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Google is reportedly shutting down its in-house VR film studio

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Re: Google is reportedly shutting down its in-house VR film studio

#11

Post by glenndebacker »

pmoriarty wrote: post #5

How's the market for VR doing in general? Is it growing or shrinking? Around the time the first Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive, and Microsoft's HoloLens were released some years back seemed to be high water mark of media stories about VR. Since then it seems to be pretty quiet. Is VR dying on the vine?

Personally I see more in Augmented Reality than Virtual Reality, certainly regarding applications.

It's also not that commercial interesting that a big percentage of people gets sick of VR. We stopped demoing because of this. AR seems to have less of those problems from empirical experience. I can use a Hololens for hours without feeling anything while with an oculus rift I get queasy after a couple of minutes.

The only thing that I'm still waiting for is project northstar (http://blog.leapmotion.com/northstar/) so the devices becomes cheaper. The high price seems to hamper the adoption a lot.

Re: Google is reportedly shutting down its in-house VR film studio

#12

Post by xroche »

pmoriarty wrote: post #5

How's the market for VR doing in general? Is it growing or shrinking? Around the time the first Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive, and Microsoft's HoloLens were released some years back seemed to be high water mark of media stories about VR. Since then it seems to be pretty quiet. Is VR dying on the vine?

I have an Oculus (DK2, development version though, so please take my opinion with a grain of salt), and while it is great, there are some show-stoppers:

• Games needs to be reinvented for VR, which basically makes adoption much harder - playing a FPS in VR will get you dizzy very quickly, even for people that are not very motion-sickness sensitive

• Quality is still not good enough, you can feel the pixels, and it breaks immersion - 4K screens, or even 8K screens, are probably the minimum, which means that we need also graphic cards that can deliver two 3D scenes combined at 4K or 8K, and these cards aren't there yet

• Plugging/handling all the messy cables is a pain

• And of course the price, but I don't think this is the biggest issue here

Re: Google is reportedly shutting down its in-house VR film studio

#13

Post by godzillabrennus »

amelius wrote: post #10
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There just hasn't been a big killer app for VR, and it's pretty expensive to get into it for any serious usage. Beat Saber [0] appears to be among the most popular games, but I don't think many people are playing regularly. Anecdotal, among my friends, people that own VR rigs don't use them very frequently either. The big problem is that even doing something super simple takes a fair amount of effort. Even watching a…

Watching a baseball/soccer/basketball game virtually from the stadium should be a pretty big market (?)

Who wants regularly wear headgear to enjoy a sports game?

I can see it being a novelty but not a normal situation.

Re: Google is reportedly shutting down its in-house VR film studio

#14

Post by throwaway66666 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #5

How's the market for VR doing in general? Is it growing or shrinking? Around the time the first Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive, and Microsoft's HoloLens were released some years back seemed to be high water mark of media stories about VR. Since then it seems to be pretty quiet. Is VR dying on the vine?

I have spent quite sometime with Vive, Rift and PSVR. (rift, psvr at home, vive at my office)

PSVR is unironically the hope for VR right now, even though it has by far the lowest quality.

It has some very good games (Astrobot, Wipeout, RE7, Ace Combat 7, Moss, Beat Saber). It's cheap, easy to set up (aimed towards couch VR instead of room scale), cool helmet design, and the fact that the headset works as a regular monitor for non-vr games and one person can be watching TV while the other person gaming, is genius.

Compared to let's say Oculus where you need, 4 usb ports (3x usb 3.0), cables everywhere, space, a ~$1200 pc/headset combo...

I do believe in VR though and am excited for what the future holds.

Re: Google is reportedly shutting down its in-house VR film studio

#16

Post by jamesrcole »

pmoriarty wrote: post #5

How's the market for VR doing in general? Is it growing or shrinking? Around the time the first Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive, and Microsoft's HoloLens were released some years back seemed to be high water mark of media stories about VR. Since then it seems to be pretty quiet. Is VR dying on the vine?

> How's the market for VR doing in general? Is it growing or shrinking? ... Is VR dying on the vine?

VR is a fairly radically different technology and in the scheme of things it's still in its infancy. Given that, whether it's currently growing or shrinking probably isn't very meaningful, as that doesn't really say anything about VR's longer-term prospects.

Re: Google is reportedly shutting down its in-house VR film studio

#17

Post by sprash »

onion2k wrote: post #6

This is Google saying VR as a medium for passive consumption is dead, or at least the market isn't ready yet. There's could still be plenty of potential for interactive media like games though.

Watching movies clearly only makes sense in a social context and is therefore predictably unsuitable for VR.

However the "interactive media" market is also way overhyped, maybe similar to 3D-TVs. When the initial excitement of the user for VR wears of it feels more like a gimmick rather than an immersive experience. I know plenty of gamers who have rarely used VR goggles stuffed away in some cupboard while going back to their plain old 1080p monitor. VR will stay a small niche even in the context of gaming.

Re: Google is reportedly shutting down its in-house VR film studio

#18

Post by pjc50 »

amelius wrote: post #10
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There just hasn't been a big killer app for VR, and it's pretty expensive to get into it for any serious usage. Beat Saber [0] appears to be among the most popular games, but I don't think many people are playing regularly. Anecdotal, among my friends, people that own VR rigs don't use them very frequently either. The big problem is that even doing something super simple takes a fair amount of effort. Even watching a…

Watching a baseball/soccer/basketball game virtually from the stadium should be a pretty big market (?)

This misses all the physicality of being there while taking away the benefits of varying camera positions chosen for you by the TV coverage.

If someone could manage the point cloud reconstruction techniques that would let you watch from positions in the middle of the game while there is no camera, they'd be on to something.

Oh, and it's a bad business model - the sports IP owner would want almost all the money.

Re: Google is reportedly shutting down its in-house VR film studio

#19

Post by pjc50 »

tallanvor wrote: post #9
pmoriarty wrote: post #5

How's the market for VR doing in general? Is it growing or shrinking? Around the time the first Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive, and Microsoft's HoloLens were released some years back seemed to be high water mark of media stories about VR. Since then it seems to be pretty quiet. Is VR dying on the vine?

It seems that with VR the technology isn't really there yet, especially at the price needed for mass adoption. It's not clear to me that any company is really ready to put in more money to move it forward right now. But at the speed things are moving, it wouldn't surprise me to see another push in 2-5 years. AR is the more interesting space right now. On the consumer side, Pokemon, Ingress, and the new Harry Potter g…

These are a very different sort of map-based AR, not a view-based one.
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