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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.
I bought into the hype, having wanted to try VR since 1992 when I first saw it on TV as a small child, never having even tried it at any convention or anything like that since, and in 2016 (right?), when the HTC Vive came out, I went crazy and wasted a ton of money on it and a whole new crap consumer PC with a beefy graphics card... and it was all garbage. It's really too many things to even bother listing them, but it also didn't exactly help that all the *software* for it was worthless bullshit. Even the VR porn couldn't have been more obnoxiously shot/directed, and I watched a whole lot of that before finally giving up on it. Very disappointed.
That the underlying problems with VR can't be solved by turning up the resolution?
Sorry, folks this is hardly unexpected. The problem with VR the first time around wasn't the frame rate and what not, it's that the goggle cut you off from the real world. That's something that people, unsurprisingly, still aren't ready for.
Give it another 20 years and try again.
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
Here is what we want with VR/ Full sensory VR - most importantly touch. That is what we truly want to feel like we are in a reality, not watching a movie.
But all we get are head gear that makes us look stupid and gives us 5% more than an Imax movie does. Yeah, the 360 video is cool, but the sound is not any better and we don't get touch or even smell, let alone the minor senses (like heat).
The stuff we truly want for a good VD would require something more like a neural implant rather than a headphones + cell phone right next to your eyes.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
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
I volunteer at my local library and they have a Vive that anyone over 10 years old can just walk up and put on. They have a smallish selection of games and demos.
I often spend afternoons helping people put on the headset and try out the experience. They all agree that it is awesome. They all agree that they love it. Only the kids feel like it is sufficient reason to go to the library all by itself.
Usually it gets less than three hours a day usage. Sometimes less than one.
I agree that the lack of a killer app or AAA titles is hurting.
There's two things we want. The artificial reality we can live in (escapism), and the modified life we can live with (augmented). Both will be handy in their own way, just like fast food and fine restaurants co-exist.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
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.
Reading the above comments from some of the naysayers, I get the distinct impression that they have never used it for more than a couple of minutes, or have only played with Google Cardboard.
Games? A small part of the use cases, but there are some great ones out there. Mostly I get this secondhand from my coworkers who are gamers (I'm not) and have VR setups, but I have played with the Spiderman demo. Pretty cool.
But it's fantastic for modeling. Face it, most 3D modeling tools suck, because a mouse is not a 3D interface. When you can shape your model like it was clay, or build it around you with broad sweeps (like with Tilt Brush), it's freakin' awesome.
HTC (and some 3rd parties) already have wireless headsets and adapters, so the tripping over the cable issue is gone.
With the next gen cards from NVidia, expect to see higher-rez goggles soon.
I would love to see better hand interfaces. The controllers are pretty good, but the finger motions are very limited. How about a glove interface, and show me my virtual hands?
-- Alastair
I spent yesterday at a Halloween Show performing a VR segment. I spent the weekend a few weeks back demoing various arts pieces. I've probably done nearly a couple of hundred VR demos in total. No technology in my lifetime (I'm late 40s) has elicited such a strong positive reaction across a broad demographic. People still find VR magical and wondrous. I don't care about sales numbers or hype cycles - I think VR is so obviously compelling that it will find it's place given time. It might not be mass market and it might not be for mainstream gaming. But it's not going away.
agreed there, that's also why arcades are dying/dead in america while they still are doing ok in japan. You look at japanese arcades and see dance dance revolution, boxing games with physical boxing gloves that you have to punch things, table flip games where you have a physical table to flip etc.. you look at an american arcade you see... 30 fighting games etc... American arcades seem to specialize in games that you can just swap out the board to turn into another game, which of course, is exactly what home consoles and PCs specialize in, yet they can't seem to get why nobody is going to them anymore.
It'll always be bulky
This, I doubt. Technology moves on. The cell phones of the 70s did not remain bulky. The hard drives of the 80s did not remain bulky. The TVs of the 90s did not remain bulky.
I think that VR was seen as the next iteration of technology, when it's more likely 2-3 iterations away.
The first needs to be lightweight, wearable screens. Google glass for the masses.
The second needs to be high resolution projection on those screens with some sensible and usable controls.
Maybe the third part is lightweight body sensors, to allow for capture of body position and motion.
Once those are all common, I think putting them together into VR will work. Right now, we've essentially stuck a smartphone in a pair of swim googles and slapped them on our heads.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Yes, and I remember when computers were going to usher in the "Age of The Paperless Office"....the result was that paper usage went up about 500% because suddenly anyone and everyone could print whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted...and boy, did they ever.
Canon, Xerox, and Boise Cascade pretty much defoliated the Amazon rainforest to keep up with demand for that sweet, sweet paper.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
The place I think I'd use VR is in the office. I currently have three largish monitors, a desktop environment with virtual desktops and layered windows... and I still don't have enough screen real estate. A VR headset with sufficiently-good movement tracking and resolution opens up the possibility of sitting in the center of most of a virtual sphere of high-resolution monitors -- ideally with some AR so that the monitors appear to be floating in my office, so I can see my office walls, my desk, keyboard, the cup of tea on the desk, etc., and interact with all of the physical stuff naturally while being able to see my virtual displays. The headset would also have to be light and comfortable enough for all-day wear. Bonus points if I can replace my office walls with a beach scene, etc., while still being able to see and use my desk.
I have done no investigation to see how far we are from making that possible. I suspect we're not there yet, even without the AR requirements.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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.
I hwo a Vive and an Oculus. I prefer the Vive, but each one has its pros and cons.
I read comments here, and I have this huge feeling that very few of them own a headset.
I am NOT an avid gamer -- in fact, I don't play games at all. However, I do love VR and play with it as much as I can.
If you don't know what RecRoom is (and you probably don't), then of course you are going to say that there is no killer app.
if you haven't played the laser games, or the quests, or one of the many custom rooms, of course you will say it's boring.
Honestly, if you spend more than 20 minutes in RecRoom, play a laser game, a quest, or maybe Royale, you will realise that all of this bullshit about small screens, etc. just melts away -- you are too busy playing and enjoying yourself.
My ideal headset is super light, has a total field of vision, it doesn't need sensors (inside-out tracking) and has glove-like controllers. This will happen in time -- in fact, all of this is already happening. In the meantime, it's still FUN.
If you actually tried, you'd know what I am talking about.
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.
Massive progress has been made on the motion sickness front since the release of Rift/Vive. If you avoid artificial locomotion (moving the camera in conflict with the players movements) altogether very few (probably less than 1%) people find themselves getting sick on current PCVR HMDs.
The ultimate solution for VR movement might require vestibular stimulation technology but they have been able to drastically reduce the number of people impacted with some clever tricks. In early VR games I personally would get sick in minutes when using a joystick to move around a virtual environment but as they've refined the techniques I can play for hours without issue.
There's a good point buried in your dismissal that is worth responding to. Do we listen to canaries in coalmines who are tweeting in distress? Because in 20 years a ton of kids are going to find themselves where I am today.
Silicon & Charybdis McLuhan Kildall Papert Kay
As Carmack said :
"Stick yaw control is such VR poison that removing it may be the right move -- swivel chair/stand or don't play."
Shame he couldn't convince his employer to ship with a ceiling mount HDMI+USB slip ring so you could actually fucking do that.
The swivel chair should have been part of the default control scheme for VR ... so it wasn't just a couple of genetic mutant who could enjoy free motion inside the 3D world. Sure that would have been a lot more niche and unappealing to the couch users Facebook wanted to woo, but at least it wouldn't have been complete garbage.
The end of moore's law is the problem. ... We need 8k per eye, and graphics cards need to be at least 4-8x if not 16x as fast for that to be viable, and given the end of moore's law this seems unlikely.
Like the multi-decade running gag "Imminent death of the Internet" predicted, film at 11:00", the end of Moore's Law has been long predicted and slow in coming.
Lately we're starting to hit a wall on the "just make the features smaller and being closer together makes things run faster" approach: As features near the scale of the size of the electron wave function keeping the signals separate becomes an issue.
But Moore's law is really about the number of transistors you can build into a chip, and we've literally "just scratched the surface" there. Until recently the transistors have been essentially a two-dimensional layer on the surface of a chip. Now we're starting to use the third dimension - up to eight layers of it, last time I looked.
The limit to that is what I called "Preposterous Scale Integration" back in the mid-sixites (when the buzzwords were "small ...", "medium ..." and "large scale integration", rather than, say, the "deep sub-micron" of the millennium or the current "xx nanometer process"). When the chip has layers of logic elements spaced along the z axis as closely as the feature size in the x y plane, and acceptable yields are obtained for "chips" the size of the old IBM mainframe cabinets - just small enough to fit through a standard elevator door - THEN you're approaching the end of Moore's Law. That's still many decades out.
Now for a single thread you're currently starting to fall off the speed-doubles-every-1.5 or so-years interpretation of Moore's law. Having lots of transistors doesn't get you faster once you're simultaneously running into limits of feature size AND switching speed AND propagation time. But for computations that are massively parallelizable, you can continue to throw more and more elements at them. Graphics rendering, combined with speculatively pre-computing multiple viewpoints for head rotation and translation options (i.e. the core of VR and AR), is such a problem.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I am just going to save my money and hold off on experiencing the current iteration of VR tech. I will re-evaluate the technology as soon as someone gets a Holodeck up and running.
it ain't VR. This is why it's failing. Wearing a headpiece will never, ever feel like 'reality'. Peripheral vision is being badly dismissed as a necessity.