It's exciting to me that there are still this many naysayers, even here on HN. That suggests there's still time to enter the field before the inflection point hits.
How to Get into VR
21–30 of 221 posts
Re: How to Get into VR
#22do 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 the…
2000 USD is too high for the cost of a VR PC. I built a PC in fall 2016 that was more powerful than what was required for VR and it cost me around $1200. Additionally there are companies advertising "VR Ready PCs" that come with an Oculus headset for around USD 1,000. See this article: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/01/dont-look-now-but-ocu...
Re: How to Get into VR
#23> 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, whi…
> 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? It's literally doing all of the stuff you mentioned, if you look for it. The blocker is that most people don't have a headset to experience it. The same thing could be (and was) said about the early internet.
The CEO of unity believes that AR/VR will be bigger than the internet and develop in much the same way [1].
Obviously he is biased but still pretty big statement from a CEO of the most popular game engine.
Re: How to Get into VR
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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? It's literally doing all of the stuff you mentioned, if you look for it. The blocker is that most people don't have a headset to experience it. The same thing could be (and was) said about the early internet.
With the important difference that getting on the early Internet only required a telephone line, which everybody already had, and a modem, an inexpensive piece of hardware you did not have to physically strap onto your face.
No it also required a computer, which a lot of people did not have back in the mid-90s, and not everyone was prepared to shell out the money to get one (it was certainly not "inexpensive" if you were buying one for the sole purpose of getting online).
My source on this? I worked at one of the first consumer ISPs in Canada, and we regularly had people coming in to sign up because they heard about "this Internet thing" but did not have a computer.
Most people thought we provided one with the service, and some people just didn't understand that you accessed the Internet through a computer.
Re: How to Get into VR
#25> 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, whi…
immersive concerts - TheWaveVR [0]
reinvented museums - TiltBrush [1]
court-side sporting events - NextVR [2]
Not to mention architecture [3], communication [4], collaboration [5], medicine [6], 3d modeling [7], game development [8], film [9] and the myriad of other industries I'm forgetting. Also if you haven't tried any of the latest games on Oculus Rift or Vive you're really missing out. They've gotten incredible since the consumer launch last year.
[0] http://thewavevr.com/ [1] https://tiltbrush.com/sketches [2] http://nextvr.com [3] http://insitevr.com/ [4] https://web.facebook.com/spaces [5] http://bigscreenvr.com/ [6] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601911/better-than-opioid... [7] https://www.oculus.com/medium/ [8] https://blogs.unity3d.com/2016/12/15/editorvr-experimental-b... [9] https://www.oculus.com/story-studio/films/henry/
*Disclaimer: I work or have worked for a few of these co's.
Re: How to Get into VR
#26Re: How to Get into VR
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 the…
2000 USD is too high for the cost of a VR PC. I built a PC in fall 2016 that was more powerful than what was required for VR and it cost me around $1200. Additionally there are companies advertising "VR Ready PCs" that come with an Oculus headset for around USD 1,000. See this article: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/01/dont-look-now-but-ocu...
Well lah dee freaking dah, dude. I'm just talking about rough ballparks.
Re: How to Get into VR
#28It's exciting to me that there are still this many naysayers, even here on HN. That suggests there's still time to enter the field before the inflection point hits.
The everyday discourse on HN is dominated by naysaying. Vision doesn't stand a chance here.
Re: How to Get into VR
#29> 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, whi…
> but what is it doing now outside of games
Clearly VR is still in very early stages of its development, so I don't see how what's being done right now provides any valuable insight into its potential.
> the high romanticism of VR one of the reasons why I am highly skeptical of the industry.
Whether that romanticism exists or not doesn't change the technology or what can be done with it, so I don't see why that's a reason to be skeptical of it.
Re: How to Get into VR
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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? It's literally doing all of the stuff you mentioned, if you look for it. The blocker is that most people don't have a headset to experience it. The same thing could be (and was) said about the early internet.
With the important difference that getting on the early Internet only required a telephone line, which everybody already had, and a modem, an inexpensive piece of hardware you did not have to physically strap onto your face.
It also required ridiculous metered long distance fees, forced you to lock up the family telephone line, and buying and installing a modem was much harder without the help of the internet.
I would advance the hypothesis that the prospect of the internet back then seemed much worse compared to dropping a few hundred to have Vive hardware shipped to your door and plugging it in. But the people who built the internet saw what it could be, not the garbage that it was.
And we're still in the beta stages; this stuff only gets better with time.