I Tried VR and It Was Just OK • Hacker News Board

Re: I Tried VR and It Was Just OK

#91

Post by shiftpgdn » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 3:58 PM UTC

sayangel wrote: post #60

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.

hey sireat! I'd love to learn more about how your friend's architecture office is using the Oculus and what their experience has been with is so far. 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…

Oh man this is heartbreaking. I've been developing what looks to be an incredibly similar product/workflow to yours, solo, for the last 8 months.

Re: I Tried VR and It Was Just OK

#92

Post by kefka » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 4:04 PM UTC

scld wrote: post #89

DK1 and DK2 are light years behind the newest revision of VR tech. Try both of them back to back and see for yourself. Night and day.

They are both pretty far back. They are also only $350.

I have access to IUPUI's CAVE, as well as other VR equipment. The expensive equipment is really good, but on part with ~$20k and up. And it's not portable. And it requires applications developed for the CAVE system.

I can haul the laptop in a bag and the rift in its box. Fast, good, or cheap.

Rift picked Fast and cheap. Can't say I blame them. It does well for me and my groups.

Re: I Tried VR and It Was Just OK

#93

Post by curiousjorge » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 4:05 PM UTC

I'd say for VR it's definitely an improvement. Resolutions will get better. More power will get cheaper.

I think we realize that to have immersion we absolutely need accessories. Haptic bodysuits and gloves. Simulate tacticle sensations and feedbacks digitally. Firing a shotgun resulting in your arms moving back as if you just fired a shotgun.

Next we can have some sort of stationary hamster ball where you could move about in complete freedom suspended in air. It would rotate to give you an illusion of gravity. The haptic bodysuit would give you the feeling that you are standing on the ground or in a race car or a spaceship.

Why stop there? Nanomachine solution you would drink and allow you to eat food in your VR and taste it.

The possibilities are endless but so are the unique challenges each of these necessary component of VR.

OR there was a way to fire some sort of lucid dream world but controlled by a software. You would know you are dreaming but you would be completely caught up in that VR world generated with the help of your own brain. Everything feels real, but what if people neglect their own bodies, wanting to be in the world as long as possible.

Re: I Tried VR and It Was Just OK

#94

Post by gspetr » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 4:07 PM UTC

kefka wrote: post #11

CosmicShadow wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you aren't a gamer or technology person, it's way more impressive then if you already live in that world. Spending hours on the thing vs a demo is a very different experience as well.

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…

> 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.

Don't think depth perception is going to go away without modifying human eyes and/or the brain, which is a much harder task than VR itself.

I have short-term depth perception issues when I take off glasses.

Re: I Tried VR and It Was Just OK

#95

Post by kamaal » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 4:10 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #70

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…

> Seems contrarian just for the sake of being contrarian. Seems he gave about 2000 words of the concrete reasons he doesn't like it. Heck, he event gave CONCRETE suggestions of things that need improvement. So, no, this is the very opposite of "contrarian just for the sake of being contrarian". > is mindblowing, both to me and friends and family I've shown it to Gimmicks can be mindblowing too. Have you used it for e…

For some one who is not into gaming, the experience(no matter how horrible to the expert gamer) will seem like the first time some one would have seen Television, used a telephone or used a desktop computer. Its a new thing which the ordinary person hasn't used before, and they will be super thrilled to even get a chance to use it.

Heck even the tech crowd was excited about this around 2 years back, how do you expect the ordinary public to not be excited about it?

Yeah, there are problems to solve. And once the overall trend moves towards VR, there will be a good enough incentive to bring down prices and have more focussed engineering towards these problems.

Beyond all that, Gaming looks like a very small area of application for this kind of a technology.

Re: I Tried VR and It Was Just OK

#96

Post by reitoei » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 4:12 PM UTC

golergka wrote: post #84

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…

> we still haven't addressed the bigger problem of coming up with something compelling to do with it For the most of the games that are developed today with first-person view in mind, adding support for VR isn't something that is very hard to add. And these games are already pretty compelling. The only question is convenience. The post mentioned 3d in televisions — but 3d did win in cinemas. I recently wanted to watc…

> but 3d did win in cinemas

lolwut?

Re: I Tried VR and It Was Just OK

#97

Post by prbuckley » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 4:13 PM UTC

This article makes some fair points but the authors opinion is tainted by recency bias. A new technology doesn't need to be as good or better then recent technology it just needs to be different and unique in some way. Gamers and gaming has a really high bar of expectations. I agree that generation 1 of consumer VR won't meet existing AAA game title experiance but it doesnt have to garner mass market appeal. This is like expecting the first mobile phones to be as polished as the iPhone, or early versions of online video to be as good as highdef tvs for mass market appeal. Clearly that wasnt the case, people found value in these early versions of technology even though they were not as good as alternative options because they added some additional element that was unique. For mobile phones if was mobility, for online video it was easy sharing and watch on demand. What will be the key value consumers derive from VR? That remains to be answered but there is something unique and different enough about VR that makes it promising.

Re: I Tried VR and It Was Just OK

#98

Post by pixie_ » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 4:15 PM UTC

DK2 isn't that good - ghosting, no positional tracking, screen door effect, etc..

CV1 really is amazing though. I've tried it. I wonder what the author would think.

Re: I Tried VR and It Was Just OK

#99

Post by hyperion2010 » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 4:15 PM UTC

This article is very much spot on. I think the true value of VR is the ability to provide new ways of playing in virtual spaces, but those ways of playing need to be compelling, they need to have good gameplay, like anything else. The 'gameplay' for watching a movie in VR is going to be absolute shit, because the viewer inherently has zero agency. The experience must be interactive and it must give the player a sense of agency (re: why hands are critical), otherwise the cost of putting on the headset will be too high for most people. Similarly, VR won't replace other experiences that have good gameplay and give players a sense of agency. Alien Isolation is an absolutely amazing game because the level of quality for the writing, pacing, level design, sound design, voice acting, control scheme, gameplay mechanics etc. are all in the 99th percentile for games and more importantly all of those parts complement eachother. Producing something like that is HARD regardless of the medium. For every Alien Isolation there are going to be a pile of shit games that you really don't want to play.

I think most of the VR guys admit that bad games in VR are going to be exceptionally bad, but I haven't heard anyone articulate quite so clearly Jeff's concerns that the experiences will just be boring. Watching Conway's game of life run: boring. Setting up and _playing_ with a fully interactive Conway's game of life: wait is it already 2am?!

Re: I Tried VR and It Was Just OK

#100

Post by kefka » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 4:15 PM UTC

gspetr wrote: post #94

kefka wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Don't think depth perception is going to go away without modifying human eyes and/or the brain, which is a much harder task than VR itself. I have short-term depth perception issues when I take off glasses.

I'm not so sure about that.

A small infrared camera and led mounted near the eye can track the eye. Along with tracking, you can also calculate the depth field by determining the circumference of the retina. This in turn allows for software-defined focus to be built in on applications.

I also see an interesting future for light-depth-field cameras and displays that capture all depths and allow user controlled focus. The question is: can we replay this data format in a single display?