News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Marc Andreessen: VR will be 1,000 times bigger than AR by dragontamer on Monday January 07, 2019 @03:53PM (#18849937)
VR Chat is one of the "killer apps" of VR. That and Beat Saber, I guess.

I think a "serious" telepresence application would be good. VR Chat is a meme-haven / non-serious location for now. But... there's that good YCombinator blogpost about non-serious apps: https://blog.ycombinator.com/why-toys/

It really does seem like VR Chat (as immature and silly as it is...) is a killer app. How to grow it into a serious application is still a major mystery to me, but I'd bet on VR Chat (or at least its successor that fixes its issues) to be a driving use of VR.

Re:Marc Andreessen: VR will be 1,000 times bigger than AR by TeMPOraL on Monday January 07, 2019 @06:37PM (#18851450)
Might be a PADS (Post-Anime Depression Syndrome), but after rewatching Sword Art Online recently, I found myself thinking that a VR Chat is actually a good idea, and something I would very much enjoy. With an ability to easily enough create and modify stuff in the virtual world (preferably mostly from within world, and I mean creating and modifying interactive objects, and absolutely no "buy funny clothes for your avatar in the platform's store" bullshit), I could imagine running a collaborative ideation space in it; a kind of half-baked virtual hackerspace.

(I find this dream doubly alluring now that I found myself remote-working from a smaller town.)

Re:Marc Andreessen: VR will be 1,000 times bigger than AR by dragontamer on Monday January 07, 2019 @07:51PM (#18851884)
I mean, what you've described is basically Second Life (except inside of a VR headset). So yeah, I could see it working out well.

3d collaborative virtual worlds are a great toy and seem to build communities relatively easily. Its not really mainstream, but Second Life is still relatively big... and has a long-term presence. It was initially released in 2003. It is kinda surprising that people still play that game. 16 years is an eternity in the video game world.

Also:

> after rewatching Sword Art Online recently, I found myself thinking that a VR Chat is actually a good idea

I'm pretty sure Sword Art Online was about how VR could be a... bad idea. Just saying. :-) Granted, I don't think we have any microwave death-triggers implemented on the back of real-world VR Headsets yet, so maybe we're safe from that particular problem.

Re:Marc Andreessen: VR will be 1,000 times bigger than AR by TeMPOraL on Tuesday January 08, 2019 @01:03AM (#18853609)
> Second Life

Yeah, I've been surprised to learn recently that it's still alive and kicking. I'll check it out eventually, I'm gearing myself to do it for more than 10 years now :).

> I'm pretty sure Sword Art Online was about how VR could be a... bad idea. Just saying. :-)

Yeah, well, one of the reason I like it is that, despite every single VR and AR system presented being abused by some villain to do evil things, including just straight imprisoning and killing people thanks to mentioned microwave death-triggers, the anime series and the movie still manage to present a lot of positive sides too, and do a decent discussion of the social impact of such technologies.

I guess it's like with all anime - focused on both extremes, at the exclusion of the mundane :).