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We Won’t See Hard AR Anytime Soon (2012)

blogs.valvesoftware.com

31–40 of 59 posts

Re: We Won’t See Hard AR Anytime Soon (2012)

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> truly immersive VR A statement like that is so subjective. What is "truly immersive"? I believe it is soon here, at least from my definition of truly immersive.

It's similar to the moving AI goalpost. At the end of the road, it's Matrix level wetware, though I'm sure at that point there will still be people waiting for "really, actually truly immersive".

Actually the two senses of "goalpost moving" are opposite. The first AI researchers imagined we'd be having pleasant philosophical debates with our robot butlers by now. Instead we have a network of big iron that can simulate ten chess moves more quickly than well-practiced humans can.

Re: We Won’t See Hard AR Anytime Soon (2012)

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> truly immersive VR A statement like that is so subjective. What is "truly immersive"? I believe it is soon here, at least from my definition of truly immersive.

I think my Vive is immersive, with the definition that it tricks my brain into believing I'm somewhere else to the extent any technology short of a direct neural interface could. You're never going to "truly" be immersed. You feel your carpet under your feet. You feel the weight of the headset. You don't smell anything. Nothing you pick up weighs anything. The list goes on. Every item breaks "true" immersion to a cer…

> You're never going to "truly" be immersed. You feel your carpet under your feet. You feel the weight of the headset. You don't smell anything. Nothing you pick up weighs anything. The list goes on. Every item breaks "true" immersion to a certain extent.

Let's go with "its going to be a while" instead of never

I'm going to hold out that a Ready Player One full body haptic suit will be possible someday. Perhaps someday instead of asking about the resolution of our screens we will be talking the latest in "resolution" of haptic feedback.

Plus smell-o-vision surely will someday work.. right? :)

Re: We Won’t See Hard AR Anytime Soon (2012)

#33

The Magic Leap is rumoured to be able to create pure black: "Such may be used to cancel light from the planar waveguides with respect to light from the background or real world, in some respects similar to noise canceling headphones." http://gpuofthebrain.com/blog/2016/7/22/how-magic-leap-will-...

Realize, that site is pure speculation and nothing has been shown or demonstrated by ML or otherwise that can "display black."

In theory it's possible to build a standing wave on the retina, but to do it with pixel precision with a vrd/fsd is beyond difficult compounded worse by form factor.

I disagree with the article that rendering black is necessary for wide consumer adoption of AR.

Re: We Won’t See Hard AR Anytime Soon (2012)

#34

The Magic Leap is rumoured to be able to create pure black: "Such may be used to cancel light from the planar waveguides with respect to light from the background or real world, in some respects similar to noise canceling headphones." http://gpuofthebrain.com/blog/2016/7/22/how-magic-leap-will-...

Somewhat relevant from earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13135735.

Re: We Won’t See Hard AR Anytime Soon (2012)

#35
post #21
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rift and Hololens. I get that there is an immediate "Wow" factor, but then I wander off and look at the real world, and think "Holy crap!". They are good, I get that... Not great but something. I don't understand the purpose though. The best virtual reality experiences I've ever had have been between the pages of a book, or induced by psychotropic substances. If they can fix the latency, resolution and FOV issues, re…

"Rift and Hololens." Tiltbrush on the Vive absolutely blew my mind. I could paint in the air and use the wide brushstrokes as an immediate and intuitive 3D modeling tool. And then walk around my scuplture, etc. I would have to categorize the experience to the same slot where building snowmen, igloos, painting, etc goes - ie. creative fun with aesthetically pleasing results. The difference is that modeling on on the T…

What do you mean that it "blew your mind?" Do you experience life differently than you did before? I hear this a lot but when I relate it to my experience of the same thing (in this case VR) I would never explain it as "mind blowing."

Re: We Won’t See Hard AR Anytime Soon (2012)

#36

The Magic Leap is rumoured to be able to create pure black: "Such may be used to cancel light from the planar waveguides with respect to light from the background or real world, in some respects similar to noise canceling headphones." http://gpuofthebrain.com/blog/2016/7/22/how-magic-leap-will-...

Realize, that site is pure speculation and nothing has been shown or demonstrated by ML or otherwise that can "display black." In theory it's possible to build a standing wave on the retina, but to do it with pixel precision with a vrd/fsd is beyond difficult compounded worse by form factor. I disagree with the article that rendering black is necessary for wide consumer adoption of AR.

What makes you disagree with it? I haven't re-read this post from Abrash since it was written (so I don't remember the arguments), but I think telling us more about why you disagree can give valuable input to those of us who are not in the field. :)

Re: We Won’t See Hard AR Anytime Soon (2012)

#37
post #26
post #22

But we've seen "soft" AR and it appears to be fairly popular - Pokemon Go and Ingress. If you ask players of either of those games, if they would like a "harder" - i guess this means more immersive - experience while playing these games, they'll bite your hand off. There's also father.io, which looks pretty fun, but I haven't tested that out yet. For me, in my uneducated almost ignorant understanding of the situation…

But every player of Pokémon Go that really tries to play the game not just for 30 minutes disables the AR camera first to save battery and because it doesn't add value. People using Pokémon Go with the AR cam enabled are young kids (it's funny) and Asian tourists snapping photos with Pokémon in front of landmarks and tourist spots. I second your remark on motion sickness. And VR cuts the user/player from the real wor…

The camera isn't the AR part. It's the real world map with game data overlaid.

Re: We Won’t See Hard AR Anytime Soon (2012)

#39
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Rift and Hololens." Tiltbrush on the Vive absolutely blew my mind. I could paint in the air and use the wide brushstrokes as an immediate and intuitive 3D modeling tool. And then walk around my scuplture, etc. I would have to categorize the experience to the same slot where building snowmen, igloos, painting, etc goes - ie. creative fun with aesthetically pleasing results. The difference is that modeling on on the T…

What do you mean that it "blew your mind?" Do you experience life differently than you did before? I hear this a lot but when I relate it to my experience of the same thing (in this case VR) I would never explain it as "mind blowing."

What demo/experience were you shown? In my case it was Elite Dangerous and Universe Simulator 2. The latter is particularly mind-blowing - within the same spectrum as "the pale blue dot" but to a far, far, greater degree. Tilt Brush has an extreme fun factor - if you own a Vive then you probably want Tilt Brush too, but I'd hardly call it mind-blowing.

The trend I've personally found with demoing VR is that the less interactive it is, the more likely it is to "wow" a newcomer.

Re: We Won’t See Hard AR Anytime Soon (2012)

#40
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Rift and Hololens." Tiltbrush on the Vive absolutely blew my mind. I could paint in the air and use the wide brushstrokes as an immediate and intuitive 3D modeling tool. And then walk around my scuplture, etc. I would have to categorize the experience to the same slot where building snowmen, igloos, painting, etc goes - ie. creative fun with aesthetically pleasing results. The difference is that modeling on on the T…

What do you mean that it "blew your mind?" Do you experience life differently than you did before? I hear this a lot but when I relate it to my experience of the same thing (in this case VR) I would never explain it as "mind blowing."

"mind blowing" in the sense that I could sculpt a life size figure in front of me with mere digital brush strokes. To produce anything like it using analogue methods (snow, clay, cardboard, wood, etc.) would have been painstaking and would have taken hours, and would have required raw materials and dedicated workspace.

This is specific to Vive, with the short latency and the fact that I could walk around my sculpture. This is a major difference to VR platform such as Oculus where the view point is fixed.

The only time anything digitally produced has felt as tangible has been when I've ordered 3D prints of my models.

I think you need to create something on the medium to experience this exhilaration. Not just walk around someone else's scene.

Or, take the general complaint that learning 3D modeling is really hard. Well, with this paradigm is completely changed with Tiltbrush. That said, it's not yet a production ready modeler.

"Do you experience life differently than you did before?"

I think the expression "Life changing" is usually used to describe traumatic experiences more than anything positive. That said I've felt a moderate urge to purchase a VR rig ever since.

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