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Mobile VR Is 'Coasting On Novelty', Says John Carmack (cnet.com)
John Carmack, chief technology officer at Oculus, says mobile VR is currently "coasting on novelty." Speaking during the Oculus Connect event, Carmack urged developers to "be harder" on themselves and create experiences on par with non-VR applications and games. "We are coasting on novelty, and the initial wonder of being something people have never seen before," he said. From a CNET report:"But we need to start judging ourselves. Not on a curve, but in an absolute sense. Can you do something in VR that has the same value, or more value, than what these other [non-VR] things have done?" During his speech, Carmack highlighted loading times in mobile VR games as a key area in need of improvement, saying that making users sit through 30-seconds of loading is too long, given the brevity of most currently available VR experiences. "That's acceptable if you're going to sit down and play for an hour ... but [in VR] initial startup time really is poisonous. An analogy I like to say is, imagine if your phone took 30 seconds to unlock every time you wanted to use it. You'd use it a lot less." He continued: "There are apps that I wanted to play, that I thought looked great, that I stopped playing because they had too long of a load time. I would say 20 seconds should be an absolute limit on load times, and even then I'm pushing people to get it much, much lower."
Is a *** Facebook Employee. ***
How the giants have fallen.
So in summary what he's saying is that it is totally unacceptable to have to wait 30 seconds between interactive 3D porn videos.
Carmack's comments about "coasting on novelty" weren't related to mobile VR. They were about VR in general, including the Oculus (after all, he was addressing an Oculus Connect audience). The original article that CNET cites gets that fact right. How CNET got it so wrong is beyond me, but the /. headline should be corrected, since otherwise his comments come across as a pithy no-brainer that mobile VR sucks (which is no surprise), rather than a stinging exhortation for improvement in the general space of VR.
To improve load times, remove all graphics, sound, and leave a simple text prompt.
C:\ is a fine example.
Can you do something in VR that has the same value, or more value, than what these other [non-VR] things have done?
WRT porn, I'm pretty sure the answer is a resounding HELL YES. It takes very, very little imagination to anticipate that.
It's entirely possible that most people born after 2010 may never have sex with an actuall person and I doubt they'll care either.
...just a really inconvenient way to play Quake. Super cool for 10 minutes though.
My experience with the DK II SDK is that there's a relationship between novelty interest and nausea. The more of the latter, the less of the former. It was a deal-breaker for me. I managed to spend quite a few hours in Elite Dangerous though but mostly because space is black. Flying inside a space station made me want to heave.
Otherwise I think VR would be greatly improved with some mocap gloves and arm sleeves (or something similar to a Microsoft Kinect), to at least come close to doing something useful better than without it.
Wow? 30 seconds, really? You should try playing a PlayStation 4 game some time!
In Destiny, for example, it regularly takes three or four minutes to transition from the "In Orbit" destination selection, through a travel/de-orbit video, finally getting to your destination. FFS I just want to play the game, why do I have to sit through this repetitive video content that yields no value after having seen it for the first time?
The answer, of course, is that Sony's using a slow-ass cheap optical drive coupled with a slow-ass spinning rust notebook drive and the videos/animations are just to give you something to watch in the mean time. Instead of making PlayStation Minis in a smaller case with 4K outputs they should be concentrating on putting in faster optical drives and SSDs to improve loading times across the board. I'd pay real money for that. I'm sure most PS4 gamers would, too.
Seriously, is there any reason to listen to Carmack anymore? He doesn't even own his gaming company anymore. He's gone from a king of the industry to just another has-been working for the establishment.
Unless you have the tech for full 'augmented reality'; and some good ideas about how to actually make that a virtue, it is hard to make a terribly compelling case for 'mobile VR'. The fact that a modern smartphone screen is just about the right size to be shoehorned into a low rent VR headset is worth a few tech demos; but nothing battery powered that fits on your face currently has the punch for VR work; and 'wearing giant, ridiculous-looking blinders' is a bad idea in public.
The main win for 'mobile' in general isn't on absolute quality; but on the fact that it is in your pocket right now and other sources of distraction aren't. Especially for cellphone stuff, which doesn't have the advantage of hardware buttons designed with games in mind; but offers a very, very, low friction path to downloading and playing something.
So long as VR gear is moderately ridiculous looking; and largely blocks the surrounding reality, it's not exactly a compelling choice for on-the-go entertainment, which generally demands something reasonably unobtrusive and capable of being used without missing your station/walking into things/etc.
VR more generally has some definite use cases(which, in part, is why deep-pocketed research types have been enduring considerably lousier and vastly more expensive VR setups for a couple of decades now); but are going to have trouble escaping 'novelty' unless the install base is larger.
Whenever you have a feature that is cool; but only some of your players have, you force developers to choose between drastically narrowing their customer base, ignoring the cool feature entirely, or doing something with the cool feature that is sufficiently unimportant that the game can still 'fail gracefully' for people who don't have access to it.
We saw a similar thing, though less dramatic, with 'PhysX': when they first came out with their dedicated PPU card, approximately nobody owned one, so any games that could use the additional physics processing used it for visual tinsel that could be removed or faked without causing any real problems in gameplay. Even after Nvidia ate them developers couldn't necessarily rely on particularly high performance physics acceleration being available(yes on higher end Nvidia setups; but limited on feebler Nvidia GPUs and CPU backed on Intel and AMD setups), so the effects remained mere flavor. Often rather pretty flavor; but nothing gameplay essential; because it still has to work if the physics acceleration isn't available.
Insightful from Carmack. There's been a history of failed attempts in technology to "game change" focusing on the single human sense of vision.
More recently it was 3D TV's and movie theatres which, in hindsight, enjoyed what Carmack describes as "coasting on novelty".
The 3D movies I paid a premium to watch were cool for the first 5 minutes and then I forgot I was watching 3D as my focus shifted to the content.
A short lived novelty and not cheap. Content is king.
Going further back I think it's fascinating that everyone assumed that video phone calls would be the future (see "Bladerunner").
Yet here we are in the 21st century using text messaging as primary.
Preference for communication is the reverse of what everyone assumed. 1.Text messaging, 2.Voice call, 3.Video call
Keeping this in mind, while watching Zuckerberg playing with his new toy on his Facebook videos, I can't help but wonder if he's going to be very disappointed in the end at the uptake numbers.
Was when John talked about developing a VR scripting language and discussion went to whether VR scripts would eat into Oculus store profits.
There are a handful of games -- mostly cockpit games that involve cars, planes, and spaceships -- that are indisputably better with VR. EVE: Valkyrie, Project CARS, and Assetto Corsa are awesome beyond compare in VR. But there aren't many of these games, and they all fit the same formula.
And there are a few other games that, while genuinely good, don't really add much with VR. These ones make you wonder why they're not a normal game because they're limiting their market. And because VR headsets aren't the most comfortable for long-term wear, you almost wish they weren't VR games if they aren't going to use it.
And then there's the rest, which feel at best like arcade games, and at worst -- and several of them are at the worst -- like tech demos. They feel like this because we haven't quite figured out how to add fluid motion to a player in first-person, so these games either have no movement at all, nauseating WASD input, or unnatural/gimmicky movement like teleporting or "rock climbing".
Smartphone GPUs are not powerful enough and not power efficient enough to drive a VR display at acceptable quality for mass appeal period. All low level "tricks" and hardware hacking in the world are not going to do much to change this basic equation.
Nor do I see where there is sufficient R&D budgets to push technology hard enough to make it happen in the near term just for the sake of VR.
Mobile games fit the VR model much better than traditional PC or Console based games.
Mobile games are short, gimmicky and disposable. The UI is already stripped down to a minimum, they're meant to be played for short periods, good for a giggle, and then you move on.
Meanwhile, PC and console games have significantly better input devices with controllers, keyboards, mice, etc. As much fun as it is to physically stand up and crouch down in a VR cover-based-shooter, it's significantly less responsive than just pressing a button. Did I stand up high enough? Too high? I'm tall, and now it won't register me crouching. Same with reloading, walking, talking, or anything else you might do in a game. Pressing a button is much easier and more reliable than trying to hump my PS/Vive/Wii-motes on something to simulate an action.
"Traditional" games are also meant to be played for longer periods, which can be anything from nausea inducing to downright painful in VR, as you must strap 2+ pounds of plastic, glass, and wires to your face.
Plus, it's easier and more convenient to get VR porn on your phone ... just sayin.
This signature is false.
I bought the HTC Vive. Most of the experiences are along the lines of impressive demos that you would show to people interested in VR. The only game I really found to have more longevity in the fun department so far is Project Cars with a desktop steering wheel and foot pedals. Driving GT Mustang down the highways along California coast with GTX-1080 is pretty fucking fun. Other than that, still waiting for some more killer apps.
'No'. Too many things are far easier and more efficient if you just do them. There is really nothing to 'improve' about many mundane tasks. This is definitely a case of solutions in search of problems (a well funded silicone valley specialty, of late) , I suspect the market will bear that out.
VR's gonna collapse sooner than anyone expects, because no matter what the developers think, the tech isn't nearly there yet.
and the horse Palmer Luckey rode in on.
The history of tech is full of examples of the lesser, just good enough technology winning ( vhs vs betamax, IBM PC, VB, Nintendo, Javascript etc).
Mobile based VR has plenty of advantages of their own, from payment contracts and easy justification to well, mobility. The Daydream base spec is the first to target the VR market... it'll be interesting to see how the competition ramps up.
Oculus, Vive etc need to become more like phones....
Always has been, always will be.
Period.