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

131–140 of 418 posts

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

#131

Post by dougmwne »

babyshake wrote: post #115
dougmwne wrote: post #89

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…

With everything happening with major movies going direct to streaming, I actually am expecting a big development somewhat related to VR in the next year or two. It's a device much smaller than a VR headset you wear on your face that gives you a theatrical quality audio-visual viewing experience, and only allows you to purchase/rent and not sideload anything. I'm thinking it could sell for around $500 and I'm pretty s…

I have been watching movies on the Quest 2 with Big Screen. It's a great experience and very much reminds me of going to the theatre.

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

#132

Post by arduinomancer »

Impossible wrote: post #116

Estimates of total hardware sales vary depending on what is considered VR hardware, but most estimates I've seen have worldwide unit sales at around 5-6M in 2020. His sales estimates are a little low, unless he's only including PC VR. PSVR alone has sold ~5M units by most estimates. In the most recent Steam hardware survey, about 2% of users that completed the survey have VR devices, which is roughly another 2M users…

Maybe he's referring to yearly sales of 5-6M

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

#133

Post by gonehome »

dougmwne wrote: post #89

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…

The headsets are pretty cool - I’ve played with all of them except for the Valve Index.

Though there’s something unpleasant about them that keeps me from going back when the novelty wears off. I think it might be because I don’t want to be standing and moving around when playing a game and if you’re not doing that, the motion is kind of unpleasant.

I’m not sure this is something it can really overcome. I think an AR overlay of our actual world is more likely to be the next real platform (assuming the hardware is possible to pull off something like this).

Being in VR is just kind of an unpleasant/isolating experience for me and I’m a pretty early adopter of most things.

In other people I’ve mostly seen a small number of games (mostly beat saber) keep people coming back, but I haven’t seen most people keep using it once the novelty wears off outside of that.

I think there are probably some narrow applications where it’s clearly better than not having it, but I’m skeptical of VR as a platform.

Maybe when the hardware is 10x better/lighter it’ll be a difference experience? We are pretty early on in the medium, movies and tv were pretty bad for the first fifty years. It might just take a while for people to figure out how to use VR well.

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

#134

Post by Geee »

klibertp wrote: post #109
forgotmysn wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thats true, but for most headsets, resolution still isn't high enough to read bodies of text without eye fatigue. until that is solved, I don't think VR will move from entertainment to productivity. Varjo is getting closer to that resolution level, but their headsets are priced for enterprise ($8k i think?)

> but for most headsets, resolution still isn't high enough to read bodies of text without eye fatigue. Most? Is there anything, no matter how expensive, which is currently capable of clearly presenting large bodies of text? The moment something like this appears I'm going to buy it even if I had to sell my kidney for it! EDIT: forgot about input. I'd probably be willing to finally learn to touch-type, if that would…

Varjo has human-eye resolution in VR/AR. https://varjo.com/

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

#135

Post by nickelcitymario »

I think it will take off when we see a convergence of some things.

Specifically:

1. It looks real 2. It's affordable 3. AI characters become believable

If anyone's played with Replika.ai lately, you'll know #3 is starting to get really close. #1 and #2 are inevitable.

So at some point it becomes wildly rewarding to spend hours hanging out with your AI friends in virtual space.

Simply being in a 3D space isn't enough. Most people seem to experience this as a neat trick, but not something they feel the need to make a part of their daily lives.

But building emotional bonds with characters who are only accessible in VR? Or perhaps can be texted (like Replika) and then met "in person" in VR? I see that being worth many billions.

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

#136

Post by outworlder »

Geee wrote: post #8

I think VR will become mainstream when it's good enough to replace large screens in productive work. It should leave large screens in dust, if done right. Productivity is quite strongly correlated with screen size, so I'm expecting quite a leap in this regard when the right software is matched with the right hardware.

I actually considered this when I was buying a new monitor. "This thing will be obsolete pretty soon".

Headsets are still a little bulky (and not enough resolution) for that to happen. Once that's fixed (and more importantly, with many people shifting to work from home, so they don't have to care about people staring), I expect it to become a pretty popular thing.

If the virtual monitor is overlaying a camera feed of your environment(AR style), this will be amazing. Imagine a headset not much heavier than sunglasses sitting on your desk, rather than a big (or multiple!) monitors. Put it on, you have as much screen real state as you would like, and can be made to look like an actual monitor.

That's with our current 2D thinking. We can probably do more useful visualizations in 3D.

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

#137

Post by jbarberu »

medium_burrito wrote: post #34
lo_fye wrote: post #3

It started to take off in October, with the release of the Oculus Quest 2, which is out of stock all over the place. It has nearly doubled Oculus' userbase on Steam in just 2.5 months despite their various other headsets having been out for years.

I have a Quest2 and motion tracking is great, but the resolution/blurriness bothers my eyes a lot, to the point where it gives me a headache. Now it could be with not wearing glasses, but I tried it with contacts and it still bothered me. My wife meanwhile has no issues. Is this a common issue?

I haven't tried Quest 2 specifically but had similar issues with Rift and HTC Vive (we had them at work). I have different prescription for right and left eye and was seeing blurry no matter how I adjusted the lenses, to the point of losing stereoscopic vision rendering the headset pretty much useless.

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

#138

Post by noir_lord »

gonehome wrote: post #133
dougmwne wrote: post #89

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…

The headsets are pretty cool - I’ve played with all of them except for the Valve Index. Though there’s something unpleasant about them that keeps me from going back when the novelty wears off. I think it might be because I don’t want to be standing and moving around when playing a game and if you’re not doing that, the motion is kind of unpleasant. I’m not sure this is something it can really overcome. I think an AR…

> I think it might be because I don’t want to be standing and moving around when playing a game and if you’re not doing that, the motion is kind of unpleasant.

Project Cars 2 and DCS make it worth the headset alone - throw in Elite Dangerous and No Man Sky and I have enough VR entertainment to keep me busy for the foreseeable.

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

#139

Post by dougmwne »

nitrogen wrote: post #114
jnwatson wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook's Quest 2 is an impressive piece of tech. One of the biggest reasons to be skeptical of VR taking off is that Facebook is one of the major players. Between the login shenanigans and their anti-competitive dealings with developers, they have an opportunity to single-handedly tank the industry.

I think Facebook is in VR because they don't want the Metaverse to belong to anybody but them.

For sure this is his play. My early take is that the VR/AR social experience is absolutely the killer app and will beat the pants off phone, chat, social feeds and video calls. It will be so good that it will be the default way to commutate at a distance, making it a huge threat to Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and Messenger. I think the fufilment of that promise is still probably more than a decade out.

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

#140

Post by novok »

dougmwne wrote: post #104
forgotmysn wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thats true, but for most headsets, resolution still isn't high enough to read bodies of text without eye fatigue. until that is solved, I don't think VR will move from entertainment to productivity. Varjo is getting closer to that resolution level, but their headsets are priced for enterprise ($8k i think?)

I pulled my neck last week and spent the weekend working, watching amazon prime and playing xbox cloud streaming flat on my back on a 10 foot virtual screen. I was working for multiple hours at a time reviewing programming specifications and taking notes. The display tech is pretty much there, even for text. Keyboard input is still unsolved, though I was using Office 365 dictation and that was working well for taking…

When I tried it, it wasn't that good. The screens on the Q2 felt like a resolution of something between 720 and 1080p, which isn't that good compared to my dual 4k monitors. Same with a 8k & 6k 180 & 360 video.

Overall VR feels like it needs a 4x resolution bump. Basically a 16k 360 video rendering and 4k x 4k per eye vs the 1832x1920 per eye that the current q2 has. To do that well you probably need something like a two 3080 GPUs, one for each eye.

Even after that, maybe even an 8k x 8k would give a big improvement. We don't have GPUs that can render that today.

Foveated rendering is definitely needed for this to become possible.

Post reply on HN