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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."
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.
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.
And, you were eaten by a grue.
The Daydream base spec is the first to target the VR market...
You mean after the one Google launched two years ago to much hype but little effect, and to which Daydream is a direct successor, right? Mobile VR has been around for years and has failed to make an impact in that time. The fact that Cardboard didn't come to mind immediately should tell you something about the current state of things, and Daydream does little to advance that state. We're still "5-10 years" away from having mobile hardware that's capable of running "good enough" VR, which is exactly where we've been for the last few years. Until that changes (and I firmly believe that it eventually will, just to be clear), there's no chance that mobile VR will disrupt much of anything.