VR does not have to compete with anything resembling a perfect life or a perfect moment (although I am sure it can and it will). Think of it as a drug, a tool for the sick and the unhappy.

Betting against VR feels like betting against drugs. I do not see any future where it will not be absolutely massive.

My point is that VR treats some rare condition while AR is like viagra: betting on VR over AR seems to seriously misunderstand human wants, and betting on sickness/isolation over healthy interactions.

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.

I vehemently disagree. VR has the potential to medicate the two biggest illnesses of our time, namely growing old/frail and being lonely -- not necessarily in a healthy way, but, again, think of it as medication to manage pain.

This is not a case against AR. AR has the potential to enhance many lifes. VR has the potential to create fake new ones.

I'm not sure VR "seriously misunderstands human wants." Collaborative immersive entertainment with unlimited creative potential is a pretty common human want. It's not the only one. No one claimed VR was a cure all, especially not in its current form. But it's still directionally very sensible.

VR introduces new experience. Don't you think that TV killed a bunch of cool stuff we used to do?

People here can't seem to imagine a future filled with stuff they don't do currently.

No, the activity I was engaged in has survived many versions of media: stories, live music, recordings, radio, and TV.

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.

>No, the activity I was engaged in has survived many versions of media: stories, live music, recordings, radio, and TV.

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...

I think no one is really assuming VR will replace your particular activity. TV didn't replace going for a walk either. There's more than one thing a person can do a day, and more than one mode of interacting with the world.

Being that this is Hacker News. I'm thinking it's the massive pro-tech bias in the site's population.

Combined with the fact that Mr. Andreessen is a bit of a taste maker of a venture capitalist... well there you are.

I agree with your point and that's probably not the primary audience for VR.

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.

This is a pretty specific use case. Sure, VR won't replicate that anytime soon, and it doesn't need to. AR might, but that's not the point.

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.

My point is that outside of hardcore gaming (and a few other specialty uses), AR can perform all of VR’s uses, but VR can’t match AR and degrades nonaugmented events by trying to shoe horn it in. By contrast, AR augments those events.

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.

With that, I can agree. AR will definitely be bigger at some point, because it can in principle be used in any scenario. It's meant to augment, not replace.

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.

If you think of VR as piping in new sensory data, it’s easier to see how it will be massive.

Mayo Clinic has a page on how deaf people can hear these days by tapping into the auditory portion of the brain stem.

While this may be a specific use case, it is a rather typical social interaction to shared media and it is something that will challenge VR for some time. It will be interesting to see how broadband addresses in-person communication like touch and pheromones.

Hm, from my experience, hot-seat VR removes only visual contact between people on the couch and the person in VR. But there is still conversation, there is still commenting about what is going on and giving hints. Much more so, than when watching a show or a movie together with someone else - in which case it usually means passively watching, exchanging maybe at most one or two sentences along the way.

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.

Interestingly one of the more popular VR apps is Bigscreen which let's you watch video content on a large virtual screen in a shared space with other remote users. The use case is consuming passive and mostly 2D content while chatting with your friends which is quite similar to what you're describing but for people who aren't physically in the same space as the people they want to consume content with.

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.

You will obviously not be able to have tactile contact with other human beings in VR anytime soon unless you are physically co-present. But you can still interact with them in most ways that you can in real life given sufficient tracking and software.

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.

> 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

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.

But what you described doesn’t augment what I was doing: it lowers the local interactions, eg by removing subtle visual cues for interactions between people, while not offering something I see as better.

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.

>But what you described doesn’t augment what I was doing: it lowers the local interactions, eg by removing subtle visual cues for interactions between people, while not offering something I see as better.

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.

The point is, many forms of entertainment do not require complete attention and they are extremely successful. Passive to complete attention is a spectrum, and there's many users who do not want to pay full attention.

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.