I've been using nothing but Macs around my house for many years, and I'm on a Mac Pro right now. I guess I'm what you might call a die-hard Mac user. However. . . I'm not going to fight reality on this one. I've already ordered a gaming PC with Windows to power a Vive. The Mac will continue to do everything else for me, but when it comes to games and VR, I knew it just didn't make good sense.
Mac users have griped for years and years about Apple never producing a reasonably specified mini-tower suitable for gaming. Sad fact is, Apple as a company has no gaming in their DNA or their corporate culture. Steve Jobs didn't get games, didn't like games, and his attitude filtered down through the ranks. To the extent that gaming is viable on the Mac today at all, it's almost entirely due to Valve and Steam, not Apple.
Tiny two-seater with a top speed of 60 MPH? Here in Texas that wouldn't even be considered highway-capable. The speed limit on many of our highways is 75 MPH, and I'm not even sure the majority of drivers stay within that. (I try to, usually, but passing with the Tesla Roadster is quite easy. And fun.)
I own one of these vehicles, and I can attest that the shifter design is awkward and confusing. The shifter paddles are another gripe, since they're effectively useless on this type of vehicle, but it's easy to hit one without realizing it when making a turn, then you have to figure out what's wrong, and then figure out how to get it out of manual mode. And the design fails are not limited to the shifter. All the controls in this vehicle are a user interface disaster. After owning mine for more than a year, I still find it awkward, and the touch screen interface for the infotainment and climate control still befuddles me at some times and infuriates me at others. And just to add an extra special touch of irritation, the stereo automatically comes on playing satellite radio whenever the vehicle is started, and there's no way to configure it not to. I've just learned to hit the mute button every time I start the car.
The utter failure of the Jeep's user interface was really pounded home to me when I was loaned a Tesla Model S for a week and a half. The huge touch panel looked alien at first glance, but I mastered most of its functions just by poking at it for about five minutes, and everything was golden after that.
When I was growing up, some of our smaller -- but paved -- farm roads (sometimes called farm-to-market roads) here in rural Texas were single-lane roads with no center stripe. That seemed to work pretty well, granted that the traffic was very light. People who lived out in the country were used to driving on single-lane dirt roads -- county roads -- anyhow, so the wider and paved road was a comfortable step up.
Then an order came down from above that all paved state roads must be at least TWO LANE. And since there was no money available to actually widen any of them. . . Yep, they just painted a stripe down the middle of the one-lane roads and called it two lanes! Two very narrow lanes. Thus, where before we had crowded to the edge of the road when passing somehow, now we are crowded to the edge of the road all the time. And there's no shoulder. This is NOT an improvement.
You're trying too hard. That much upheaval isn't needed. (I started to say that much "change" isn't needed, but caught myself!)
If we just got rid of the cent and the nickel and the $1 bill, it would be a big improvement. We already have a perfectly serviceable $1 coin. The only reason people don't use it much is because the $1 bill has all the inertia in the world. (I have no idea what you meant about the color. I've never seen a $1 coin turn the color of a quarter, unless both coins were covered with something like paint!)
The only problem is, if the dime is the smallest denomination, but we still have the quarter, then you get into a situation where sometimes you have to round to the nearest ten cents and other times to the nearest five. Awk-ward. Replacing the quarter with a newer and less clunky fifty-cent piece might be worth contemplating.
I'm ambivalent about the $2 bill. They might see more usage with the $1 bill gone, but we could probably get by just fine without either of them.
Some kind of reform is long overdue, but what's really messed things up is all the lobbyists. The paper mills have fought hard to keep the $1 bill alive. Meanwhile, the vending machine industry lobbied hard for the $1 coin, claiming it would save them bazillions on bill-changing mechanisms -- but most vending machines still won't accept $1 coins and still have bill-changing mechanisms, so that was apparently just BS.
We'll end up going cashless before all of this is straightened out.
Uhhh... I'm not sure what you mean about "no Apple OSX or Linux support". You're not talking about SL, are you? The viewers have run on Mac and Linux for well over ten years already. (It is partly responsible for my loyalty to SL, since many of the other virtual worlds -- such as There and Blue Mars -- never came out with Mac support, and I sure wasn't going to buy a new computer just to try them!)
Actually, now I find myself contemplating the purchase of a Windows PC for the first time in many years. It has become clear that a lot of games simply perform better on Windows (presumably because those games target DirectX), and VR headset support is going to be strongest on Windows, and I'm just tired of riding against the wind all the time. But the PC will be strictly for games and VR. I'll be sticking with my Mac for everything else.
As for SL being very outdated. . . It has been upgraded and improved many times over the years. We got voice chat, we got mesh object import, avatars look 100% better now, etc. But yes, SL is still haunted by architectural decisions made long ago, in another era. I think the intent with Project Sansar is to make a clean break somewhat like Apple did when going from Mac System 8/9 to Mac OS X.
Thanks for joining us, and thanks for writing the piece!
I am one of those who hasn't yet tried on a current headset. I'm eager, I'm chomping at the bit! I did play a VR game in the arcade 20 years ago -- Dactyl Nightmare -- and it was what I might call a "Pong experience": obviously crude and limited, yet there was the thrill of doing something entirely new and seeing that it worked at all. It was fun.
I have to shake my head over all the comparisons with 3D TV or with various gimmicky controllers for game consoles. VR falls into a completely different category. This is a whole new ball game.
A lot of people don't know that Linden Labs originally began as a VR hardware company. They started to research into headsets, but then realized they would have no compelling content for one. So, they started to create a virtual world, which grew and spiraled into Second Life, and the VR hardware project was forgotten. But there's an important point. . . Simulated worlds, shared 3D virtual worlds, have undergone great development over the last 20 years. On the software side, the groundwork has been laid for VR. Now it's time for the hardware to catch up.
Allow me to set you straight on a few points of fact. . . You wrote that the Virtual Boy failed because of "the uncomfortable headset and being tied [to] one location with wires". Virtual Boy was not a headset (because it wasn't anything resembling VR, as I've already pointed out), and it didn't tie you to one location with wires any more than any other non-portable game console does. It was simply a tabletop videogame console that made you awkwardly shove your face into the display. And gave you 3D. But took away color.
Virtual Boy didn't fail from being VR, because it wasn't VR. It didn't fail from being (falsely) marketed as VR, because any dummy who looked at it could see that it wasn't VR, no matter how Nintendo may have tried to spin it that way. It failed because it was teh sux.
The majority of the VR headsets that are coming don't tie you down into one spot. None of the phone-based ones do, and the HTC Vive allows tracking anywhere in a room. You can still trip over the Vive's cables, though. (Probably. Unless going wireless is the "big breakthrough" that they're going to show at CES.)
I don't think you have any basis for saying VR is going to fail. You say 3D TV failed (even though they are still being made and sold), but VR isn't anything like 3D TV. You say the 3DS failed, and I'm struggling to even remember what a 3DS is, or why it could possibly be relevant to the discussion. And then you say "it just isn't as compelling a feature as people seem to think it is", which directly contradicts every single account that I've heard from everybody who has been through the demos. I think I'll take their word over yours.
FWIW, I remember playing Dactyl Nightmare in the arcade. I thought it was fun. I would have played more if I'd known it was going to be 20+ years before I'd have the opportunity to put on a VR headset again.
The comparison of 3D TV and VR is indeed interesting. ..but complicated. (Or maybe interesting *because* it's complicated.)
The biggest factor in 3D TV's decline seems to be lack of content -- very few movies were actually shot in 3D, but instead we were given a lot of cheap conversions and no easy way to identify them as such before watching. Hollywood really dropped the ball on this. Also. . . Movies have been pretty well developed as an art form in 2D for many decades, and this seems a bit like an effort to fix what wasn't broken. Furthermore, a 2D motion picture, especially when there's any sort of camera movement (panning, especially), already provides a lot of unconscious depth information.
BTW, 3D TVs are still selling. Most of the higher-spec TVs on the market still include the 3D feature. I find it useful for viewing stereo photos taken with my Fujifilm REAL 3D W3 camera. Stereo photography has a history of huge, mass-market success -- now mostly forgotten. In the 1800s, before automobiles and consumer-ready box cameras caught on, professional photographers went around the country and around the world shooting 3D images and printing them on Holmes stereo cards. Peddlers would then go house-to-house selling bundles of stereo cards, and that was how you got to see the world. A virtual vacation!
The Fuji isn't a great camera in 2D terms, but the stereo images really are striking and beautiful when shown on my TV set. And stereo photos are especially well suited to some kinds of subject matter -- like plants and trees, which often seem to turn into a camouflage-like jumble in mere 2D images.
Getting back to VR. . . I am very skeptical of watching movies in VR. It doesn't make sense to me. You can't move around freely. You can't interact with your surroundings. It's not "VR" in a conventional sense of the term. It's just. . . 3D TV, with poor resolution, plus head tracking. And the head tracking seems like more of a problem than a benefit, since you may be looking the wrong direction when the action starts. I won't be surprised if VR cinema is a flop, but so what? That's not what VR was really about anyhow.
VR is best, and makes more sense, when putting you into a dynamic simulation. Many games are dynamic simulations, so that's a natural fit. And the game industry is huge. It's bigger than the music industry, and it's bigger than the movie industry. All this hand-wringing in the blogosphere about the need for VR to "reach beyond games to find a mainstream audience" is bunk. Games are mainstream.
But it's not just Oculus Rift. If FB manages to screw it all up, there will still be Playstation VR and HTC Vive and Razer OSVR and even (heaven help us!) Vrvana Totem. Personally, I'm holding out for the Vive. It has better tracking, it has Valve+Steam, and it's not FB. Seems like an easy choice.
And as for people wanting to get their hands dirty. . . I would direct your attention to Linden Labs and Project Sansar.
Linden Labs have been running Second Life for well over 10 years already. It didn't set the world on fire the way some people predicted (hyped) in the beginning, but it's still chugging along and making money. One of my friends who studies a lot of this stuff concluded that SL only appeals to a certain type of personality: those who can entertain themselves. Give them a great toy box and sandbox where they can tinker and create things, and show them off, and trade or sell them, and they're happy. On the other hand, people who come into SL expecting to play a game or be led through a story soon lose interest.
Linden Labs are making a successor to SL called Project Sansar, and compatibility with VR headsets is a design goal. They claim it will have the most accessible content creation tools ever. This is the number one thing on my wish list.
The article presents the most optimistic possible scenario, in which VR catches on like wildfire (or like smartphones did!), followed by massive investment and rapid technological progress. It's a scenario at one end of the spectrum of possible outcomes -- but it's not implausible, it's not crazy. We've seen this kind of shift before.
At the other end of the spectrum, it's possible that the awkwardness and expense of VR headsets (especially the high-spec ones for PCs) may hold things back, and VR may not explode into the mainstream. Even if this happens, though, I can't see it flopping completely. VR technology is simply too useful, and useful for too many things (beyond games), to just go away.
Interesting mention in TFA of Second Life. . . QUOTE: "In 2017 a clear leader will emerge in the field of social VR platforms, and it will look something like Secondlife but in VR. If it’s not facebook itself as the platform, then facebook will try to acquire whoever makes such a platform stably with good adoption during the 2017 year."
Of course, Linden Labs are still running Second Life (after all these years!) and are making steady money from it. They are adapting it to work with VR headsets, and they are also developing a successor world, called Project Sansar, which is designed with a focus on VR. I am very eager to see how this turns out.
Same answer I give to everybody who brings up the Virtual Boy. . . .
Virtual Boy wasn't VR. Virtual Boy had no connection with VR aside from the word "virtual". Nintendo: "Hey, let's slap the word virtual on this turkey, and these idiot kids will think it has actually something to do with virtual reality, and they'll buy it! Hahaha!" Yeah, how did that work out? Turns out the kids aren't so dumb.
(I've got the feeling I'll be cut-and-pasting this a lot.)
Virtual Boy wasn't VR. Virtual Boy had no connection with VR aside from the word "virtual". Nintendo: "Hey, let's slap the word virtual on this turkey, and these idiot kids will think it has actually something to do with virtual reality, and they'll buy it! Hahaha!" Yeah, how did that work out? Turns out the kids aren't so dumb.
You lose credibility by referencing Virtual Boy, which was not any kind of VR device. The only link it had to VR was the word "virtual" in its name. (Which itself was a turnoff, at least to me, because it seemed like Nintendo was trying to insult our intelligence.)
From where I sit it's looking like Oculus, Vive and Playstation VR are the "serious" contenders. However, it's still early days. And Apple will probably come up with something, too.
All my instincts tell me to pull for HTC Vive. Steam is great. The lighthouse tracking system is great. It's not FB. Seems like an easy choice, but my crystal ball is always murky, and usually whatever I go for is the first thing to flop.
The one dark cloud that I see hanging over VR right now is balkanization. Just like in the early days of computering: When you were the guy with the Atari 800, but you walked into the store and all they had was Apple II and Commodore 64 games. Then you went to the next store and found only Tandy and TI99/4A software. . .
So, are we going to have Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Razer OSVR, Playstation VR, Vrvana Totem, and something we haven't even seen yet from Apple, all running their own little software ecosystems full of "exclusive" titles?
I've never heard of the VFX1 before. (looks it up. ..) Why haven't I heard of this before? If I'd known about it, I probably would have been all over it.
Then again, it wouldn't have worked on my Amiga 2500. >.
And there weren't really any MMOGs then like there are today. . . So maybe it's just as well that I was ignorant.
At first your response seemed a bit insulting, but I thought about it a bit more and realized you're exactly right. . . and I'm fine with that.
I'll be getting one of the first headsets commercially released, one of the first production runs of that model, v1.00 with all that implies. It won't be cheap, especially factoring in the computer and the space I'm preparing for it. If the product flops (or if VR somehow flops altogether!) and the company goes out of business, and there's no support and no more content. . . or the headset I chose loses the "standards war" and becomes the new Betamax. . . or it's simply obsolete after two years because the technology advanced so quickly. . . That would be unfortunate, but I won't be bitter. It happens. I knew the job was dangerous when I took it.
There's a thrill I get from being in on something new right at the beginning.
I don't believe it. I have to wonder if you've even played a VR game in your life?
To date, the only one I've played was Dactyl Nightmare in the arcade, back in the 1990s. Man, that was crude. . . Black void in the background, low-rez pixellated objects. . . It was like the Pong of VR. And to me, it was fun. However rough and limited it was, I was able to mentally put myself into that space. I was standing on my feet, and I had a gun (not a mouse) in my hand, and I was able to aim and shoot at the pixel critters in all directions in a very natural way, and it was like nothing else I'd experienced. I wanted to do it again. But it cost $4 a play, so I didn't. If I'd known VR was going to vanish from the Earth for the next 20+ years, I would have coughed up the money and played that game more when I had the chance!
It irks me that VR languished for so long. It could have evolved from there.
Immersiveness. . . You make it sound like an unattainable goal. Immersiveness, you seem to be saying, is something possible only in theory but not in practice, therefore we shouldn't foolishly strive for it! Well, there are too many examples of highly immersive video and computers games already around for me to swallow that. I thought the original Everquest game was startlingly immersive. So. . . Unless you think that VR technology is somehow going to detract from that effect rather than boost it, I don't see a valid argument.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been using nothing but Macs around my house for many years, and I'm on a Mac Pro right now. I guess I'm what you might call a die-hard Mac user. However. . . I'm not going to fight reality on this one. I've already ordered a gaming PC with Windows to power a Vive. The Mac will continue to do everything else for me, but when it comes to games and VR, I knew it just didn't make good sense.
Mac users have griped for years and years about Apple never producing a reasonably specified mini-tower suitable for gaming. Sad fact is, Apple as a company has no gaming in their DNA or their corporate culture. Steve Jobs didn't get games, didn't like games, and his attitude filtered down through the ranks. To the extent that gaming is viable on the Mac today at all, it's almost entirely due to Valve and Steam, not Apple.
Tiny two-seater with a top speed of 60 MPH? Here in Texas that wouldn't even be considered highway-capable. The speed limit on many of our highways is 75 MPH, and I'm not even sure the majority of drivers stay within that. (I try to, usually, but passing with the Tesla Roadster is quite easy. And fun.)
Making it sound inhuman is the whole point. If you're against something, make it sound evil!
Don't like guns? Talk about "assault weapons" and "cop-killer bullets".
Don't like GM foods? They can be "frankenfoods".
And now. . . Designer babies!
The Jeep doesn't have a key as such. It just has a fob that you can keep in your pocket.
I own one of these vehicles, and I can attest that the shifter design is awkward and confusing. The shifter paddles are another gripe, since they're effectively useless on this type of vehicle, but it's easy to hit one without realizing it when making a turn, then you have to figure out what's wrong, and then figure out how to get it out of manual mode. And the design fails are not limited to the shifter. All the controls in this vehicle are a user interface disaster. After owning mine for more than a year, I still find it awkward, and the touch screen interface for the infotainment and climate control still befuddles me at some times and infuriates me at others. And just to add an extra special touch of irritation, the stereo automatically comes on playing satellite radio whenever the vehicle is started, and there's no way to configure it not to. I've just learned to hit the mute button every time I start the car.
The utter failure of the Jeep's user interface was really pounded home to me when I was loaned a Tesla Model S for a week and a half. The huge touch panel looked alien at first glance, but I mastered most of its functions just by poking at it for about five minutes, and everything was golden after that.
When I was growing up, some of our smaller -- but paved -- farm roads (sometimes called farm-to-market roads) here in rural Texas were single-lane roads with no center stripe. That seemed to work pretty well, granted that the traffic was very light. People who lived out in the country were used to driving on single-lane dirt roads -- county roads -- anyhow, so the wider and paved road was a comfortable step up.
Then an order came down from above that all paved state roads must be at least TWO LANE. And since there was no money available to actually widen any of them. . . Yep, they just painted a stripe down the middle of the one-lane roads and called it two lanes! Two very narrow lanes. Thus, where before we had crowded to the edge of the road when passing somehow, now we are crowded to the edge of the road all the time. And there's no shoulder. This is NOT an improvement.
quote: "However, what if you prefer to work with the x86 architecture?"
However, what if you prefer to whip yourself with a wet rope?
Am I the only one who actually likes the patina that the $1 coin picks up after a bit of circulation?
You're trying too hard. That much upheaval isn't needed. (I started to say that much "change" isn't needed, but caught myself!)
If we just got rid of the cent and the nickel and the $1 bill, it would be a big improvement. We already have a perfectly serviceable $1 coin. The only reason people don't use it much is because the $1 bill has all the inertia in the world. (I have no idea what you meant about the color. I've never seen a $1 coin turn the color of a quarter, unless both coins were covered with something like paint!)
The only problem is, if the dime is the smallest denomination, but we still have the quarter, then you get into a situation where sometimes you have to round to the nearest ten cents and other times to the nearest five. Awk-ward. Replacing the quarter with a newer and less clunky fifty-cent piece might be worth contemplating.
I'm ambivalent about the $2 bill. They might see more usage with the $1 bill gone, but we could probably get by just fine without either of them.
Some kind of reform is long overdue, but what's really messed things up is all the lobbyists. The paper mills have fought hard to keep the $1 bill alive. Meanwhile, the vending machine industry lobbied hard for the $1 coin, claiming it would save them bazillions on bill-changing mechanisms -- but most vending machines still won't accept $1 coins and still have bill-changing mechanisms, so that was apparently just BS.
We'll end up going cashless before all of this is straightened out.
Uhhh... I'm not sure what you mean about "no Apple OSX or Linux support". You're not talking about SL, are you? The viewers have run on Mac and Linux for well over ten years already. (It is partly responsible for my loyalty to SL, since many of the other virtual worlds -- such as There and Blue Mars -- never came out with Mac support, and I sure wasn't going to buy a new computer just to try them!)
Actually, now I find myself contemplating the purchase of a Windows PC for the first time in many years. It has become clear that a lot of games simply perform better on Windows (presumably because those games target DirectX), and VR headset support is going to be strongest on Windows, and I'm just tired of riding against the wind all the time. But the PC will be strictly for games and VR. I'll be sticking with my Mac for everything else.
As for SL being very outdated. . . It has been upgraded and improved many times over the years. We got voice chat, we got mesh object import, avatars look 100% better now, etc. But yes, SL is still haunted by architectural decisions made long ago, in another era. I think the intent with Project Sansar is to make a clean break somewhat like Apple did when going from Mac System 8/9 to Mac OS X.
Thanks for joining us, and thanks for writing the piece!
I am one of those who hasn't yet tried on a current headset. I'm eager, I'm chomping at the bit! I did play a VR game in the arcade 20 years ago -- Dactyl Nightmare -- and it was what I might call a "Pong experience": obviously crude and limited, yet there was the thrill of doing something entirely new and seeing that it worked at all. It was fun.
I have to shake my head over all the comparisons with 3D TV or with various gimmicky controllers for game consoles. VR falls into a completely different category. This is a whole new ball game.
A lot of people don't know that Linden Labs originally began as a VR hardware company. They started to research into headsets, but then realized they would have no compelling content for one. So, they started to create a virtual world, which grew and spiraled into Second Life, and the VR hardware project was forgotten. But there's an important point. . . Simulated worlds, shared 3D virtual worlds, have undergone great development over the last 20 years. On the software side, the groundwork has been laid for VR. Now it's time for the hardware to catch up.
Allow me to set you straight on a few points of fact. . . You wrote that the Virtual Boy failed because of "the uncomfortable headset and being tied [to] one location with wires". Virtual Boy was not a headset (because it wasn't anything resembling VR, as I've already pointed out), and it didn't tie you to one location with wires any more than any other non-portable game console does. It was simply a tabletop videogame console that made you awkwardly shove your face into the display. And gave you 3D. But took away color.
Virtual Boy didn't fail from being VR, because it wasn't VR. It didn't fail from being (falsely) marketed as VR, because any dummy who looked at it could see that it wasn't VR, no matter how Nintendo may have tried to spin it that way. It failed because it was teh sux.
The majority of the VR headsets that are coming don't tie you down into one spot. None of the phone-based ones do, and the HTC Vive allows tracking anywhere in a room. You can still trip over the Vive's cables, though. (Probably. Unless going wireless is the "big breakthrough" that they're going to show at CES.)
I don't think you have any basis for saying VR is going to fail. You say 3D TV failed (even though they are still being made and sold), but VR isn't anything like 3D TV. You say the 3DS failed, and I'm struggling to even remember what a 3DS is, or why it could possibly be relevant to the discussion. And then you say "it just isn't as compelling a feature as people seem to think it is", which directly contradicts every single account that I've heard from everybody who has been through the demos. I think I'll take their word over yours.
Anything old enough becomes new again!
FWIW, I remember playing Dactyl Nightmare in the arcade. I thought it was fun. I would have played more if I'd known it was going to be 20+ years before I'd have the opportunity to put on a VR headset again.
The comparison of 3D TV and VR is indeed interesting. . .but complicated. (Or maybe interesting *because* it's complicated.)
The biggest factor in 3D TV's decline seems to be lack of content -- very few movies were actually shot in 3D, but instead we were given a lot of cheap conversions and no easy way to identify them as such before watching. Hollywood really dropped the ball on this. Also. . . Movies have been pretty well developed as an art form in 2D for many decades, and this seems a bit like an effort to fix what wasn't broken. Furthermore, a 2D motion picture, especially when there's any sort of camera movement (panning, especially), already provides a lot of unconscious depth information.
BTW, 3D TVs are still selling. Most of the higher-spec TVs on the market still include the 3D feature. I find it useful for viewing stereo photos taken with my Fujifilm REAL 3D W3 camera. Stereo photography has a history of huge, mass-market success -- now mostly forgotten. In the 1800s, before automobiles and consumer-ready box cameras caught on, professional photographers went around the country and around the world shooting 3D images and printing them on Holmes stereo cards. Peddlers would then go house-to-house selling bundles of stereo cards, and that was how you got to see the world. A virtual vacation!
The Fuji isn't a great camera in 2D terms, but the stereo images really are striking and beautiful when shown on my TV set. And stereo photos are especially well suited to some kinds of subject matter -- like plants and trees, which often seem to turn into a camouflage-like jumble in mere 2D images.
Getting back to VR. . . I am very skeptical of watching movies in VR. It doesn't make sense to me. You can't move around freely. You can't interact with your surroundings. It's not "VR" in a conventional sense of the term. It's just. . . 3D TV, with poor resolution, plus head tracking. And the head tracking seems like more of a problem than a benefit, since you may be looking the wrong direction when the action starts. I won't be surprised if VR cinema is a flop, but so what? That's not what VR was really about anyhow.
VR is best, and makes more sense, when putting you into a dynamic simulation. Many games are dynamic simulations, so that's a natural fit. And the game industry is huge. It's bigger than the music industry, and it's bigger than the movie industry. All this hand-wringing in the blogosphere about the need for VR to "reach beyond games to find a mainstream audience" is bunk. Games are mainstream.
But it's not just Oculus Rift. If FB manages to screw it all up, there will still be Playstation VR and HTC Vive and Razer OSVR and even (heaven help us!) Vrvana Totem. Personally, I'm holding out for the Vive. It has better tracking, it has Valve+Steam, and it's not FB. Seems like an easy choice.
And as for people wanting to get their hands dirty. . . I would direct your attention to Linden Labs and Project Sansar.
Linden Labs have been running Second Life for well over 10 years already. It didn't set the world on fire the way some people predicted (hyped) in the beginning, but it's still chugging along and making money. One of my friends who studies a lot of this stuff concluded that SL only appeals to a certain type of personality: those who can entertain themselves. Give them a great toy box and sandbox where they can tinker and create things, and show them off, and trade or sell them, and they're happy. On the other hand, people who come into SL expecting to play a game or be led through a story soon lose interest.
Linden Labs are making a successor to SL called Project Sansar, and compatibility with VR headsets is a design goal. They claim it will have the most accessible content creation tools ever. This is the number one thing on my wish list.
The article presents the most optimistic possible scenario, in which VR catches on like wildfire (or like smartphones did!), followed by massive investment and rapid technological progress. It's a scenario at one end of the spectrum of possible outcomes -- but it's not implausible, it's not crazy. We've seen this kind of shift before.
At the other end of the spectrum, it's possible that the awkwardness and expense of VR headsets (especially the high-spec ones for PCs) may hold things back, and VR may not explode into the mainstream. Even if this happens, though, I can't see it flopping completely. VR technology is simply too useful, and useful for too many things (beyond games), to just go away.
Interesting mention in TFA of Second Life. . . QUOTE: "In 2017 a clear leader will emerge in the field of social VR platforms, and it will look something like Secondlife but in VR. If it’s not facebook itself as the platform, then facebook will try to acquire whoever makes such a platform stably with good adoption during the 2017 year."
Of course, Linden Labs are still running Second Life (after all these years!) and are making steady money from it. They are adapting it to work with VR headsets, and they are also developing a successor world, called Project Sansar, which is designed with a focus on VR. I am very eager to see how this turns out.
I'm with you. I am having a room remodeled to become my virtual game room, specifically with the HTC Vive's lighthouse tracking system in mind.
Same answer I give to everybody who brings up the Virtual Boy. . . .
Virtual Boy wasn't VR. Virtual Boy had no connection with VR aside from the word "virtual". Nintendo: "Hey, let's slap the word virtual on this turkey, and these idiot kids will think it has actually something to do with virtual reality, and they'll buy it! Hahaha!" Yeah, how did that work out? Turns out the kids aren't so dumb.
(I've got the feeling I'll be cut-and-pasting this a lot.)
Virtual Boy wasn't VR. Virtual Boy had no connection with VR aside from the word "virtual". Nintendo: "Hey, let's slap the word virtual on this turkey, and these idiot kids will think it has actually something to do with virtual reality, and they'll buy it! Hahaha!" Yeah, how did that work out? Turns out the kids aren't so dumb.
You lose credibility by referencing Virtual Boy, which was not any kind of VR device. The only link it had to VR was the word "virtual" in its name. (Which itself was a turnoff, at least to me, because it seemed like Nintendo was trying to insult our intelligence.)
From where I sit it's looking like Oculus, Vive and Playstation VR are the "serious" contenders. However, it's still early days. And Apple will probably come up with something, too.
All my instincts tell me to pull for HTC Vive. Steam is great. The lighthouse tracking system is great. It's not FB. Seems like an easy choice, but my crystal ball is always murky, and usually whatever I go for is the first thing to flop.
Will this game be available for other headsets?
The one dark cloud that I see hanging over VR right now is balkanization. Just like in the early days of computering: When you were the guy with the Atari 800, but you walked into the store and all they had was Apple II and Commodore 64 games. Then you went to the next store and found only Tandy and TI99/4A software. . .
So, are we going to have Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Razer OSVR, Playstation VR, Vrvana Totem, and something we haven't even seen yet from Apple, all running their own little software ecosystems full of "exclusive" titles?
I've never heard of the VFX1 before. (looks it up. . .) Why haven't I heard of this before? If I'd known about it, I probably would have been all over it.
Then again, it wouldn't have worked on my Amiga 2500. >.
And there weren't really any MMOGs then like there are today. . . So maybe it's just as well that I was ignorant.
At first your response seemed a bit insulting, but I thought about it a bit more and realized you're exactly right. . . and I'm fine with that.
I'll be getting one of the first headsets commercially released, one of the first production runs of that model, v1.00 with all that implies. It won't be cheap, especially factoring in the computer and the space I'm preparing for it. If the product flops (or if VR somehow flops altogether!) and the company goes out of business, and there's no support and no more content. . . or the headset I chose loses the "standards war" and becomes the new Betamax. . . or it's simply obsolete after two years because the technology advanced so quickly. . . That would be unfortunate, but I won't be bitter. It happens. I knew the job was dangerous when I took it.
There's a thrill I get from being in on something new right at the beginning.
I don't believe it. I have to wonder if you've even played a VR game in your life?
To date, the only one I've played was Dactyl Nightmare in the arcade, back in the 1990s. Man, that was crude. . . Black void in the background, low-rez pixellated objects. . . It was like the Pong of VR. And to me, it was fun. However rough and limited it was, I was able to mentally put myself into that space. I was standing on my feet, and I had a gun (not a mouse) in my hand, and I was able to aim and shoot at the pixel critters in all directions in a very natural way, and it was like nothing else I'd experienced. I wanted to do it again. But it cost $4 a play, so I didn't. If I'd known VR was going to vanish from the Earth for the next 20+ years, I would have coughed up the money and played that game more when I had the chance!
It irks me that VR languished for so long. It could have evolved from there.
Immersiveness. . . You make it sound like an unattainable goal. Immersiveness, you seem to be saying, is something possible only in theory but not in practice, therefore we shouldn't foolishly strive for it! Well, there are too many examples of highly immersive video and computers games already around for me to swallow that. I thought the original Everquest game was startlingly immersive. So. . . Unless you think that VR technology is somehow going to detract from that effect rather than boost it, I don't see a valid argument.