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I Tried VR and It Was Just OK

blog.codinghorror.com

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Re: I Tried VR and It Was Just OK

#71

Post by wpietri »

timr wrote: post #34

LOL. I lived through the first VR hype bubble, and it's pretty remarkable how similar this is to my recollection of VR back then -- the only difference is that at the time, the goofy, uncomfortable headset was tethered to a refrigerator-sized SGI machine at the science museum, and there was no hope of getting it at home. Instead, we got the Lawnmower Man on VHS. It sounds like technology has advanced enough that we h…

So true! People looking at something and finding it "mindblowing" for short periods says almost nothing about whether a) there is actual value delivered, or b) there's a real business to be built there.

I can count at least 5 waves of 3D hype going back to the 1850s. Stereoscopic photos were all the rage for brief periods starting with the 1851 World's Fair in London [1], and we are all familiar with the 3D View Master, which was developed in 1939. There was the anaglyph 3D [2] wave in the 1950s, and as the marketing suggests, the main audience appeal was novelty. [3] Next came, as you say, the VR wave of the 1990s, including predictions of "affordable VR by 1994". [4] We next have this decade's rise and fall of 3D movies, with a related rise and fall of 3D TV.

So far, history suggests that this is just another wave of novelty. 3D pictures did not replace pictures. 3D movies and TV did not replace movies and TV. The evidence is equally strong that many otherwise smart people can combine "cool novelty effect" plus "OMG future" and to end up fooling themselves.

Sure, it could be different this time. But I suspect that 3D will end up, for at least the 6th time, as being about as appealing as Smell-o-Vision. [5] This is in strong contrast to color and sound, which started out being optional and became mandatory both for movies and computers. Wake me up, I say, when we get to showing movies in "Feel Around". [6]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereoscope [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaglyph_3D [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wax_%281953_film%29#/... [4] http://i.imgur.com/j73ipNp.jpg which is from http://www.cgwmuseum.org/galleries/index.php?year=1992&pub=2... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smell-O-Vision [6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjm_zmBoxjw#t=2m20s [7] and dang, when will we get some hypertext here?

Re: I Tried VR and It Was Just OK

#72

Post by bane »

jonstokes wrote: post #43

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…

You might be surprised at how far you can get with a media room with a pair of old $50 computer speakers a used subwoofer and a cheap projector pointed at a bedsheet hanging from the ceiling connected to a $300 laptop. Some variant on this has been my media room for years and a six foot screen (ahem bedsheet) works fine for everybody who likes to come over to see it.

These days you can probably just hook a chromecast up to the projector directly and save $300.

Re: I Tried VR and It Was Just OK

#73

Post by dsugarman »

timr wrote: post #34

LOL. I lived through the first VR hype bubble, and it's pretty remarkable how similar this is to my recollection of VR back then -- the only difference is that at the time, the goofy, uncomfortable headset was tethered to a refrigerator-sized SGI machine at the science museum, and there was no hope of getting it at home. Instead, we got the Lawnmower Man on VHS. It sounds like technology has advanced enough that we h…

I was previously getting my PhD in VR (I dropped out to start a company) and I can't believe the hype around a HMD, like it's a new revolutionary thing. I do own an Oculus as I love VR and I am a proud UMD alum but generalized VR is so far off, immersion is way too difficult to completely generalize. I do think that there has been enough significant improvements from the first VR hype bubble that there could be a serious specialized VR arcade where the application is very well understood and you can build real immersion into the product. For example a fighting robot MOBA where you can control the haptic feedback and the player's surroundings match the virtual world (cockpit is real compounded with stereoscopic screens for windows)

Re: I Tried VR and It Was Just OK

#74

Post by jimbobimbo »

sireat wrote: post #30

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.

>So for architecture Occulus fills a nice niche.

Ditto for plane and car simulators. I'm looking into picking up a headset for playing carsims, but don't think I'll be using it for, say, 3D shooters.

Re: I Tried VR and It Was Just OK

#75

Post by kabouseng »

silverlight wrote: post #39

I'm most excited for VR headsets to replace my desktop monitors. Infinitely sized displays in 360 degrees around me...I think that's where the real future is for these things. And doing that won't require nearly the hardware power that a 3D game does. The main thing holding it back is that the displays in the Oculus are still a little too low-resolution to make text 100% crisp and clear. I fully expect that a couple…

And that would really be getting in the zone while coding, as long as I can keep HN out of that world...

Re: I Tried VR and It Was Just OK

#76

Post by wpietri »

sireat wrote: post #30

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.

The real question for me is if architects end up working in the OR rig or whether it's just a novelty for client demos. As I mention upthread, 3D has a long history as a compelling novelty technology; a real test for me would be whether architects use it every day and the ones who don't have it are demanding it instead of demanding, say, bigger 2D monitors.

Re: I Tried VR and It Was Just OK

#77

Post by bane »

I'm really interested in good VR, but then I start to really think about it:

How long do I really want to play a game with a headset strapped to my face?

I'm going to need better input devices soon. That's more $$$

I have a pretty high-end system right now, capable of playing pretty much any top-end game at full settings at 60FPS, and it doesn't meet the specs facebook/oculus wants, so to use it my purchase-price goes up by 4 figures.

I buy it, and a year later an even betterer headset comes out.

I'm going to need to have a dedicated space for it, I have too many beer bottles and other things on my desk to be blindly moving around with motion controls.

I'm really concerned also about the marketing and messaging coming from facebook/oculus. I really don't want to be part of a facebook branded and owned cyberspace. And the marketing story (we're shipping with an Xbox One controller!) is not what I want to hear from a supposedly 2 billion dollar company.

They've already so much as said they're going to nickle and dime buyers with new controllers later anyway.

Re: I Tried VR and It Was Just OK

#78

Post by fixermark »

coldtea wrote: post #69
austenallred wrote: post #48

It says something that we're writing blog posts about, "This early version of tech didn't absolutely blow my mind" I mean, this is still early-iPod-days of this tech. You could look at it, especially after hearing hype about the iPod, and say something like, "No wireless, less space than a Nomad, lame." http://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ip... Anecdotally, I've found that looking at anything fr…

> I mean, this is still early-iPod-days of this tech. Well, people have been touting VR since the early nineties. When is this "late version" gonna come out?

Now that we have sub-one-dollar accelerometer circuits with enough accuracy and reliability to embed into commercial gaming controllers coupled with the existence of enough processing power to render DOOM-level graphics at the 60FPS necessary to minimize the number of people who get physically ill in the headset, the "late version" is actually very close.

It has always been a hardware challenge, and we are actually likely to be right on the cusp of meeting the challenge this time. It's an exciting time to be alive.

Re: I Tried VR and It Was Just OK

#79

Post by fixermark »

rrss1122 wrote: post #51

Seems contrarian just for the sake of being contrarian. Even the cheap google cardboard, which ticks all his requirements except 4K (and probably will have that in the next year), is mindblowing, both to me and friends and family I've shown it to. I didn't even show them games running on cardboard, just videos shot using Google's special 360 cameras. The technical challenges around VR are not that deep, hard, and fas…

No-one has ever accused Jeff Atwood of writing blog posts for the sake of having a blog post to write. ;) That having been said, his description is solid, even if it's only his take on a space he's not specialized in. He makes some good points (and spends several pages to do it, in classic Atwood style).

Re: I Tried VR and It Was Just OK

#80

Post by gspetr »

jonstokes wrote: post #52
codinghorror wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I totally disagree. I would have taken that crappy media room demo home and (along with another headset for my wife) right then and there, for the simple reason that as crude as it was it totally scratched the itch of "watch TV in a dedicated room in the house with no kid stuff anywhere." 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…

Not sure I'm buying into orders of magnitude of people visiting a "60's cafe in Paris". Just who, for example, is going to design said cafe that few people alive (You'd have to be 65+ years old, and that's being very generous) even remember?

Don't see that use case gaining a traction so massive.

What you described seems to be more of a Mind Machine Interface variety than a VR one.

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