A Vive Pro headset, the most advanced consumer-ready VR headset, costs $800, plus a few hundred $ more for each of the base stations and controllers. On top of that, you need a good PC to run any VR software. That's a lot of money to invest.
And if you do, you're met with a bunch of weird experiments, a few weird experiments with some polish, and a handful of games that offer a truly novel experience in VR.
But because the barrier to getting into VR is so high, it doesn't make financial sense for most companies to try to make software for the space. And because there are too few games, there isn't a good reason to buy a headset, so the whole ecosystem goes full ouroboros.
So, I guess the thing that is missing is the price falling low enough that the VR ecosystem can become self-sustaining. Good VR systems totally exist; they just cost $4000 and you can't do anything with them, lol.
I think the having multiple focal planes likely is over indexing on one thing that likely is not the most important thing..
I saw these in multiple research labs, but I'm not sure they ever really served a real application base. They were in constant use by grad students and postdocs writing new experimental apps and demos. Unfortunately, I think real technical users often find that immersion is a gimmick rather than a real tool. You'd rather spend your money or compute resources on higher resolution and high dynamic range images than stereo rendering. And, when you have challenging visualization problems you are often struggling to sustain any interactive rendering and exploration at all, much less the high framerates needed for immersion.
You could have immersion at any time, if you are willing to adjust your problem size and expectations. Stereo rendering always means rendering twice as much as for a regular screen, so you are also going to require a larger hardware investment for any given application and quality metric. Natural, immersive navigation always means limiting your model such that the working set remains well cached and you don't have massive drops in rendering rate as the user moves. People get aggravated when ripped out of immersion by application stalls.
Also, it is hard to make an immersive display system low friction/accessible to casual use. But, if you have to design your application to easily degrade to normal screens and keyboard+mouse, then you cannot really focus on and exploit the compelling parts of immersive rendering and immersive user inputs. Can you ever find enough users to agree on this set of compromises to make a product successful?
I have no particular inside knowledge of this, it's just an idea/hypothesis.
Magic Leap decided, perplexingly, to locate itself in a suburb west of Fort Lauderdale. Not the most far-flung location, but not exactly a tech hub, either.
I was repeatedly contacted by their recruiters despite living in a completely different part of the country and having limited experience at the time. The impression it left me with is that they were really hurting for talent. Maybe the location is one reason why.
What’s left there are the echoes of the employees that hung around. IIRC, XM Satellite Radio has their engineering office in Lauderdale. Wonder where they found all the RF people needed to spin that one up.
Which one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boynton
I'm guessing the Detroit one since you said "lots of it moved up to Chicago later on".
Content
Grand Theft Auto 5 cost $265 million to create.
VR content is going to be much harder and expensive to create to just equal it.
It also has to work sitting down. No one wants to come home after a hard days work and relax standing.
(And don't even bother with the it will be useful in work environments, high end users often don't even use gui's and prefer text. Even the cliche of buying a house even with a cookie cutter plan the cost to make it 3D and look good from pre existing CAD drawings is probably too much)
What critical milestones are still missing that, when available, will allow truly immeresive VR? And anyone dare predict when they will be available?