How to Get into VR
blog.ycombinator.com
How to Get into VR
1–10 of 221 posts
Re: How to Get into VR
#2do I need a PC to be able to get into it?
Re: How to Get into VR
#3I've only seen the talk in person and I've not been able to find a resource online that enumerates exactly what he means, but Dr. Ken Perlin gives an excellent talk (with live demo) about how AR could potentially change the human communication completely.
The gist of it is: assuming ubiquitous access to an AR system that provides a completely shared experience, people will naturally start using that shared experience as a communication tool. We will draw what we mean when words become difficult. We will riff on those ideas in a real-time simulation. And with the mind-set or combination of services, it may as well be, or could actually become, a physical reality.
If you've seen any of his more recent, HTML5-based demos (he has completely switched off of Java) involving visually-oriented, live-programmable environments with physics baked-in, it's almost completely targeted at this dream of communication. He has said he's not in it for graphics or VR/AR anymore, it's the communication aspect he's after.
Re: How to Get into VR
#4do I need a PC to be able to get into it?
Not necessarily. As always, the answer is "it depends".
If you're looking to get into high-end, room-scale VR with hand-tracked controllers and high-fidelity graphics, then yes. You need a Windows 10 PC with as much RAM, CPU, and GPU as you can muster. Plan on spending at least USD 2000 on a custom-built PC.
If you're looking to get into smartphone-based AR, you can use practically anything to write the code, and there are plenty of tools to be able to build completely cross-platform apps. But you will want a flagship phone, whether that's the latest iPhone or one of the Androids with a powerful CPU and GPU. AR is very CPU intensive. While there have been demonstrations of SLAM on GPUs, all of the implementations I'm aware of are doing it on the CPU.
Where should you start? Well, without hand-tracking of some kind, I don't really consider it VR. Google Cardboard, Google Daydream, Samsung Gear VR, and Oculus Rift without the Touch controllers are all glorified 2D interfaces. They don't provide anything actually new in terms of being able to interact with the application.
Smartphone-based AR apps will probably reach a wider audience sooner than VR. But if Microsoft's approach to headsets and Windows Holographic pays off, I think that is not a perpetual state of affairs. Ideally, this gets down to the size of a pair of sunglasses (which is very nearly the case already). At that point, smartphone-based AR is going to be a quaint novelty.
Re: How to Get into VR
#5do I need a PC to be able to get into it?
At the moment, if you want the real VR with positional 6 DOF tracking, yes.
Re: How to Get into VR
#6First they should ask if you want to get into VR. I mean, there is a certain crisis, as the hype did not live up and obvious problems (sickness) remained obvious.
Re: How to Get into VR
#7do I need a PC to be able to get into it?
Check out the Samsung Gear VR and Google Daydream if you have a compatible smartphone. If you don't you can use Google Cardboard (I believe even with iOS).
From a development standpoint the main difference between mobile headsets and PC headsets is that mobile VR doesn't track the physical position of your head or hands. However you can still learn a ton and make a lot of cool things with them.
Re: How to Get into VR
#8> The development of VR has been surprisingly tied to science fiction. Authors in the field have envisioned the futures that engineers set out to build
Incidentally, the high romanticism of VR one of the reasons why I am highly skeptical of the industry. The article argues "VR will also enable immersive concerts, reinvented museums, and live, court-side sporting events", but what is it doing now outside of games, which have been hit-or-miss? (the Samsung Gear VR commercials make VR look ridiculous, IMO)
AI is a similarly romantic industry, but the difference is that there are many practical, non-gimmicky applications of AI now and already implemented on your phones/PCs.
Re: How to Get into VR
#9Using VR makes me sick...
Re: How to Get into VR
#10First they should ask if you want to get into VR. I mean, there is a certain crisis, as the hype did not live up and obvious problems (sickness) remained obvious.
As a professional VR developer I'm unaware of this crisis. There's also about as many headsets sold as people thought there would be (and way more GearVR's than expected). I haven't gotten sick from a VR experience (that I wasn't half-way through building) in over a year. The headsets are good enough that they don't make you sick by default (like they used to) and to make somebody sick you have to go against best design practises.