I Tried VR and It Was Just OK

Admittedly true.

I do spend a great deal of time on our rifts. I've done some dev work for it, along with using it as my virtual desktop. I didn't think that people would be interested in my personal use case, because I am rather an outlier.

Airflow is one concern. I am hot, and stay hot. Along with that, it tends to fog up the lenses and get somewhat sweaty. Demos aren't a concern because condensation doesn't have a chance to form.

I also have issues of depth perfection after about 4 hours, which is around lunchtime. This goes away in perhaps 5 minutes, but is still a problem.

There is also the screen door effect still in DK2. I've heard the CV1 doesn't have this, but that shall be seen.

There is also the mention of input issue. Using keyboard is still hard. I still resort to looking down the nose-hole to see the keyboard (others with Rift will know what I mean). I've been playing around using a wiimote and nunchuck for input along with a sensor bar, and it works well.

Sound is also another problem area, but CV1 has builtin speakers. It's to be seen if they're good or not.

Jeff is speaking from a position of not having tried the good stuff that delivers a sense of 'presence' in the virtual world. That is the game changer, the thing that is making people believe something special is on the way. When he says "I have experienced modern VR. A lot. I've tried both the Oculus DK1, the Oculus DK2." he's just flatly wrong, he hasn't. Those headsets at not modern VR and using them as the reference for where VR is at is pretty crazy.

But you'll get a chance to try to presence-inducing stuff in the next ~6 months with the consumer release of the Vive and Oculus CV1.

So his problem is that pre-release, AAA game software for pre-release hardware is nothing more than tech demos. And bloggers. But let's not get too far off topic discussing his own contributions to the "I need to get my voice included, too!" problems with blogging-as-a-career-move. Let's just stick to the tech.

It's disappointing to see someone who has such a prominent position in the developer community not just completely misunderstand a new piece of tech, but then go on to use his platform to stand up one part of that burgeoning sector as a straw man against all of it.

I agree, the games and other software available right now are underwhelming in a lot of aspects. That's because they are either made by indies who don't have the technical prowess to figure out best workflow for the nascent technology, or by AAA game studios that don't have the creativity necessary to make anything other than adaptations of their current FPS franchises, what all the serious pundents agree is the worst possible UX for VR. That's not too say there aren't great experiences, but they are few and far between right now.

Though frankly, so are monodisplay games, after you've burnt out on Call of Duty and World of Warcraft five (or more!) years ago.

But if all you see VR as good for is games, man, I just don't know if I can even reach you with words.

People keep comparing VR to when smartphones were new. I think that is wrong, because it implies a platform rather than peripheral approach, but even if we accept it, are smartphones just about games? IDK, maybe for some cynical, short sighted view of them they are. I don't think we are anywhere near fully taking the potential of smartphones. But even more, they represent a fairly different (though I wouldn't say fundamentally different) means if computing for users.

If you look at the original iPhone like Atwood has for VR, then you're going to come to similar conclusions, "this hardware sucks, the resolution sucks, who would want this? I want Siri now." I mean, the iPhone didn't even have the App Store when it was first released. Everyone was expected to make HTML5 web apps.

But VR isn't smartphones. It's upgrading from monochromatic CRTs to full color LCDs and adding a mouse to your computer, before any GUI operating system has been invented. Thinking this is only for games, that it won't evolve (thaaank you, Jeff Atwood, we weren't aware resolution should be improved or that the headsets are heavy), that I don't think I've ever seen anyone come unstuck from such stubbornly old ways of thinking.

VR is going to be the thing that keeps the first manned mission to Mars from dying of boredom-induced insanity on the longest single-leg voyage man has ever undertaken. The Mars colonists will use VR to exercise their body and minds. It will allow them to participate in vastly more cultural exchange with Earth than would be feasible without.

VR is going to be the thing to save the Rainforest and push people to cleanup any future ecological disasters. We are going to be able to put people in the space, to give then a hook on which to empathize that isn't possible through just TV.

Even for mundane things, VR is going to revolutionize content authoring, especially in the 3D space. Editing 3D models with 2D tools is an exercise in learned zen suppression of frustration. I'm working on an IDE in VR, where text isn't just an adaptation of the old dog chow of your Visual Studios or Eclipses or Emacsen of the world.

So yeah, it's young. Is it "not ready?" I don't agree. When the first color CRTs were released, we knew they would be better at a higher resolution, but that didn't stop us from using them. I think VR is ready. It's not ideal, but we won't be able to build the ideal unless we get it out, start exercising it.

EDIT: okay, to quell the "hype" a bit, things you can do in VR right now that are better than without VR.

- Simulator games, i.e. racing and flying, on the DK2. Project Cars and Elite: Dangerous are flipping amazing. I actually don't care for games for VR that much, but I love these games and I can't play them without the headset anymore. Yes, even the "low" resolution of the DK2 is better than playing these games at a "high" resolution on a flat screen.

- Architectural visualization with Google Cardboard. Several architecture firms are now using VR to visualize future buildings as well as additions to current buildings. I've heard several anecdotes of plans being fundamentally changed after seeing them in VR vs. just architectural drawings.

- Watch films made for VR in Vrse (http://vrse.com/). There aren't very many yet, and some of them are very short, but they are very good and not at all like 3D TV.

Things you'll be able to do, very soon

- Event space visualization with Google Cardboard. Sites like Social Tables are developing visualizers for their existing event space planning software.

- Interactively author GPU shaders in the DK2 https://share.oculus.com/app/shadertoy-vr

- Play "I Expect You To Die" which has not only been one of the few VR games I've enjoyed, it's one of the only "locked room" games I've enjoyed https://share.oculus.com/app/i-expect-you-to-die

So is VR "not ready yet"? I don't think so. I think it's as ready as any new tech on release day, perhaps even more so, because the developer ecosystem is just so much more open.

I've interpreted presence as "how much can you fool the brain that you really are there".

The screen-door effect is still moderately high in DK2. I've heard the CV1 has much reduced the size of the pixels, so the effect is greatly reduced.

Also the refresh also needs to be jacked up further. I'd prefer 120hz or 240hz. That would assist in faster and more seamless head-tracking. I don't think HDMI can handle that much bandwidth though. I could be wrong.

Aside) The screendoor effect is the effect of magnifying pixels in a LCD screen so you can see the pixels along with the interstitial black space where the pixels arent. The black space creates black lines like a screen door. Your eyes will then flip on focusing on the image displayed and the screen door, losing the feeling of depth and presence.