VR is where computation becomes human. No keyboards, no monitors, no mice or joysticks, but instead hands, gaze, movement, and voice. VR presents itself as a new way to receive information, but its essential innovation is data input in its most natural form.
Enabling humanity to engage with itself and its machines with a fully embodied interface is a 10x improvement over touch-screens. Small example: whiteboards. The simple act of a talented group viewing and marking a large flat surface can change the world. Today, this is not possible without co-location. Once a VR headset with positional and hand tracking hits the market (Oculus promises this spring), the rate of world-changing collaboration will no longer be restricted to geography. Once these virtual whiteboard trend toward Jupyter notebooks, VR will not only have triumphed over location-restricted bodies, but also location-restricted computers.
The future is bright and VR will be at the heart of it, regardless of how many people currently mistake it for a toy.
The VR optimists underestimate how deeply human it is to manipulate a tool with your hands. It's not a coincidence that the only intelligent mammal is also the only one with opposable thumbs. If voice was actually vastly preferable to the output of a keyboard, it wouldn't be the case that texting is more popular than calls (and that voicemail has more or less gone the way of the betamax).
> The simple act of a talented group viewing and marking a large flat surface can change the world. Today, this is not possible without co-location.
Are you being sarcastic? I do this every day in Google docs.
But that's exactly what VR enables. Instead of clicking a button to swing an axe, in VR you can naturally swing that axe with your own hand. Instead of dragging a mouse to draw a line, you can just move your hand. In many cases VR allows to skip that layer of indirection between input (keyboards/mice/joysticks) and output (screen).
I agree. This is exactly the sort of inconsequential activity where VR will really excel.
> Instead of dragging a mouse to draw a line, you can just move your hand.
Dragging a mouse is "just moving your hand." If you really need less friction in this case, use a touch screen. What do a VR headset and VR hand tracking gloves add?
> In many cases VR allows to skip that layer of indirection between input (keyboards/mice/joysticks) and output (screen).
I like this point, and I think it might illuminate where the fundamental disagreement is: how many of these cases are there? For most of the things I do with my computer (writing code, email, listening to music, reading articles) I am simply not convinced that there is a layer of indirection. Keyboards, graphical user interfaces, and CLIs are already well-optimized for ease and efficiency in achieving their stated goal. Introducing VR would increase friction rather than remove it.
I don't think your objection diminishes my main argument, which is that many forms of communication don't receive any optimization from VR - including forms that the VR crowd seems to believe will be revolutionized (e.g. wildermuthn's whiteboard example).
Texting is preferable to voice only when it's a break from human interaction.
That's why you call your parents but text the girl you met last weekend.
It's not because they're too old to text. If the only way they could communicate with their children was through text, they'd be typing on their phone more than a stereotypical teen. It's because you're comfortable talking to your parents. Even when it's at it's most-uncomfortable, it's still familiar, safe, and never going to be as bad as the painful conversations you've already had with them. You don't need the safety net of putting the phone down, distracting yourself from the conversation by stressing about the conversation, procrastinating, or the flexibility to workshop every response with your friends.
For human interaction, voice is vastly preferable.
This is trivial or false. If you define "human interaction" as "the sorts of interactions where we'd rather talk" then sure, voice is preferable by definition. On the other hand, if you define it as "interaction between humans" then your own example shows that it depends entirely on the nature of the interaction. Sometimes we'd rather talk and sometimes we'd rather text.
I should have originally written "If voice was _always_ preferable to the output of a keyboard". I'm obviously not suggesting that there are no cases where voice is better than sms.
What I'm suggesting is that our existing text/chat messaging, CLIs, GUIs etc are much more than a crude approximation of moving things with one's hands (or speaking) which will be obviated by VR. They are, in the appropriate cases, _more_ easy and efficient than moving things with one's hands or speaking.
But not every technology ends up being the next personal computer, cellphone, or Facebook. Someone probably once thought that hosting sites like GeoCities were the future before blogs/Facebook made it clear that the average user doesn't want to design their own website. It took something more approachable to come along.
Yes, chalkboards, I’ve heard of them and used them.
Yeah, sorry, but that’s just not how most real work gets done in the real world.
Make Excel a compelling VR app, then we’ll talk.
Is this really such a common way to work and collaborate? I’ve rarely seen this even in co-locates teams. More usually problems are such that people work offline, put and document/proof-of-concept, presentation together and then maybe discuss the presentation/document verbally, or over email.
Not so much movie style enthusiastic whiteboarding. Maybe that would be better way of working, but is it really that common? Is there any data on this?
Same observation: it absolutely isn’t how people work & collaborate. VR is DOA for most kinds of work because it just isn’t all that compatible with most kinds of work.
Why will VR be a better solution for this than AR? Surely being able to see your real surroundings with virtual whiteboards and controls 'stuck' to various surfaces will be more comfortable for people than a totally immersive world.
I don't know anything about VR and the biological costs of using it, but why is it necessarily more harsh on the body than glasses and headphones and gloves? Future-VR is likely to get smaller and lighter, like current VR is smaller and lighter than Steve Mann's 1980s and 1990s wearables. Won't there come a point where it's just .. light and easy and mostly fine?
Biggest killer application of VR would probably be a new Internet
Interactive VR will be no different. Either it will be very simple but entirely artificial, or it will be complex and "natural" but ultimately unsatisfying. We are nowhere near being able to implement anything approaching "reality".
But even if we were, I think you overstate the promise. "Having to learn a new UI" is exactly what you will always have to do to learn to do anything new, whether it's in a mobile app, on a computer, in VR, or in the real world with physical objects. Guitars, power tools, ping pong tables, pressure cookers... they all have new and different user interfaces.
Are you referring to existing technology, or some kind of Sci fi holodeck thing?
I can think of 2 broad categories of potential computer program. The first, old world computer programs, and I can't see flicking through virtual files in a virtual filling cabinet being an improvement over what we have now. And the 2nd category is 'real world' computer programs. Basically simulating real life. So ranging from VR watching the tv (what's the point) to white water rafting. Which I can see, but that's basically back to computer games. Which is the thing the VR always ends up being used for.
It really does seem that a keyboard is a quite deep local maximum of human-computer interaction. Not a single other mode of HCI invented afterwards can match the combination of high versatility and high efficiency.
But virtual worlds, and the vision-oriented tasks (like e.g. 3D modelling, be it artistic, scientific, or engineering) - there I can see VR working much better than what we currently have.
I can see (3D manual manipulation + verbal commands + weak-AI inference of intent) being a pretty compelling interface package.
For our primary coding purposes, I doubt we'll ever surpass keyboard.
But the counterargument would be that coding is a fairly esoteric set of criteria that we've specifically built around the keyboard (i.e. every character matters, no synonyms, etc). Were there an alternative... say, boilerplate code intelligently glued together by verbalized architecture directions? I wouldn't want to put a bet down. Rails convinced me that sometimes being smooth is more important than being best.
Now I was going to say that the trick is workload reduction, and that 'AI-glued boilerplate directed by voice' could just work by doing most of the task automatically, but then I realized: workload reduction doesn't work. As proved time and again in the last few centuries, as soon as you find yourself with extra free time due to some efficiency improvement, more work will be assigned to you to fill that time. You may not want it, your employer may not even want it, but someone over at a competing company thinks they can get ahead this way, and now everyone has to follow suit.
For programmers of course its hard to work with those interfaces. But imagine a carpenter being able to order coffee, without having to deal with a screen.
That's the kind of utility we are talking about.
Real world interaction is obvious for certain fields where user does something that's comparable to a real world task. i.e. Loading ammunition, Surgery, Plumbing, Repair of various instruments.
For fields that don't have comparable real world representation I would imagine that we're again at the moment in computer science history where we have an opportunity to create a new desktop environment but in 3D space with certain well known natural gestures. For example transferring a file from my laptop to a smartphone doesn't have to be done with context menu, we can have a VR smartphone object and just drag file with our hands in that object lie we would do in real world if were to move a file from one place to another.
Instead of having to switch between different overlapping windows, we can have all windows laid out all around us in a comfortable zone. To go to particular window in focus we use certain gestures like pushing of pulling with hands.
Even if some gestures have to be created artificially, user would probably remember that better next time because of the muscle memory.
There's a really good discussion regarding this in Unity Unite 2016 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzPDTrWcjxc). In fact 2016 conference had a lot of good VR related discussions.
Anything complicated enough -- like most software uses are -- will remain so.
Some niche fields aside (e.g. games, robotic surgery, immersive education, exercise, and obviously porn, the niche field to end all niche fields) VR only makes using the computer more tedious (as you have to move your body). We have seen mostly the trend of disassociating with our bodies through computers...
That said, I'm not sure what you mean by "a new Internet". I have the internet on my desktop, my laptop, my tablet, my phone, my TV, my game consoles, and even my lightbulbs. Do you just mean a new interaction paradigm? A new style of presentation? A new social network?
Not sure about the blocking. I watched the movie a long time ago, in movie it's in the first 5 minutes introduction of OZ platform.
VR probably won't have a place in every home, just as TV or Alexa type devices don't have a place in my home. I think the market can ultimately be as big as those technologies however.
Once they make it a really great experience, I'll bet most games go 3D.
But for other things ... not so much.
What sort of company do you work for, for what purpose are your customers getting VR training, and what are they (or their companies, if applicable) paying?
> VR probably won't have a place in every home, just as TV [...] I think the market can ultimate be as big as [that technology] however.
Nobody needs training to watch a TV.
> Nobody needs training to watch a TV.
I'm not sure what your point is here. Training/education is one big application of VR, entertainment is another. TV is also used for training/education as well as entertainment. Using VR doesn't require much more training than using a TV, although you don't find many adults who don't already know how to use a TV.
Alright, so people who are already quite unlike most of the rest of the general population, and doing things in a work environment rather than at home.
> I'm not sure what your point is here. Training/education is one big application of VR
I'm not disputing that, but we're all talking about general uptake by the wider population, not niche uses. Andreessen is talking about the mass market, given the assertion that (apparently) only 99% of people live in uninteresting places where VR would apparently spice our lives up.
> Using VR doesn't require much more training than using a TV
I don't think there were ever seven figure companies (weird flex, but okay) teaching people how to tune a TV.
You turn the TV on, you watch it. Couldn't be simpler.
Television was an easy sell. Radio you could see? Great.
Smartphones and tablets were an easy sell. Computers you could put in your pocket? Computers that even your nana and grandad could operate? Brilliant.
VR? I don't know what the sales pitch would be that someone in Best Buy could give to a technologically illiterate person, at least without that conversation devolving into a bunch of technobabble and an offer to come do some training in an environment and social context likely to be completely unlike where the customer would be likely to use theirs.
Like television, VR sells itself.
If someone has never seen television before, you don't need to draw up a sales pitch to convince them that it can enrich their life. You just need to have a television on display tuned to an action movie and that person can see for their self. It immediately entertains.
Same with VR. Ever seen VR on display in the wild? People, young and old, are naturally drawn to it. It immediately fascinates people.
Your post makes it seem like you would've poo-pooed computers and video games because keyboards and gaming controllers are too complicated. Yet the VR interface is much simpler than those. Watch a tech-illiterate person strap on VR for the first time. The first thing they do is look down at their hands and wave them around.
Like the person seeing an action movie on television for the first time, they don't need a sales rep to tell them how this might be entertaining.
It's sort of a smell-o-vision situation.
Indeed, because they can see a television. They enjoy it immediately. They don't have to put on a headset, they don't have to engage in sensory deprivation, they don't need to think about software, they don't need to think about use cases.
The point I'm making is that TV was a bogus analogy.
> Your post makes it seem like you would've poo-pooed computers and video games because keyboards and gaming controllers are too complicated
Not at all. Game controllers don't require me to take myself out of my environment to enjoy them.
> Watch a tech-illiterate person strap on VR for the first time. The first thing they do is look down at their hands and wave them around.
They then say "wow, this is cool, I wish I had one". They don't say "I want to buy one of these and put it in my living room". To think they do is, again, that disconnect between Silicon Valley and ordinary people in full force; that because we think it might be cool, somehow we know everybody wants it, and we'll happily ignore all the reasons why people don't or, more condescendingly, dismiss them and anybody who mentions them.
Such hubris should be the lesson of Google Glass and Snap.
N=1, but after I experienced a high-quality VR headset and got to play VR a game alone for a while, my reaction was "wow, this is cool, I'm sure as hell gonna get one of these". Then I realized I'll have to also upgrade my desktop for this, and decided this needs to be actually budgeted. Such is the adult life. You may want to buy something, but there are more important expenses too. VR is still expensive, especially if one doesn't have a gaming rig at home. But it's getting there. It starts to pop up in bars and cafes, and in richer houses.
(Also, getting used to VR took exactly 0 seconds for me, and I can't imagine it's because my subconsciousness is tech-savvy. Good VR already feels natural.)
Hmm no. My grandad had worked out the video recorder, my nan not so much. She has a dumb phone, but never turns it on, nor charges it.
Agree with your final paragraph. Wonder if 'Surround' cinema would work as a marketing term?
I have no doubts that we will end up with a nice headset, with high dpi, eye trscking, full body tracking and a 360 threadmill too walk on. Maybe even fancy tracking shoes which could replace the threadmill.
They could include realtime camerafeeds in front of you, and either show it, adapt the game to it (for tables etc) or show boundaries in the headset
Nothing in AR has hit that yet. VR kinda-maybe-sorta does, but even in games, it's an expensive, niche periphery, at best.
The biggest problem AR has is that most people aren't fighter pilots. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3vbPEtSbv0&t=54s
Hard drives succeeded (in the sense that we now see) because they exponentially created more use cases for themselves (by driving more data processing and storage).
AR doesn't really do that. Most people simply can't derive value from annotations over the real world, in the way they can by simply storing things. So the total addressable market is a lot smaller. Furthermore, AR adoption doesn't drive more AR adoption.
Which is where the VR case is stronger. There are some scenarios (all social) where I can see viral, exponential VR adoption. For all its flaws, the fact that SecondLife still exists demonstrates there's enough of an escapist market to self-sustain.
We're practically living in a VR world where we have not only ubiquitous black mirrors everywhere but displays in our cars, restaurants, work, schools, homes, refrigerators. Stop for a second and think about it and it's as though, in our urban existence, we already have a headset on. In a manner of speaking.
As Orson Welles said, (paraphrased), "Now people only watch Shakespeare plays in order to hear the quotations."
Sure, many people still enjoy replicating existing postcard pictures and posting them to their Instagram/Facebook.
But those experiences are fairly limited compared to what's available if you look at VR's potential — meaningful shared experiences across unlimited varied universes and identities. To be fair, that argument could be made about gaming. But I think gaming and VR are on a pretty obvious collision course.
For 2-3 hours, me and two other people sat cuddled on a couch, alternating in a pretty free flow way between speaking with each other, speaking about the show we were watching, and just watching the content passively — based partly on small tactile, visual, or auditory invitations to shift attention.
VR seems to propose completely removing that dynamic and human contact, that free flowing interaction, with distance and barely more than passive consumption of content.
Because I can picture the AR equivalent, and that situation is the bulk of my TV time. So for me, I just can’t see what VR is offering outside of a few really limited times I want to be deeply in a fake world, alone.
Betting against VR feels like betting against drugs. I do not see any future where it will not be absolutely massive.
VR just isn’t that useful, even by your tacit admission you can’t think of how it directly competes in a situation where it’s obvious how AR would fit in.
This is not a case against AR. AR has the potential to enhance many lifes. VR has the potential to create fake new ones.
People here can't seem to imagine a future filled with stuff they don't do currently.
In fact, each of those media conveyances has made concessions to that activity, rather than the other way around.
So I’m naturally skeptical that a media form which ignores it is going to somehow replace the ones that don’t, given the history of that activity.
I’m asking why other people seem to think otherwise.
Lots of other activities people used to do haven't survived, for example gathering in houses where they played music themselves (eg. on the piano). Heck, visits to friends have almost been killed by social media today...
Combined with the fact that Mr. Andreessen is a bit of a taste maker of a venture capitalist... well there you are.
A more likely audience is the millions of people who, for example, played Call of Duty together last night. Most of those players were connected remotely via a virtual world and voice chat and did not share a geographic location much less the same room.
VR can supplant other experiences many of us spend time on. Like, a multiplayer video game. Or watching a movie alone (reading comments here I feel like I'm a weird person by watching alone, even though I can't see how you can immerse yourself and truly enjoy a deep movie if you keep talking with your friends or spouse). Or casually hanging out with people halfway across the country.
VR is not, and should not be, a 100% or nothing tech. You should be able to enjoy both virtual and real experiences during your day, as you see fit.
So the bet that VR will be massive, and particularly that it will be larger than AR, seems unlikely.
I think it will have a place — in the same way high end gaming rigs currently do, but not even at the level of penetration video game systems have, and certainly not like cellphones.
By contrast, AR seems to be on track to be as common as cellphones.
That said, let's remember that AR today does not exist. HoloLens demos barely qualify as AR. Google Glass was essentially a trimmed down ~2006 feature phone blocking some of your FOV. And before someone says this, Ingress and Pokémon Go do not qualify. It's not really AR until you can overlay images on top of the real world, and until those images are contextually relevant.
With the current trends I see in both spaces, VR has plenty of space to explode before AR becomes ubiquitous, or even usable.
Mayo Clinic has a page on how deaf people can hear these days by tapping into the auditory portion of the brain stem.
From the two, I'd say watching TV together is what is "barely more than passive consumption of content", VR feels more much active, because the people involved create the action, rather than just consume it.
It's not something I've found much use for (but I don't own a TV so your scenario isn't one that has much relevance to me) but it is a common thing and one that already translates quite successfully into VR.
So, to answer your question: perhaps you won't be able to ideally replicate your experience in VR. But you will be able to come close. Why bother? Because you can have that experience with any human on Earth instantly, instead of the privileged few who happen to be taking up extraordinarily close coordinates to you in real world space.
Let's ignore the fact you were watching the content passively and thus making your argument moot given we're talking about a technology designed to hold your complete attention.
The VR equivalent of that is simple: you keep doing that, but with a headset on. Now all of you are still within ears reach of each other and can continue to talk, but the audio for the simulation is shared among those in the room, and only the visuals are private and slightly different to compensate for your slightly different "physical" location in the 3D space, just like the real world.
Now you're flying over the top of the rings of Saturn listening to Brian Cox explain how they formed and using a controller (perhaps single handed and optional), to click on things and reach out into the 3D space and explore what's going on elsewhere... now you can flip down the private audio option on the headset and listen to Professor Cox give you a private tour of a moon around Saturn. You're free to return to the shared experience as and when you wish.
That technology probably could exist today, but it's certainly available yet. But given the article is talking about future implementations, well there you go.
And no one is saying it'll replace what you've described, just augment it.
I’d rather interact with the people next to me than fake touch things while adjacent to other people. Further, if I want to fake touch things with other people — why would I do it with us both wearing immersive displays instead of AR and a shared projection we can collaboratively touch?
In this case, AR seems like a genuine augmentation of what I was doing, while VR sounds like a regression in quality.
What you describe sounds like what a planetarium would install, not anything I need in my living room — precisely because I have limited need to be engaged with content over adjacent persons.
> Let's ignore the fact you were watching the content passively and thus making your argument moot given we're talking about a technology designed to hold your complete attention.
Yes, that’s precisely what I’m trying to call out: in one situation I’m freely switching between passive content and local interactions, while the other insists on my full, continuous attention. They’re not really equivalent activities, so I’m confused why they’re compared.
I have very little use for a full attention display, because that’s the minority of content I engage with or interactions I want to have.
Which is great for introverted people, people who are bored with their spouses/s.os, and people who don't care for "subtle visual cues for interactions between people" compared to the possibility to experience an alternate reality.
It's as if some people can't understand why others would rather escape in an alternate reality than have "quality time"...
>I’d rather interact with the people next to me than fake touch things while adjacent to other people. Further, if I want to fake touch things with other people — why would I do it with us both wearing immersive displays instead of AR and a shared projection we can collaboratively touch?
Because that way you don't immerse yourselves into another world, just project stuff into your living room.
>They’re not really equivalent activities, so I’m confused why they’re compared.
They don't have to be "really equivalent" for one to eat in (or overtake) the other, it's enough that they compete for people's spare entertainment time in the house. Nothing before TV was "really equivalent" to TV, and yet it replaced what people did before in their living rooms by a large margin.
Seeing the current failure of VR proves that the example of flying around the rings of Saturn in VR is not compelling enough vs. seeing that scene on a TV.
Rather, think of the hundreds of people who AREN'T right next to you: out of town parents, friends, your wife when she's on vacation, etc.
It won't replace everything, but'd be nice to play a game with a friend on the opposite coast, collaborate on a project with a remote coworker, or have a conversation with a relative far away.
>How would I turn to my wife and make a comment
You just turn your head/gaze to your wife's avatar in 3D space and make a comment to her...
>how would whatever your answer is going to be actually be any better than AR?
If we're talking "escaping together" you could be inside some virtual world (e.g. a virtual game of thrones 3D environment) watching events or playing together.
AR would just add some extra figures and/or annotations on top of the real world, but it wont be as immersive.
And not being able to enjoy your friend/partner's reaction, facial expression, or simply what they're doing. That mutual participation is half the fun. No, looking at an avatar mimicking your partner's movements doesn't count.
Err, you could see your friend/partner in the VR world trivially, facial expressions and everything.
Besides, when you're looking to escape, this could include seeing your partner 24/7. Not everybody has just fallen in love yesterday...
>No, looking at an avatar mimicking your partner's movements doesn't count.
Yeah, like exchanging texts with friends as opposed to hearing their voice on the phone or going to hang out with them "doesn't count", and yet everybody does it to the detriment of the former activities...
Besides, if we're making arbitrary "laws", then I say it counts double!
VR ain't gonna be a perfect simulacrum of the real world, but it doesn't have to be. It only needs to be good enough to let people express themselves somehow, and people will figure out the rest.
You also can't conveniently eat, drink, or go to the bathroom while using VR, and those are very common things for people to do in the midst of a period of social interaction. Imagine in how many households any given night the following happens in a group of friends or a family: people are watching TV or a movie, someone gets up, maybe goes to relieve themselves, stops by the kitchen to grab a snack or a can of pop, asks if anyone else wants anything, grabs what was asked for, comes back, hands over the item, sits down, and resumes watching.
Because TV and movies tend to be designed to be comprehensible with partial attention, that person very well have kept track of what was happening. Maybe they have to ask "who's that guy?" This kind of thing might happen multiple times a night. This doesn't have to be a planned or organized event -- it's a totally casual domestic interaction.
VR as it currently exists, and as far as can be reasonably predicted based on our understanding of the technology, is something that requires a great deal of physical and mental focus. That will necessarily limit its reach, unless it manages to fundamentally rewrite human society. (And I don't think I, for one, am eager to see what that new society would look like.)
I think there's a lot of interesting opportunities for VR technology. But should I live another 4-5 decades I doubt that I will live to see VR attain anything close to the social pervasiveness of video games, much less TV.
VR misses the mark on a bunch of real life scenarios: selfies, device sharing vs different body sizes, multitasking (e.g. cooking while watching youtube).
And that's beside the point anyways. Selfies exploded after digital photography became mainstream since one no longer needed to buy film. You could say that selfies happened because a physical burden was taken out of the picture.
In contrast, you could say VR is a type of technology that _adds_ physical burden: today I can walk down to T-mobile, buy a new phone and get a free TV delivered to my house that I can then use to watch Peppa Pig w/ my kids. VR can do that too for, what, $1600 for a family of 4? Except I can't actually see my kids laughing with the thing stuck on my face and half of the devices have a high likelihood of breaking in 2 weeks in the hands of toddlers anyways.
https://imgur.com/gallery/boUed
Totally not a thint.
The biggest is motion sickness. It’s still a huge problem despite advances. I can’t game for several hours straight, it’s just impossible.
Movies are better, but the second problem is the the total immersion. It’s a pain in the ass to even check the time with a VR headset on. I can’t easily answer a text, I can’t get up to go to the bathroom without untangling myself, I can even pick up a beer without risking spilling it.
When I have my TV on, I can still cook, flip through catalogs, look at my partner, write emails on my iPad, etc.
Nothing sounds more tedious than having a conversation with somebody whose attention is being drawn by something that only one of us can see.
Then you'd be free to chat over the top of the boring bits...
I agree that replicating the full social context of TV will be difficult
Try that with relatives living in three different places across the country.
Typically whatever is seen in VR is repliacted on the monitor, so it's not true that only one person in the room can see what's going on in VR.
I almost exclusively watch shows while drinking coffee.
Why not, instead, interpret the interest as being in a future where VR is a universal productivity technology?
Any place where "training" or "simulation" matters, VR will be better than what it replaces.
Verticals that have immediate use for VR for training: military, police, fire and rescue; medicine; sports. (With enhanced haptics support and careful use of physics engines, you could also include some of the skilled trades, like machining/woodworking or automotive repair.)
Professions that have immediate use for VR for simulation: therapists; travel agencies; interior designers; architects and structural/civic engineers; criminologists, accident reconstructionists, and insurance adjusters.
And that's just off the top of my head, as someone who doesn't really pay attention to the field.
Certainly, VR is isolating. But so is sitting at your desk, in a cubicle, in an office, staring at a screen. If you're already being paid to suffer 0.9 units of isolation (cubicle+desk+screen), I'm not sure the company moving to 1.0 units of isolation (cubicle+desk+VR goggles) is going to make people upset. Either way, you still go back to 0.0 units of isolation when you get up and go to the water cooler.
(Admittedly, though, a VR-centric office productivity paradigm would make pair programming harder. Unless, I guess, people were pairing in some Second-Life-alike virtual office—which would actually be quite good for remote-first companies.)
Currently the major barrier I foresee is the 3D TV & glasses issue. Many people just don't want to bother or care about setting up 3D TV content and glasses. It's why things like the occulus go exist.
[0]: Apparently the lens distortion makes it not map perfectly 1:1 and putting it in like, "night vision" mode makes that less nausea inducing).
Turned out to be empty hype and not a product that was that desirable. VR headsets seem firmly in the same category. I've been hearing that VR will be huge since the 80s, which is when I first tried a VR headset. Current tech is higher res and framerate with nearly all the same limitations.
There's no sign VR Hype 5.0 will prove more successful than any previous incarnations.
Maybe it won't always be stuck as a niche gaming addon, but at this point I'm tempted to say "not in my lifetime".
I remember seeing a VR headset in the 90's once. The only thing in common with today VR is that it provided stereoscopic vision. I find it baffling to say that current VR only has higher resolution and framerate.
There were many different improvements, which make current VR way better than two decades ago:
- smaller headsets (those headsets from the 90's where huge helmets, nowhere near the size of current goggles)
- true 3d graphics (the 90's demo I saw was of Doom, which didn't even have 3d models, only sprites)
- headset tracking (the main source of immersion, if I turn my head I expect the view to turn in VR as well)
- hands tracking (because obviously I want to directly interact with the world, rather than through the mouse and keyboard)
- force feedback (by itself it always felt like kind of a useless gimmick, until I experienced it in VR)
First VR set I tried was driven by a powerful (for the time), expensive, Unix workstation, or may even have been a pair of them, one for each eye. Whatever the best graphics Sun or SGI offered at the time it had, ie the expensive option. It was intended as a technology exploration and dev kit for the "coming soon" huge wave of arcade and home VR systems. A wave that never arrived outside of a couple of rubbish arcade machines, and the awful, but massively hyped "VR is here", film Lawnmower Man.
Hand tracking was there - you got special gloves. Headset tracking was there too, and worked flawlessly. The graphics were clearly orders of magnitude different, as was latency. The level of hype is about the same too, with similar absurd predictions back then as this feature article! Yet the reaction was one of "ooh, neat demo", just as my reaction to Oculus was "ooh, neat demo". Then happy to put it back on the shelf until it's ready. Still just as much a gimmick as 3D tv is to the sibling commenter and me.
The limitations were the same, just scaled up. Headsets are annoyingly heavy still, enough to quickly distract (well oculus was/is) and hugely limit my wish to use. The first set was this, and more. Obviously with added cable harnesses. Both about as attractive in the home as sitting on my sofa with my motorcycle crash hat on, just now we have a fairly lightweight full face helmet. Nowhere near as forgettable as wearing a pair of specs or a baseball cap.
They still cause feelings of sub-nausea for some that better latency was meant to fix, yet didn't, weird isolation, and a feeling that it's almost, but not quite there. Current incarnation is clearly much nearer than back then. Yet it's funny, it felt, going on my fallible memory of the demo we played with that it would be there "quite soon" back then. I feel just the same now. So that quite soon turns out to be very, very subjective. I think that must have been the impression of most of us as the company didn't come close to buying, but it was certainly a talking point in the following weeks. They spent plenty on unnecessary and absurdly expensive toys just because they could or that might be the next interesting thing to develop for. Yet didn't on that.
So they seem destined to stay something that's a niche gaming addon, or niche industrial use like working on something remotely because it's on the sea floor or in a nuclear plant etc. The niches are clearly bigger, and you no longer need a brace of £20k workstations, but still to my eyes not likely to break out of those niches any time soon. If the killer game(s) arrived for VR I'd probably buy one and it would get used to play an occasional hour of those games. Yet those killer apps still haven't arrived, I think because for most a mouse, joystick or controller is more than enough. It's still more a tech to get me a divorce than of the family room. :)
We have a long way to go for the games that transplant you, the relative in Australia sitting on your sofa in place of Facetime calls, or eventually the Holodeck in every home. That seems like the point VR might actually become mainstream. I suspect I won't still be around.
I'm not even sure we need HW to improve, it's just a matter of creating the correct virtual world (which is what FB is working on I'm sure).
This argument keeps coming up, but it's not substantial enough. Not everybody wants to escape in that way, nor do they need to.
A good film, beautifully and cinematically realised to incite powerful emotions; a fun game that engages the player to the extent that it's suddenly midnight and you don't know where the day has gone; or simply a good book that you read in bed until your eyes are sore.
Or hell, just flicking through Facebook/Snapchat/Instagram/reddit/HN (circle as applicable).
> And if you are not a creative type you can pay 0.99$ to get a virtual pet dragon and hangout with your friends and play a bunch of crazy stuff
Sounds tedious. We've had those kinds of things already — Second Life, Small Worlds, Active Worlds, Habbo… their popularity comes and goes, but they're hardly mainstream. Most times people want to do something together, it's for the sake of communicating feelings and ideas; sitting across from avatars of my friends is so much more contrived than just talking to them through voice chat, video chat, or text messaging that I don't see that most would bother.
The pet dragon sounds more fun in AR, roaming around my actual house rather than requiring me to enter a limited virtual world by shutting out my ability to see the actual world around me. Even then, I don't think I could persuade my fully-grown adult friends to come watch me play with a 3D tamagotchi, mainly for the reason that … well, it's utterly stupid.
Going back a bit:
> be immersed in a place where you have a ton of power at the tip of your hands with 0 limit on your creativity
What you're describing sounds basically like 3D artwork. The majority of people aren't creatives who could draw stickmen let alone do great and massive 3D artworks; that's so much more intimidating, I don't see the general public dropping thousands of dollars on equipment to ignore whatever art software they've decided on. That's another thing: it's not as though zero limits on creativity is mutually inclusive with the concept of VR; it depends on the software available, and not everybody may be in a position to buy the best ones.
I don't see "an incredible escape mechanism" as the killer app for VR, nor do I see these examples are being what will drive the masses to VR. If anything, it's possible to do what people proposed in VR using AR, without the need to have people forsake the real world and their sense of security with it.
Those of us who want a 100% escape mechanism are fewer and further between than we may imagine, and I suspect many are driven by the technological impressiveness of VR rather than the daily utility.
I believe VR will have specific uses like gaming, art, simulations, and training. Maybe people with high levels of stress or mental illness could benefit from entering another world, too. But the masses? It ain't gonna happen.
Finally, I doubt FB is working on virtual worlds. It doesn't help their business in any tangible way. They want data that they can use to sell things; if they wanted data from our sensory perceptions, they'd just record our voice and video chats.
Every day on my walking commute to work and when I go out to get lunch, I keep on having to walk around and avoid people whose faces are buried in their phones, sometimes walking straight at me, completely oblivious to those around them.
Also: they're out and about in town doing things, moving between here and there, maybe going to meet someone at a café for lunch, not stuck in a building with a headset on.
Totally incomparable.
Not remotely comparable...Totally incomparable.
Note the above quote: "Prolonged stretches of being unable to see the real world, invoking feels of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty." Haven't we seen quite a few articles recently about how social media tends to produce feelings like that? They are very different things, but there are certain similarities.
Prolonged stretches of being unable to see the real world, invoking feels of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty are completely alien to those who work in huge, warehouse-sized, empty rooms in secure facilities, trying out what they assume everybody will want to put in their ornately decorated front rooms.
There's a disconnect between the tech industry and the "real world", so to speak, and it really makes you appreciate companies who can see the limits of certain technologies in certain domains. Take Apple, working to make AR easy and friendly on iOS; if, one day, VR takes off, then Apple is already prepared with plenty of machine learning and physics frameworks.
Until then, they present AR as the next best thing to VR in a safe, controlled, and non-threatening way; we can see the real world very clearly both through our devices and around them, we don't need to pay for prescription headsets or eyewear, and we are all free to put our iPhones and iPads away at any time.