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How to Get into VR

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: How to Get into VR

#61

Post by bpicolo »

skizm wrote: post #52
Animats wrote: post #40

Somebody at YC likes "Ready Player One", which is a stupid book. (Essential skill for taking over a big company: ability to play a perfect game of PacMan.) "Snow Crash" was ahead of its time. Yet the plot of Snow Crash would play out the same if everybody simply had modern phones. Where's the killer app for VR? VR headsets have been around for years. The current generation of technology works adequately. Yet other th…

You know what's funny? I actually think Ready Player One nailed the only use case that might be a game changer for VR: remote schools. You can just make all learning materials virtual. VR school means no physical real estate, buses, cafeterias, bullying, janitors, you can cut like 90% of support staff, the list goes on. Also if you divide people by location (like we do now) you can still coordinate field trips and/or…

What about the barrier of 1:1 interaction being important? Certainly schools only scale so far on that front.

And probably kids aren't going to just be left home alone all day. That's a very big logistics problem on a country-wide scale.

Re: How to Get into VR

#62

Post by DanBC »

Animats wrote: post #40

Somebody at YC likes "Ready Player One", which is a stupid book. (Essential skill for taking over a big company: ability to play a perfect game of PacMan.) "Snow Crash" was ahead of its time. Yet the plot of Snow Crash would play out the same if everybody simply had modern phones. Where's the killer app for VR? VR headsets have been around for years. The current generation of technology works adequately. Yet other th…

> Where's the killer app for VR?

Treatment of mental illness, for example PTSD or vertigo.

Re: How to Get into VR

#63

Post by omg_ketchup »

haydenlee wrote: post #7
it_learnses wrote: post #2

do I need a PC to be able to get into it?

Check out the Samsung Gear VR and Google Daydream if you have a compatible smartphone. If you don't you can use Google Cardboard (I believe even with iOS). From a development standpoint the main difference between mobile headsets and PC headsets is that mobile VR doesn't track the physical position of your head or hands. However you can still learn a ton and make a lot of cool things with them.

You can just download VR prototyping kits for Unity or Unreal, you don't even need a headset.

Re: How to Get into VR

#64

Post by omg_ketchup »

kettlecorn wrote: post #53
moron4hire wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well lah dee freaking dah, dude. I'm just talking about rough ballparks.

You used the language "at least" implying that you had a fair amount of certainty that that's the minimum cost of a VR PC. Additionally you were off by at least a factor of 2, which is outside a rough ballpark. While it might seem picky the amount of people who would decide to commit 2k to VR is far lower than those who would commit 1k, so in this case it is important to be accurate.

If you include the price of the headset with a serious VR development computer, you get pretty close to $2,000 pretty quickly.

Re: How to Get into VR

#65

Post by moron4hire »

kettlecorn wrote: post #53
moron4hire wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well lah dee freaking dah, dude. I'm just talking about rough ballparks.

You used the language "at least" implying that you had a fair amount of certainty that that's the minimum cost of a VR PC. Additionally you were off by at least a factor of 2, which is outside a rough ballpark. While it might seem picky the amount of people who would decide to commit 2k to VR is far lower than those who would commit 1k, so in this case it is important to be accurate.

$1000 might be good enough for playing the Vive and Rift games that launched with the platform. If that's all you want, I guess you're not quite so annoyingly pedantic as you first seem. But that's a really narrow use case. "I'd like to play only the worst VR games, please. Let's forget about keeping up with the market. That's not for me."

If you're just getting in as a consumer, a $1000 VR-capable PC is going to age very quickly. In my experience, the only way to get any sort of legs out of a high-end purchase is to buy the top of the line. Unless you're buying right before a major product release, my experience has been that you end up spending less year over year than if you try to commoditize.

But I took the person I was replying to to be asking about getting in as a developer, considering the blog post is about getting in as a developer, and considering this site is full of developers. $2000 has been very consistently the price one pays for "top of the line PC with parts that aren't going to shit the bed". You should not cheap out on a development PC for VR. You're going to be doing a lot of experimenting and running up against performance limits during development. You should have some headroom to avoid giving yourself a headache for the day.

But go ahead. Buy a Radeon GPU. Have fun not being able to use your VR headset right before a crucial demo because of some obscure driver issue. Cheap out on a crappy power supply. See how many investors you get for our VR startup when your demo PC won't even start.

Re: How to Get into VR

#66

Post by plokiju »

smacktoward wrote: post #44
sbarre wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it also required a computer, which a lot of people did not have back in the mid-90s, and not everyone was prepared to shell out the money to get one (it was certainly not "inexpensive" if you were buying one for the sole purpose of getting online). My source on this? I worked at one of the first consumer ISPs in Canada, and we regularly had people coming in to sign up because they heard about "this Internet thing"…

I left that out because VR also requires an expensive computer -- expensive at least compared to what most people have. Rift, for instance, requires not just a discrete GPU but a pretty serious one (GTX 970/1060 level), in a market where only about a third of PCs sold at retail in 2016 had a discrete GPU at all (see http://www.anandtech.com/show/10864/discrete-desktop-gpu-mar... ). So, if by "VR" you mean Vive/Rift-l…

Buying a VR headset and a new gaing computer today is still significantly cheaper than buying a home computer in the 90's for the early internet

https://pifflelab.com/2012/07/22/computers-the-1990s-you-pai...

Re: How to Get into VR

#67

Post by kettlecorn »

omg_ketchup wrote: post #64
kettlecorn wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You used the language "at least" implying that you had a fair amount of certainty that that's the minimum cost of a VR PC. Additionally you were off by at least a factor of 2, which is outside a rough ballpark. While it might seem picky the amount of people who would decide to commit 2k to VR is far lower than those who would commit 1k, so in this case it is important to be accurate.

If you include the price of the headset with a serious VR development computer, you get pretty close to $2,000 pretty quickly.

That is true. I was discussing just the cost of the PC in the above comments, but when I built my development PC and bought a Vive it ended up costing me over 2k USD after taxes.

Re: How to Get into VR

#68

Post by mattnewport »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #48
haydenlee wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

immersive concerts - TheWaveVR [0] reinvented museums - TiltBrush [1] court-side sporting events - NextVR [2] Not to mention architecture [3], communication [4], collaboration [5], medicine [6], 3d modeling [7], game development [8], film [9] and the myriad of other industries I'm forgetting. Also if you haven't tried any of the latest games on Oculus Rift or Vive you're really missing out. They've gotten incredible…

I've found the gaming experiences pretty mediocre. It's $900 + big clunky thing on your head vs $500 for a really nice 4k monitor. Something like Onward is pretty special for its realism, but its not a better game than Rainbow Six was 20 years ago. There are some other fun games but the novelty wears off quickly. It's like a really expensive ($1300 setup) Wii. The current experiences aren't worth the money.

For me there's no comparison between the experience of firing a gun or a bow and arrow in VR with hand tracked controls vs in a traditional game with a monitor and a mouse or gamepad. Even virtual target practice with very little 'game' around it is pretty fun I find.

The industry is still figuring out how to create gameplay that takes advantage of VR rather than just porting over gameplay mechanics from traditional games. There are also limitations on how ambitious VR games can get given the current size of the market. There's some very compelling experiences starting to appear already though in my opinion.

I think it's a mistake to put too much emphasis on the current relatively high cost of hardware as a guide to the future potential of the medium. We know that price will come down and if you compare it in real terms to the cost of early PCs it already looks quite affordable.

Re: How to Get into VR

#69

Post by munchbunny »

aVReality wrote: post #39

Perhaps counterintuitively, I see/hear more interest in VR for business/productivity than for gaming, right now. I think it comes down to stimulation: we're used to gaming and other entertainment being high-octane, exciting experiences. But work/productivity is boring. VR, by virtue of its immersion and fantastical interactions, can bring more excitement to productivity uses (which are typically boring), while adding…

I'm working on a VR game at the moment (solo side project for now), and one thing I notice is that you very quickly hit immersion limits for even simple interactions when you use the Touch or Vive controllers. The UX is actually a really hard problem!

I can see why that leads to an enterprise approach where UX is a bit less important.

More specifically, I'm building a juggling simulator. Other apps and games have simulated throwing and it looks and feels convincing, but once you have to throw multiple things per second, the immersion totally breaks with trigger based grabbing. I've been experimenting trying to find a better approach.

Originally I thought it could be a nice fun little project, not really trying to make money. But it took all of maybe five hours of Unity programming to hit untrodden territory! Now I'm starting to nerd out on the immersion and design problem.

Re: How to Get into VR

#70

Post by aaron-lebo »

haydenlee wrote: post #55
aaron-lebo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found the gaming experiences pretty mediocre. It's $900 + big clunky thing on your head vs $500 for a really nice 4k monitor. Something like Onward is pretty special for its realism, but its not a better game than Rainbow Six was 20 years ago. There are some other fun games but the novelty wears off quickly. It's like a really expensive ($1300 setup) Wii. The current experiences aren't worth the money.

Going back to 2D games like CS:Go after playing Onward is such a let-down personally. I'd choose Onward over them any day of the week. The adrenaline you get when bullets are actually flying over your head continues to blow me away. To each their own.

Heh. I still find CSGO horribly addictive after 16+ years off and on CS games and I attribute it to CS's core mechanics being so great. It's not an "experience" like the most recent Battlefield but the gameplay carries it.

Onward is a vanilla game that's improved because of the "experience" of VR (and yes, it's very cool), but I'd take better gameplay any day. The game that finally combines gameplay with VR, that'll be exciting.

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