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Virtual Reality is going to change the world

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Re: Virtual Reality is going to change the world

#191

Post by wolfgke »

samstave wrote: post #81
smacktoward wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And I did not chip in ten grand to seed a first investment round to build value for a Facebook acquisition He really puts his finger on one of the reasons why this deal feels so weird here, I think. Nobody who contributed to the Oculus Kickstarter did so because they were hoping Oculus would get flipped to a mega-corp. They didn't do so because they wanted the Oculus team to have a big, splashy VC-style exit. They…

Personally, I think this illustrates a severe gap in how crowd-funding works. 10K drops by an individual are no different than an angel investor. There should be a chip-in-level for crowd-funding campaigns that require the OP to provide some % equity into the project.

> 10K drops by an individual are no different than an angel investor.

So far accepted. The difference is that the angel investor buys equity share with their money, while the individual gets a piece of the product if its development and production will succeed.

Re: Virtual Reality is going to change the world

#192

Post by bjt »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #126
bloaf wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people predict that the instant we have complete VR, all human progress will cease. We will have no reason to seek new experiences in the real world because we can simulate any experience we want in the virtual world.

That's bunk. Most people don't care about fake experiences.

Most people spend quite a lot of time having "fake experiences". TV, movies, and video games are wildly popular, and consume quite a lot of people's time. As they become more immersive through VR, and provide an even better escape from reality, it's natural to expect them to become more popular, not less.

Re: Virtual Reality is going to change the world

#193

Post by dkokelley »

runako wrote: post #172
Argorak wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are oversimplifying things as well. On the "cash on the table" side of things you are right: people put cash on the table and got the goods. On the other hand, Kickstarter is a platform where people invest in future of some geeks. A successful funding drive plays on emotions, on promises and a glimpse of the future. A lot of the people that got a dev kit were closely monitoring what Oculus was doing and were plea…

>> Kickstarter is a platform where people invest in future of some geeks And then those same backers complain loudly when those geeks succeed at business. Oculus just sold, before launching a product, for a quarter of the value of Electronic Arts (revenue: $3.7B). Perhaps Oculus (the business) was too successful for its backers, but there's not a lot of teams that would have turned down a deal like this.

Nitpick: If EA's revenues are $3.7B, their value is much more than that.

Generally you could look at market cap, or derive the present value of future expected cash flows (meaning how much would you have to invest today in order to receive $3.7B in interest payments annually).

Re: Virtual Reality is going to change the world

#194

Post by jjoonathan »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #181
jjoonathan wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do you think it would look anything like what we currently consider social networking? Why are people so painfully short-sighted? Why do you think the fact that "next-gen" social networking will look different excuses three massive friction points of VR (buying the VR gear, buying a decent computer, and strapping on an ungainly headset)? It's not short-sighted to see problems, it's short-sighted to ignore them.…

>It's not short-sighted to see problems, it's short-sighted to ignore them. Unless you have a reason to think you can. Do you? And the history of technology has shown that these "friction points" never last. Why do you think this will be any different? Short-sightedness. >You're wandering in circles, still not addressing the friction problem. That statement was to set up the point that Facebook is so forward thinking…

> And the history of technology has shown that these "friction points" never last.

Only the history of technology as understood by someone who puts blinders on to focus on success stories alone. Selection bias.

Do you know when the first hydrogen fuel-cell was built? 1851. Before the American Civil War. It took a century to figure out how to get them to output significant power before they found an application on the Apollo missions. It has been another 50 years and nobody has solved the H2 storage problem yet. AI has a bunch of problems that are like this but on a shorter time scale if you want a CS-related example.

These aren't isolated incidents; the history of technology sees a constant stream of people hurling themselves against Hard Problems and consistently failing to solve them until someone with the right combination of specialization, drive, timing, and strategy cracks the case. The people that succeed invariably attribute their success to "not letting conventional thinking hold us back," but that's a load of feel-good nonsense, as evidenced by the long string of "forward-thinking" failures that everyone likes to ignore.

There may be a steady trickle of breakthroughs coming out the end of the pipeline, but that doesn't mean you can point to a droplet anywhere in the pipe and say "it's about to come out!"

Re: Virtual Reality is going to change the world

#195

Post by crpatino »

ekianjo wrote: post #91
weixiyen wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're going to read this in 10 years and look like the guy who predicted the iPhone to be a flop. Usable VR is absolutely world-changing.

Haha. Then I'll hope I'm wrong, but come up with clear reasons why this will be mainstream and mass market.

It is not a joke. I'm not meaning it as a smart-ass retort:

Porn == Money

Re: Virtual Reality is going to change the world

#196

Post by eli_gottlieb »

bjt wrote: post #192
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's bunk. Most people don't care about fake experiences.

Most people spend quite a lot of time having "fake experiences". TV, movies, and video games are wildly popular, and consume quite a lot of people's time. As they become more immersive through VR, and provide an even better escape from reality, it's natural to expect them to become more popular, not less.

TV, movie, and video game story-lines also near-uniformly consist of situations that would be unpleasant or even traumatizing to actually live through.

Everyone thinks it's a great story when the heroine sets out to avenge her father's murder and ends up saving the world. Most people do not actually want to have their father murdered and then deal with an existentially-threatening war for the survival of the human species. Likewise, everyone enjoys a good round of the Hero's Journey, but most people don't really want Spiderman-level responsibility (and yet find superheroism largely meaningless without it).

Many people really enjoy sports dramas in film. Very few people want to pack endless hours over a period of years into athletic training and then find out they've only got even odds against the opponent who also trained hard. Even fewer people want to just beat sports video-games by some athletic equivalent of "Rare Candies", leveling up without actually training or working hard.

Oh, and people who actually try to do the stuff portrayed in romantic comedies are called creeps, let alone the entire creepy-vampire-romance section of the bookstore.

People would have a much better point about escapism "overtaking" real life if more of our culture's fantasies consisted of experiences we actually really want to live through when confronted with the possibility.

Re: Virtual Reality is going to change the world

#197

Post by visakanv »

JPKab wrote: post #178
skore wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They did so because they wanted the Oculus product . Let's not forget that a huge part of the pitch was to be part of a developer community that sets out into an as of yet unknown realm. I don't think people are worried about what Facebook might do to Oculus, the product. They have a hard time seeing Facebook the social engine and Oculus, the developer community coexisting peacefully. In a way, they're already maki…

I see this as Oculus being a pawn in the Google/Facebook war for the future of owning all of us. Google is doing Glass(which admittedly is nothing like Oculus) and here comes FB buying Oculus. I'd like to know why Oculus sold to Facebook. That's bullshit. If there's ever been a company that didn't need to sell because its so obvious they are going to be huge, its Oculus.

According to John Carmack:

"For the record, I am coding right now, just like I was last week.I expect the FB deal will avoid several embarrassing scaling crisis for VR."

"I have a deep respect for the technical scale that FB operates at. The cyberspace we want for VR will be at this scale."

Source: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack

Re: Virtual Reality is going to change the world

#198

Post by abledon »

MrScruff wrote: post #134
varkson wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd probably still be an RTS and likely never become popular. There might never have been a second Halo.

When was Halo a RTS?

see here MrScruff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vTDwW3H5Jw

Re: Virtual Reality is going to change the world

#199

Post by anigbrowl »

ekianjo wrote: post #128
anigbrowl wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Headphones were a niche product for a certain sort of music lover until the invention of the Walkman, now everyone has a pair. Obviously VR goggles are a bit different since you can't (safely) walk around wearing a pair, but imagine them in a Google Glass like package or with optical nerve transducers. Today's hardcore gamer is tomorrow's prosumer, is the day after's average consumer.

Excuse me but the cost of producing stereo sound and the cost of producing stereo 3D world in fullHD on each eye has really nothing to do with each other. Cheap speakers are easy to make, cheap VR sets and cheap equipment to produce good enough VR is nowhere near available at a cheap price.

What they have in common is economics. I had to replace a broken smartphone in a hurry last month and I just got the cheapest thing that runs the latest version of Android. I paid $75, not on a plan. I got a slight discount for being a long-time customer, but I think the RRP of that phone is only $99.

VR headsets will be cheap and basically disposable accessory within 10 years; I'm pretty sure they'll be available for under $100 by end of the decade.

Re: Virtual Reality is going to change the world

#200

Post by hackinthebochs »

jjoonathan wrote: post #194
hackinthebochs wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's not short-sighted to see problems, it's short-sighted to ignore them. Unless you have a reason to think you can. Do you? And the history of technology has shown that these "friction points" never last. Why do you think this will be any different? Short-sightedness. >You're wandering in circles, still not addressing the friction problem. That statement was to set up the point that Facebook is so forward thinking…

> And the history of technology has shown that these "friction points" never last. Only the history of technology as understood by someone who puts blinders on to focus on success stories alone. Selection bias. Do you know when the first hydrogen fuel-cell was built? 1851. Before the American Civil War. It took a century to figure out how to get them to output significant power before they found an application on the…

While I don't disagree with any of the facts you've stated here, its mostly irrelevant to the original point of contention. Facebook bought Occulus because they believe in the future of this technology and they believe in the company. If these pain points still persist, they simply will not release a product using it. They did not acquire Occulus for the technology they currently produce, but for what they will produce in the future. It is simply incorrect to evaluate the potential of this pairing by what the technology currently is.
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