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It's Becoming Increasingly Unlikely that We'll See a Major Shift To Virtual Reality Any Time Soon (theoutline.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: VR was supposed to be a revolution, with companies like Oculus pioneering a whole new way for gamers and non-gamers alike to be immersed in digital environments -- but that excitement has markedly cooled. The media has gone through several cycles of fawning, optimistic prognostication, and... wishful thinking? -- but for all the hype we have very little consumer interest to show for it. Oculus sold off to Facebook and has become little more than a parlor trick Mark Zuckerberg shows off at every F8 event. As Ben Thompson recently noted, the bet on the company is an awkward fit for Facebook that strays from Zuckerberg's strengths in several ways.
Oculus founder Palmer Luckey is now tooling around on right wing defense projects, while co-founder Brendan Iribe has just left the company amid rumors of future headsets being shelved. Several prominent studios have shut down or ceased VR efforts, including Viacom and AltspaceVR, and Microsoft is a steadfast "no" when it comes to dipping its toes in the water via the Xbox. Sony has boasted about sales of the PSVR hitting 3 million in two years, but there are 82 million PS4 units in the hands of consumers (and keep in mind that Microsoft sold 35 million Kinects but still discontinued the product). With cumbersome hardware (which, let's be honest, looks really stupid to most people), absurd PC requirements, and nearly no AAA titles to lure the curious into the world of VR, it's becoming increasingly unlikely that we'll see a major shift to virtual reality any time soon.
Also worth noting: if you're looking to Magic Leap for a kind of bridge to the future with its AR efforts, don't get too wound up. Brian Merchant's excellent and detailed feature story for Gizmodo on the company's struggles to get around the same hardware, software, and consumer adoption issues that plague VR make it clear there is no easy answer in this space. In my opinion -- as someone who watched this new generation of virtual reality emerge from the earliest days, and was one of its biggest fans -- VR adoption will only happen when the barrier to entry is akin to slipping on a pair of sunglasses (and even then it's no sure thing). Most people don't want to wear a bulky headset, even in private, there's no must have "killer app" for VR, and no one has made a simple plug-and-play option that lets a novice user engage casually. Everyone I know who's tried a VR headset is blown away by the experience, but no one really wants to go deep on it except for what amounts to a rounding-error percentage of enthusiasts. Further reading: 'We Expected VR To Be Two To Three Times as Big', Says CCP Games CEO.
Oculus founder Palmer Luckey is now tooling around on right wing defense projects, while co-founder Brendan Iribe has just left the company amid rumors of future headsets being shelved. Several prominent studios have shut down or ceased VR efforts, including Viacom and AltspaceVR, and Microsoft is a steadfast "no" when it comes to dipping its toes in the water via the Xbox. Sony has boasted about sales of the PSVR hitting 3 million in two years, but there are 82 million PS4 units in the hands of consumers (and keep in mind that Microsoft sold 35 million Kinects but still discontinued the product). With cumbersome hardware (which, let's be honest, looks really stupid to most people), absurd PC requirements, and nearly no AAA titles to lure the curious into the world of VR, it's becoming increasingly unlikely that we'll see a major shift to virtual reality any time soon.
Also worth noting: if you're looking to Magic Leap for a kind of bridge to the future with its AR efforts, don't get too wound up. Brian Merchant's excellent and detailed feature story for Gizmodo on the company's struggles to get around the same hardware, software, and consumer adoption issues that plague VR make it clear there is no easy answer in this space. In my opinion -- as someone who watched this new generation of virtual reality emerge from the earliest days, and was one of its biggest fans -- VR adoption will only happen when the barrier to entry is akin to slipping on a pair of sunglasses (and even then it's no sure thing). Most people don't want to wear a bulky headset, even in private, there's no must have "killer app" for VR, and no one has made a simple plug-and-play option that lets a novice user engage casually. Everyone I know who's tried a VR headset is blown away by the experience, but no one really wants to go deep on it except for what amounts to a rounding-error percentage of enthusiasts. Further reading: 'We Expected VR To Be Two To Three Times as Big', Says CCP Games CEO.
There are a couple. The obvious key problem with Oculus is Facebook and Zuck. Most people I know who own VR rigs go with Vive.
On the hardware side, it didn't help that cryptocurrency miners sucked the air out of the high-end graphic card market (and ballooned the prices) just around the same time that HTC, Oculus, etc were introducing their gear. If you bought VR gear, good luck finding a card to run it on at less than some multiple of what you paid for the headset. (That has changed in recent months, thankfully.)
Some of the problems others have mentioned above are there too, but are already being worked on or have solutions.
-- Alastair
Oculus founder Palmer Luckey is now tooling around on right wing defense projects
The project referenced in theoutline.com link uses cameras, infrared sensors, and LiDAR to monitor the border. So that's right wing? Give me a break.
There is a killer app - it's porn. But the current experience is like two virgins fumbling in the back of a cramped car and nobody can figure out how to get the bra off and you can't really see anything well. It looks meh, controls suck, and for filmed stuff camera problems make it look like people are about to rip their skins off and expose their lizard forms near the edges of the screen. Just not worth it in the current form.
Generally avoid things that make me throw up.
love is just extroverted narcissism
pretty sure that battlefield VR and related wil alsol be used by left-wing administrations and Congress's in the future
The reason for that is prices. When the US arcades were still popular, and tried out some of those games, they made them 4 to 8 times more expensive than the regular games, and so nobody played them. Then when arcade popularity went down, the owners usually blamed any gruffy-looking teenagers hanging around for having destroyed society with their evil young-people politics.
In Japan business people are expected to know about money. In the US, only larger businesses are run that way; small business, like arcades, the business culture is anti-intellectual which can't help but also be accidentally anti-business.
that need a bunch of other things in place to become available before they really are successful.
The iPHone wasn't the first smartphone; as a developer I used a number of early attempts at "converged" phones. The first was probably the IBM Simon A massive 18 ounce brick of a phone with a monochrome display and a one hour battery life. These early converged phones were tour-de-forces of the day's technology, but they were still too big, too slow, too crude, and too battery-hungry to be anything more than curiosities.
What Steven Jobs did with the iPhone was catch the wave at exactly the right moment, when screens and processors and batteries and networks and UIs all got good good enough, cheap enough to make a blockbuster product possible. Other people were close -- Palm's Treo devices were pretty good, but ever-so-slightly clunky due to their legacy tech. Jobs had the advantage of a clean sheet.
It's not vision that's lacking in most failed attempts to get a new concept off the ground, it's timing.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
No big deal, there's room to grow. Back in the 90s, when the first 3D games were appearing, people also dreamed up a bunch of stuff quite prematurely. But I'm quite sure that by now we've surpassed those expectations by far, it just took a bit longer than some expected.
So I've got a CV1. Here are the issues so far:
The resolution is too low. It works for gaming, but barely so. You won't really want to even browse the web on this if you can avoid it. So that currently puts a limit on using it for any kind of non-gaming use. This is a technologically solvable problem, but it will take time.
Dual 4K displays at 90fps would be cool, if there was hardware to support such a thing. USB C + Thunderbolt 3 does two 4K displays, at 60 FPS. Almost there, but not quite yet.
Cables are limiting. While the resolution is not huge, it's big enough to be challenging even over wires. Doing it over some kind of wireless is even more of a challenge.
Control is limited. The controllers are nice, but they're nowhere near as good as my hands.
Current tech just happens to exist at the edge of reasonably available technical capacity -- while they could do dual 4K displays right now if they wanted, only really, really hardcore adherents would pay what it takes to provide that. So it'll have to wait until today's bleeding edge becomes the next normal.
Fortunately, it's nothing tech and money can't fix. The basics are already there, now all that's left is to refine existing tech and make it better. Doing last year's hardware 20% better is what's the industry has been doing all along.
The Oculus Quest seems like a promising development -- no wires, which should make it a lot easier to use in some kinds of setups, though it will have to sacrifice 3D processing power to do so. I think at the very least it'll be a good test of how big of a deal a wire is.
The reason it's ideally suited is because it's a cockpit. VR works best when it simulates something akin to sitting on a couch with your hands on controllers that match those in the VR world.