> VR next. If you don't have an Oculus Quest 2 or realize what a game changer it is in terms of price, power and wireless usability, you really need to get one, no matter what you think of Zuck and FB. It's the next thing. And it'll look clunky as hell 5 years from now. It's the suitcase-sized laptop of the early 90s.

I just got a Quest 2, and totally agree. It's incredible for what it can do for the price. And that it's untethered. Anyone who's into tech or interested in the future of tech should get themselves a Quest 2. The immersion level of games like Superhot VR was totally mind-blowing to me.

I also think it's the future of home workouts. If Peloton's not working on a VR system then they'll be done in five years.

Yeah Thrill of the Fight is one HELL of a workout. I keep saying this and only those who have actually tried it get it.

And yeah totally agree - I think one of the biggest changes here is the price. $300 is insane for what you're getting out of the box.

I'm looking for more workout apps, so I will check that out. I've been pretty impressed by Les Mills Bodycombat, though I find the banter/encouragement of the presenters/coaches barely tolerable (I believe I can turn them off in the latest update; I'd like a switch for "style/form tips only")

There's a line I can't cross; I like being physical. The Internet and its medusa of services already takes me away from meaningful choices, why should I deepen that connection that feels so overwhelmingly oppressive already?

Rest assured, nobody will force you.

FWIW, I'm also wary of embracing full-time VR. I'd certainly like augmented reality, but immersive VR feels like too much yet.

I suspect VR porn will be a huge driver of this technology. The porn industry both has the money and the desire to push the envelope into new offerings.

I wouldn't be surprised if pornhub invests in VR in some way in the next 5-10 years.

There's already a "pornhub" for VR called sexlikereal. You can watch videos and even connect toys that are synchronised with the video. The platform seems to be getting pretty big and even produces some of their own videos.

PS explaining for a friend XD

Yeah, while most people will avoid this conversation - they were huge innovators in early eCommerce, and it's an obvious use case.

But there are also other super exciting applications like dating e.g. a dating app facilitates the first date in VR and is able to provide safety controls making first-dates far more approachable and happen earlier on leading to more successful relationships.

Well, if you think about it, they were a huge driver for the web, so that would be just continuing the trend :-)

Implants may be coming sooner or later but the rest of society doesn't stand still, and as we extrapolate trends into the future, one thing seems very clear:

You will not own the implants in your body.

They will be owned by a separate third party. You may still pay for them, and you may get some value out of the proposition, but they will not be under your control.

That's perhaps the most important aspect of our future.

So long as we live in a free market economy I would hope consumers wouldn't be as stupid as to go that route. Sure, with music, movies, and even electronic peripherals many people go the rent vs buy route. I imagine however that many more would have issues with ownership and bodily autonomy if the items were actual physical implants.

Futurama did it. Implanted vision devices have been a few years away, for decades. The nerve-wire interface isn't a simple problem.

https://youtu.be/uASUHbFEhWY

Gibson did it in Neuromancer in 1984 and others before that. Even if the bio interface problem isn't solved, lightweight wearables that encompass all your vision and are super performant with a massive dev ecosystem and incredibly useful will be a reality in a couple decades.

It shows the technogical plateau we're in with iPhones mostly being the same form factor.

Earpieces were alleged during the last presidential debates[1] (fact checkers said this was false), and other places[2]. How would one detect an implant?

[1]https://www.naturalnews.com/2020-10-05-biden-wore-wire-with-...

[2]https://twitter.com/3ree6ixty/status/1352444645125414913?ref...

1) No credible source alleged that.

2) Those allegations have surfaced around every debate since 2004 (or at least one debate every cycle)

3) Who cares if they were fed lines? Speechwriting isn't their job, nor is memorizing numbers.

Were they alleged by anyone with a shred of credibility? Natural News is somewhere below the late, lamented Weekly World News in terms of being a news source you should take seriously.

Natural News is an extremely accurate source. Just take anything written on the website, take the exact opposite position, and you will be correct more often than night.

What a fantastic selection of sources

Put the presidential candidates in a debate room that's actually inside a faraday cage. Use jammers to jam radio signals.

My personal preference would be to put each candidate on multiple 3 to 4 hour long-form podcast interviews so we can get some idea of what they are like.

Would that actually mean anything in a contemporary American election? Most of the electorate has an attention span of about 30 seconds.

That being the case, one has to imagine that 30 seconds taken from the final hour of a four-hour podcast (or, potentially, anywhere in the middle) have the potential to be quite different in insight than 30 seconds take from the first hour.

The longest period we have seen a presidential candidate speak extemporaneously for is ~90 minutes (Biden town hall) which is an exceedingly rare occasion that came with pre-arranged questions and was mostly prepared talking points anyway.

One of the aims of a longform podcast would be to extend the interviewee out beyond their prepared talking points to see what happens.

One of the big problems is that certain sections of the press will just be hoping for you to fail, and will go over every word with a fine comb to look for something to moan and bitch about in the most bad-faith negative interpretation possible. Furthermore you need to be a renowned expert on any issue, cannot be seen to be thinking about something for more than a nanosecond, cannot hesitate in their answers, etc.

We are asking for too much of our politicians, so they will find ways to cope out of necessity, by limiting the exposure. We all like to think that we'd do better, but after being shafted by twats who call themselves journalists a few times we'd all be doing the same.

The problem you describe is why presidents will only sit down for interviews with anchors/journalists/networks who they have some guarantee will treat them favorably.

It's ironic that to get more than this from politicians, it seems we need to be MORE forgiving of them. That is a hard pill to swallow, as a citizen.

> The problem you describe is why presidents will only sit down for interviews with anchors/journalists/networks who they have some guarantee will treat them favorably

That's not true. Only the last president outright refused to engage in unfriendly press. Obama may have called on Fox reporters less often and only got interviewed once or twice on the network, but he still engaged them.

Didn’t Bernie Sanders do the Rogan podcast?

Or, accept that listening to and trusting a capable team of advisers is perhaps a better qualification for the role than thinking on your feet, and definitely better than being able to recall which of your rehearsed sound bites to use in response to which prompts.

> VR synthetic reality. [Already here and super fun and useful]

Is it though?

Standing in your home office, sweating, with foggy vr glasses, trying not to fall down or run into walls while looking at low-poly NPCs coming at you, trying to use bizarre, disembodied "hands" to keep them away. What's not to love?

Have you played much VR? All of the points you made could technically be problems, but based on my experience, they really arent.

I have played VR. Several headsets in different setups. It's fun if you are riding a VR roller coaster or sitting in a boat as a tourist, but the only games I played that were halfway decent were Beat Saber and Alyx. Those games have addressed the controls issue better than the other games I've tried, but the sweating, fogged goggles, and the aching feet definitely still showed up in those games.

If you have not tried something with a cockpit (like Elite: Dangerous), it's worth a shot. I found it very accessible and actually quite fun, even though I hate the game outside of VR.

>> VR synthetic reality. [Already here and super fun and useful] >Is it though?

Yes. The Quest 2 is incredible. No PC required, just a headset and 2 hand controllers. Games give you a completely immersed experience in a synthetic world where you can look around, explore, play, talk to other players in real time.

It is here and I would call it super fun, but not useful (maybe that's what you were questioning). I think it may be a fad like the Nintendo Wii, or it might hang around to varying degrees. Maybe I lack imagination but I don't see people wearing AR glasses in public or to work even if they do become ultra-compact and awesome.

Some people let their excitement lead them to believe "cool fun new thing" is somehow the magical future. I played Dactyl Nightmare (VR) back in the 1990's and have been waiting for awesome home-VR since then and quest is every bit of what I had imagined maybe it could be. But at the end of the day, rec-room paintball is just Dactly or Quake Arena. A 25yr old guy at work had to show me Mario Tennis on his Switch - it's just pong with special moves and fancy graphics. What's new is old, and I don't see any revolution with VR outside of niche applications like training and some visualization. Now get off my lawn while I go play some EchoVR.

> Games give you a completely immersed experience

I haven't tried the Quest 2 yet, so I don't know how good it is, but to me, it's not "completely immersed" until you can interface directly with my brain to feed it false visual, auditory, smell, touch, etc. signals, as well as interpret signals I make to move around, which causes me to interact with the virtual world instead of the real world.

Anything else to me just feels kinda clunky. Certainly the stuff available now is way better than stuff from 20, 10, or even 5 years ago, but it's a far cry from complete immersion.

It sure is clunky yes. It's certainly not totally immersed.

But it's so much more immersive than what we had before that it's still really amazing. If you had skipped computers in the 80s and 90s because they were nowhere like perfect yet, you still works have missed out on an amazing time. The same is happening now.

Yeah I too played Dactyl arena for like 1 minute at a fair. Then I waited what 30 years for it to come to my home. At least it finally did happen!

Never understand why people imagine this progression. I love gaming, but wouldn't really see the need to implant a PS4 into my body even if it were small enough. And outside gaming and entertainment in general, VR just doesn't have any compelling use cases. Even in gaming, VR controls are still horrible, and games are actually more limited in the range of actions your character can take - since there just aren't enough buttons on any controller to simultaneously move and interact fully enough.

Not to mention that a good 10% or more of people get violently motion sick from using VR.

There was a dystopian poem in the 1980's that ended with someone unable to go to sleep at night because there was a constant blinking red light when he closed his eyes from the AT&T answering machine implant in his eye.

I suspect that after augmented reality wearable glasses we'll transition to AR contact lenses first, and maybe even stay there, before we go to full-on implants.

You're probably right. At the very least the market will always exist as some folks just refuse to get a bio implant.

Is there something like Oculus but... Well, in control of the user? Or at least less FB-y?

It will come. FB is investing the big bucks but once they start seeing real success (and they are) others will see the value and start competing for real.

for true AR did anyone finally solve the problem of how to make black light or it's going to go through a camera + processing + display?

Try passthrough on Oculus Quest 2 to get an idea of how easy this is to solve. It just uses the motion sensor cameras and it's pixelated and black and white, but you get some overlays and you can get a very good idea of how quickly this will be solved in full 8k hidef with overlays that look like they belong.

A simple solution would be to have liquid crystals on the glasses, like electronic auto-darkening sunglasses or welding helmets. Of course, this could only change the light level of the entire field of view at once (since it's way too close to your eye to focus), but that's still useful for many things.

I’ve always wondered this too. Once they figure how to make me feel like I’m sunbathing late night on the beach instead of by my pool, I’m sold.