Where Will Virtual Reality Take Us?

Between 2016 and 2024, an advanced alien race arrived and was preparing to make first contact with humanity. Their primary goal was to ensure that the human race would be a good steward of their technological heritage they were about to bestow upon mankind. After observing the large wasteful investments in techs such as during the Crypto mania, AR/VR mania, and Gen AI mania, the alien race decided that the human race was still too immature and decided to schedule another return visit in 100,000 years hoping that the situation would be improved by then.

Re: Where Will Virtual Reality Take Us?

#5

Post by netsharc » Fri, Feb 02, 2024, 9:31 PM UTC

The author is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier

Re: Where Will Virtual Reality Take Us?

#6

Post by ben_w » Fri, Feb 02, 2024, 10:04 PM UTC

bugbuddy wrote: post #4

Between 2016 and 2024, an advanced alien race arrived and was preparing to make first contact with humanity. Their primary goal was to ensure that the human race would be a good steward of their technological heritage they were about to bestow upon mankind. After observing the large wasteful investments in techs such as during the Crypto mania, AR/VR mania, and Gen AI mania, the alien race decided that the human race…

> Crypto mania, AR/VR mania, and Gen AI mania

One of the things I will never stop finding weird, is the tendency to group together things that aren't really related.

I wonder if I do it too? If I did, I expect I wouldn't notice…

Re: Where Will Virtual Reality Take Us?

#7

Post by spcebar » Fri, Feb 02, 2024, 10:05 PM UTC

I like this article. It expands on the big question for VR. We have this technology, it's here, it's mostly good enough (with the caveats the article lays out) for a variety of purposes. But what is the purpose consumers will want to use it for?

Apple has been the king of telling consumers what they want for years. If they can't sell VR, I don't think anyone can sell VR. This feels like the make or break moment for VR, where we'll know what people want to use it for/if it's capable of living in the mainstream, or if it's forever going to live as a niche product, as it has been since the VR renaissance started when the Occulus Rift came onto the scene.

Re: Where Will Virtual Reality Take Us?

#8

Post by bsimpson » Fri, Feb 02, 2024, 10:08 PM UTC

> But the truth is that living in V.R. makes no sense. Life within a construction is life without a frontier. It is closed, calculated, and pointless. Reality, real reality, the mysterious physical stuff, is open, unknown, and beyond us; we must not lose it.

This is one of the throughlines of Interstate 60. It's an absurd existential comedy from the writer of Back to the Future with an insane cast for an indie film. It was one of my favorite movies in college; I wonder how it holds up.

-----

From the movie:

> He said the frontier was a safety valve for civilization, a place for people to go to keep from goin' mad. So, whenever there were folks who couldn't fit in with the way things were, nuts, and malcontents, and extremists, they'd pack up and head for the frontier. That's how America got started - all the crackpots and troublemakers in Europe packed up and went to a frontier which became the thirteen colonies. When some people couldn't fit in with that, they moved farther west, which is why all the nuts eventually ended up in California. Turner died in 1932, so he wasn't around long enough to see what would happen to the world when we ran out of frontier. Some people say we have the frontier of the mind, and they go off and explore the wonderful world of alcohol and drugs, but that's no frontier. It's just another way for us to fool ourselves. And we've created this phony frontier with computers, which allows people to, you know, think they've escaped. A frontier with access fees?

Re: Where Will Virtual Reality Take Us?

#9

Post by bee_rider » Fri, Feb 02, 2024, 10:14 PM UTC

> Life within a construction is life without a frontier. It is closed, calculated, and pointless. Reality, real reality, the mysterious physical stuff, is open, unknown, and beyond us; we must not lose it.

Only a tiny minority of people have lived on a frontier, that’s sort of the inherent to the definition. Most people now live in a very constructed environment (urban areas). In the past, most people lived somewhere in between; towns, suburbs, etc.

Many of us find our mysteries in artificial areas: parks, little shops, back yards. There’s plenty of beauty and complexity in nature of course. But in human spaces we see just as much complexity and mystery; somebody builds something, it decays, gets fixed up, added to, gets some graffiti. We’ve all got little worlds in our heads that motivate us to do things, there’s plenty of complexity in there, especially once our actions start bouncing off each other.

I think most of the problem with VR so far has been, well… first, the tech just isn’t there yet, it kind of sucks still. But also we’re mostly getting silo’d VR experiences from single authors or companies. Games. There’s no mystery there because it was all intentionally placed by the designer. Eventually we’ll get better persistent dynamic multi-user spaces I bet.

Re: Where Will Virtual Reality Take Us?

#10

Post by bsimpson » Fri, Feb 02, 2024, 10:15 PM UTC

> There are many reasons why V.R. and gaming don’t quite work, and I suspect that one is that gamers like to be bigger than the game, not engulfed by it. You want to feel big, not small, when you play.

I'm curious how he feels about Half Life: Alyx.

What makes that game so compelling is the degree of interactivity it affords. You can pick up anything. If it's glass, you can break it. It allows you to interact with a tangible world to a degree that no other consumer VR software does.

It's one of the most well-reputed games of all time, and it's only available in VR. As such, modders have figured out how to make it playable without a VR headset. The reviews of non-VR players are that it's actually a pretty boring game when you're not in a simulated environment. If you're not taking the time to open the drawers and break the bottles and duck behind the barrels in a gunfight, it's mostly just walking through tunnels waiting for the occasional ambush.