What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week • Hacker News Board

Re: What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week

#401

Post by fouric » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

hyperpallium2 wrote: post #121

jstrieb wrote: post #119

> Complete control over my visual environment is like using noise-canceling headphones for my eyes. Could not agree more. I tried out a much simpler setup on my friend's Oculus Go (predecessor to the Quest 2, since abandoned by Facebook), and was amazed at how well I was able to focus. For my setup, I used the a web browser on the headset itself to connect to ttyd [0] running on my computer for doing programming home…

The future of cubicles.

Cubicles suck, but if I'm going to be stuck in one anyway, I might as well opt to block everything out of my vision except for my screen. My monitor bezels, keyboard, mouse, desk surface, phone, post-it notes, office locker, etc. are just distractions unless I actively need to interact with them.

Re: What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week

#402

Post by paul7986 » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 5:17 PM UTC

dcx wrote: post #170

paul7986 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes VR a technology that's been around since the 90s is finally going to take off ... maybe ...can anyone name another technology that started decades before and later became a product that changed the world like the iPhone? Why would I want to wear a headset strapped to my face for hours to interact with memojis of my co-workers? I've definitely tried out VR games in the past few years ... cool, but novel fun and th…

Yes, lots of technologies work like that. Solar panels. Deep learning in pretty much its modern form was invented decades ago, but had to wait for the hardware to get good enough to show results. Personal computing took decades to take off. Heavier than air travel spent centuries as a curiosity. Tipping points are fundamental to the nature of reality. Technology improves through decades of little tweaks and increment…

Sure I agree with you but the cellphone brief case of the 90s looks way different our iPhones.

The form factor basic idea of VR hasn't changed since the 90s which is still strap a bulky headset to your face. Prescription or sunglasses aren't bulky ..what humans have worn for possibly centuries.

Maybe it will finally change how we play video games but working virtually with my coworkers emojis for 8 hours or long periods of time with a headset strapped to my face is lol

Re: What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week

#403

Post by soylentcola » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 5:38 PM UTC

volta83 wrote: post #394

PerkinWarwick wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The underlying question is 'what would it take to break the device free'.

Can't answer that question, but suppose you break it free, then what ? It would be like maintaining a separate appstore for iPhones.

I recall that being the case when I had an old gen2 iPad and wanted to do a few things that weren't sanctioned/supported by Apple. There were a few well-known repos for homebrew software and that's where I got the handful of useful tweaks and customizations for that (jailbroken) tablet.

I guess the issue there is that the popularity of the platform and nature of its limitations made it worth someone's trouble to maintain those repos. With something like an Oculus, I don't know that there are enough users (and also a sufficient subset that want to avoid Facebook or run some unsanctioned software) to justify the effort.

Re: What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week

#404

Post by jdlyga » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 5:46 PM UTC

The main problem is the poor image quality. It's much nicer to look at monitors than fuzzy text and images on the Oculus Quest or Oculus Quest 2. It also makes me feel sick after an hour even if I'm in a static space that's not moving.

Re: What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week

#405

Post by PerkinWarwick » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 7:06 PM UTC

volta83 wrote: post #394

PerkinWarwick wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The underlying question is 'what would it take to break the device free'.

Can't answer that question, but suppose you break it free, then what ? It would be like maintaining a separate appstore for iPhones.

Perhaps as a hobbyist device, there's certainly a lot of interesting apps that could be written.

I'm assuming here that it is somehow subsidized (via volume or via data mining) and is cheaper than alternatives.

Re: What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week

#406

Post by danielEM » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 7:39 PM UTC

dougmwne wrote: post #364

danielEM wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For games definitely, from dev perspective feels to me like just nice extra feature. Thinking of Quest only in terms of dev. I play literally no games, but I'm dev for 14h a day :-)

I think 3-dof would lead to motion sickness issues. You might be mostly moving your head rotationally, but if you move at all in the xyz directions your movement is no longer going to match up to the image in the headset. That mismatch between movement and vision is the primary cause of motion sickness. Phone VR was an evolutionary dead end for VR tech. The future is 6-dof, hand, eye, face and body tracked, both for…

> Phone VR was an evolutionary dead end

Wouldn't be that quick in judgement :-) I think all that 6dof is about image sensors and machine learning and both are already widely used in mobiles. To my senses it feels like nowadays smartphones could handle 6dof with even only single camera with just appropriate software.

Re: What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week

#407

Post by nouveaux » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 7:42 PM UTC

heax wrote: post #366

ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #361

I can't speak to the use-case for this amount of time, but as someone who has used it plenty I can attest to pretty much everything the author has stated. The experiences that have blown me away the most have ironically been the ones that are the most "boring", or like essentially being a close analogue to the real world. When I tried online poker in VR, it was mind-blowing. It wasn't like reality... it was objective…

Oh come on, im not an experienced poker player but even i know that reading the facial expression and body language of your opponent is a core element of the actual game.

Facial expressions and body language is not a core part of modern poker. Many pros play online.

Online poker among friends gained a lot of popularity during Covid. With the computer dealing, its much easier to play for 1-2 hours. Given our stage in life, we can play once a week online instead of once or twice a year in person.

Re: What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week

#408

Post by globular-toast » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 7:46 PM UTC

dougmwne wrote: post #344

globular-toast wrote: post #294

> even with my higher-capacity headset and accessories, my entire outlay is easily competitive with a conventional multi-monitor configuration. I highly doubt it. My dual monitor setup cost me about £300 including a nice desk stand. No fancy GPU or anything required. If that VR setup really cost that much it would be an impulse buy for me.

The Oculus Quest 2 really is $299 and it's the only necessary piece of equipment. It's a standalone computing platform running a flagship mobile processor. It's a completely amazing device along several different use cases, VR office is just one of them. Gaming, art, media consumption, social, education, work and more are eventually going to get revolutionized by this tech. For any tech geek, I would recommend an imm…

Ah, I won't buy tech that needs a cloud subscription, though. Especially not one linked to Facebook.

Re: What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week

#409

Post by wintermutestwin » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 7:58 PM UTC

dev_tty01 wrote: post #331

banana_giraffe wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, according to the FAQ [1]: > Quest 2 requires everyone to use a Facebook account to log in. > If you are an existing Oculus user and have an Oculus account, you will have the option to log in with your Oculus account and merge your Facebook and Oculus accounts. I can't speak how enforced these are, but even if it's a soft requirement for now, it's enough for me to avoid it. Pity, since it seems pretty good tech w…

Yep, that rules that out. It is a competitive space, I'll wait.

>I'll wait.

Same here. Such a shame that this toxic company is stifling VR adoption by wrapping their tentacles around such a prime product.

Re: What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week

#410

Post by smilespray » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 8:05 PM UTC

ptom wrote: post #359

smilespray wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's impressive. A little too impressive. Does OP have any documentation on how this latency can be achieved and measured?

Yes I do! 1. WiFi direct, or as direct as you can make it - which means the computer is either the AP itself, or wired directly to it in order to keep the hops short. 2. Measurement can be done via a companion ping that looks at frame timing, but that's kind of a secondary measure. Best way to really check it is with high-speed video capture of a hardware display and the mirrored content in the headset, of a high-(te…

Thank you for a good response, which takes into consideration several of my concerns.

My advice would be to both include these points and demonstrate this (perhaps with a video) in your article, as latency is IMHO correctly perceived as the killer of several concepts, such as remote game streaming services and host-to-goggles interactivity. This is especially important as you're using a cheapish consumer device as your primary display.

Do include the circumstances that contradict your 3ms claim. You do this elsewhere in your article (the gray old computers example) but it will serve to bolster your overarching argument.