This reminds me of higher-res Mii's from the Wii, which was dated tech even at the time.

That said, the most important thing people should be asking is: is it fun? Because if you aren't gonna go super realistic then you had better nail the gameplay (Nintendo or Blizzard style).

Sometimes ultra-realism takes the fun nature out of things.

Simpsons and South Park could easily use high tech graphics but the simple nature of it all is what makes it appealing . Same with Minecraft or even Zelda.

It's also easy to build expansive worlds with breakable objects that don't require tons of physics and special effects to make something like a box exploding look realistic.

I really don't think VR needs to wait half a decade for hardware to catch up. Existing systems can create beautiful experiences with the right artistic decisions

Perhaps but you haven't established that.

> To meet your deadline for a 120hz video frame, your signal can travel at most 1500 miles in a vacuum, closer to 1000 miles in copper/fiber.

Edge computing is a feature of some modern clouds, and certainly is intended to have much lower round trip distance than that to at least major markets, specifically to reduce latency.

Admittedly, public cloud offerings don't tend currently to have compute resource suitable for hosting VR in their edge offerings, but it's certainly something a major cloud player supporting their own gaming/VR offering could do, and for that matter a feature that it is easy enough for public cloud vendors to offer if there was sufficient demand.

If it takes 4ms to generate a frame you’re down to < 500 miles from the data center. If you need to pad for packet loss you’re down even further.

As I understand, edge computing locations tend to be in most major cities in the regions covered, providing tens-of-miles distance to most people in major markets.

Global birth rate is around 150,000 people per day. At Facebook scale that’s not one sucker born every minute but tens of thousands; millions of new Facebook users born every month.

They never played second life or minecraft.

“We” have done this, most humans haven’t.

Yes, but how many of them are going to waste time playing pointless games like Horizon online? How many people that would play such a game haven't already? To say that there are a lot of Facebook users and that that naturally means a lot of players is strange given that VR headsets are still a luxury item and that Facebook Horizon doesn't essentially offer anything novel outside that.

> They never played second life or minecraft.

> "We" have done this, most humans haven't.

Similarly, most humans haven't played Horizon, and there is as far as I'm concerned no compelling reason to believe that a lot of people will. Who would waste their time in that disgusting looking world and present themselves using a bland Wii-like avatar?

Probably less cybering, from the looks of it.

This probably won't actually stop people.

I never spent a cent inside of an FPS but probably spent a few thousand dollars in SL.

Any such VR world should be openly developed and not be provided by a corporation who can selectively put anything in there and inhibit anything going against company policies.

This is Black Mirror waiting to happen.

But Dirt Rally on the other hand... That is a different story. VR is great when realism is the goal. Games in zero g environments are cool too.

> it's really surprising how powerful GPUs have gotten. Improvements over the last few years have been very nonlinear

These improvements did not come at fixed cost, though. Prices for top-of-the-line GPUs have been increasing (as well as die sizes, power consumption, and manufacturer margin). Together with Moore's law, that already brings nonlinear improvements, the available computation power has increased a lot.

However, those GPUs are very expensive. Most people just can't afford them. And if few people can afford them, it's hard to justify paying a whole army of developers (like AAA game studios) to bring that kind of experiences.