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

When will virtual reality take off? The $100 bet

glinden.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 418 posts

Re: When will virtual reality take off? The $100 bet

#81

Post by _iyig »

Having owned every Oculus headset since the Kickstarter, I think the Quest is the first truly consumer-ready VR headset. At $300 it’s competitively priced against gaming consoles, without requiring a gaming PC or separate tracking sensors. It has a healthy library of games, 6DOF position tracking, and hand-tracking controllers with excellent haptics.

I was tremendously excited about it, to include messing around with VR development in my spare time, until the Facebook account debacle dropped my enthusiasm to zero. I’ve used my Quest maybe twice since my account got caught up in all that. I have no plans to develop any software for such a closed platform with arbitrary gatekeeping.

Re: When will virtual reality take off? The $100 bet

#83

Post by cwkoss »

stevebmark wrote: post #67

I don't think the current incarnation of VR will ever take off. It's too inconvenient to need to block out everything around you with a headset. It's fundamentally incompatible with human behavior. Until VR is as convenient as picking up a phone or tablet, it's not going anywhere.

Oculus has a cool pass-through mode where it displays what the cameras are seeing in black and white. I think this sort of feature will become widespread in future generations.

Re: When will virtual reality take off? The $100 bet

#84

Post by shams93 »

binarymax wrote: post #7

Technology is not the problem. Flashback to 1995. I'm a 17 year old PFY invited to beta test a VR headset from a local company. My Uncle was an investor and I was technically savvy and the target market. I had a copy of Descent that supported VR, and while it was a bit of a hassle to get setup, I got it working. The experience was incredible. After the first use I said to myself "this is the future". I had permission…

There's a basic usability problem I found with my VR experience that I cannot see what I am doing in my room, unless you have a large dedicated space its easy to injure yourself by accident because the real world is still there with AR you can literally still see what you are doing in the physical world while interacting with the tech.

Re: When will virtual reality take off? The $100 bet

#85

Post by jjeaff »

deeeeplearning wrote: post #79
jmiskovic wrote: post #66

On same note, developing VR from inside is incredible and it quickly turned into my #1 hobby. At first you are surrounded with blank space, then you slowly fill it out with whatever reality rules you can think of. I went with code-only approach (no binary assets) and built a primitive development environment that works in VR. Now I have a neat little virtual shed with different experiments and demo projects. Geometri…

>VR is already fun and we're in for a wild ride once AR hits the market. I for one can't wait for full field of vision pop up adds to infest our daily lives. How exiting.

I'm all for that ad subsidized tech.

I'll take advantage of it just as soon as uBlock Origin VR is released.

Re: When will virtual reality take off? The $100 bet

#86

Post by allenu »

stevebmark wrote: post #67

I don't think the current incarnation of VR will ever take off. It's too inconvenient to need to block out everything around you with a headset. It's fundamentally incompatible with human behavior. Until VR is as convenient as picking up a phone or tablet, it's not going anywhere.

That's my problem with it as well. You need to have a space set up where you can use it, and you also have to have the VR headset/equipment available to just grab and put on in an instant, otherwise I think it will just languish in the closet.

VR is competing with phones, tablets, and TVs today, which are in my opinion good enough and way more convenient. The experience within VR might be amazing, but it has to be so good that you forego other more convenient devices available to you.

Re: When will virtual reality take off? The $100 bet

#88

Post by entropicdrifter »

bullen wrote: post #36

The major (unpopular) reasons for VR plateau: - Fresnel lenses! - No haptic feedback? - Closed hardware/software. Unfortunately in the future electricity prices will mostly limit VR to non-realistic graphics, f.ex. Cyberpunk 2077 can't render (full blast) at 60 FPS on a 350W 3090, so to get 90FPS on both eyes you would need (if it was possible, it's not) more than 3x 3090 at a whopping 1000W! And this is at peak ever…

Considering the ridiculous pace of progress for GPU performance we've seen in the last few years, coupled with NN-based upscaling of frames, foveated rendering with eye tracking, and the fact that you've cherry-picked a game whose performance is wildly unoptimized with graphics that are on the absolute cutting edge of what PCs can handle, I imagine there are still many possible scenarios that could play out over the next decade or so where VR with reasonably realistic graphics by today's standards is not only possible to do on a normal PC power budget, but even with a mobile/tablet chipset, as in the Oculus Quest or some similar standalone headset.

Things would get really interesting if Apple decided to enter the standalone VR/AR arena with their cutting edge ARM chipsets

Re: When will virtual reality take off? The $100 bet

#89

Post by dougmwne »

I very much think that folks on HN are jaded by the long wait and the unfulfilled promises of VR. I recently picked up a Quest 2 as my first VR headset and I am blown away and convinced it is the future. The thing is, I also recognize that while it is already an incredible achievement, it's still probably 5-20 years from hitting its iPhone moment. By then, my initial excitement will have gone away and I'll have tired of waiting too.

But for all you jaded folks out there, let me tell you that this is an absolutely unstoppable evolution of computing. All entertainment since sung epic poetry has aimed to briefly take us into another world. Plays, novels, movies, theme parks, and video games have always offered immersive fantasy. This is the ultimate fufilment of that very human impulse, to consciously enter another world. If we lose sight of that, then it will be up to the next generation of technologists to create it.

Re: When will virtual reality take off? The $100 bet

#90

Post by entropicdrifter »

standardUser wrote: post #47
entropicdrifter wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a late 20s gamer, some of my earliest gaming memories were formed during the flight/space flight sim boom of the 90s, so I absolutely adore my Vive for Elite Dangerous, Star Wars Squadrons, and No Man's Sky. Put it this way, for simulation gamers it's a godsend compared to a 3 or 4 monitor setup with head tracking.

Right, the type of games matter a lot. I do like first-person RPGs, but those are only a little appealing to me in VR so far. And most of my gaming (4x, strategy, builder) don't benefit much from VR as far as I can tell.

For the most part, that's true. There's a couple of strategy/card games for VR that are nice since they're in sort of a "You're a god looking down at the table with the battle on it" perspective. Likewise Tabletop Simulator has decent VR support, so for tabletop strategy games it can be fun. It doesn't add much to the experience, though, aside from the ability to move your head to control the camera being very intuitive.
Post reply on HN