For those out of the loop: Google has gradually shut down and in some cases, open sourced their VR projects (Daydream, Mirage, VR180, Seurat, etc) over the last 6-12 months to be more focused on their mobile AR projects (ARCore, Google Streetview AR, Lens, etc). A sad day for VR.
I mean not a sad day for VR. Google is just being Google and thinking that XR is a tech problem. It’s not. The XR gap is in content, not developers, and not tech. Any VR play should be throwing money at creatives, not devs or APIs or frameworks.
Google Open-Sources Cardboard
51–60 of 182 posts
Re: Google Open-Sources Cardboard
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean not a sad day for VR. Google is just being Google and thinking that XR is a tech problem. It’s not. The XR gap is in content, not developers, and not tech. Any VR play should be throwing money at creatives, not devs or APIs or frameworks.
I bought an Oculus Rift devkit and later the full version and loved it, but I actually have doubts about it only being a content problem. VR has some inherent problems (lack of any outside visibility, motion sickness, space restrictions) that are hard to solve and keep many people away from it. For me it only really worked in racing games where i was not moving at all and even then it is quite exhausting.
As for motion sickness; with modern headsets that's generally only a problem for games which move the "camera" in ways which don't match your movement in the real world. (Such as racing games.) There's plenty of content available these days which doesn't have that problem.
Space restrictions I agree are an issue. There are a lot of games which only really need standing room to work well, but even then it can be hard to find enough space close to your PC (since the area you're standing in needs to be completely free of obstacles you could hit with your hands). I think standalone VR partially solves this problem though by increasing the number of areas you can set up in. With Quest, for example, the area you're playing in doesn't have to be near your PC; that makes it way easier to find a space that's big enough.
Re: Google Open-Sources Cardboard
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean not a sad day for VR. Google is just being Google and thinking that XR is a tech problem. It’s not. The XR gap is in content, not developers, and not tech. Any VR play should be throwing money at creatives, not devs or APIs or frameworks.
I bought an Oculus Rift devkit and later the full version and loved it, but I actually have doubts about it only being a content problem. VR has some inherent problems (lack of any outside visibility, motion sickness, space restrictions) that are hard to solve and keep many people away from it. For me it only really worked in racing games where i was not moving at all and even then it is quite exhausting.
The lack of any outside visibility is a huge problem for families. It is anti-social. Small kids can't be near you while you are using VR. Pets can't really be near you.
It's very difficult to share your experience with other people. VR streamers aren't very popular on Twitch. They probably have issues interacting with their audience since they can't easily see Twitch chat I would think.
I also question the accessibility of VR. At what severity of physical impairment does VR become unusable?
There are just so many problems with VR as a mass-consumer product that don't have anything to do with technology.
AR doesn't have many of these problems, because you can still see other people.
Google's direction makes sense.
Re: Google Open-Sources Cardboard
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't this exactly what cardboard/daydream does (daydream has a controller; cardboard doesn't, but I think a lot of VR apps will honor a bluetooth controller anyway)
Afaik they only support specific phone models—understandable due to the fixed dimensions of the headset. Not so understandable is why I don't see apps that support any phone as long as I can build a headset for it.
So while "Cardboard" can "work" on most phones, it's a pretty terrible experience, once you get past the awe factor of seeing stereoscopic visuals with head tracking. Us developers have largely stopped making anything with basic "Cardboard" support, for fear of giving people a bad first impression of VR.
As for Daydream, a lot of the point of the Daydream system was to get around those issues I mentioned. First, it required phones to meet a certain hardware profile to before they were allowed to market themselves as "Daydream Compatible". Second, it included changes to the operating system to provide much lower latency in input tracking and change display settings to reduce pixel persistence.
Re: Google Open-Sources Cardboard
#55I spent $69 on a Daydream headset a month or so ago just to play with it, only to find out it didn't work with my phone. I kept it just in case. Then Google cancelled it. It'd be nice if they opened up that code as well...
Re: Google Open-Sources Cardboard
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I bought an Oculus Rift devkit and later the full version and loved it, but I actually have doubts about it only being a content problem. VR has some inherent problems (lack of any outside visibility, motion sickness, space restrictions) that are hard to solve and keep many people away from it. For me it only really worked in racing games where i was not moving at all and even then it is quite exhausting.
I'm not so sure. Lack of outside visibility seems more like a feature to me than a problem with the medium; the whole point of VR is to remove you from the real world and place you in a virtual one. As for motion sickness; with modern headsets that's generally only a problem for games which move the "camera" in ways which don't match your movement in the real world. (Such as racing games.) There's plenty of content a…
Who does this work for? It doesn't for people with spouses and children. I can't be removed from the real world when my child wants my attention. How many hours of game play do you think the average family person might have available to them where they can just remove themselves from the real world?
Given all of VR's problems, the people who will play VR games seriously enough to spend money on AAA VR games will always be a smaller subset of the overall gaming population. It's never going to be bigger than what exists already. All these billions dumped into VR as the next big thing seem to miss that the VR market is limited by the problems the parent comment mentioned.
Re: Google Open-Sources Cardboard
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Afaik they only support specific phone models—understandable due to the fixed dimensions of the headset. Not so understandable is why I don't see apps that support any phone as long as I can build a headset for it.
Largely, it comes down to Android being a bad OS for input latency (indeed, Oculus and Samsung had to perform what John Carmack described as "deep hacks" into the Android kernel to get it to a reasonable state with Gear VR), most phones not having a high-enough quality IMU for tracking head motion, and most phones not having a low persistence display (high persistence causes a smearing effect in the visual). So while…
Re: Google Open-Sources Cardboard
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean not a sad day for VR. Google is just being Google and thinking that XR is a tech problem. It’s not. The XR gap is in content, not developers, and not tech. Any VR play should be throwing money at creatives, not devs or APIs or frameworks.
I bought an Oculus Rift devkit and later the full version and loved it, but I actually have doubts about it only being a content problem. VR has some inherent problems (lack of any outside visibility, motion sickness, space restrictions) that are hard to solve and keep many people away from it. For me it only really worked in racing games where i was not moving at all and even then it is quite exhausting.
Re: Google Open-Sources Cardboard
#59For those out of the loop: Google has gradually shut down and in some cases, open sourced their VR projects (Daydream, Mirage, VR180, Seurat, etc) over the last 6-12 months to be more focused on their mobile AR projects (ARCore, Google Streetview AR, Lens, etc). A sad day for VR.
It seems like Apple and Microsoft really nailed with focusing on AR instead of VR.
First of all, Apple's ARKit (and by extension, Google's ARCore) is not a good experience. It has some "gee whiz" factor to it, and then once you get over it, you realize that there really aren't very many things you can do with it that you can't do better with a smartphone or a VR headset.
Case in point: I spent a lot of time at my previous employer working on self-service/guided-repair AR apps for the iPad Pro. It's a ridiculously bad concept (though my previous employer is kind of known for chasing ridiculously bad concepts). 1) Your hands are occupied with the tablet, so you're not actually able to perform the repair tasks without putting the tablet down, thus largely negating the usefulness of the overlaid 3D animations we created, and 2) who is going to take a $1000 Apple product with them out to a repair job?
We also spent a lot of time making large posters into 2D animations for conference expos. You could have had the same, exact experience for 1% of the cost if you just bought gigantic TVs and turned them to portrait view. I mean, I didn't complain about getting the money, per se, but it just was not good stewardship for our clients to even propose that contract from the sales team.
There are distance measuring apps that presume the tracking is accurate and precise, which it is not. For a very long time, ARKit had very little concept of how far away any given surface was. Instead, it was good about scaling objects so that visually they did not appear to be moving closer to you as the tracking point jittered wildly on the Z-Axis. At best, it's better than walking off steps to get rough measurements of a space, but anything more than that and you're going to have an easier, faster, more reliable time with a $10 retractable tape measure.
Second, the HoloLens is an amazing device, but it's nowhere near ready for any mainstream use. I think it does have a good use case in industrial repair scenarios (which was originally how we got the iPad work, I had built an app for HoloLens that did the same thing, but then the suits got involved and wanted to push our Apple partnership). There are specific features of the HoloLens that make this work, and there are specific features of the job that make the HoloLens work. Specifically, HoloLens' built-in, completely free voice recognition is a huge boon for being able to build systems that you can use while your hands are occupied with the job. Second, having physical objects (the machine you're trying to repair) on which to hang virtual graphics causes a huge improvement in believability of the visual and usability of the application (primarily related to issues of object permanence being hindered by the limited field of view).
That last point wouldn't be so bad if the HoloLens were visually and performance-wise up to spec with much, much cheaper VR headsets in terms of grpahics and visual fidelity. But so long as you're paying literally 10x as much for half to a quarter as good of visuals (not to mention the input systems being otherwise mismatched), you have a lot of ground to catch up on to make an AR-only experience as valuable and meaningful to a user as you could a VR experience.
AR will continue to be a lackluster consumer user experience for a long time. Most developers making apps for these devices don't understand how to make a real AR app. In AR, the user supplies the context to the developer. In VR, the developer supplies the context to the user. This fundamental dichotomy makes good, meaningful AR application design significantly harder than VR design. In my own evaluation, easily 80% of the extant software in the HoloLens and Magic Leap stores take no cues from the user's immediate vicinity, in their context, to which they are tying their experience. In essence, they are just crappy VR experiences.
In comparison: VR is cheap, it works, it is relatively easy to design for, and there are already a ton of great apps available for it.
Re: Google Open-Sources Cardboard
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not so sure. Lack of outside visibility seems more like a feature to me than a problem with the medium; the whole point of VR is to remove you from the real world and place you in a virtual one. As for motion sickness; with modern headsets that's generally only a problem for games which move the "camera" in ways which don't match your movement in the real world. (Such as racing games.) There's plenty of content a…
> the whole point of VR is to remove you from the real world Who does this work for? It doesn't for people with spouses and children. I can't be removed from the real world when my child wants my attention. How many hours of game play do you think the average family person might have available to them where they can just remove themselves from the real world? Given all of VR's problems, the people who will play VR ga…