At Learn Immersive [1], we are bringing VR to education, specifically for language learners. It's incredible what effects VR has on learning and training.

In contrast, VR will definitely be used for porn. If anything, that's where most of the content outside of gaming is being created right now.

I'm 100% confident VR will be at the top of many consumer's Xmas lists next year and the following. It will start with gamers, then trickle into more consumer-y use cases like education and porn.

I apologize for the juxtaposition there. I'm one of the few who has tried Vive and other tracked-remote solutions, and these are what make VR most compelling (not the headset itself). Until you try these, I'd hold off on having a strong opinion.

[1] - http://learnimmersive.com

I am really curious about video content in VR. How does it work? Obviously a 360 degree camera lets you look around the scene arbitrarily, but you're still locked to whatever position the camera was at. Moving within the scene requires 3D rendering, which isn't nearly on the level of actual film. So, what gives?

That's correct. You're stuck as a fixed point, although you can still get a stereoscopic perspective.

Companies like Lytro have started working on solutions to let you move your head around a little bit, but that's about the extend of video for the foreseeable future.

Still, you don't always want to be moving around in a scene. People sit and watch movies all the time, so there's going to be a place for it.

My understanding was that VR was intensely nauseating if you can't at least move your head and have the motion translated (at very low latency!). Is that not the case?

If you try to move around a lot in a non-positional tracking system like the Gear VR or in a 360 video, you might feel nauseous. But if you're sitting down and just looking around, generally developers are getting better at not making people sick in VR.

The other half of that is when your motion isn't translated 1:1 to your perspective in the game (e.g., exaggerated movements in a first-person shooter), that's when you can really feel simulation sickness.

Valve's "room-scale tracking" actually solves a lot of that by keeping your perspective in sync with your real self. I'd say it's the best VR solution I've tried yet.

Nausea is mostly a solved problem at this point. Oculus and Vive have both done extensive testing on nausea and few report it on the new consumer versions.

The reason Oculus took so long to announce a consumer version was largely tied to the fact they hadn't solved the nausea problem. Now they have.

Well... But isn't the way that they solved the nausea problem that they managed to get very, very, very low latency between your head movements and those movements being translated to the image you see?

All the hardware improvements there presumably don't help if there isn't a different image to view when you move your head.

Yeah. You can imagine uses for VR that aren't gaming -- lots of them, actually -- but are people actually going to go for it? I don't know. It may just be a bridge too far for people, or it may be that they don't think that the advantages of VR per se are sufficient to forsake their screens, or it may be that by the time the technology is finally there and content is created for it, some other shift has come into place.

(Oculus Rift feels like it's been right around the corner for like five years now. How long has it actually been? I guess only three years.)

Indeed. Originally people predicted it would arrive by last year's holiday season, now we're waiting for Q1 next year, and Q2 for their actual motion controlled input solution.

That also makes me wonder how the first gen of sales will go, since Oculus is only shipping with an Xbox controller, dividing us devs on input solutions to target and limiting our options in VR quite heavily at first.

Then again, we're waiting til October for HTC/Valve to announce the final consumer Vive, and that'll be out by the end of 2015. And the Vive is quite an amazing experience.

>...but are people actually going to go for it? I don't know

~..death would take care of people who didn't know how to type..~ - Steve Jobs

~iPad sales definitely won't be in strong year-over-year declines within five years~ - probably also Steve Jobs

Sometimes people build technologies that just aren't that attractive to people. I stretched a little for the Steve Jobs joke, but it turns out that sometimes you build something, it works, it's even pretty awesome, but a few years later it turns out that smartphones have 6" screens and tablets just seem less useful than they used to.

Or sometimes it's worse, and you build Google Wave to revolutionized and unify email, chat, and discussion boards and it turns out that people Just Don't Want your tech.

I predict that VR for "live" music and sports events is going to be huge. I would (did) not spend $200 to see the Stones. But I would spend $25 for a good VR version of the live concert. I would not spend $1000 for a season ticket for the Pirates, but I'd spend $100 for a VR season ticket.

Totally agree. We just shot some 360 footage of the Winnipeg Folk Festival (http://www.winnipegfolkfestival.ca) and I'm sure people are going to love this way of experiencing concerts, sports, you name it.

We also just backed the Sphericam kickstarter (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1996234044/sphericam-2-...), so I look forward to a much more streamlined process and the ability to play with more theatrical ideas. Lots of film makers around here who I'm sure could do some amazing things with this tech!

Google Jump is shaping up to be an interesting offering. "Jump is coming to YouTube soon" https://www.google.com/get/cardboard/jump/ YouTube is probably already Google's highest grossing platform. I assume that Google will be a dominant player in the paid VR marketplace. I've no doubt that within just a couple of years that the majority of content that I personally buy will be VR.

One can only imagine how much Ticketmaster is salivating over this.

>"You mean we can charge insane ticket prices and fees for virtual attendance, with no physical cap on how many people can attend?! Shutup and take my money" -Random Ticketmaster Exec

When knowledge workers head to the office, it won't be by driving to a building. It'll be by putting on a VR headset and working in a virtual world that is superior to the physical office in many ways. You can work with anyone in the world. There are infinite meeting rooms that can be accessed effortlessly. Everyone gets a private office when they want it.

Communicating with loved ones changes too. Why catch up on the phone when you can sit in a living room with them?

Virtual reality is not a niche pursuit.

There are a lot of unanswered questions in there, though. If I'm sat in a living room with my loved ones, what am I looking at? A live 3D video of them? What is capturing that video? Will I see them wearing a headset? Because that's going to look pretty bad.

Something I think people often forget about VR - it's going to be really weird to be totally disconnected from the environment around you. If you're plugged into a meeting and your kid runs into the room to get your attention, how will they do it? Probably by poking you, scaring the bejesus out of you.

I just don't buy the idea that VR will make our lives more "real". It'll lead to living in weird bubbles.

That's because you treat VR vs AR vs reality as three different extremes.

They're not.

Think of them as a spectrum. VR + stereoscopic image passthrough gets you an AR-like view of the real world around you. These overlays allow you to pick up coffee cups, see when your kid is poking you, etc.

Here are some of my thoughts on your questions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9938332

Valve is solving walking into walls by showing you a holodeck-like barrier inside the headset, so something like that could work with moving objects like kids or the dog over time too. Still, you are quite disconnected from the world that's actually around you.

In terms of making technology more human, I see VR as a stepping stone to Augmented Reality, which will eventually allow us to interact with our hands and instead of being in another world, you'll see things brought into your own world. That is an improvement over a screen too.

But VR can also transport you to places you've never been through 360 video, which is a powerful opportunity to create empathy through journalism and documentaries that can help us better understand how people live halfway across the world. I'm rather excited for that.

While any technology has the potential to further divide or distract us, VR has made me feel things that no other technology has even come close to feeling.

It may very well be that this iteration does not solve those challenges.

But if you look 5-10 years out, I wouldn't be entirely surprised to see drastically miniaturized components, perhaps a headband of sorts, a Glass-like eyepiece with a projector, maybe contact lenses, or something that provides a strong level of immersion without hiding the face.

In terms of recording the space, the Kinect is able to determine an astonishing amount about a physical space that I imagine would go hand in hand with this.

Isn't the solution obvious? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/Googly.j...

It isn't difficult to connect the external world to an otherwise external sensory deprived VR environment, either with external cameras or smart overlays. I suspect Facebook may try something similar to how Steam functions within games.

I've tried thinking about how virtual meetings would work, but to me it seems to be flawed. Virtual reality allows us to view a 3D environment as if we are there, but how would we capture that 3D environment to begin with? Is there technology that allows us to capture not just 3D, but 3D from all angles? I expect that for "presence" to work, when you move your head, the perspective that the camera sees (on the other end) would need to change, and I can't imagine how this would be achieved.

Many technologies exist to achieve this, they're just not in the "consumer ready" stage yet.

3D scanning is best for static objects like walls in your room. They never move or change, so scan the whole space. When you turn your head in VR, you'll see accurate 3D representations of that 3D environment.

Full 6DOF tracking is another method. Given a 3D scanned static object, like a coffee cup, you can track it using various optical and IMU-based techniques. This means a static object can be dynamically tracked as it moves, giving you accurate information about the 3D world to pick up your coffee cup without spilling it.

Optical tracking can be used to replicate facial movements into 3D models (see: Faceshift), to track finger movements (see: LeapMotion/Kinect), or full body motion.

Video can fill in the gaps for dynamic content. This can be achieved in two ways: 1) depth cameras which combine RGB video like a normal camera with depth information, allow us to reconstruct dynamic objects at proper depth. 2) 360-degree stereoscopic video which gives a fixed perspective to the full 3D environment. This isn't great for "3D from all angles" as non-rotational head movements won't see an accurate view.

A combination of these technologies will enable a VR user to see a real 3D environment, and feel like they are in it.

One thing is certain: it's coming. It's just a matter of time. The technology is rapidly maturing.

Here is some very interesting tech from OTOY that is basically doing that, http://uploadvr.com/diy-wormholes-hands-on-with-otoys-light-...

"Recap: the rig takes two Canon DSLRs and spins them around in a circle, capturing a dense light field image. The resulting data, when properly processed, can be rendered with OTOY’s pipeline and delivered to a VR headset with full head tracking. It’s a static scene but OTOY have alluded to future video capture."

I think there are other hurdles to remote work. Management simply doesn't want it to happen. I'm in a small, very technology-savvy company and - even though we are currently out of office space - there is no option to work from home even part time. The traditional reasons of "need collaboration" / "we work face to face" are always given.

There's a lot of value and comfort that people get from the kind of spontaneity involved in face-to-face communication. If you have to plan a virtual meeting, you loose that. As well as the benefits of walking around to meet with people.

I agree wholehartedly! There is a lot of value. Is there so much value such that an employer cannot allow any remote work?

What's the advantage over FaceTime?

I only see disadvantages... I have to wear this giant thing that prevents me from seeing my arms and anything else physically around me, no ability to capture my actual head and eyes unless you do a bunch of fancy 3d reconstruction, etc.

Think longer term, when augmented reality advances sufficiently that it will look like the person is sitting right across from you. No loss of non-verbal communication, which is still pretty limited to a small field of view over FaceTime.

VR won't solve this in an elegant way immediately, although virtual avatars will soon have eye and facial expression tracking, so at least the avatar will mimic your actual expressions inside of a virtual space. The value add there is that you can be in a shared collaborative space with additional objects besides just other people, and interact with those together.

I'm working on this!

SpaceVR is going to put a VR camera up on the space station so that you can see out into space. I think that might draw the average person. Perhaps putting VR cameras at strategic points in the world, and beyond, might be one of the best usages.

Have you watched live webcam footage from the Space Station? From the Eiffel Tower? Cool stuff, but hardly engaging for more than an hour or so. I'm not sure that adding an extra dimension is really going to sell the technology. (I have no doubt that VR will find its use cases and killer app, just doubt that this alone is it.)

I'd love to see footage from the Space Station, but you're right I wouldn't watch it for more than a few minutes outside of a particular event.

Events though I can definitely see spending real time inside of a headset just to watch video. Cinema too. Lots of studios (including Oculus's own Story Studio) are getting in on that already.

Would you be able to foresee the existence of something like Uber back when you were using your Nokia phone (10+ years ago)? We can't imagine what VR technology will be used for.

I've been reading about Richard Hamming a lot lately, and this stuck with me when he was talking about AI.

"You must struggle with your own beliefs if you are to make any progress in understanding the possibilities and limitations of computers in the intellectual area. To do this adequately you must formalize your beliefs and then criticize them severely, arguing one side against the other, until you have a fair idea of the strengths and weakness of both sides."

In this case, I don't think the technology was as surprising as the fact that it came from outside the Taxi industry. Who would have thought that it would be easier to create a global fleet of drivers from scratch than it would be to utilize existing infrastructure.

I do see your point though. Someone may have been thinking of this concept 10 years ago, but it certainly wasn't me.

I actually did want to make something similar, born out of a desire to digitize my local transit schedules. I tried emailing my local transit agency, but they were uninterested and I didn't realize the kind of hustle you needed to get such stuff started.

I then had an idea using SMS and windows pocket PCs to basically make something like Uber for a software taxi dispatch system. You would SMS a number and then get updates via SMS on the status of your cab. Cabs would have the pocket PCs installed with an external GPS module. I would sell it to taxi dispatch companies as a way to make more money. I was just starting university although, and felt quite overwhelmed with the idea of actually selling it to anyone.

Short term, I think the biggest industry use will be in training, and mainstream (outside of games) will be in 360 video for things like sports.

Long term, I think AR will overtake VR but will only go mainstream when the tech miniaturizes enough to not be visually invasive. Nobody wants a big clunky headset on while they shop.

Those are my predictions anyway (and sound a lot like a lot of people's predictions too, I'm sure).

AR == actual reality?

Augmented reality, I assume.

I can maybe see pre-trip travel planning (for certain types of holiday) working. E.g. take a VR tour of prospective hotels/resorts, cruise ships, big airports, conference halls etc.

I like my travelling unscripted but lots of people I know would dig the above.

I'm a fan of the unscripted travel variety too (backpacking ftw!), although I'm also really into the idea of 360 video of things like short previews of festivals, some harder to get to places, just to get a sense of where I should prioritize my sight seeing.

VR can give you a sense of what a new place is going to be like, but it'll never be quite like breathing the air or climbing on things.