51–60 of 139 posts
The technical challenges around VR are not that deep, hard, and fascinating. At this point, it's only a matter of prices coming down.
This article is pure distillation of everything that's wrong with VR -- not the tech, but the people who are thinking about it and trying to build it. Specifically youngish white male gamer nerds. I want to write about this more at length -- maybe I'll put something on my blog or on Medium or something -- but I also tried VR, and the most interesting aspect of the experience was just how clueless all of the gamer typ…
I have three kids for the record. And trust me, if VR isn't doing a good job of making a believable aliens-are-destroying-your-house game, it isn't going to be any more believable when it is just rendering your house with bigger rooms. That's the problem.
FWIW I agree with you about the technical stuff -- the resolution has to go way up. But it will.
Again, the tradeoff is not "do I buy this megabuck Windows PC for VR gaming, or do I just stick with a console?" The tradeoff is, "do I pay a bunch of money to knock a wall out and/or redecorate, or do I buy this VR rig and some DLC from virtualcelebritycribs.com and call it a day."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The increased framerate only helps is the latency is low enough. If there is a very high framerate but the frames lag a few 10's of milliseconds behind the movement of the head of the user then that won't help one bit.
240hz is only 4.16 ms, which is still within human perception of view. Ideally, I'd like 1khz refresh, but that's going to be a very long time away. I do remember an HN article recently discussing a 1khz 8bit screen with touch input running at 1khz as well. The comparison was fantastic and I believe also relevant.
My only disagreement is with the "gloves" idea. I thought we learned from the Wii that motion controls without force feedback is anti-immersion. Imagine "firing" a 12 gauge shotgun and seeing considerable recoil in VR while your hands stay still. Without haptic feedback I'll have to rely on imagination for the full experience, which I thought video games were supposed to skip.
This article is pure distillation of everything that's wrong with VR -- not the tech, but the people who are thinking about it and trying to build it. Specifically youngish white male gamer nerds. I want to write about this more at length -- maybe I'll put something on my blog or on Medium or something -- but I also tried VR, and the most interesting aspect of the experience was just how clueless all of the gamer typ…
They are, kind of. The very same "addictive" mechanics in MUDs have been filtered and dumbed down into popular freemium games.
>I'm pretty sure none of them owned a house
This is what bothers me most about sites like HN and Reddit. Its a lot of loud proclamations of the future from people who are more or less kids. They've never bought property, never been responsible for raising a human life, never paid 'real' taxes, never buried a parent, never have been in positions of leadership, etc. They don't understand the status quo, let alone whats good about it and what's bad. They just yell about how everything sucks and how a revolution is always brewing. The problem is that its rare for revolutions to be brewing, so they all fall for this dumb hype machine. Reading /r/futurology on reddit is cringe inducing. Everything amazing is just 5 or maybe 10 years away. As someone who has been reading sci-fi and futurist junk since he was a kid, well, lets just say none of that fun stuff happened and "boring stuff" like commodization of SoC's onto touchscreens and better wireless data standards are the real revolutions, yet no one was really singing the praises of smartphones or saw their potential. Even when I had a Treo with 1mbps EVDO it was seen as an "executive toy" by even the most techy kids because it couldn't play games. How wrong they were.
The problem is that tech is almost exclusively a young man's game, so its young men who will be making the calls. Everything is filtered through the experiences and expectations of INTJ males. They don't have the social understanding to know that maybe people don't want to a tissue box sized device strapped onto their faces or that lots of people, especially women, suffer strongly from motion sickness illusions. Or that FP shooter "presence" isn't a compelling experience, even if its 'neat to experience.' There's a major, major hurdle to overcome here. Normal and social people don't want isolating boxes strapped to their faces. INTJ males do. This conflict isn't going away. VR isn't a shoo-in here. It has nothing but an uphill battle. Shame articles that point this out are often marginalized. Only Jeff's celebrity saves him here.
Sadly, there is probably a real and major revolution going on under our noses right now that is ignored by HN and Reddit because "it doesn't play games." I have my own thoughts on the matter, but I really don't want an argument about who is the better futurist here, so I'll keep them to myself, but life as seen through the eyes of hardcore gamers isn't mainstream. Older men and women with kids and bills are mainstream, not Steam and freemium addicts. I wish more people could accept that here. If your revolution can't win over parents, minorities, and the elderly, then you don't have a revolution. I remember seeing the mockups of the first iphone and looking at my Treo and thinking, "Wow, Apple solved this. They made a smartphone grandma can use. This is going to be big." Meanwhile geek media was calling the iphone a toy, slashdot was in hysterics about how terrible it was (no 3G? No games? No keyboard?!?!), etc.
Jeff compares the DK2 to Quake resolution (640x480), but I think that's quite misleading. Quake looks terrible, to modern eyes, but that has little to do with the resolution, and much more with the low polygon count, low quality textures and the lack of lighting effects. Run Far Cry 4 at 640x480, and it'll look much better.
I do not think Far Cry 4 would look very good at 640x480. Imagine it full screen on even a modest 20" monitor at that resolution. There are tricks, yes, but big pixels are a fundamental problem until you reach a "good enough" size. Sort of like when the iPhone 4 and retina was released. We are very, very far from retina resolution in VR.
Looks significantly better than Quake, even when maximized to fullscreen (except for the JPEG artifacts)!
edit:
far cry 4 640x480 filetype:png
http://www.picmygame.com/wp-content/uploads/ktz/yQq6DDQq-m2a...
http://www.picmygame.com/wp-content/uploads/ktz/Z7ptQrAC-m1n...
The text isn't great and the last image is hard to look at, but that's probably post processing.
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 refere…
To be fair, most of the people who are excited about VR (including myself) have been that excited already about DK1 and DK2, so your comment feels like it's just moving goalposts without seriously engaging the article. Personally, I'm very excited about VR. But I know for a fact that other people have tried the same gear that I've tried and have been way less excited about it. Overall, I'd say it's a good thing to se…
3 years ago, people were breathless about oculus. They're not anymore. They're breathless about the next things that are building on what oculus demonstrated was possible with synced stereoscopic viewing and head tracking 3 years ago (with steady improvements always coming).
If he had pointed to people still being breathless about Oculus today, I'd consider the argument much more compelling. The hype absolutely deserves skepticism, but he is trying to argue from a place of authority that I don't grant him.
(I also nitpick his view of predicted market time frames. Affordable niche is not mass market is not mainstream is not ubiquitous. Smartphones are already to basically ubiquitous. I haven't seen many predictions for when VR of any particular variety will reach ubiquity).
My only disagreement is with the "gloves" idea. I thought we learned from the Wii that motion controls without force feedback is anti-immersion. Imagine "firing" a 12 gauge shotgun and seeing considerable recoil in VR while your hands stay still. Without haptic feedback I'll have to rely on imagination for the full experience, which I thought video games were supposed to skip.
What we learned from the Wii is that those kinds of controls can move over 100 million console units. Seems people don't mind the lack of force feedback that much.
Counterpoint: My friend's architecture office has Occulus, and everyone, clients and architects love it. I asked her if anyone experienced any headaches or seasickness but since there is no action happening just a visual walk through buildings it seems side effects are minimized. So for architecture Occulus fills a nice niche.
My company, InsiteVR, makes it super simple for architects to get from 3D modeling software to VR without the headache of programming a game engine or setting everything up. And we use the GearVR so it's wireless, nice res, and easy to set up.
Shoot me an email at angel[at]insitevr.com - I'd love an introduction to your friend.
