facebook will try to acquire whoever makes such a platform stably with good adoption during the 2017 year."
Of course, Linden Labs are still running Second Life (after all these years!) and are making steady money from it. They are adapting it to work with VR headsets, and they are also developing a successor world, called Project Sansar, which is designed with a focus on VR. I am very eager to see how this turns out.
... photogrammetry (aka conversion of 2d images to 3d data). That would allow any recorded imagery (photos, film, etc) to be experienced in VR from any angle as well as the easy digitization of any object. There exists photogrammetry software today, of course, but it's weak sauce - some variants fundamentally require knowledge of positioning and/or orientation, all have trouble with reflection (including specular reflection), translucency/transparency, shadows, any form of movement, etc, and even in perfect circumstances often do a poor job.
That's not to say that point matching, as is used today, is useless; it's good to help establish initial conditions, particularly if the source data is missing any sort of GPS/dead reckoning positioning/orientation data, and to get an initial rough layout of the geometry and texturing. But it's just not enough on its own - it's only a first step. There's far more to how things look in 3d than just positioning flat static matte opaque surfaces in flat lighting. You have to next proceed to actual renderings and optimize these other properties from there.
What we really need is subsequent steps built around a fast, physically-based raytracer, with each image being treated as an object with optimizeable properties (geometry, maps for color, roughness, reflectiveness, transparency, etc). Discontinuities (say, where a foreground object ends and a background object begins) turn out to not be an actual problem because such an optimization problem would turn the discontinuities transparent (so that they don't interfere with the scene as viewed from other angles) and they'd effectively go away. Similar areas (geometry, location, surface properties) get automatically grouped into new objects. Everything in the scene is a parameter that can be tweaked, from camera positions/imager properties all the way to the light pattern from the (unseen) sky sphere - and the effects of the tweaks evaluated by quickly re-rendering the scene from the point of view of a number of nearby (temporally and geographically) camera positions. Areas where tweaks provide significant benefits are the focus of further tweaks and tesselation (both in terms of geometry and surface properties). Areas providing little benefit become deemphasized and potentially collapsed.
Optimization problems require error minimization. The error is minimized where every part of every image maps has as much mutual mapping as possible with other images, with as little error in the resultant images rendered from each viewpoint, with as few objects as possible and as simple of geometry/surface maps as possible.
There should in theory be two sources of error remaining between the renderings and the real-world images: unseen objects that have an influence on the world (shadow-casters, lights, reflections, etc), and objects whose parameters shift with time. So all error remaining after the previous details are optimizing can be attributed to these things. The possibility of unseen objects can be trialed by treating patches of surfaces with high error as new camera positions and creating the error as a new heightmap-image object to be optimized, just like any other picture. It can either be in front of it (reflection) or behind it (transparency), the latter which also gives the potential need for optimizing refraction parameters (the default scenario should assume no refraction).
Time-related errors can be handled by experimentally tweaking any object's parameters over short periods of time and seeing if the overall errors converge or diverge. The more that transforming an object tends to minimize error, the more likely that further optimization attempts should try transforming it again in different timeperiods. Transformations at a minimum can include translation, rotation, creation, deletion, and surface property changes, but depending on the object model may include things as complex as armature generation/rotation and deformation.
It's a huge task. But I think some day we'll get there. And then a
Shiny New Australia.
Maybe we'll eventually see tracking, framerates and latency good enough to avoid motion sickness. For many of us, 15 minutes in today's best VR gear is a quick ticket to a day's worth of virtual stomach flu (no fever, no contagion, just the sensations). It sucks, but it's physiological reality.
So, until that magical day, VR for me is a really unpleasant weight-loss tool, and not much else.
And that's where it will remain, as long as it forces you to wear gear that makes you look like a complete dork. In that respect, the front page of Time magazine a few months ago contributed enormously to establish the correspondence between dorkiness and VR in the public mind.
Isn't posting speculation about VR kind of second level VR and therefore redundant?
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it." - George Bernard Shaw
I agree with the other negative posters, recall Google Glass et. al. to "see" through the hype. This already died once in the late 1990s. At that time, my friend commented, 'Virtual reality is just video games really close to your face.'
People who haven't tried the dev kits.
Got me a cheap plastic Archos VR viewer with headband (â26 tax&shipping included), loaded some apps on my 2-year old Note3 and came away pretty impressed. There definitely is some nice stuff floating around on Cardboard (Lanterns, Seaworld VR2, Titans of Space, Deep Space VR and so on) . Then Samsung launched their consumer Gear VR for a measely â100 at about the same time my company phone came up for renewal. My interests having been raised, I immediately opted for the Samsung S6 even though the LG G4 seemed a better phone. So now I'm a blown away Gear VR user. I never was a real Gamer. Todays games just take too long for me so the type of games on the Gear (small, short and simple) being closer to mobile games really got to me. Marine Rift, Bravo Six, Gunjack are just awsome, even without positional tracking. And that is just on a memory constrained, mobile device! So yes, the moment Oculus Rift comes out, I'll be getting one. (Ok, I just might wait to see what the Vive brings to the table...) Luckily I should already have a suitable PC (i7, Nvidia 980) So there, one happy and impressed VR user right here. (we seem to be in the minority...) As for the future of VR, with everything that is coming out in the near future (like the Gear look-alike from China which will take any phone, not just Samsung), I have a pretty optimistical view for VR as an entirely new gaming/experience/documentary environment (although the article's one year prognosis should better be spread out over 5 years...)
VR has been around over 30 years since Jared Lanier coined the term. The early stuff was basically 3D line drawings with noticeable delays to head movement. That gave some people nausea.
Flash to 2015 SIGGRAPH. I tried tried models from Oculus and Sony. They were so fast and good that they made nauseous in another way. When I tried the Sony tightrope walk demo I was scared of falling because it seemed so real. Another company's demo put me on a skateboard at 50 mph and I was scared too.
Hello, article author here. What a lot of commenters here seem to missing is the fact that almost every technology I'm predicting here for the coming years **already exists**, and the reactions among anyone who has used these new things is unanimously impressed, amazed, awe-inspired, and wanting more. Check the youtube clips within the article. As another commentor here pointed out, it's very easy to identify whom among us has not yet tried a current headset.
I predict that most of these predictions will not come true. Possibly including this prediction.
VR will never take off once its health hazards become well known.
In the linked article Steven Colbert looks like Bender from Futurama. It must feel rather odd to run around with a game console strapped to your face.