Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 135 posts

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

#31

Post by snaky »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #7
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?

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…

> There just hasn't been a big killer app for VR

Porn?

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

#32

Post by andybak »

xroche wrote: post #12
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 br…

I actually disagree in several areas.

1. It's surprising how well flat screen games work in VR with minimal changes. 3rd person RTS, retro top-down shooters, casual puzzle games. I personally would love to see more "low-effort" ports to VR of existing content as just adding stereoscopy, 6DOF and 360 to a game can make it visually stunning.

2. I wouldn't turn my nose up at more resolution but even first gen Vive and Rift and more than enough to make me happy. You see past the pixels fairly quickly. I've demoed VR to over a hundred people and very few comment on the resolution (I'd prefer more FOV than more pixels personally)

3. Cable management varies from the annoying (Rift with 3 cameras) to a non-problem (plugging in a Windows MR headset is basically just 1 USB and a HDMI)

4. You can grab an Acer WMR for close to $200. The GPU cost is still a burden but we're on the 3rd gen of VR capable cards now so a 1060 or a 970 is now entry level for PC gamers.

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

#33

Post by andybak »

pjc50 wrote: post #19
tallanvor wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep. Lumping Pokemon and the Hololens into the same product category is a bit of a stretch. I can't see much in common other than buzzword sharing.

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

#34

Post by michaelt »

melling wrote: post #25
glenndebacker wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Doesn’t everyone see more in AR, at least in the near term. Even conservative Apple is was working on AR. The ability to augment the real world has lots of useful benefits.

A bet on regular VR is conservative in the sense that there are existing games, game engines, game fans and game companies. All of them used to 3D and fancy graphics cards and spending money.

Given the choice between spending $X on porting Skyrim to VR, and spending $X on an all-new AR game, and spending $X on trying to find an unmet industrial need AR can fulfil, I know which I think is the safer bet!

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

#35

Post by usrusr »

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.

Even if VR was alive beyond all expectations, why would Google have an in-house studio? It just does not seem to be a good fit long term, no matter how you twist it. I can see how Google might want to have some content creation in house to kickstart platform/technology projects, but it would not be intended as a permanent institution no matter the outcome.

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

#36

Post by madeofpalk »

andybak wrote: post #32
xroche wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 br…

I actually disagree in several areas. 1. It's surprising how well flat screen games work in VR with minimal changes. 3rd person RTS, retro top-down shooters, casual puzzle games. I personally would love to see more "low-effort" ports to VR of existing content as just adding stereoscopy, 6DOF and 360 to a game can make it visually stunning. 2. I wouldn't turn my nose up at more resolution but even first gen Vive and R…

> 3rd person RTS, retro top-down shooters, casual puzzle games

What does that get us then? Just a worse version of the games we already have?

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

#37

Post by baud147258 »

andybak wrote: post #32
xroche wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 br…

I actually disagree in several areas. 1. It's surprising how well flat screen games work in VR with minimal changes. 3rd person RTS, retro top-down shooters, casual puzzle games. I personally would love to see more "low-effort" ports to VR of existing content as just adding stereoscopy, 6DOF and 360 to a game can make it visually stunning. 2. I wouldn't turn my nose up at more resolution but even first gen Vive and R…

Honestly, I'd envisage buying a VR device if I could play games like XCOM or Supreme Commander. I'm not really interested in the games currently offered

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

#38

Post by andybak »

paule89 wrote: post #20

VR is in its infancy for over 30 years now. It is just not really good.

> It is just not really good.

I suspect you having been shown the right content. I could reel of a long list of amazing work being done in VR. Google Earth in VR is one of the most astonishing things I've tried in the last decade. Narrative works like Dispatch and Manifest 99 show the potential of VR as a storytelling medium. Tilt Brush, Gravity Sketch are already genuinely useful creative tools...

Oh - and Beat Saber. :-)

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

#39

Post by andybak »

madeofpalk wrote: post #36
andybak wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually disagree in several areas. 1. It's surprising how well flat screen games work in VR with minimal changes. 3rd person RTS, retro top-down shooters, casual puzzle games. I personally would love to see more "low-effort" ports to VR of existing content as just adding stereoscopy, 6DOF and 360 to a game can make it visually stunning. 2. I wouldn't turn my nose up at more resolution but even first gen Vive and R…

> 3rd person RTS, retro top-down shooters, casual puzzle games What does that get us then? Just a worse version of the games we already have?

I don't understand how your comment relates to what I was saying. Could you please elaborate?

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

#40

Post by Theodores »

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 just needs a generational reboot.

In the late 1990's I had seen the Virtuality VR headset on various Orbital album covers, when I got to have a go with the headset I was quite taken by it and didn't even notice that the '3D' wasn't ever stereo. At around the same time I saw Virtual I/O's iglasses and thought the experience was compelling. Had it not been a trade show I would have bought them there and then.

I have a feeling that some person at Facebook had a similar moment of 'oh yes this must be the future' as what I had. They just had more money than me and bought the company instead of hoping to buy just the headset.

Around the time this happened I was saying 'we have been here before' and everyone was saying 'this time it will be different!'.

It wasn't different, there were just more pixels.

So we will see what happens next time around when the next generation comes along and gets wowed by the VR of the day.

Incidentally some of the use cases of the Virtual IO iglasses included being able to watch TV soaps whilst doing the washing up. People got dishwashing machines and Netflix instead of standing at the sink watching broadcast TV to occasionally look down at the draining board.

Rinse and repeat.

Post reply on HN