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How to Get into VR

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: How to Get into VR

#51

Post by blhack »

minimaxir wrote: post #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, whi…

This stuff takes time.

I know of at least one music venue that is currently being built with VR attendance as a major goal.

For concerts and sporting events, you need the right cameras, video pipeline, and bandwidth. One potential camera is here: https://www.orah.co/

But how many music venues were built with the bandwidth requirements of high-resolution 360 streaming video in mind? My guess is almost none. The bandwidth to support things like that is an industry in itself.

As far as after-the-fact concert attendance, I know that at least Red Bull had a major presence at Bonnaroo (a major music festival with an attendance of around 70,000) last summer, and they were shooting concerts with 360 cameras with the intent of sharing them online.

(According to this article, they may have actually been live streaming, but I'm not sure: https://www.axs.com/bonnaroo-2016-to-be-livestreamed-on-red-... I know first hand that they were there shooting stuff on gopro rigs, though, which requires post processing, so probably wouldn't have been live)

Re: How to Get into VR

#52

Post by skizm »

Animats wrote: post #40

Somebody at YC likes "Ready Player One", which is a stupid book. (Essential skill for taking over a big company: ability to play a perfect game of PacMan.) "Snow Crash" was ahead of its time. Yet the plot of Snow Crash would play out the same if everybody simply had modern phones. Where's the killer app for VR? VR headsets have been around for years. The current generation of technology works adequately. Yet other th…

You know what's funny? I actually think Ready Player One nailed the only use case that might be a game changer for VR: remote schools. You can just make all learning materials virtual. VR school means no physical real estate, buses, cafeterias, bullying, janitors, you can cut like 90% of support staff, the list goes on. Also if you divide people by location (like we do now) you can still coordinate field trips and/or social events that I'm sure parents and nay-sayers would claim are lost with virtual schools.

Honestly I think if we had the right software we could do remote schools effectively right now. The largest barriers are going to be (as always) legislation, bureaucracy, and cultural. I mean companies still balk at remote workers, I don't see governments jumping at remote teachers and students any time soon unfortunately.

Re: How to Get into VR

#53

Post by kettlecorn »

moron4hire wrote: post #27
kettlecorn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You used the language "at least" implying that you had a fair amount of certainty that that's the minimum cost of a VR PC. Additionally you were off by at least a factor of 2, which is outside a rough ballpark. While it might seem picky the amount of people who would decide to commit 2k to VR is far lower than those who would commit 1k, so in this case it is important to be accurate.

Re: How to Get into VR

#55

Post by haydenlee »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #48
haydenlee wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've found the gaming experiences pretty mediocre. It's $900 + big clunky thing on your head vs $500 for a really nice 4k monitor. Something like Onward is pretty special for its realism, but its not a better game than Rainbow Six was 20 years ago. There are some other fun games but the novelty wears off quickly. It's like a really expensive ($1300 setup) Wii. The current experiences aren't worth the money.

Going back to 2D games like CS:Go after playing Onward is such a let-down personally. I'd choose Onward over them any day of the week. The adrenaline you get when bullets are actually flying over your head continues to blow me away.

To each their own.

Re: How to Get into VR

#56

Post by centrinoblue »

Does anyone have a good resource covering Headset Hardware reviews and specs?

I researched this recently looking for an HDMI compatible AR headset to try command line coding with but it was tough to find concise feature/spec/price comparisons.

Sign of the times I guess.

Re: How to Get into VR

#57

Post by omg_ketchup »

smacktoward wrote: post #34
haydenlee wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 des…

I'm not a VR developer, but from an outside perspective it actually looks like there are a few different crises. 1) Developers seem to be interested in heavyweight VR systems like Vive and Rift, while users (based on sales figures, anyway) seem to be interested in inexpensive, cordless systems like GearVR and Cardboard. Which leads to the awkward situation where all the innovative software is coming out for hardware…

What's possible on a high-end rig today will be possible on on a phone within 2 years.

Re: How to Get into VR

#58

Post by Para2016 »

minimaxir wrote: post #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, whi…

I think it might be interesting to have VR use in the military. For example, small unmanned recon drones fly/move through an area, get a very detailed virtual environment, and then mission participants get a walk-through beforehand.

Re: How to Get into VR

#59

Post by [deleted] »

Animats wrote: post #40

Somebody at YC likes "Ready Player One", which is a stupid book. (Essential skill for taking over a big company: ability to play a perfect game of PacMan.) "Snow Crash" was ahead of its time. Yet the plot of Snow Crash would play out the same if everybody simply had modern phones. Where's the killer app for VR? VR headsets have been around for years. The current generation of technology works adequately. Yet other th…

[deleted]

Re: How to Get into VR

#60

Post by mattnewport »

strictnein wrote: post #42
mattnewport wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have paying customers for our VR surgical training - ossovr.com - I left the games industry in 2014 to work on non games VR applications because I believed (and still believe) that commercial applications of VR will be more profitable in the near term than games. Architecture is another field that is seeing rapid adoption of VR as a real business tool and not just a gimmick.

Interesting, I pitched VR training as part of a hackathon at [my very large employer] who offers platforms for employee training and onboarding. One of the studies I cited during my presentation was on VR surgical training [0], showing that it decreased surgeon error. I lost to a multiuser wiki document editor (think Google Docs, but less exciting). Because that's a huge market for a multi billion dollar company. No,…

Cool, we're in discussions with a major medical school to run a study to compare performance after training with one of our modules vs traditional training materials.

Even outside of studies that specifically look at VR there is a lot of research into general learning, training and education that tends to support the hypothesis that VR will be a powerful tool for this type of application.

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