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The HTTP of VR

roderickkennedy.com

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Re: The HTTP of VR

#41

Post by andrewmcwatters »

jayd16 wrote: post #27
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WebSockets are not an appropriate medium for VR in the most common use case today: real-time video games. Even if you're not building a video game today and want to do something other-VR esque, I guarantee that you will inevitably end up recreating something the video game industry has done in the last 22-23 years. Everything real-time the author of this article suggests is in the realm of something you would want fo…

Unless you need twitch-shooter level ping times in your web app, websockets/TCP is fine. The rendering is client side after all. Nothing about VR rendering would involve the web stack anyhow. Http/3 is UDP. So whats wrong with http exactly?

What's wrong with HTTP is that there's no real benefit to using it in a real-time environment. There's no point. We use reliable UDP abstractions today to accomplish this. Everyone does. There are countless articles on why TCP didn't work for video games, or of the ones that use it today, it's in an extremely limited sense.

I can't think of a single reason why you would go out of your way to serve HTTP over UDP for the purpose of communicating to a user agent for s/video games/virtual reality/, because no one has done that in over 20 years and if it was a good idea, it would have been done by now. But no one does it. Because there's no point.

Re: The HTTP of VR

#42

Post by bigyikes »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #31
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WebSockets are not an appropriate medium for VR in the most common use case today: real-time video games. Even if you're not building a video game today and want to do something other-VR esque, I guarantee that you will inevitably end up recreating something the video game industry has done in the last 22-23 years. Everything real-time the author of this article suggests is in the realm of something you would want fo…

> I seriously feel bad for kids today. You have what, Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox to play and that's it? Too many micro transactions and low quality games. Yes, those are the only 3 video games.

Even if they were… they’re pretty great games. Roblox is what originally got me into programming, and Minecraft took that further. I probably wouldn’t have the software job I have today without these games.

Fortnite is fun too, and paying for silly skins and dances isn’t so bad.

Re: The HTTP of VR

#43

Post by Animats »

moron4hire wrote: post #35
Animats wrote: post #33

Since I'm writing a new client, in Rust, for Second Life/Open Simulator, I'm very aware of these issues. A metaverse client for a high-detail virtual world has most of the problems of an MMO client plus many of the problems of a web browser. First, much of what you're doing is time-sensitive. You have a stream of high-priority events in each direction that have to be dealt with quickly but don't have a high data volu…

This is why I think it's a joke to be building metaverse apps in Unity. Unity and dynamic asset loading are not happy bed fellows. There's not a lot I liked about Unity when I was working with it full-time a few years ago. But the one thing I could acknowledge that it has that was generally missing from open source web development was the asset pipeline. But dynamic, user-uploaded assets won't be able to use the asse…

Unity and dynamic asset loading are not happy bed fellows.

Not Unreal Engine 4, either. UE5 has "asset streaming" and "open worlds", but mostly static and loaded from a local SSD on a Playstation 5. That's working nicely.

Asset management from the network is the real difference with seamless, modifiable virtual world systems. Otherwise, it's a minute of "...LOADING..." when you move to the next area. You need clients, servers, file formats, and protocols designed for it. It's a moderately hard engineering problem, and, as yet, there are no good off the shelf solutions.

There's a "check out, check in" approach. Decentraland uses that. You check out your parcel into a local Unity environment, edit, and check in the whole parcel to make it visible to others.

The Spatial OS people, Improbable, did some of this, but their solution cost so much to operate server side that all four of the games that used it went broke. So Improbable is trying to pivot to military simulation.

Probably by UE6 this will all be standard. It's one of those things that has to be done to move the metaverse from hype to usefulness.

Re: The HTTP of VR

#44

Post by berkes »

gfxgirl wrote: post #37

I think there is a different problem that needs to be solved and it's probably impossible. I've dreamed of the metaverse since Snow Crash and maybe before (Tron?) but ... when it comes to actually making it, lets assume unlimited CPU/GPU power and unlimited memory. Ideally, I want the Metaverse to allow people to run their own code. Whether its VR or AR it's a shared 3D space. So I want my Nintendo "Nintendogs" to be…

You presume a push model. And compare it to a pull model (iframes). I think that is where the solutions are.

The messages could be delivered as a simple XML feed. Your virtual home, or HUD knows where to place them. Through hyperlinks they know where to subscribe, or refresh, or get details. The messages don't need to know anything about placement and usage.

Re: The HTTP of VR

#45

Post by usrbinbash »

agar wrote: post #21
Bellend wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking about exactly this today! On the right of me I have an oculus quest which I got 2-3 months ago and honestly, it is gathering dust. Just the idea of picking it up and putting it on my face is enough to make me think meh. I did though and I feel like I can't be the only one who finds it really frustrating to the point of making me furious. 1. I started with my eyes at floor level. 2. It moans about a gua…

Jeez, you're slagging the entire value of VR because your specific setup is finicky? Your complaints # 1-3 are a software issue that, while mildly annoying, will ultimately be resolved in an update. Creating a new guardian is literally a 15 second process. Numbers 4-8 are because you choose to use a wireless headset from Oculus as a wired headset through Steam. Of course that's your choice, but the optimized workflow…

But these mass-market applications all have one thing in common:

They are games. What's more, most of them are rather simple games, and their only novelty is the IO device they were designed for.

This is a far far far cry from the supposed applications promised by the "metaverse" clamor as a place to do serious work and basically spend a substantial portion of our lives in.

Is it cool that I can put on a headset and hunt some robots in VR, aiming with my hands and dodging stuff by moving around? Absolutely! Is it cool that this is possible wo. being connected to a computer because the headset itself is so powerful? Undeniably!

Is it cool that these devices are becoming actually affordable for the masses, and easy&intuitive to use on top if that? Hell yeah!

But the technological & societal revolution that "metaverse" is presented as? Not by a long shot.

Re: The HTTP of VR

#46

Post by bullen »

Animats wrote: post #43
moron4hire wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I think it's a joke to be building metaverse apps in Unity. Unity and dynamic asset loading are not happy bed fellows. There's not a lot I liked about Unity when I was working with it full-time a few years ago. But the one thing I could acknowledge that it has that was generally missing from open source web development was the asset pipeline. But dynamic, user-uploaded assets won't be able to use the asse…

Unity and dynamic asset loading are not happy bed fellows. Not Unreal Engine 4, either. UE5 has "asset streaming" and "open worlds", but mostly static and loaded from a local SSD on a Playstation 5. That's working nicely. Asset management from the network is the real difference with seamless, modifiable virtual world systems. Otherwise, it's a minute of "...LOADING..." when you move to the next area. You need clients…

But why does it have to load dynamically, when you can just package releases instead?

Re: The HTTP of VR

#47

Post by usrbinbash »

donmcronald wrote: post #5
usrbinbash wrote: post #2

What exactly is the "metaverse" supposed to be, other than a marketing term to sell a more expensive class of IO devices? People will not switch over in droves to do their text/image/video editing in VR all of a sudden, because other than a few special design applications, there is no point in doing so...it's slower, clumsier and the input devices are much less precise than mouse&keyboard. Another supposed target dem…

The inefficiency may not matter if the inconvenienced workers don't get a say. A virtual environment is a corporate dream come true in terms of monitoring. Imagine an AI manager that could monitor workers and virtually walk up behind the ones that aren't being productive. With spatial audio every worker could feel like they're being monitored continuously when it's really just an AI manager monitoring everyone. Just…

> If I could have a virtual workspace that rivaled 4k monitors and brought my real keyboard / mouse into the VR world

IF that happens, and IF the input devices are not weighty headsets, and IF they offer the same level of haptic feedback, count me in.

Re: The HTTP of VR

#48

Post by schmorptron »

Kinda Off-topic, but if anyone is looking to play around with building vr spaces or games, i recently found out about LÖVR[0] which is a sipmle lua-based open source VR "framework". Haven't had a chance to play with it but it seems other people like it!

[0] https://lovr.org/

Re: The HTTP of VR

#49

Post by giantrobot »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #8
usrbinbash wrote: post #2

What exactly is the "metaverse" supposed to be, other than a marketing term to sell a more expensive class of IO devices? People will not switch over in droves to do their text/image/video editing in VR all of a sudden, because other than a few special design applications, there is no point in doing so...it's slower, clumsier and the input devices are much less precise than mouse&keyboard. Another supposed target dem…

The Motorola DynaTAC mobile phone was about the same size as a VR headset is today. Imagine the same improvements are made to VR that were made to phones. The VR headsets are expensive bricks right now but they'll be in glasses form factor (or better) with extraordinary usability in the relatively near future. An overlay on the real world that brings remote and nearby contacts into the same room seamlessly.

> The Motorola DynaTAC mobile phone was about the same size as a VR headset is today.

> Imagine the same improvements are made to VR that were made to phones.

Your missing some important details here. The DynaTAC was the whole telephone. All the electronics and battery were in the unit. The better VR headsets need a giant PC attached to them. Even with the giant PC on mains power and brick of a headset top of the line VR experiences are pretty lackluster.

What you're talking about isn't going from the DynaTAC to the iPhone. You're talking about a giant PC on mains power with a brick of a VR headset and shrinking it to just a headset (or glasses) powered by a battery. Even if you set your VR baseline to the fully detached headsets they're not at a fully usable by normal people state.

While it's not impossible to go from the giant PC on mains power, it's unlikely to be happening in the near term. The DynaTAC was battery powered so it was a continuum of development from it to an iPhone. The DynaTAC was a user device for an existing and well developed telephone system (infrastructure and services). VR still doesn't even have that everyday use case let alone the technology to make it really workable.

This is all the more challenging because today's technology is pushing up against hard physical limits. Today's GPUs on mains power with at the cutting edge of semiconductor manufacturing are hard pressed to render 4K resolution at consistently high framerates. Mobile GPUs aren't even close. So there's still a lot of question marks between today and "realistically usable VR" and a whole lot more between that an VR sunglasses.

Re: The HTTP of VR

#50

Post by giantrobot »

agar wrote: post #17
usrbinbash wrote: post #2

What exactly is the "metaverse" supposed to be, other than a marketing term to sell a more expensive class of IO devices? People will not switch over in droves to do their text/image/video editing in VR all of a sudden, because other than a few special design applications, there is no point in doing so...it's slower, clumsier and the input devices are much less precise than mouse&keyboard. Another supposed target dem…

John Carmack (consulting CTO for VR at Facebook/Meta) said in his most recent talk on VR (paraphrasing despite quotes), "The internet has been described as people and screens. I've been arguing that the metaverse is just more people and more screens. Trillions of dollars of investment have made 2D screens very effective tools for delivering information. If the metaverse can deliver that information anywhere, at scale…

> Will people want to work in VR? If it means 4 screens on the balcony of a Tuscan villa instead of a tiny desk in a depressing space? Maybe.

There's a lot more to physical environments than high resolution graphics. You've got more senses than just sight. Your body is still experiencing the depressing desk even if your eyes are trying to convince you that you're at a Tuscan villa. That seems more depressing.

You're essentially just describing a high resolution 3D desktop wallpaper.

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