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Magic Leap is a Tragic Heap, Says Oculus Cofounder (palmerluckey.com)
Palmer Luckey, the co-founder of Oculus, has something to say about the competing Magic Leap gear. He writes: The title of this review was carefully chosen, not glibly. I want what is best for VR and all other technologies on the Reality-Virtuality Continuum, Magic Leap included. Unfortunately, their current offering is a tragedy in the classical sense, even more so when you consider how their massive funding and carefully crafted hype sucked all the air out of the room in the AR space. It is less of a functional developer kit and more of a flashy hype vehicle that almost nobody can actually use in a meaningful way, and many of their design decisions seem to be driven by that reality. It does not deliver on almost any of the promises that allowed them to monopolize funding in the AR investment community.
Dammit, I wanted that VC money!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
well yeah, kinda understandable given the amount that went to ML for the overhyped crap they have produced. I would be kinda pissed too if I was in that industry and fighting for investment with a real product and watched it all go to them.
IIRC Oculus didn't have that much trouble getting funded, for both their initial product and subsequent developments. The article reads as a fair rundown of what Magic Leap is about and how it stacks up to the hype. Conclusion: it doesn't. Magic Leap had all the hallmarks of a classic Silicon Valley scam: incredibly impressive mock-ups coupled with impenetrable secrecy and no details on their actual product whatsoever, landing a few big fish in VC funding and dropping their names to convince other investors to attend their privileged, exclusive dog&pony shows. They promised a world-shaking game changer in AR technology, and turned out to be a mediocre also-ran with pretty much no new tech to offer. If I were one of the investors, I'd be cranky too.
So yeah, I'd rather have seen all that funding go to Oculus instead... except that they're now owned by Satan.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
"The product [magic leap] put out is reasonably solid,"
So actually what he says is it's not bad as a first iteration of a hardware/software system. Indeed, he is upset and wants to portray his competitor in a bad light.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
revolution just like we are currently in the 3D printer revolution? Witness all the 3D printed cars and houses we currently have.
https://slashdot.org/comments....
Mmmmm, shorts!
Palmer Luckey, the co-founder of Oculus, has something to say about the competing Magic Leap gear.
Founder of company bashes competitor. News at 11...
It is less of a functional developer kit and more of a flashy hype vehicle that almost nobody can actually use in a meaningful way, and many of their design decisions seem to be driven by that reality.
That is unfortunately a fair description of most VR technology that has ever been developed in the last 30 years. The hype has always exceeded the reality substantially even as far back as the early 1990s (see the movie Lawnmower Man back in 1992 for an example of the hype train in the form of a terrible movie). Understand that I used to make my living with VR tech and it has a soft spot in my heart. But the market potential of VR has been blown WAY out of proportion to the reality of it. AR is a huge market. VR not so much, particularly the bits requiring an immersive headset. Where VR is useful it's incredibly helpful but literally every application of it is the very definition of a niche market.
It does not deliver on almost any of the promises that allowed them to monopolize funding in the AR investment community.
AR != VR so I'm not really sure what he's on about. If investors are confusing the two then they are morons. But frankly most of the AR investment seems quite healthy because it's being done by companies like Google, Apple, and the like. You'll note that aside from Facebook, none of the other big tech companies are worried much about VR but they are spending a LOT of money on AR because there are vast, obvious, and hugely profitable applications for the tech. The closest VR comes to a mass market application is for games but even that is still a pretty small population segment and market compared to AR technology. AR tech includes all sorts of location aware smartphone tech, heads up displays, self driving and driver assisting car tech, warehousing, skilled trades, and so much more. VR is useful for some games and a few niche simulations like flight simulators and other training applications plus a bit of marketing. I'm not saying VR is useless, just that it's a smaller market opportunity than AR. Orders of magnitude smaller.
That.. And a lot of people I know bought occulus for the cross platform support. Then they dropped Linux.
Really hope HTC vive beats the crap out of them long term.
I think the word your looking for is blinders.
Is Palmer Luckey talking about Magic Leap or Oculus Rift rift here?
The way he blew the Rift launch is one of the most epic failures in tech history. To start with so much hype and so much VC and such a market lead. Then to putter around wasting years, pissing off the fanbase with constant delays and a complete lack of communication, string people along expecting a launch any day a year before the product hit the street. Then to release it at more than double the price he had said it would cost and completely kill the early adoption, handing the market to the competition that was at one point years behind. Only to have repeated price cuts the first year as nobody cared to buy at his insanely high price point. And let's not forget him selling out to facebook in the middle of all this.
Palmer Lucky has got to be one of the last people anyone should be listening to in the VR industry.
The full quote:
The product they put out is reasonably solid, but is nowhere close to what they had hyped up, and has several flaws that prevent it from becoming a broadly useful tool for development of AR applications.
What he's actually saying is it's not bad -- compared to the state of the art three years ago. Given that the company was hyping this as the AR equivalent of Mr. Fusion, what they delivered is woefully disappointing.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I think given the Hype, money and time people have a right to demand a little more than just ok.
You have a right to demand whatever you want but that doesn't mean it's reasonable.
Look at it this way: suppose the magic leap product improves enough to match the demos five years from now. That will be very late, but will you really complain? It will have taken a long time, but then we'll have something cool.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
What he's actually saying is it's not bad -- compared to the state of the art three years ago. Given that the company was hyping this as the AR equivalent of Mr. Fusion, what they delivered is woefully disappointing.
Nah, what he's actually saying is, "Buy my stuff, not theirs."
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
That only means that the product actually somewhat works and is not only a load of marketing hype. That is not really any endorsement and a pretty damning remark, in fact.
Also, Magic Leap is hardly a competitor of Oculus - they are not even in the same market. AR *does not* compete with or replace VR, they serve totally different purposes and applications (and also the price bracket is completely elsewhere).
Oculus doesn't have anything AR related in their portfolio, AFAIK.
Except he already sold his stuff to FaceBook. He does not work for Oculus anymore.
So actually what he says is it's not bad as a first iteration of a hardware/software system.
Well aside from the fact that you cut off the most relevant parts of the quote (sentences stop with a full stop not a comma), even if they did put out a solid product that wouldn't change anything. They didn't promise a solid product, they promised to change the world and blow minds, sucking up investment capital that could have better spent elsewhere.
Is this that hard to grasp?
There's a billion dollar industry in contacts and laser surgery to get rid of glasses, which are comparatively unobtrusive. For AR to hit the mainstream, it needs to offer at least the same experience - and there has to be a SUBSTANTIAL benefit to doing so.
VR doesn't require interaction with the outside world (by definition) so you don't care you've got stupid shit on your head. The tech is capable of providing that experience.
AR requires a SUBSTANTIAL advance in laser projection, lenses, and/or another technology to be viable. I wish more companies would go public with AR focus so I can short the living hell out of them; it's not ready, anyone using this technology knows it's at least 5+ years out, which is a long, long time in tech.
Ultimately there's a case for it, and it might even dominate, but the technology just isn't ready yet.
I worked in a VR lab in 1996. Even made Popular Science. AR is in a similar state to VR back then.
This seems very obvious to me; the VC bucks should be going into the laser projection and lens tech, not this monstrosity.
..don't panic
HTC has been having MAJOR financial problems for a long time.
As far as investors are concerned, if Satan can get the product out the door and return on their investments they are good with it.
Often what happens is an idea made by a tech guy who has little business experience, tries selling the product for much less then it is worth. To only find that that they can't keep it up. Then a business guy goes in and shoots up the price, but makes the company more stable, however the customers are now annoyed that they will have to pay twice as much as they expected.
Price is more then the cost of labor and materials.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I see a quite of few Testla on the road. Testla problem is trying to meet demand, that is far from a failure.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The thing is that they *were* funded. Same thing is going to hold true for Magic Leap, funded by VCs doing lottery-ticket type investment, going to be left out to dry in the reality of the market.
At least Oculus has *some* funding to keep lurching along, I see Magic Leap as having to fold up shop sooner.
The VR market has seemingly plateaued (at about 10m units/year), so I don't anticipate a whole lot of enthusiastic investment, but on the flip side there seems to be enough there to maintain the state of the market.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Pappa John's founder quoted as saying: "Pizza hut sucks". Also of note: AT&T thinks Verizon sucks, Ford doesn't like GM, Bing has nothing nice to say about Google, and Bud would like to see Miller in the pit of misery (dilly dilly)
> And a lot of people I know bought occulus for the cross platform support
There are dozens of us. DOZENS!
And yet, ive not seen any evidence the magic leap HARDWARE is not capable of everything they promised. for everything else the openxr spec isnt even final yet.
You will never solve the motion sickness problem.
Regarding motion sickness, first not everybody is affected the same. (Just like not everybody is sea sick)
Some where already happy with the tech 20 years ago (VFX1-era) and since then it's only getting better (better resolution, wider field of view, more responsiveness).
For the rest, the problem has been studied, is quite well understood (basically, sensory input has to match each other. Thus there should be as little lag as possible between head motion and update of image), and since the recent Occulus wave there has been a lot of effort to solve this problem (ultra-fast display, ultra-short frame duration to avoid percieved blur, and extremely fast and precise positioning relying on cameras instead of slow accelerometers, etc.) we're slowly approaching the point were it's solved for the biggest part of the population.
AR has potential.
For AR to work any reliable, a lot of the EXACT SAME problems as the motion-sickness need to by addressed : fast display update, extremely precise and responsive positioning, otherwise the "A" part risks to lag behind the "R" part.
And in addition to the above there's a ton of OTHER new exotic tech that needs to be developed to address the mixing of "A" into the "R".
(That's also where lies the downfall of Magic Leap. There was all this new tech being researched back then that showed promises : waveguides, lightfields, etc. All this could give hopes of generating SciFi-style augmented glasses.
Turns out almost none of this research has turned up a good and light-weight mixing tech, so Magic Leap has to fall back to what's basically the same approach as IO-Glasses back in the mid 90s only with slightly better resolution, but still as bulcky and no that much better FOV).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
What are some of the niches where VR is incredibly useful?
I think the poster meant that *AR* is the incredibly useful tech.
It's basically useful whenever you would need some head-up type display to give extra information.
But the problem is that these are tons of small specific tasks.
There are tons of them so the market is very vast (nearly everybody could use some AR tech at some point)
But each task is vastly different and specific (think getting head-up navigation instructions while driving vs. a surgeon getting useful data hands free while operating. Both are useful, but beside both needing some AR equipment, there's not much else in common)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
whole thing off. /s
I would like to coin a new term:
Hype-Wear
Please feel free to use it for all this crap.
The full quote:
The product they put out is reasonably solid, but is nowhere close to what they had hyped up, and has several flaws that prevent it from becoming a broadly useful tool for development of AR applications.
What he's actually saying is it's not bad -- compared to the state of the art three years ago. Given that the company was hyping this as the AR equivalent of Mr. Fusion, what they delivered is woefully disappointing.
No, what he's saying is that despite hype and funding, it's not really anything new. If you've ever tried the Hololens dev kit, it's not much better than that. Except the Hololens kit has been out for 2.5 years. So basically years of hype and hundreds of millions of dollars, and they launched the same thing MS did years ago. Not really worth it.
I mean. Its just as bad.
Big killer of mine in any VR when they did that.
Besides not having the rig.
The millennial that doesn't like most of the stuff designed for millennials.
Yes, but that doesn't matter, because the core technology (the software ecosystem, platform, and room-scale tracking) belongs to Valve. HTC just provides some industrial assemblage and quality control, which Valve may replace anytime with a different vendor.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
VR technology is pretty close to "ready for primetime", I'd say. Tracking technology is there, funny enough, the problem is display quality and actual content that isn't just trying to use VR as a gimmick.
But I'd guess that's a development process. When you look at movies, you'll notice that the first few also resemble mostly theater productions that make little use of the features film adds that could simply not be done in theater, early cinema mostly resembles theater productions, and you have the same with VR in comparison to traditional games.
It takes time. The technology is on a pretty promising track.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There's a variety of very solid products out there and several very solid SDKs as well.
That's a "build it and they will come" argument. We could have an honest disagreement about how "solid" the products are but there is no argument that they have improved quite a lot. But just because the technology has advanced doesn't mean it will be adopted widely or that there are use cases people care about. Ask yourself what problem is this tech solving for people and then what are its advantages and disadvantages over the alternatives. VR is mostly a solution in search of a problem. Doesn't matter how solid the products or SDKs are if there isn't a real world use case that matters to a lot of people in the real world. It's got some utility in entertainment, a tiny bit in marketing, and a bit in high end simulations. Entertainment is probably the largest of these but even there it is a niche within the market.
What we are seeing currently is nothing at all like the toys of the past with games, big platforms, and even the bloody porn industry getting in on the action.
"Toys"? I was working with supercomputers costing 6 figures, CAVE systems, and 3D headsets as far back as 20 years ago. ALL of the things you mention were being worked on then and they certainly weren't toys. They simply didn't have much of a use case and still don't for the most part. VR gaming isn't likely to be a mainstream thing though it should be a viable market segment. And while I have no doubt that porn will likely become one of the major uses of VR, its still going to be a niche industry (most people don't need VR to get their rocks off to porn). Not to mention the problems with motion sickness which for quite a lot of people are impossible to prevent. VR is useful tech but there is way too much koolaid being consumed about how big its impact is going to be.
VR is smaller than AR in the same way that desktop home PCs are smaller than workplaces. You're conflating two very different target markets.
Conflating them? No. Not even a little. Yes the markets are different and that was my point. VR simply has FAR fewer viable use cases and the ones it does have mostly are smaller financial opportunities. VR is useful (and cool) but be realistic about what the actual market for it is.
In the consumer space VR is far larger than AR and so far have done a far better job at demonstrating adoption, and technological readiness.
The market opportunity in VR is not even CLOSE to being larger than AR, in the consumer space or business. Almost every smartphone and tablet made is getting AR technology built into it TODAY but you aren't going to see many people strapping them to their forehead any time soon. Even in gaming and porn AR has some seriously large opportunities (see Pokemon Go and similar) but AR is not nearly as limited in use cases. I've already used AR on my smartphone for astronomy, tracking airplanes, sign translation, virtual street signs, and games and I'm not even really pushing the envelope.
And yet, ive not seen any evidence the magic leap HARDWARE is not capable of everything they promised.
Based on the reviews I've seen online, the current hardware is NOT capable of providing the functionality that was promised. For example; there are only two focal depths, the screens embedded in the goggles do not provide wide viewing angles and the AR is far from opaque.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law - Aleister Crowley
What are some of the niches where VR is incredibly useful?
Simulations (think flight simulators or other forms of training), certain games, porn, sales/marketing, architecture (virtual walkthroughs), and education are common market segments. Probably in some cases also remote operation. Most of these are sort of niche segments within a larger industry segment.
The main limitation of VR is that it's a cool technology but there just aren't a lot of use cases which are economically sensible in the real world. Simulation and virtual walkthroughs are where it historically has really shined. Gaming has become more of a thing lately as the technology has improved but it's only a fraction of a percent of the overall industry. Same with porn, marketing, etc.
I don't think it's quite there yet. True mass market appeal needs to be wireless and standalone, which nothing currently on the market achieves. Oculus's Santa Cruz will get a heck of a lot closer, being a standalone (no PC required) headset with 6DOF tracking of both the headset and controllers. I'm not sure that the performance or displays are good enough for true broad market appeal, but I think it represents the minimum bar for VR to be mainstream.
Luckey sold Oculus to Facebook for multiple billions of dollars. Dude's not fighting for anything at this point, aside from PR goodwill after selling a kickstarted company to Facebook for billions of dollars.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
I don't get the standalone angle, since you'll most likely have to use it in a static environment anyway, so why the standalone requirement? I can easily see it as a PC accessory, that angle doesn't bother much. People already have a PC and most people interested in (and financially able to afford) VR will also already have powerful enough hardware. The level of hardware power required is pretty much on par with last-gen technology, so it's going to be a long time before you'll see that anywhere near affordable and in a mobile form factor.
I'd give you the wireless, but not only does it exist, it also isn't that big a deal to be honest. You barely notice the cable.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
VR needs MUCH higher framerates & close to zero latency for any application that involves immersive "look around by turning your head" navigation. 60hz just doesn't cut it. Even if you read your sensors & render frame {n+1} while displaying frame {n}, you're looking at ~17ms of latency *anyway*. Anything longer than 10ms feels sloppy (like sloshing around in water), and anything longer than 5ms is perceptible. At 90-100hz (used by most official VR platforms), you're on the bare outer edge of tolerability.
Likewise, you need ultra high resolution... at least, in the specific spots you're looking at. In theory you could use eye-tracking, but the industry is still working on ways to focus detail where it's needed without making the scene visibly shimmer in peripheral vision (the eye is simultaneously picky & oblivious to higher-order artifacts in ways we're still discovering.)
To move to the next level, immersive VR needs:
* faster framerates. As in, 200hz or better.
* GPU hardware that can render a frame at double the video framerate. No "mobile" GPU comes anywhere close today, and a 2-slot desktop card barely approaches it.
* short-range wireless networking with sub-millisecond latency & gigabytes per second of bandwidth (so you can do your rendering with a beefy mini-supercomputer across the room).
In many ways, MagicLeap's technology sidesteps some of these problems. For example, instead of having to completely render an entire scene from scratch, it can focus on just the holographic part, then use straightforward video techniques to optically anchor it to an object in the room (making the framerate of the hologram less important to the immersiveness experience). In other words, with ML, you can look back & forth, and the scene around you doesn't 'slosh' because you're seeing the room itself directly, and the hologram just appears to wobble slightly. Since the BIG detail (the room) doesn't lag, your brain is more tolerant of the hologram's quirks.
Virtual/Augmented/Mixed Reality is now approaching its "Roomba" stage... finding ways to do useful things with presently-viable technology. We're a LONG way from general-purpose robotic servants (or a Star Trek Holodeck) & still have to hand-scrub behind the toilet, but at least the cat's daily furballs & tracked litter get cleaned with a button-press (and the equivalent of child-proofing the room to accommodate the robot's limits).
Right now, you need to have a moderately powerful computer, you need to do setup on your computer, you need to plug a bunch of things in, you need to find places to mount cameras, you need to run wires. This is all a barrier to entry for the mainstream. Non-technically savvy people who don't know much about VR aren't going to go out of their way to upgrade their computers and make sure that they buy a video card with a VR link connector. They just want to buy something that they can put on and it works. Keep in mind that I'm not talking about the level required for success, I'm talking about broad mainstream appeal. The kind of adoption rates that you see from, if not smartphones and dvd players, then at least from videogame consoles.
Oculus Go was a good first step, being completely standalone, but the lack of positional tracking in either the headset or controllers is a critical flaw. Santa Cruz (which should be out within the next year, roughly) solves both of those problems (it uses inside-out camera tracking for the HMD and the controllers), but the expected displays may not be quite dense and fast enough to really offer a good experience. Even if it doesn't get there, it's an important step along the path.
I've played around with these VR systems (Samsung Gear, Dev Kits, Vive) and even had the chance to try out the Virtuality headsets decades ago. Even with a LCD screen, the Samsung Gear headset is still too heavy to be comfortable for long period of use. Not as bad as Virtuality headsets, which were way too heavy as they had CRT's. We are probably going to have to wait until high-speed flexible plastic LEDs become available.
The other problem is this distinction between dev kits and regular consumer headsets. Why can't they just have the one system?
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
I think the word your looking for is blinders.
Humanity!!! Why are there so many people who don't bother to learn what they are talking about before leaping to 'correct' people who are already correct?
It's easy to make people throw up in VR, it's hard to not make them throw up, but _not_ impossible.
Down to content: Keep up mostly up, limit turn rates, provide a consistent visual reference.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
VR was usable, with the right content, on a VFX-1 in 1998 at 30Hz. It was almost certainly usable before that, but that was the first I used it.
Higher frame rates are better, but won't fix puke inducing content.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
With high latency, you can't even stand in place & look around a fully-immersive VR environment without vertigo becoming a problem. So no, higher framerates aren't a cure-all, but at LEAST they enable nausea-free "look around while standing still" immersive VR.
Simply put, your brain can deal with small objects in a large scene that have wonky motion, but draws the line when seemingly EVERYTHING, including your larger surroundings, is in sensory conflict.
Sitting is preferred. There were a few VFX-1 games there were real playable. Flight Unlimited 2. Comanche 3. At 30fps display, driven by a computer 2 or 3 x as fast as those games were designed for.
With just 3 axis tracking, standing was _impossible_. Having a solid controller/wheel in your hands is still a good thing for VR.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
At best it would just be another HoloLens which is damning it with faint praise. Nothing that has been seen of the project (very little) suggests it even reaches even that far. The recent SDK demo was pretty lamentable.
AFAIK, the VFX-1 was REALLY the equivalent of wearing 3D glasses in a darkened movie theater with a perfectly-positioned seat, and Comanche didn't do head tracking at all. 30fps for any application where you're expected to be able to turn your head & have the screen immersively track the motion in realtime would be completely INTOLERABLE after ~5 minutes. Hell, I could barely endure the gen1 Oculus Rift demo (the one where you're seated in front of a virtual desk looking around) without getting queasy & a headache.
I maintain... for any application where, at the minimum, users are expected to be able to immersively experience the equivalent of sitting in a chair and looking around a room through a welder's mask (with everything the user sees being synthesized and displayed on video screens in front of the eyes), 90-100fps is the absolute rock-bottom minimum for tolerability... and really is nowhere close to being fast enough to be satisfying once the novelty wears off.
Immersive first-person shooters make for cool prototypes and demos, but IMHO, the first mixed-reality games that will be genuinely fun and playable will be modern ports of games like Battle Chess, Archon, and Sim City (where there's zero immersion and a very fixed, stable point of reference, and no question that you're viewing a computer-generated hologram rendered onto a tabletop).
We all still have a lot to learn about what makes virtual/augmented/mixed-reality experiences enjoyable, what makes them unpleasant, and how to mitigate things from the 'unpleasant' side within the constraints of practical hardware. Compare a FPS from the early 2000s to one from today. I remember a period of a few years circa 2005 when most FPS-type games had become almost unplayable (without major vertigo) by anyone over the age of 12, because they'd become photorealistic enough to SEEM like they should be immersive, but REALLY did SO MANY THINGS "wrong" (from the perspective of sensory overload, logical contradiction, and ignorance of basic physics), it's almost a miracle the genre even SURVIVED (younger kids weren't as bothered, because they tend to just take things at face value instead of constantly scrutinizing the nature of reality around them).
Eventually, certain design patterns emerged that allowed games to subtly anchor and ground themselves into the player's surroundings and reality, so your brain could once again look at the screen & say, "ah, this is cool-looking... but not real, so there's no need to freak out about sensory contradictions". For at least the next few years, the key to making successful games that take advantage of virtual, augmented, and mixed-reality will be resisting the temptation to jump straight into "you're immersed in an imaginary world", and instead settling for "virtually enhancing the world already around you".
The main thing Oculus has going for it compared to, say, a high-end Android phone in a head bracket, is heat-removal. Even phones that technically have the horsepower to do reasonable VR just can't "take the heat". Case in point: a Nexus 6p. On paper, it has impressive specs... but if you ignore Google's cautions and try running Daydream on it, you'll hit the 6p's heat limit within minutes, thermal-management throttling kicks in, and the whole use experience rapidly goes down the toilet. An Oculus Rift isn't expected to be pocketable or have long battery life, so even if it HAS nearly the same specs as a decent Android phone, the difference is that it can run a marathon using that hardware instead of going into metaphorical heatstroke within a few minutes.
Dev kits really need to be over-engineered and over-spec'ed compared to consumer-oriented hardware, especially early in a product family's life. A company that releases a brand new product, then renders it completely obsolete within 12 months will piss off a LOT of people, so you need to ensure that the first-gen hardware has at LEAST enough horsepower to limp along with the likely next-generation hardware. People grumble when the expensive hardware they buy today sucks at running software written for next year's hardware... but get downright PISSED and ENRAGED when the expensive hardware they buy today won't run software written for next year's hardware AT ALL. Premature value-engineering is the kiss of death for new platforms.
The main thing Oculus has going for it compared to, say, a high-end Android phone in a head bracket
1. VR just doesn't work with frame rates 90. The majority of people are going to get headaches or worse.
2. When you put your phone in a headset you are essentially looking at the screen through a pair of magnifying glasses. Even a 1440p phone exhibits a severe screen door effect.
The main problem with 3D television is that the TV industry had already given up on it and walked away by the time Blu-Ray finally got its shit together and had actual hardware consumers could go out and buy.
It's not hopeless, though. Eventually, we WILL have TVs with the equivalent of FreeSync that can be driven directly at 96-144hz over HDMI. Once that happens, it'll just be a matter of time until manufacturers of Blu-Ray players add the ability to control 3D shutter glasses into the player itself. Explicit support for "3D" from the TV itself won't be necessary, because all the required logic can be moved into the player as long as the TV can be driven directly at 96-144hz.
Makes mental note to avoid Oculus products from now on...
Requiem for the American Dream
I don't disagree about the inadequacy of 90hz, I was mainly pointing out that even with hardware specs nominally comparable to a top-shelf Android phone, Oculus does still have value due to its superior heat-removal vs a phone.
both are correct.
How big was your TV? As a practical matter, for 3D Hollywood movies to give you the full effect intended for theater viewing, the screen HAS to fill your entire FoV, because near objects are larger than distant objects on the screen, and the nearest an object can GET is the distance at which the object would fill the screen from edge to edge. So yeah, a 52" TV sitting 10 feet away on a high stand is going to suck for 3D. With a 65" or larger TV, viewed from 5-6' away in a darkened room, the effect is MUCH more impressive.
This is why it's so important for people buying cutting edge technology to UNDERSTAND its limits & constraints. If you're just running into them randomly while the vendor pretends they don't exist, you're probably going to have a disappointing experience with it. If you understand exactly what those constraints are, how to mitigate them in actual use, and go into it with realistic expectations, you can enjoy it. That's also why first-gen hardware is always targeted towards developers... developers will actually read the 400-page instruction manual & have at least some understanding of the technology's capabilities & constraints. Average consumers won't even read a 4-page quick-start guide (though in their defense, that's usually because they tend to be almost completely devoid of useful information... if someone looks at the instructions and the first 2 pages are legal disclaimers, copyright notices, and general bullshit nobody actually cares about, they aren't likely to keep searching for the paragraph or two of actual information carefully hidden somewhere among it.
Video games had some rather humble beginnings as well. Gaming wasn't mainstream until well into the 1990s and "adult gaming" certainly wasn't a real thing until the 2000s. In the 1980s, you'd probably already consider selling more than 50k copies a success.
VR is in the same boat today. Yes, the sales numbers are dwarfed by "normal" games, because adaption is certainly slow. First, the effort and space required to play in VR is some magnitudes higher. It's more of a time and space investment to get VR set up and ready to play. Which is probably quite on par with what people had to do in the 80s to hook up their console to the family TV, because it wasn't always connected like gaming systems are often today. Picking up and play was simply not a thing. Maybe in a few years having a "VR room" in your house becomes a reality, then a normality.
VR is, much like video games were in the 80s and 90s, still mostly a thing for enthusiasts and early adopters. Not the mainstream players that just want to pick up a game and play for an hour to pass the time.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What, yes Comanche (3) did head tracking. It just didn't show a helicopter in head tracking mode.
It was not 'intolerable'...though Descent 2 was unbelievably pukey, that was intolerable. (I can blow the dust off of the VFX1, install in new CMOS battery in the old 1 gig win98 machine. Yes I am a packrat.)
Of the good ones on the VFX-1, I could play for an easy half hour. The biggest problem was you had to change modes and lift the headset in FU to see instruments (which you had to do to land).
As you say, you can't even tolerate the 'setting at a desk demo' on new hardware. You're just very susceptible to VR sickness.
It is down to content. Which is why AR is generally better, the 'augmented' part prevents the devs from tumbling the users POV. VR can do the same and get the same result.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Yeah, but his kit is similar to every other kit out there. Oculus didn't reinvent the wheel. They used existing tech and integrated it into a product. That is a stellar feat on its own I suppose, but not like reinventing the wheel.
Magic Leap's product may be complete shit, but what they are trying to do is a lot harder.