How to Get into VR • Hacker News Board

Re: How to Get into VR

#71

Post by moron4hire » Wed, May 03, 2017, 7:09 PM UTC

smacktoward wrote: post #34

haydenlee wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a professional VR developer I'm unaware of this crisis. There's also about as many headsets sold as people thought there would be (and way more GearVR's than expected). I haven't gotten sick from a VR experience (that I wasn't half-way through building) in over a year. The headsets are good enough that they don't make you sick by default (like they used to) and to make somebody sick you have to go against best des…

I'm not a VR developer, but from an outside perspective it actually looks like there are a few different crises. 1) Developers seem to be interested in heavyweight VR systems like Vive and Rift, while users (based on sales figures, anyway) seem to be interested in inexpensive, cordless systems like GearVR and Cardboard. Which leads to the awkward situation where all the innovative software is coming out for hardware…

Alright, let's make a different statement on simulator sickness:

In the last two years, I've personally demoed thousands of people in VR, in a wide variety of experiences. In that time, one--maybe two--got sick. And it was mild discomfort. It wasn't keeling over, puking blood in the streets like every tech journalist begging for clicks makes it out to be. I know a lot more people with problems handling shaky camera views in movies and first-person shooters on consoles.

Re: How to Get into VR

#72

Post by kenning » Wed, May 03, 2017, 7:13 PM UTC

avaer wrote: post #50

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…

> Essential skill for taking over a big company: ability to play a perfect game of PacMan. Upcoming generations see Youtubers as their idols. It sounds stupid on the surface, but the ability to play a perfect game of Pacman wouldn't be the worst thing to bet on if you wanted to take over some big media company. Even if you don't have a tech billionaire stacking the deck. > Where's the killer app for VR? Like finding…

> Upcoming generations see Youtubers as their idols. It sounds stupid on the surface, but the ability to play a perfect game of Pacman wouldn't be the worst thing to bet on if you wanted to take over some big media company. Even if you don't have a tech billionaire stacking the deck.

Except talented players are not the most popular youtubers. The best pac-man player in the world is famously unpleasant.

> Like finding startup ideas, I don't think the killer VR app is going to come about from someone looking for killer VR apps. It's going to start as something silly done by the people messing around with VR today.

This is true. Most VR feels gimmicky to me now, but the best VR experience I've seen was 3d video with extremely well-calibrated audio. For some reason, that was the big difference for me, but I doubt anyone would have predicted that to be the case.

Re: How to Get into VR

#73

Post by westoncb » Wed, May 03, 2017, 7:14 PM UTC

deepnet wrote: post #45

At least in my case VR simulator sickness was nascent prioproception. Fast paced and hectic movements performed in VR would make someone sick if performed in real life. Back in the day, playing FPSs with shutter glasses, I realised the motion sensations were tied to the motion. Then the sensations became a feature not a bug. Once I understood the feelings they stopped making me nauseous. VR-prioproception improved my…

Do you mean 'proprioception'?

Btw, I'm working on something that I think has some relation to Gibson's vision of cyberspace—just the '3D information sorting' part though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvfMthDInwE (that video is very outdated unfortunately, but here's a newer screenshot: http://symbolflux.com/images/avdscreen.png)

Re: How to Get into VR

#74

Post by Impossible » Wed, May 03, 2017, 7:15 PM UTC

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.

One issue with VR is the market is so small, the quality of even the best games is relatively low. Onward is basically made by one person, and although you cannot directly compare Onward's development with Rainbow 6 in 1998, mostly because of easy and cheap availability of 3D engines and assets, the original Rainbow 6 had a significantly larger team, budget and sold roughly 10x (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Clancy%27s_Rainbow_Six_(vi... Onward has sold so far(http://steamspy.com/app/496240)...

This might be an unfixable flaw in the VR market, but really all of this stuff seems like good business opportunities to me. If what people want out of VR is cheaper, better hardware and better games, and there isn't a fundamental flaw with the concept of VR, of course.

Re: How to Get into VR

#75

Post by moron4hire » Wed, May 03, 2017, 7:16 PM UTC

centrinoblue wrote: post #56

Does anyone have a good resource covering Headset Hardware reviews and specs? I researched this recently looking for an HDMI compatible AR headset to try command line coding with but it was tough to find concise feature/spec/price comparisons. Sign of the times I guess.

There are no good AR headsets right now. The Hololens doesn't have enough field of view, processing power, or battery to make it very useful, especially not as a development computer of any kind. And while the Meta 2 is tethered to a PC, it's also garbage. I'm not aware of any others that its actually possible to acquire right now.

Re: How to Get into VR

#76

Post by aaron-lebo » Wed, May 03, 2017, 7:16 PM UTC

mattnewport wrote: post #68

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.

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…

I agree with you and expect experiences to get better as the industry learns.

With nothing to back this up, I think the VR headset is a mass market item at $400 (or the price of a console) and better tech (mainly lighter headset, slightly improved panels). I guess with that belief the question is will the industry continue to subsidize those hardware improvements while developers figure things out? Or perhaps VR hardware will improve regardless of gaming success.

Re: How to Get into VR

#77

Post by Pica_soO » Wed, May 03, 2017, 7:17 PM UTC

avaer wrote: post #30

smacktoward wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the important difference that getting on the early Internet only required a telephone line, which everybody already had, and a modem, an inexpensive piece of hardware you did not have to physically strap onto your face.

It also required ridiculous metered long distance fees, forced you to lock up the family telephone line, and buying and installing a modem was much harder without the help of the internet. I would advance the hypothesis that the prospect of the internet back then seemed much worse compared to dropping a few hundred to have Vive hardware shipped to your door and plugging it in. But the people who built the internet sa…

Lets not forget ruining two perfectly fine rubber plunger, if you did it DIY.

Re: How to Get into VR

#78

Post by kettlecorn » Wed, May 03, 2017, 7:18 PM UTC

moron4hire wrote: post #65

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.

$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…

We may just have different approaches to this sort of thing.

My personal experience has been that my VR development PC, which cost me around $1200 in the fall, has been great. I opted for parts just below the top of the line because I thought that would be the sweet spot. (I opted for a GTX 1070 rather than a 1080 for example). I have had no issues so far, but perhaps over the longer term I'll wish I had opted for the top of the line build. That is not the case yet. I see your point about buying for the long term savings rather than needing to upgrade every year. I haven't yet had issues with that but that may be true over a longer period of time.

Additionally, if you choose to buy a PC prebuilt rather than building it yourself it costs a lot more so your price range becomes more accurate than my estimates. That said if I were to give a cost estimate to someone who wanted to get a PC for VR development I'd tell them they can build a PC that can run everything for around $1200 USD and it would be completely adequate for development work for at least a year or two. As someone pointed out above that doesn't include the headsets, so the whole endeavour is still quite expensive.

Re: How to Get into VR

#79

Post by Animats » Wed, May 03, 2017, 7:18 PM UTC

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…

Ready Player One nailed the only use case that might be a game changer for VR: remote schools.

Edison thought education would be the killer app for the phonograph. Zworykin thought it would be the killer app for TV. The One Laptop Per Child people thought it would be the killer app for laptops. The tablet people thought it would be the killer app for tablets.

Education doesn't seem to be a technology problem. Would Udacity or Coursera be better with VR? Probably not.

Re: How to Get into VR

#80

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, May 03, 2017, 7:22 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #79

skizm wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ready Player One nailed the only use case that might be a game changer for VR: remote schools. Edison thought education would be the killer app for the phonograph. Zworykin thought it would be the killer app for TV. The One Laptop Per Child people thought it would be the killer app for laptops. The tablet people thought it would be the killer app for tablets. Education doesn't seem to be a technology problem. Would U…

> The One Laptop Per Child people thought it would be the killer app for laptops.

No, they didn't.

They thought laptops would be a useful enabling technology for a particular model of education, but did not think that education would be the killer app for laptops (a product that was so we'll established by that time that thinking about it even needing a "killer app" at that point is senseless.)