The HTTP of VR
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The HTTP of VR
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Re: The HTTP of VR
#2What 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 demographic, people in IT won't switch either. I see no point in virtually grabbing a glowing code-ball and throing it into the "deploy-tube", or navigate a codebase using haptic gestures with the huge meat-styluses at the end of my arms, when I can simply type `git push` or `/myAwesomeStruct`
I also have a hard time imagining management sitting in meetings while wearing a 400g headset for 3h. Or companies being willing to cough up 350+$ for every employee just so they can join meetings, when Zoom is basically free.
So, what else is there? Gaming and maybe some "recreational apps" (aka. alsogaming, only less interactive). And since not all games will take place in the same unified MMORPG-ish permanent universe (yes, people want to play in sessions, and people want to play single player, and people want to play while not connected to the internet), this will not be a paradigm-shift, but rather a new toy in an already large collection of other toys.
Re: The HTTP of VR
#3Oh how this reminded me of the Verse protocol and Uni-Verse! To be young again, and so on. :)
Re: The HTTP of VR
#4This is pretty silly. We can't throw away http because http solves problems that VR does not alleviate.
>A real-time, dynamic, stateful two-way client-server protocol. As such, it will be if not fully RTP then close to it.
Why didn't we always have this if all we needed to do was ask? So...realizing we still have the internet of today, what we actually need to rethink is html and the concept of the web as documents alone.
I would be interested to see some work on hyper-objects. As in, hypertext beyond text. The article should be "HTML for VR" and we should be musing about how to find, load, interact and link web based virtual objects.
Re: The HTTP of VR
#5What 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 think of everything in terms of observing / monitoring / tracking and you can see why some of it will start getting pushed really hard.
There are some neat things. If I could have a virtual workspace that rivaled 4k monitors and brought my real keyboard / mouse into the VR world, I can't say I'd be opposed to setting up in a virtual office with an amazing view instead of the 10'x10' box I currently live in.
> I also have a hard time imagining management sitting in meetings while wearing a 400g headset for 3h.
I have a Quest 2 and after about 1h I need to take it off and have a break. That's not an issue for gaming, but it has a long way to go before being a productivity tool.
There's also going to be huge commercial benefits for anyone that can convince the public to adopt VR environments instead of real environments. Imagine a generation of movie goers where friends gather in a VR theater to watch the newest movie. They still pay admission, but you have no costs beyond licensing IP. There are apps on the VR stores that are already laying the ground work for that type of setup.
Re: The HTTP of VR
#6What 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…
Nothing is stopping you from using your keyboard in VR.
Re: The HTTP of VR
#7tl;dr: "So at Simul, for the past few years we’ve been building this protocol: it’s called Teleport VR. Let’s see what we can make with it!"
An alternative view would be that HTTP(S) would be "the HTTP of VR". With WebXR and standard JS APIs for HTTPS, async fetching, WebRTC, etc, all the items listed in "Imagine an application-layer protocol for VR with the following characteristics..." are satisfied. And the stack can use battle-tested web technologies so that it can leverage standard CDNs, cloud servers, etc.
VR has some extra constraints over 2D webpages due to tighter frames per second and latency tolerances, but most of the web protocols can get you 90% of the way there.
Re: The HTTP of VR
#8What 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.
Re: The HTTP of VR
#9Nothing in the blog posting suggests to me you can't use HTTP and Websockets for VR. The understanding of HTTP in the blog posting seems to be rooted in the early 2000s. I don't think the author has much experience in protocol design (it is harder than it looks).
It would be more productive to define a layer on top of HTTP/2 so we can leverage a lot of code that already works, rather than having to spend 10-15 years creating a new spec and codebases that need maturing.
And if you're not happy with websockets for low latency bidirectional communication: it would make more sense to improve websockets rather than reinvent the wheel.
Re: The HTTP of VR
#10Latency is incredibly important in VR. If everything is streaming from a remote server, even if it's a straight fiber connection, it'll still be too much latency.