Fans of Second Life Hope to Bring VR Back to the Classroom

The biggest issue for VR is similar to that of Second Life: outside of gaming, it needs to seamlessly augment reality.

If the pervasive influence of social media in our times has taught us anything, it is that a platform that does interface with our everyday existence will never be more than a cool tech demo.

Off the top of my head, for success VR needs to provide:

  * Virtual Conferences

  * Remote Home Sale Walk-throughs

  * Credit for remote class attendence. 

  * Remotely Shared Sports Viewing with Friends

Until the VR experience can supplant some of the activities above, I doubt it will take off.

Just because something is in 3D doesn't make it automatically better -- often times it's worse as you now have artificial constraints that you didn't have before. For example, it's far easier to scroll through Instagram with your fingers (a UI win) and have every photo at 100% scale than to glide through a 3d representation where much more work has to be done. Certainly you wouldn't want the world to scroll you in VR -- you'd throw up.

This was true before with SL, and it'll be true with VR in the future. It'll be great for certain kinds of games, therapy, housing walk throughs, and other contexts for which a synthetic 3D world is useful, but it won't be the panacea that replaces all other forms of UI. Immersion also has a cost -- it's very intense and you don't want it for hours and hours and hours. Just like you'd never want to be on a rollercoaster for 8h, VR for 8h will also be too much (unless the world itself is not an intense game, you don't have a screen 2" from your eyeballs, etc).

>> Can it mimic all the qualities of a good hike -- visuals, body movement, sounds?

I've got some VR hiking goggles to sell you. They are cheap, lightweight and totally wireless, but only work in the woods. They were featured on a recent SouthPark episode.

Too many discussions focus on VR being a drop-in replacement for reality. Nobody should expect them to mimic reality any more than they expect computer screens to mimic sunlight. I don't much care if VR helms don't allow me to jog up Everest. I just want to be free to look around as if I were standing on the top.

> Negroponte's failure with the OLPC project comes to mind. A mix of cheap netbooks, tablets, and phones made it quickly irrelevant.

To be fair to OLPC, it just predated those other devices. It [the hardware] was developed precisely because cheap laptops didn't yet exist, and then the form and market came into existence and obsoleted a large part of the project's efforts (the physical hardware development, not its educational goals).

Not really, but the time they were actually shipping the olpc in non-trivial deployments, the netbook revolution was already here. Intel also had the education aimed Classmate netbook as well. 2007 article on the two competing platforms:

http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/03/acomparison-of-...

>nd then the form and market came into existence and obsoleted a large part of the project's efforts

It was also a terrible, terrible product. The crappy screen, low ram, low performance, lack of software, etc. When I used one I considered it something for toddlers or preschoolers. The Classmate by comparison is something I could use right now if I had to and still be mildly productive with.

The market moves fast and OLPC wasn't ready for it. They built their house on not just last gen technology but last junky gen technology (milquetoast AMD designs, shovelware linux distro, etc). They got leapfrogged trivially. The fact that they couldn't see that is inexcusable. Moores law reigned supreme back then.

While the OLPC was ambitious, it pretty much is the poster boy for incompetent central planning by out of touch technocrats who thought they were smarter than the market, educators, and policy makers.