A new medium never really replaces an old medium, it just starves all other media for time. So far VR is great for games, experiencing immersive environments (eg destinations), and some design/creation (eg tiltbrush).
I think it will get better as time goes on, but it is already really compelling. I realize I'm an early adopter, but my enthusiasm is only increasing. WebVR is fascinating, and it's possible to create, for example, a really compelling shopping experience where you could see the actual size of objects before buying.
Whoever comes up with a way for furniture and homewares retailers to demonstrate their products in your home is going to make a fortune, whether it's an open system or a whitelabel platform for scanning rooms, ingesting models and integrating with a shopping cart.
Even though the VR app is just a kitchen demo, IKEA has had Augmented Reality to place furniture in your own home in their standard catalog app for a couple years now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDNzTasuYEw So VR is the next step
Probably something like the Hololens is the next step for that, and Hololens is amazing, so seeing the furniture in your room without having to wave a phone around is going to change buying and decorating
VR is more a different direction, it's hard to take your house and represent it in VR for you to furnish. You could use something like the Matterport, but even then it's an hour or two before you can use it in VR.
It's a start. I already have my apartment mocked up in Sketchup, and I imagine it's not that hard to import that. It'll be hack-y at first, but it seems like a very achievable target for professional interior designers, etc. The tech could easily trickle down.
I used to manage the engineering R & D department at a pretty major e-commerce retailer, they bought the oculus devkit and that was my first idea. I brought it up and was promptly shut down. Then they made me build a cars.com clone. Don't work there anymore.
Similar story: I backed the oculus kickstarter and one of the first thing I wanted to try it once it would be released is realtime 360 video (then move on later to realtime 3d 360). Not being in the Valley, obviously got zero funding, and now such cameras are commonplace; so frustrating.
This was demoed at Google I/O for Project Tango, featuring furniture from WayFair among others. It's not true VR but AR, which actually works better for this application. Until consumer project tango hardware has shipped in quantity, though, it won't get past the demo stage.
The great thing about project tango is that since it has accurate depth sensing and builds a 3D model of the space, furniture placed is accurate to scale. Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gYwc6nS7qs
I personally know of three companies trying to do this. It's a hard problem, one of them basically gave up on the problem, but someone's going to figure it out.
A new medium never really replaces an old medium, it just starves all other media for time.
Really? So, TV and movies starved audio commentary and discussion for time? I suspect TV and movies became dominant, but they didn't completely eliminate audio. Games are a new medium, and they seem to coexist with other media. Books don't seem to be going away. If anything, new forms of media seem to be synergistic with the existing forms.
Maybe starved is too strong a term. I think we're both trying to make the same point - a new medium can exist, but it doesn't mean that the old media go away. You might just use them less. The idea of a new medium replacing an older medium 1-for-1 doesn't make much sense.
That said, the amount of attention people can pay to all media is essentially finite, and new media decreases the hold of old media. In a very real way the internet is killing print newspapers, by drastically reducing the amount of attention that is paid to them.
Likewise, if you look at printed books, they are much less important than they were 100 years ago, largely due to radio, television, movies, computers, and the internet.
Books might be less used by the majority, but they're still the most important medium. They're usually the highest quality, most vetted source of information and reading exercises your mind. As well, most content online today will be gone in 100 years, while we have books from 2,000 years ago. It sounds weird to the modern, arrogant man who mocks something so old fashioned, but the printed word dwarfs all these other inventions. Nothing is replacing it.
> They're usually the highest quality, most vetted source of information and reading exercises your mind.
That's kind of an arrogant categorization.
1) We all read, regardless of the material the text is presented on.
2) I've bought and borrowed an immense amount of really awful books, and I've read a ton of truly insightful, well worded and interesting stories, posts, discussions online.
Sure internet is ful of crap, but I believe it's equally full of great ideas that wouldn't get a chance to be published on paper, whether that is because the author doesn't feel he/she can fill a book, they are not appropriately confident about their work or any number of other factors.
Online, you can crowdsource the editing process and everything (most) good will be visibly published. If that is not succeeding a medium I don't know what is. Honestly I'm not even comfortable calling them different medias. I believe text is the medium, the same way 2d video is a medium, from 35/70/135mm celluloid through VHS/betamax through all imaginable codecs online. There's really no difference in how you process the information.
Most content online doesn't require quite the attention span and focus of reading a book. There's just no equivalency between Facebook and The Republic. Books usually have better vetted sources and an editor going over it. I've never seen anything that originated online like The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. Except maybe The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
And I doubt that the next "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" will originate online either. It might be advertised online, eventually people will pirate it in epub form but no one is putting a great work online first. Because what I'm saying is true.
"I've read a ton of truly insightful, well worded and interesting stories, posts, discussions online"
As have I. It's not worthless, I love the internet. It's just not replacing books. When all the drives fail that store this conversation, there will be a million copies of The Iliad still in existence. I stand by my original statement, books dwarf all these other mediums.
There's an incredibly huge difference between text and video and how the information is processed. Your statement literally rejects the validity and significance of the director of photography's job
If I'm not mistaken, they meant that text == text, just as video == video - not that text and video are directly comparable.
There's no difference between a printed and bound book full of (for the sake of argument) Tumblr posts and the same posts online - or alternatively, a betamax video, and the same video captured and encoded in an MKV container.
The parent comment meant that there is not a big difference to them on which medium (paper book, iPad, desktop monitor) they read a text, "text" is its own category instead of paper vs electronic. Similar "video" is its own category. Watching a Football game on a gigantic 60 inch screen vs on your small phone the big screen may be more comfortable, but it doesn't fundamentally change how you process the information (compared to reading what happened on Wikipedia or hearing radio play-by-play commentary.)
The other replies have already clarified it better than I did, but from the horses mouth: Yes, of course video is different from text. I meant as the other comments suggest that text is no different from text, and video is no different from video. I called both of them their own (separate) medias.
I personally don't think it'll so much "replace" as much as open up new doors. As in Cinema/TV didn't "replace" theatrical performances, theatre is still around and strong, but the audience has mostly shifted to movies/TV because it is more scalable and flexible.
There's a bunch of apps that are trying to make virtual desktops in VR or 360 movies and the like. I don't personally buy into those that much, I think 360 movies are difficult to make interesting and virtual desktops are more for Augmented Reality.
Besides the obvious (VR games), I think there is a potential for a new form of entertainment (maybe a hybrid of theatre/cinema), for more advanced design tools that make faster work of 3D-based design, for educational experiences. Some things might be "replacements", but there are a lot of possibilities that a VR environment opens up for things that would not be compelling or practical on a 2D screen with common input controls.
>I personally don't think it'll so much "replace" as much as open up new doors. As in Cinema/TV didn't "replace" theatrical performances, theatre is still around and strong, but the audience has mostly shifted to movies/TV because it is more scalable and flexible.
Theatre is niche whereas once it was mainstream though. And it has been ages since its been culturally relevant in the way movies are discussed etc, even for high-bro audiences (e.g. since the 50s or so in the US, or around the 70s for European audiences).
Movies are still like theater though. You can go all things you might do at the theater at the movies: Eat a snack, have a drink, whisper commentary to your significant other. Essentially it's scalable theater.
With VR, you're trying to be 'inside' the media. Imagine a bunch of people feeling around for their drink or bumping heads as they try to whisper. I think if this iteration of VR becomes successful, it will be because they found a niche for themselves. But I can't imagine it becoming the default medium for anything, not even games.
You can put the other people in the VR experience too.
Google at IO/2016 showed some experiment with schools using cardboard where they raytraced where each student in a classroom was looking at. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuceLtGjDWY
With full body tracking and depth cameras you could put 3d avatar bodies in.
Obviously the face would be obscured by the headset, but it's dark in a cinema and people are normally looking at the screen when watching TV at home. So it might actually end up being more social.
Even with just simple 3d positioning of the headset and input devices with a simple visual indicator is enough to get a sense of someone being present. Add a microphone and 3D spacial positioning of voices.
Of course the current generation of technology would make that hard and rare. Not too many people you know will buy a $1000 headset. Everyone would need to bring that and a fairly powerful computer to the one place.
Although physically being present in the same room isn't required.
VR is interesting. It gives content creators a lot more options to engage participants, but it also takes an axe to their knees in their ability to control things. The author has no control over where the participant is looking - and with room-scale tracking, very little control over where the participant is standing either.
The most successful content in my view capitalizes on this freedom, and provides new spaces for participants to express themselves. You do not have to roll on the floor to dodge lasers in the arcade shooter Space Pirate Trainer, but it is fun to do, gives you a workout, and was not programmed into the game.
If it replaces anything, it will be things like museums, casual sports (ping pong, pool etc that require big space commitment for a singular activity), and social interaction tools like skype.
I like the Chris Milk quote "VR is the last medium." Because VR (eventually) encapsulates all of our senses and all of our actions, all other media, past and future, can be encapsulated in VR.
It depends on how you define VR ... if you define it as covering every sense, then yes, by definition is encapsulates all other media. But if you define it as how its implemented, then no, because net every sense has been implemented. Smell, temperature, wind, acceleration, weightlessness, full-body touch ... we're a long way from the holodeck.
VR is new and thus not well defined. The name, at least, is inclusive of all technologies that simulate a sensory experience, in a way that "television" never was.
I just got done apartment hunting recently, and there's walkable virtual tours of just about every apartment, at least in my region on apartments.com.
Basically a bunch of 360 panoramic shots with spaces you can click on the ground to traverse to the next spot that gives you another view, and it fades between the two, kind of like moving down the street in Street View with Google Maps.
It did a pretty damn good job of giving you a feel for the apartment (we toured many of them afterwards).
Obviously actual VR would be better, but what they've got now is pretty darn good already, and definitely a lot better than pictures.
That being said, I think most home listings still rely on low-res still pictures, which is a shame.
It's the first time humans will move from speaking in binary with one another to interfacing with one another in binary. Good luck to regimes like China keeping up with their censorship like they can today when we can all talk and exchange ideas in a VR world while speaking what seems to be the same language in realtime.
If other forms of internet communications are any indication, China will have its own virtual universe, shut off from any outside influence, "harmonized" with the party line, requiring real names and such, and likely larger than any Western one.
