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How to Get into VR

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: How to Get into VR

#91

Post by return0 »

DanBC wrote: post #62
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.

It's also used for strabismus (https://www.diplopiagame.com/)

But i don't think any of these are killer apps, these are very niche demographics.

Re: How to Get into VR

#92

Post by return0 »

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 can plug into Second Life or High Fidelity with a VR headset, but few people do.

Which was disappointing to me, because among the crowds in SL/opensim/highfidelity there are many creators and early adopters.

Re: How to Get into VR

#93

Post by whicks »

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.

> It's $900

The Oculus Rift is $500, $598 with the Touch controllers and and extra sensor.[1]

[1]: https://www.oculus.com/cart/

Re: How to Get into VR

#94

Post by sevensor »

> VR is a new medium

This is just blatantly not true, at least not on the implied timescale. VR has been around for literally decades, including immersive VR with head and hand tracking. I know because I used it in 1998. The current VR hype cycle is based on this all having gotten a lot cheaper and faster.

To top it off, listing Snow Crash and Neuromancer as suggested reading is just silly. Those are the exact same books we were reading during the last VR boom, and while they're two of my favorites, they're both laughably wrong about VR. Specifically, VR is bad for the exact use cases presented in these novels! VR is, was, and will continue to be a product with niche appeal. We'll see the market expand because it's cheaper, but it's not an effective user interface for most applications.

Re: How to Get into VR

#95

Post by soared »

haydenlee wrote: post #36
soared wrote: post #32

While this was super interesting to read it was fairly disappointing. I'm hoping the entire series focuses on VR and this wasn't our only post. They lead off with > We talked to college students interested in engineering, business, and technology to figure out what resources would be most helpful to them. Then, we reached out to experts from academia, industry, or some combination of the two. But we all ended up with…

Here's an example of using your laptop camera and html to see what building AR is like: https://github.com/jeromeetienne/AR.js

Exactly what I've wanted to see and with an easy demo. Thank you!

Re: How to Get into VR

#96

Post by j2bax »

omg_ketchup wrote: post #57
smacktoward wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What's possible on a high-end rig today will be possible on on a phone within 2 years.

Color me skeptical! 5 years, maybe... 10 years, definitely!

Re: How to Get into VR

#97

Post by aaron-lebo »

whicks wrote: post #93
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.

> It's $900 The Oculus Rift is $500, $598 with the Touch controllers and and extra sensor.[1] [1]: https://www.oculus.com/cart/

It's $800 + tax for the Vive (you probably want to buy some light stands, too).

What's the Rift at that price missing compared to the Vive?

Re: How to Get into VR

#98

Post by AlwaysRock »

mattnewport wrote: post #16
minimaxir wrote: post #8

> The development of VR has been surprisingly tied to science fiction. Authors in the field have envisioned the futures that engineers set out to build Incidentally, the high romanticism of VR one of the reasons why I am highly skeptical of the industry. The article argues "VR will also enable immersive concerts, reinvented museums, and live, court-side sporting events", but what is it doing now outside of games, whi…

We have paying customers for our VR surgical training - ossovr.com - I left the games industry in 2014 to work on non games VR applications because I believed (and still believe) that commercial applications of VR will be more profitable in the near term than games. Architecture is another field that is seeing rapid adoption of VR as a real business tool and not just a gimmick.

Not quite architecture but I'd love to have a interior designer be able to see a vr version of my apartment or be able to see a VR version of a apartment instead of having to go apartment shopping. I believe stuff like this is out in the world but just not widespread enough yet.

Re: How to Get into VR

#99

Post by munchbunny »

aVReality wrote: post #81
munchbunny wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sim…

Juggling simulator sounds awesome...I've always wanted to learn how to juggle! I'd definitely agree that design challenges are worth nerding-out over...and probably the most difficult aspect on VR development. You don't even want to know how much time we've spent tossing around interface ideas... That being said, I disagree that UX is less important for enterprise. UX is maybe even more important for enterprise. As a…

"UX is less important" is probably the wrong way to describe it. "UX can be more trained" is closer to what I meant. In business applications (Photoshop, for example), some degree of tools training is assumed, so there's some allowance for unnatural feeling ways of doing input that can be learned, so you have a bit more room to fudge the design. Games and consumer software are somewhat less tolerant of the UX acclimatization issues.

Re: How to Get into VR

#100

Post by centrinoblue »

moron4hire wrote: post #75
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.

I'm fine with a tether. I just want something simple that plugs into an HDMI or thunderbolt port and projects my laptop screen into the headset
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