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

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

#101

Post by reaperducer »

throwaway66666 wrote: post #14
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 spent quite sometime with Vive, Rift and PSVR. (rift, psvr at home, vive at my office) PSVR is unironically the hope for VR right now, even though it has by far the lowest quality. It has some very good games (Astrobot, Wipeout, RE7, Ace Combat 7, Moss, Beat Saber). It's cheap, easy to set up (aimed towards couch VR instead of room scale), cool helmet design, and the fact that the headset works as a regular mo…

cool helmet design

Save those helmets. 30 years from now they'll be worth a fortune on fleaBay the way Philco televisions are now.

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

#102

Post by jniedrauer »

andybak wrote: post #38
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 Sabe…

> Google Earth in VR is one of the most astonishing things I've tried in the last decade.

It really is hard to overstate how game changing google earth VR has been for me. I use it extensively to plan outdoor excursions now. I can memorize the route ahead of time, get a quick sense of how exposed I'll be, plan bailout routes, etc.

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

#103

Post by EpicEng »

coldtea wrote: post #89
brandnewlow wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Mobile” was the same until it was just everywhere.

Not really, mobile exploded immediately (in the early nineties), and kept expanding (with the smartphone boom).

>mobile exploded immediately (in the early nineties)

The only people I knew who had cell phones in the early nineties were my rich uncle and Zack Morris.

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

#104

Post by skybrian »

aikah wrote: post #78
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?

> Is VR dying on the vine? No VR is heavily used in architecture, healthcare industry and other professions. VR as a mass market however is not doing that great right now, because it's not yielding the results the entertainment industry hoped, which leads to less investment and so on... it's a vicious circle. Ultimately someone will get it right. Apple, maybe.

I'd be interested in reading more about its use in architecture or healthcare. Running into it at a hospital or doctor's office doesn't seem all that likely?

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

#105

Post by YUMad »

coldtea wrote: post #89
brandnewlow wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Mobile” was the same until it was just everywhere.

Not really, mobile exploded immediately (in the early nineties), and kept expanding (with the smartphone boom).

There was a lot of hype and bust too, but mostly because something better would come in and change the paradigm. For example, I remember the pushing of IMPS as answer to IM on phones in mid 00s, and then it just died out.

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

#106

Post by insertcredit »

theNJR wrote: post #87

I bootstrapped a VR company (1) after leaving a high paying CMO job. I put in around $100k, we released three games, one got some funding from HTC, we were shown at GDC, SIGGRAPH, VRLA, etc. We hit around 2,700 MAU before my co-founder tapped out after no salary for two years. I took six months off from VR to go back to a normal job that paid well. That got acquired (in a very non-meaningful way, at least for me) in…

Like you I think the Quest will change everything. I feel that it has to, at this point, for VR momentum to break through. Do you think Oculus will dominate the space in the coming decade? I can't help but be reminded of Sense/Net from Neuromancer as a potential VR-only business with massive upside and potential (userbase in the hundreds of millions if not billions) that can be done _today_ if VR headset proliferation went beyond gamers. I am thinking if Carmack and Abrash can't get it done, chances that anyone else will are slim, at least in this generation.

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

#107

Post by GuB-42 »

brandnewlow wrote: post #81
lm28469 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VR is like AI. It's a constant hype/disappointment cycle, albeit it's getting better at every iteration; it's far from delivering on their promises though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality#History

“Mobile” was the same until it was just everywhere.

I think it is closer to electric cars.

Electric cars are far from new, in fact, the first car to exceed 100 km/h in 1899, was an electric car named "La jamais contente".

And for decades after that, other impractical electric cars came out. But as technology improved, they started looking more and more promising, then commercially viable, then desirable, and they are on their way to becoming mainstream.

I think we are at about the same point with VR. It is more than a novelty, but here are still kinks to iron out before it becomes mainstream.

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

#108

Post by insertcredit »

crsv wrote: post #85
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…

From my direct experience it's a quality thing. Once we're at 4K per eye @ 120FPS or something approaching this - and able to maintain it steadily without dropping frames, it's going to be a pretty mind blowing experience. The problem is right now the resolution and framerates just aren't there to make it feel visceral enough. I think even with just a sitting still model of a headset that has ultra high resolution an…

Immersion is the killer feature of VR, not standalone graphical fidelity. FOV, 6DOF tracking are far more important today than 4K per-eye resolution and 120 FPS. Moreover, foveated rendering will give us drastic graphical fidelity improvements, in the very near future.

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

#109

Post by T-A »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #97
T-A wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice resource! One thing worth keeping in mind: the Steam survey only sees a VR headset if the VR software stack is running while the survey is taken, and that requires the headset to be plugged in and powered up. So those figures likely underestimate the number of VR-equipped systems by some significant factor. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it's 2 or 3.

Yeah, that little quirk is both a blessing and a curse, because while it does make it harder to judge the actual number of VR-equipped systems, it also makes the numbers more representative of _active_ VR users rather than just users who _have_ a headset but don't often use it. If you're trying to judge the size of the market in absolute numbers, you also have to account for the fact that this survey only measures _S…

> makes the numbers more representative of _active_ VR users rather than just users who _have_ a headset but don't often use it

YMMV. My Vive-equipped PC launches Steam on boot, because that lets it install updates quietly in the background as they come in. Otherwise, the first thing likely to happen when I try to launch something is a long wait for stuff to download.

The Vive on the other hand is only plugged in when I actually use it. It gets hot, and I don't particularly want it to burn electricity for no better purpose than to die a premature death.

So even as an active VR user, my Vive is only visible to Steam for a minor fraction of the time my PC is logged on.

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

#110

Post by coldtea »

EpicEng wrote: post #103
coldtea wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, mobile exploded immediately (in the early nineties), and kept expanding (with the smartphone boom).

>mobile exploded immediately (in the early nineties) The only people I knew who had cell phones in the early nineties were my rich uncle and Zack Morris.

That was because of high early adopter price.

Not because "huh, why would I want one" given the price being alright.

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