Another article on technology in search of a problem to solve. Once again, Silicon Valley just can't quite see the human factor in why VR won't be this universal technology that everybody uses. Yes, it will have its place, but that place won't be in every home.
Prolonged stretches of being unable to see the real world, invoking feels of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty are completely alien to those who work in huge, warehouse-sized, empty rooms in secure facilities, trying out what they assume everybody will want to put in their ornately decorated front rooms.
There's a disconnect between the tech industry and the "real world", so to speak, and it really makes you appreciate companies who can see the limits of certain technologies in certain domains. Take Apple, working to make AR easy and friendly on iOS; if, one day, VR takes off, then Apple is already prepared with plenty of machine learning and physics frameworks.
Until then, they present AR as the next best thing to VR in a safe, controlled, and non-threatening way; we can see the real world very clearly both through our devices and around them, we don't need to pay for prescription headsets or eyewear, and we are all free to put our iPhones and iPads away at any time.
Most technological breakthroughs are first perceived as toys and hobbies of the rich: personal computers, cellphones, mechanical carriages, Facebook. In this context, sour-grape reactionism is unfortunate but not surprising.
VR is where computation becomes human. No keyboards, no monitors, no mice or joysticks, but instead hands, gaze, movement, and voice. VR presents itself as a new way to receive information, but its essential innovation is data input in its most natural form.
Enabling humanity to engage with itself and its machines with a fully embodied interface is a 10x improvement over touch-screens. Small example: whiteboards. The simple act of a talented group viewing and marking a large flat surface can change the world. Today, this is not possible without co-location. Once a VR headset with positional and hand tracking hits the market (Oculus promises this spring), the rate of world-changing collaboration will no longer be restricted to geography. Once these virtual whiteboard trend toward Jupyter notebooks, VR will not only have triumphed over location-restricted bodies, but also location-restricted computers.
The future is bright and VR will be at the heart of it, regardless of how many people currently mistake it for a toy.
> VR is where computation becomes human. No keyboards, no monitors, no mice or joysticks, but instead hands, gaze, movement, and voice.
The VR optimists underestimate how deeply human it is to manipulate a tool with your hands. It's not a coincidence that the only intelligent mammal is also the only one with opposable thumbs. If voice was actually vastly preferable to the output of a keyboard, it wouldn't be the case that texting is more popular than calls (and that voicemail has more or less gone the way of the betamax).
> The simple act of a talented group viewing and marking a large flat surface can change the world. Today, this is not possible without co-location.
Are you being sarcastic? I do this every day in Google docs.
> The VR optimists underestimate how deeply human it is to manipulate a tool with your hands.
But that's exactly what VR enables. Instead of clicking a button to swing an axe, in VR you can naturally swing that axe with your own hand. Instead of dragging a mouse to draw a line, you can just move your hand. In many cases VR allows to skip that layer of indirection between input (keyboards/mice/joysticks) and output (screen).
> Instead of clicking a button to swing an axe, in VR you can naturally swing that axe with your own hand.
I agree. This is exactly the sort of inconsequential activity where VR will really excel.
> Instead of dragging a mouse to draw a line, you can just move your hand.
Dragging a mouse is "just moving your hand." If you really need less friction in this case, use a touch screen. What do a VR headset and VR hand tracking gloves add?
> In many cases VR allows to skip that layer of indirection between input (keyboards/mice/joysticks) and output (screen).
I like this point, and I think it might illuminate where the fundamental disagreement is: how many of these cases are there? For most of the things I do with my computer (writing code, email, listening to music, reading articles) I am simply not convinced that there is a layer of indirection. Keyboards, graphical user interfaces, and CLIs are already well-optimized for ease and efficiency in achieving their stated goal. Introducing VR would increase friction rather than remove it.
Texting being more common than calls is a pretty bad example.
Texting is more popular because it allows asynchronous communication. Calls require both participants to be connected at the same time, which is a big hassle.
That's fair - comparing calls to texts is not apples to apples. But I think the issue is deeper than live vs async: voicemail is fully asynchronous, and it is by far the least popular of the three.
I don't think your objection diminishes my main argument, which is that many forms of communication don't receive any optimization from VR - including forms that the VR crowd seems to believe will be revolutionized (e.g. wildermuthn's whiteboard example).
I think part of it's due to the perceived privacy i.e you can 'text' at anytime without bringing any attention from surroundings, but that's not possible with 'calls' when you are in the office or when surrounded with friends/parents/relatives etc.
>If voice was actually vastly preferable to the output of a keyboard, it wouldn't be the case that texting is more popular than calls
Texting is preferable to voice only when it's a break from human interaction.
That's why you call your parents but text the girl you met last weekend.
It's not because they're too old to text. If the only way they could communicate with their children was through text, they'd be typing on their phone more than a stereotypical teen. It's because you're comfortable talking to your parents. Even when it's at it's most-uncomfortable, it's still familiar, safe, and never going to be as bad as the painful conversations you've already had with them. You don't need the safety net of putting the phone down, distracting yourself from the conversation by stressing about the conversation, procrastinating, or the flexibility to workshop every response with your friends.
For human interaction, voice is vastly preferable.
> For human interaction, voice is vastly preferable.
This is trivial or false. If you define "human interaction" as "the sorts of interactions where we'd rather talk" then sure, voice is preferable by definition. On the other hand, if you define it as "interaction between humans" then your own example shows that it depends entirely on the nature of the interaction. Sometimes we'd rather talk and sometimes we'd rather text.
I should have originally written "If voice was _always_ preferable to the output of a keyboard". I'm obviously not suggesting that there are no cases where voice is better than sms.
What I'm suggesting is that our existing text/chat messaging, CLIs, GUIs etc are much more than a crude approximation of moving things with one's hands (or speaking) which will be obviated by VR. They are, in the appropriate cases, _more_ easy and efficient than moving things with one's hands or speaking.
> Most technological breakthroughs are first perceived as toys and hobbies of the rich: personal computers, cellphones, mechanical carriages, Facebook. In this context, sour-grape reactionism is unfortunate but not surprising.
But not every technology ends up being the next personal computer, cellphone, or Facebook. Someone probably once thought that hosting sites like GeoCities were the future before blogs/Facebook made it clear that the average user doesn't want to design their own website. It took something more approachable to come along.
VR vastly overestimates the amount of space people have in their living rooms. Unless we're designing houses with rooms just for VR, I don't ever see it taking off. Maybe as a destination like a holodeck?
> The simple act of a talented group viewing and marking a large flat surface can change the world.
Is this really such a common way to work and collaborate? I’ve rarely seen this even in co-locates teams. More usually problems are such that people work offline, put and document/proof-of-concept, presentation together and then maybe discuss the presentation/document verbally, or over email.
Not so much movie style enthusiastic whiteboarding. Maybe that would be better way of working, but is it really that common? Is there any data on this?
> Is this really such a common way to work and collaborate?
Same observation: it absolutely isn’t how people work & collaborate. VR is DOA for most kinds of work because it just isn’t all that compatible with most kinds of work.
Once these virtual whiteboard trend toward Jupyter notebooks, VR will not only have triumphed over location-restricted bodies, but also location-restricted computers.
Why will VR be a better solution for this than AR? Surely being able to see your real surroundings with virtual whiteboards and controls 'stuck' to various surfaces will be more comfortable for people than a totally immersive world.
VR sounds great. Where it falls apart, IMHO, is biology. Tech is a world of plastic, glass, and metal. Eukaryotes just don't get along with those things in close contact for very long. Dermatitides are a thing.
People can wear clothes, shoes, glasses and jewellery 16 hours/day for decades, can work with thin food-protective or thick hand-protective gloves on for hours every day. Even when people suffer from chapped or sore skin problems with gloves, as some do, they still manage to do it because the value of (being employed, or being able to work with delicate or dangerous things) makes it worth enduring.
I don't know anything about VR and the biological costs of using it, but why is it necessarily more harsh on the body than glasses and headphones and gloves? Future-VR is likely to get smaller and lighter, like current VR is smaller and lighter than Steve Mann's 1980s and 1990s wearables. Won't there come a point where it's just .. light and easy and mostly fine?
Sebaceous glands and sinuses are going to be problems for as long as humans vaguely resemble other apes. Those are the sorts of problems you're up against, combined with the basic optics problems. Don't you think that if there was an easier way to put the required visual field in front of the eye closer, with a lighter lens, that wouldn't have been already done? There's some basic optics problems that fix the solution space in ways that are not great the particular sack of meat that biology produced.
I think that appeal of VR is to be able to use real world interaction techniques learned since birth to interact with computer programs without having to learn a new UI with another new app.
Biggest killer application of VR would probably be a new Internet
The thing is, just because it's theoretically possible to interface "naturally", that doesn't mean it will feel natural. Much like interacting with voice-based assistants is stilted, constrained, and often awkward with misunderstandings and false starts.
Interactive VR will be no different. Either it will be very simple but entirely artificial, or it will be complex and "natural" but ultimately unsatisfying. We are nowhere near being able to implement anything approaching "reality".
But even if we were, I think you overstate the promise. "Having to learn a new UI" is exactly what you will always have to do to learn to do anything new, whether it's in a mobile app, on a computer, in VR, or in the real world with physical objects. Guitars, power tools, ping pong tables, pressure cookers... they all have new and different user interfaces.
Are you referring to existing technology, or some kind of Sci fi holodeck thing?
I can think of 2 broad categories of potential computer program. The first, old world computer programs, and I can't see flicking through virtual files in a virtual filling cabinet being an improvement over what we have now.
And the 2nd category is 'real world' computer programs. Basically simulating real life. So ranging from VR watching the tv (what's the point) to white water rafting. Which I can see, but that's basically back to computer games. Which is the thing the VR always ends up being used for.
Yup. I can't see most software more usable with VR either. At some input fidelity, people would just recreate virtual keyboards.
It really does seem that a keyboard is a quite deep local maximum of human-computer interaction. Not a single other mode of HCI invented afterwards can match the combination of high versatility and high efficiency.
But virtual worlds, and the vision-oriented tasks (like e.g. 3D modelling, be it artistic, scientific, or engineering) - there I can see VR working much better than what we currently have.
At the same time, we are as close as we've ever been to human (or supra-human) spoken language parsing. Even if we have a ways to go on machine understanding / interpretation.
I can see (3D manual manipulation + verbal commands + weak-AI inference of intent) being a pretty compelling interface package.
For our primary coding purposes, I doubt we'll ever surpass keyboard.
But the counterargument would be that coding is a fairly esoteric set of criteria that we've specifically built around the keyboard (i.e. every character matters, no synonyms, etc). Were there an alternative... say, boilerplate code intelligently glued together by verbalized architecture directions? I wouldn't want to put a bet down. Rails convinced me that sometimes being smooth is more important than being best.
I'm not saying it's totally impossible to get rid of keyboards, but I feel this would require first significantly thinning down the amount of text that needs to be written, and the amount of abstract interactions with program that need to be done. The keyboard is very efficient in several criteria at the same time. Versus a 3D manipulation + verbal commands + weak AI, it's much more energy-efficient/ergonomic. Instead of waving your arms around in complex motions and talking a lot, you just have to move your fingers and wrists a little bit here and there. I know I can easily keep pounding at the keyboard for 8+ hours without much slowdown; I imagine that an interface of voice and direct manipulation would get one tired much quicker, if not mediated by another input device, or if the workload isn't reduced.
Now I was going to say that the trick is workload reduction, and that 'AI-glued boilerplate directed by voice' could just work by doing most of the task automatically, but then I realized: workload reduction doesn't work. As proved time and again in the last few centuries, as soon as you find yourself with extra free time due to some efficiency improvement, more work will be assigned to you to fill that time. You may not want it, your employer may not even want it, but someone over at a competing company thinks they can get ahead this way, and now everyone has to follow suit.
I think blade runner style emanators or Iron Man Jarvis is what you are looking at. Sure they won't help you do work, but they will do other things for you. You can call people, order things, watch movies, do other myriad other social networking stuff(Watch videos, see pictures).
For programmers of course its hard to work with those interfaces. But imagine a carpenter being able to order coffee, without having to deal with a screen.
Yes for any sort of complicated input i.e. computer code, real world experience can not be used. On the other hand natural language processing almost good enough today for inputs with medium complexity like grocery list.
Real world interaction is obvious for certain fields where user does something that's comparable to a real world task. i.e. Loading ammunition, Surgery, Plumbing, Repair of various instruments.
For fields that don't have comparable real world representation I would imagine that we're again at the moment in computer science history where we have an opportunity to create a new desktop environment but in 3D space with certain well known natural gestures. For example transferring a file from my laptop to a smartphone doesn't have to be done with context menu, we can have a VR smartphone object and just drag file with our hands in that object lie we would do in real world if were to move a file from one place to another.
Instead of having to switch between different overlapping windows, we can have all windows laid out all around us in a comfortable zone. To go to particular window in focus we use certain gestures like pushing of pulling with hands.
Even if some gestures have to be created artificially, user would probably remember that better next time because of the muscle memory.
There's a really good discussion regarding this in Unity Unite 2016 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzPDTrWcjxc). In fact 2016 conference had a lot of good VR related discussions.
>I think that appeal of VR is to be able to use real world interaction techniques learned since birth to interact with computer programs without having to learn a new UI with another new app.
Anything complicated enough -- like most software uses are -- will remain so.
Some niche fields aside (e.g. games, robotic surgery, immersive education, exercise, and obviously porn, the niche field to end all niche fields) VR only makes using the computer more tedious (as you have to move your body). We have seen mostly the trend of disassociating with our bodies through computers...
Clip unavailable in my country, but upvoted for Summer Wars.
That said, I'm not sure what you mean by "a new Internet". I have the internet on my desktop, my laptop, my tablet, my phone, my TV, my game consoles, and even my lightbulbs. Do you just mean a new interaction paradigm? A new style of presentation? A new social network?
Our customers for VR training are not particularly tech savvy and not part of the Silicon Valley bubble but we don't find any of the issues you raise to be concerns with our customers.
VR probably won't have a place in every home, just as TV or Alexa type devices don't have a place in my home. I think the market can ultimately be as big as those technologies however.
What sort of company do you work for, for what purpose are your customers getting VR training, and what are they (or their companies, if applicable) paying?
> VR probably won't have a place in every home, just as TV [...] I think the market can ultimate be as big as [that technology] however.
I'm cofounder of a company building a VR surgical training platform. Currently we're focused on orthopedics and our primary customers are some of the largest medical device manufacturers. Our revenue last year was 7 figures.
> Nobody needs training to watch a TV.
I'm not sure what your point is here. Training/education is one big application of VR, entertainment is another. TV is also used for training/education as well as entertainment. Using VR doesn't require much more training than using a TV, although you don't find many adults who don't already know how to use a TV.
> VR surgical training platform [...] our primary customers are some of the largest medical device manufacturers
Alright, so people who are already quite unlike most of the rest of the general population, and doing things in a work environment rather than at home.
> I'm not sure what your point is here. Training/education is one big application of VR
I'm not disputing that, but we're all talking about general uptake by the wider population, not niche uses. Andreessen is talking about the mass market, given the assertion that (apparently) only 99% of people live in uninteresting places where VR would apparently spice our lives up.
> Using VR doesn't require much more training than using a TV
I don't think there were ever seven figure companies (weird flex, but okay) teaching people how to tune a TV.
You turn the TV on, you watch it. Couldn't be simpler.
You seem to think we're training people to use VR? We train people to do orthopedic surgery, using VR. Those people are not particularly tech savvy (surgeons are smart people, but not necessarily particularly tech enthusiasts) but don't have much trouble using VR.
I could be wrong but I think you've misunderstood the comment that you're replying to. It sounds like the comment is talking about a company that uses VR to train employees to do certain tasks, not a company that trains people to use VR.
Oh, yes, I didn't notice that potential misunderstanding. Correct, we use VR for surgical training, we don't train people to use VR (except incidentally as part of our onboarding for new users).
Even then, it still demonstrates that people need to become accustomed to the technology in a safe environment, a space for "training". As opposed to training people to use computers, where their visual faculties are still intact, you couldn't just release VR to the mass market and expect everybody to jump on board.
Television was an easy sell. Radio you could see? Great.
Smartphones and tablets were an easy sell. Computers you could put in your pocket? Computers that even your nana and grandad could operate? Brilliant.
VR? I don't know what the sales pitch would be that someone in Best Buy could give to a technologically illiterate person, at least without that conversation devolving into a bunch of technobabble and an offer to come do some training in an environment and social context likely to be completely unlike where the customer would be likely to use theirs.
You seem to have different goal posts for VR and you also seem to take existing tech for granted.
Like television, VR sells itself.
If someone has never seen television before, you don't need to draw up a sales pitch to convince them that it can enrich their life. You just need to have a television on display tuned to an action movie and that person can see for their self. It immediately entertains.
Same with VR. Ever seen VR on display in the wild? People, young and old, are naturally drawn to it. It immediately fascinates people.
Your post makes it seem like you would've poo-pooed computers and video games because keyboards and gaming controllers are too complicated. Yet the VR interface is much simpler than those. Watch a tech-illiterate person strap on VR for the first time. The first thing they do is look down at their hands and wave them around.
Like the person seeing an action movie on television for the first time, they don't need a sales rep to tell them how this might be entertaining.
At the same time, VR still gives me a splitting headache in ~15 minutes at every exposure. So the "Oh Cool" is still supplanted by blinding pain and nausea.
> If someone has never seen television before [...] you don't need to draw up a sales pitch to convince them that it can enrich their life
Indeed, because they can see a television. They enjoy it immediately. They don't have to put on a headset, they don't have to engage in sensory deprivation, they don't need to think about software, they don't need to think about use cases.
The point I'm making is that TV was a bogus analogy.
> Your post makes it seem like you would've poo-pooed computers and video games because keyboards and gaming controllers are too complicated
Not at all. Game controllers don't require me to take myself out of my environment to enjoy them.
> Watch a tech-illiterate person strap on VR for the first time. The first thing they do is look down at their hands and wave them around.
They then say "wow, this is cool, I wish I had one". They don't say "I want to buy one of these and put it in my living room". To think they do is, again, that disconnect between Silicon Valley and ordinary people in full force; that because we think it might be cool, somehow we know everybody wants it, and we'll happily ignore all the reasons why people don't or, more condescendingly, dismiss them and anybody who mentions them.
Such hubris should be the lesson of Google Glass and Snap.
> They then say "wow, this is cool, I wish I had one". They don't say "I want to buy one of these and put it in my living room".
N=1, but after I experienced a high-quality VR headset and got to play VR a game alone for a while, my reaction was "wow, this is cool, I'm sure as hell gonna get one of these". Then I realized I'll have to also upgrade my desktop for this, and decided this needs to be actually budgeted. Such is the adult life. You may want to buy something, but there are more important expenses too. VR is still expensive, especially if one doesn't have a gaming rig at home. But it's getting there. It starts to pop up in bars and cafes, and in richer houses.
(Also, getting used to VR took exactly 0 seconds for me, and I can't imagine it's because my subconsciousness is tech-savvy. Good VR already feels natural.)
The technology is still in its infancy. Think of 20mb harddrived the size of a shoebox.
I have no doubts that we will end up with a nice headset, with high dpi, eye trscking, full body tracking and a 360 threadmill too walk on. Maybe even fancy tracking shoes which could replace the threadmill.
They could include realtime camerafeeds in front of you, and either show it, adapt the game to it (for tables etc) or show boundaries in the headset
A 20mb harddrive the size of a shoebox is not a technology in its infancy. It is an incredibly useful, paradigm-changing piece of engineering, as long as you're not hoping to use it to store rich media.
Nothing in AR has hit that yet. VR kinda-maybe-sorta does, but even in games, it's an expensive, niche periphery, at best.
Hard drives succeeded (in the sense that we now see) because they exponentially created more use cases for themselves (by driving more data processing and storage).
AR doesn't really do that. Most people simply can't derive value from annotations over the real world, in the way they can by simply storing things. So the total addressable market is a lot smaller. Furthermore, AR adoption doesn't drive more AR adoption.
Which is where the VR case is stronger. There are some scenarios (all social) where I can see viral, exponential VR adoption. For all its flaws, the fact that SecondLife still exists demonstrates there's enough of an escapist market to self-sustain.
VR technology is the ultimate escapist technology to be used as a platform for entertainment. It's just a matter of time before it replaces TV. I can't see why it wouldn't have a place in every home (like TV).
Hmmm ... I'm thinking the opposite. Outdoors, the sky, lakes — they're going to be the escape.
We're practically living in a VR world where we have not only ubiquitous black mirrors everywhere but displays in our cars, restaurants, work, schools, homes, refrigerators. Stop for a second and think about it and it's as though, in our urban existence, we already have a headset on. In a manner of speaking.
That's one form of escape. But it's not necessarily meaningful to everyone. Many people have become jaded because all the beautiful sights have been turned into /r/EarthPorn posts or Netflix documentaries they've seen over and over.
As Orson Welles said, (paraphrased), "Now people only watch Shakespeare plays in order to hear the quotations."
Sure, many people still enjoy replicating existing postcard pictures and posting them to their Instagram/Facebook.
But those experiences are fairly limited compared to what's available if you look at VR's potential — meaningful shared experiences across unlimited varied universes and identities. To be fair, that argument could be made about gaming. But I think gaming and VR are on a pretty obvious collision course.
Please describe the VR equivalent of what I did last night, I legitimately can’t picture it:
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 — based partly on small tactile, visual, or auditory invitations to shift attention.
VR seems to propose completely removing that dynamic and human contact, that free flowing interaction, with distance and barely more than passive consumption of content.
Because I can picture the AR equivalent, and that situation is the bulk of my TV time. So for me, I just can’t see what VR is offering outside of a few really limited times I want to be deeply in a fake world, alone.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
I think you're looking at it wrong. It'd be like asking why you need an iPhone/facetime/texting when your wife is right next to you.
Rather, think of the hundreds of people who AREN'T right next to you: out of town parents, friends, your wife when she's on vacation, etc.
It won't replace everything, but'd be nice to play a game with a friend on the opposite coast, collaborate on a project with a remote coworker, or have a conversation with a relative far away.
I'm not seeing much prospects in VR myself, but can answer those questions trivially.
>How would I turn to my wife and make a comment
You just turn your head/gaze to your wife's avatar in 3D space and make a comment to her...
>how would whatever your answer is going to be actually be any better than AR?
If we're talking "escaping together" you could be inside some virtual world (e.g. a virtual game of thrones 3D environment) watching events or playing together.
AR would just add some extra figures and/or annotations on top of the real world, but it wont be as immersive.
> You could be inside some virtual world watching events or playing together
And not being able to enjoy your friend/partner's reaction, facial expression, or simply what they're doing. That mutual participation is half the fun. No, looking at an avatar mimicking your partner's movements doesn't count.
>And not being able to enjoy your friend/partner's reaction, facial expression, or simply what they're doing
Err, you could see your friend/partner in the VR world trivially, facial expressions and everything.
Besides, when you're looking to escape, this could include seeing your partner 24/7. Not everybody has just fallen in love yesterday...
>No, looking at an avatar mimicking your partner's movements doesn't count.
Yeah, like exchanging texts with friends as opposed to hearing their voice on the phone or going to hang out with them "doesn't count", and yet everybody does it to the detriment of the former activities...
Besides, if we're making arbitrary "laws", then I say it counts double!
Sounds like you've never played a multiplayer video game before. Sure, sound alone is not even half the emotional communications bandwidth, but people can work around those limitations. We already do in text, and in video calls, and it mostly works. With VR, you get to also have low-bandwidth body language, like movements of the head and limbs (and nothing is stopping the tech to slowly incorporate more and more cues).
VR ain't gonna be a perfect simulacrum of the real world, but it doesn't have to be. It only needs to be good enough to let people express themselves somehow, and people will figure out the rest.
But right now people who interact with their own partners/housemates in MMOs, chat, etc. when in close proximity to each other are a tiny minority (although probably a heavily overrepresented one at HN). I don't see why that would change with VR.
You also can't conveniently eat, drink, or go to the bathroom while using VR, and those are very common things for people to do in the midst of a period of social interaction. Imagine in how many households any given night the following happens in a group of friends or a family: people are watching TV or a movie, someone gets up, maybe goes to relieve themselves, stops by the kitchen to grab a snack or a can of pop, asks if anyone else wants anything, grabs what was asked for, comes back, hands over the item, sits down, and resumes watching.
Because TV and movies tend to be designed to be comprehensible with partial attention, that person very well have kept track of what was happening. Maybe they have to ask "who's that guy?" This kind of thing might happen multiple times a night. This doesn't have to be a planned or organized event -- it's a totally casual domestic interaction.
VR as it currently exists, and as far as can be reasonably predicted based on our understanding of the technology, is something that requires a great deal of physical and mental focus. That will necessarily limit its reach, unless it manages to fundamentally rewrite human society. (And I don't think I, for one, am eager to see what that new society would look like.)
I think there's a lot of interesting opportunities for VR technology. But should I live another 4-5 decades I doubt that I will live to see VR attain anything close to the social pervasiveness of video games, much less TV.
I'd say smartphones and tablets already do 90% of what people want as far as tuning out of the real world goes.
VR misses the mark on a bunch of real life scenarios: selfies, device sharing vs different body sizes, multitasking (e.g. cooking while watching youtube).
And that's beside the point anyways. Selfies exploded after digital photography became mainstream since one no longer needed to buy film. You could say that selfies happened because a physical burden was taken out of the picture.
In contrast, you could say VR is a type of technology that _adds_ physical burden: today I can walk down to T-mobile, buy a new phone and get a free TV delivered to my house that I can then use to watch Peppa Pig w/ my kids. VR can do that too for, what, $1600 for a family of 4? Except I can't actually see my kids laughing with the thing stuck on my face and half of the devices have a high likelihood of breaking in 2 weeks in the hands of toddlers anyways.
I own a VR headset, but it has a couple of major practical drawbacks for consuming entertainment.
The biggest is motion sickness. It’s still a huge problem despite advances. I can’t game for several hours straight, it’s just impossible.
Movies are better, but the second problem is the the total immersion. It’s a pain in the ass to even check the time with a VR headset on. I can’t easily answer a text, I can’t get up to go to the bathroom without untangling myself, I can even pick up a beer without risking spilling it.
Because TV (and its internet equivalent) allows us to be passive and enjoy others doing the hard work to entertain us -- which is more like what we seek...
VR is a bit of a contrarian tech. It’s a tool for focus. It shuts down the noise. Some described it as the headphones for the eyes. I find a good session of Google Earth VR very refreshing and meditative. Fully focused on enjoy wonderful places around the globe without interruptions and leaving the appartment.
At that point it's just background noise. But I'll grant you that. I think those shortcomings are just a matter of improving current VR technology to make it less invasive more than an absolute limitation of the medium.
Why do you interpret the interest in VR as an expectation that VR will become a universal recreational technology (in est, a replacement for playing video games on a TV)?
Why not, instead, interpret the interest as being in a future where VR is a universal productivity technology?
Any place where "training" or "simulation" matters, VR will be better than what it replaces.
Verticals that have immediate use for VR for training: military, police, fire and rescue; medicine; sports. (With enhanced haptics support and careful use of physics engines, you could also include some of the skilled trades, like machining/woodworking or automotive repair.)
Professions that have immediate use for VR for simulation: therapists; travel agencies; interior designers; architects and structural/civic engineers; criminologists, accident reconstructionists, and insurance adjusters.
And that's just off the top of my head, as someone who doesn't really pay attention to the field.
Certainly, VR is isolating. But so is sitting at your desk, in a cubicle, in an office, staring at a screen. If you're already being paid to suffer 0.9 units of isolation (cubicle+desk+screen), I'm not sure the company moving to 1.0 units of isolation (cubicle+desk+VR goggles) is going to make people upset. Either way, you still go back to 0.0 units of isolation when you get up and go to the water cooler.
(Admittedly, though, a VR-centric office productivity paradigm would make pair programming harder. Unless, I guess, people were pairing in some Second-Life-alike virtual office—which would actually be quite good for remote-first companies.)
You can put a cheap binocular camera on the goggles to give people a quick way to see the outside world, kind of like how the Sony NC headphones let you hear the outside world when you put your hand over one of the pads. I don't really see that as a major barrier for VR.
Currently the major barrier I foresee is the 3D TV & glasses issue. Many people just don't want to bother or care about setting up 3D TV content and glasses. It's why things like the occulus go exist.
Vive has an optional overlay with a weirdly-coloured[0] view of the outside world. It's pretty useful for quickly checking something in the environment, or grabbing a glass of water, etc.
[0]: Apparently the lens distortion makes it not map perfectly 1:1 and putting it in like, "night vision" mode makes that less nausea inducing).
It's not so long ago that 3D TV was going to be in every home.
Turned out to be empty hype and not a product that was that desirable. VR headsets seem firmly in the same category. I've been hearing that VR will be huge since the 80s, which is when I first tried a VR headset. Current tech is higher res and framerate with nearly all the same limitations.
There's no sign VR Hype 5.0 will prove more successful than any previous incarnations.
Maybe it won't always be stuck as a niche gaming addon, but at this point I'm tempted to say "not in my lifetime".
> I've been hearing that VR will be huge since the 80s, which is when I first tried a VR headset. Current tech is higher res and framerate with nearly all the same limitations.
I remember seeing a VR headset in the 90's once. The only thing in common with today VR is that it provided stereoscopic vision. I find it baffling to say that current VR only has higher resolution and framerate.
There were many different improvements, which make current VR way better than two decades ago:
- smaller headsets (those headsets from the 90's where huge helmets, nowhere near the size of current goggles)
- true 3d graphics (the 90's demo I saw was of Doom, which didn't even have 3d models, only sprites)
- headset tracking (the main source of immersion, if I turn my head I expect the view to turn in VR as well)
- hands tracking (because obviously I want to directly interact with the world, rather than through the mouse and keyboard)
- force feedback (by itself it always felt like kind of a useless gimmick, until I experienced it in VR)
Well I can only say what I felt and feel. I'll try and describe.
First VR set I tried was driven by a powerful (for the time), expensive, Unix workstation, or may even have been a pair of them, one for each eye. Whatever the best graphics Sun or SGI offered at the time it had, ie the expensive option. It was intended as a technology exploration and dev kit for the "coming soon" huge wave of arcade and home VR systems. A wave that never arrived outside of a couple of rubbish arcade machines, and the awful, but massively hyped "VR is here", film Lawnmower Man.
Hand tracking was there - you got special gloves. Headset tracking was there too, and worked flawlessly. The graphics were clearly orders of magnitude different, as was latency. The level of hype is about the same too, with similar absurd predictions back then as this feature article! Yet the reaction was one of "ooh, neat demo", just as my reaction to Oculus was "ooh, neat demo". Then happy to put it back on the shelf until it's ready. Still just as much a gimmick as 3D tv is to the sibling commenter and me.
The limitations were the same, just scaled up. Headsets are annoyingly heavy still, enough to quickly distract (well oculus was/is) and hugely limit my wish to use. The first set was this, and more. Obviously with added cable harnesses. Both about as attractive in the home as sitting on my sofa with my motorcycle crash hat on, just now we have a fairly lightweight full face helmet. Nowhere near as forgettable as wearing a pair of specs or a baseball cap.
They still cause feelings of sub-nausea for some that better latency was meant to fix, yet didn't, weird isolation, and a feeling that it's almost, but not quite there. Current incarnation is clearly much nearer than back then. Yet it's funny, it felt, going on my fallible memory of the demo we played with that it would be there "quite soon" back then. I feel just the same now. So that quite soon turns out to be very, very subjective. I think that must have been the impression of most of us as the company didn't come close to buying, but it was certainly a talking point in the following weeks. They spent plenty on unnecessary and absurdly expensive toys just because they could or that might be the next interesting thing to develop for. Yet didn't on that.
So they seem destined to stay something that's a niche gaming addon, or niche industrial use like working on something remotely because it's on the sea floor or in a nuclear plant etc. The niches are clearly bigger, and you no longer need a brace of £20k workstations, but still to my eyes not likely to break out of those niches any time soon. If the killer game(s) arrived for VR I'd probably buy one and it would get used to play an occasional hour of those games. Yet those killer apps still haven't arrived, I think because for most a mouse, joystick or controller is more than enough. It's still more a tech to get me a divorce than of the family room. :)
We have a long way to go for the games that transplant you, the relative in Australia sitting on your sofa in place of Facetime calls, or eventually the Holodeck in every home. That seems like the point VR might actually become mainstream. I suspect I won't still be around.
Citation needed. My contention is that VR makes far too many severe trade-offs based around human instinct (trust, fear, anxiety, security) for people to swallow en masse. What's your contention that VR is a de facto part of the future?
It's an incredible escape mechanism. You can escape your shitty little apartment and be immersed in a place where you have a ton of power at the tip of your hands with 0 limit on your creativity. And if you are not a creative type you can pay 0.99$ to get a virtual pet dragon and hangout with your friends and play a bunch of crazy stuff.
I'm not even sure we need HW to improve, it's just a matter of creating the correct virtual world (which is what FB is working on I'm sure).
Comparing PS4 Pro to PSVR, VR gaming is still niche. You can escape your "shitty little apartment" with a TV, ipad or iphone, which looking at the sales numbers, is what people are doing.
This argument keeps coming up, but it's not substantial enough. Not everybody wants to escape in that way, nor do they need to.
A good film, beautifully and cinematically realised to incite powerful emotions; a fun game that engages the player to the extent that it's suddenly midnight and you don't know where the day has gone; or simply a good book that you read in bed until your eyes are sore.
Or hell, just flicking through Facebook/Snapchat/Instagram/reddit/HN (circle as applicable).
> And if you are not a creative type you can pay 0.99$ to get a virtual pet dragon and hangout with your friends and play a bunch of crazy stuff
Sounds tedious. We've had those kinds of things already — Second Life, Small Worlds, Active Worlds, Habbo… their popularity comes and goes, but they're hardly mainstream. Most times people want to do something together, it's for the sake of communicating feelings and ideas; sitting across from avatars of my friends is so much more contrived than just talking to them through voice chat, video chat, or text messaging that I don't see that most would bother.
The pet dragon sounds more fun in AR, roaming around my actual house rather than requiring me to enter a limited virtual world by shutting out my ability to see the actual world around me. Even then, I don't think I could persuade my fully-grown adult friends to come watch me play with a 3D tamagotchi, mainly for the reason that … well, it's utterly stupid.
Going back a bit:
> be immersed in a place where you have a ton of power at the tip of your hands with 0 limit on your creativity
What you're describing sounds basically like 3D artwork. The majority of people aren't creatives who could draw stickmen let alone do great and massive 3D artworks; that's so much more intimidating, I don't see the general public dropping thousands of dollars on equipment to ignore whatever art software they've decided on. That's another thing: it's not as though zero limits on creativity is mutually inclusive with the concept of VR; it depends on the software available, and not everybody may be in a position to buy the best ones.
I don't see "an incredible escape mechanism" as the killer app for VR, nor do I see these examples are being what will drive the masses to VR. If anything, it's possible to do what people proposed in VR using AR, without the need to have people forsake the real world and their sense of security with it.
Those of us who want a 100% escape mechanism are fewer and further between than we may imagine, and I suspect many are driven by the technological impressiveness of VR rather than the daily utility.
I believe VR will have specific uses like gaming, art, simulations, and training. Maybe people with high levels of stress or mental illness could benefit from entering another world, too. But the masses? It ain't gonna happen.
Finally, I doubt FB is working on virtual worlds. It doesn't help their business in any tangible way. They want data that they can use to sell things; if they wanted data from our sensory perceptions, they'd just record our voice and video chats.
Prolonged stretches of being unable to see the real world, invoking feels of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty
Every day on my walking commute to work and when I go out to get lunch, I keep on having to walk around and avoid people whose faces are buried in their phones, sometimes walking straight at me, completely oblivious to those around them.
Not remotely comparable. They can still see around them, their peripheral vision allowing them to notice when there's somebody next to them, in front of them. They can detect dangers to avoid through sight and sound, and they can easily glance up to see what's coming ahead.
Also: they're out and about in town doing things, moving between here and there, maybe going to meet someone at a café for lunch, not stuck in a building with a headset on.
There was one young man at a WWDC, who had his head buried in his phone while on the escalator. He reached the end of the escalator and just stopped where he was. All of us behind him on the escalator were yelling at him not to stop. I don't know how no one got hurt or killed, but we all somehow got around him. As I passed him, he seemed to not have noticed anything at all.
Not remotely comparable...Totally incomparable.
Note the above quote: "Prolonged stretches of being unable to see the real world, invoking feels of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty." Haven't we seen quite a few articles recently about how social media tends to produce feelings like that? They are very different things, but there are certain similarities.
The only condition where I'd see this being true is if VR leads to "good as there" telepresence, where you can feel like you're having the sort of spontaneous conversations that arise from physical presence at a workplace.
Telepresence done right would be an absolutely huge economic boon - it subsumes transportation, housing, national boundaries, and lots of education and training. If you could get the same sort of "all the web experts in the room" like you get in Silicon Valley or "all the electronics experts in the room" like you get in Shenzhen, but do so where you literally have all the experts (rather than just those who live in those cities), you'd get rid of a lot of economic inefficiencies like houses costing 40x more in Silicon Valley than Detroit.
Failing that, I see it as a niche product that'd revolutionize the entertainment industries but doesn't change much outside of them.
VR Chat is one of the "killer apps" of VR. That and Beat Saber, I guess.
I think a "serious" telepresence application would be good. VR Chat is a meme-haven / non-serious location for now. But... there's that good YCombinator blogpost about non-serious apps: https://blog.ycombinator.com/why-toys/
It really does seem like VR Chat (as immature and silly as it is...) is a killer app. How to grow it into a serious application is still a major mystery to me, but I'd bet on VR Chat (or at least its successor that fixes its issues) to be a driving use of VR.
Might be a PADS (Post-Anime Depression Syndrome), but after rewatching Sword Art Online recently, I found myself thinking that a VR Chat is actually a good idea, and something I would very much enjoy. With an ability to easily enough create and modify stuff in the virtual world (preferably mostly from within world, and I mean creating and modifying interactive objects, and absolutely no "buy funny clothes for your avatar in the platform's store" bullshit), I could imagine running a collaborative ideation space in it; a kind of half-baked virtual hackerspace.
(I find this dream doubly alluring now that I found myself remote-working from a smaller town.)
I mean, what you've described is basically Second Life (except inside of a VR headset). So yeah, I could see it working out well.
3d collaborative virtual worlds are a great toy and seem to build communities relatively easily. Its not really mainstream, but Second Life is still relatively big... and has a long-term presence. It was initially released in 2003. It is kinda surprising that people still play that game. 16 years is an eternity in the video game world.
Also:
> after rewatching Sword Art Online recently, I found myself thinking that a VR Chat is actually a good idea
I'm pretty sure Sword Art Online was about how VR could be a... bad idea. Just saying. :-) Granted, I don't think we have any microwave death-triggers implemented on the back of real-world VR Headsets yet, so maybe we're safe from that particular problem.
Yeah, I've been surprised to learn recently that it's still alive and kicking. I'll check it out eventually, I'm gearing myself to do it for more than 10 years now :).
> I'm pretty sure Sword Art Online was about how VR could be a... bad idea. Just saying. :-)
Yeah, well, one of the reason I like it is that, despite every single VR and AR system presented being abused by some villain to do evil things, including just straight imprisoning and killing people thanks to mentioned microwave death-triggers, the anime series and the movie still manage to present a lot of positive sides too, and do a decent discussion of the social impact of such technologies.
I guess it's like with all anime - focused on both extremes, at the exclusion of the mundane :).
I love using VR, even for long (3 or more hours straight, no breaks) periods, but dear lord would I hate using a VR headset to pretend I'm in an office.
Open offices are trash in the first place (at least for me), headsets do not have enough resolution to pretend to have a screen in front of me, and even if they did, it would likely produce more eyestrain than just looking at an actual HD screen in front of you.
Maybe wearing it all day as an office is a little overkill. But being able to collaborate even in front of some kind of 3D whiteboard room would be a killer for fully remote teams like mine. Drawing on paint-like sites or with clunky web apps has been one of my biggest pains that VR controllers, if done right, could be huge for me.
Maybe with enough presence remote would become even more commonplace. A man can dream.
Two thoughts, based on evaluating remote collaboration tech.
1) Writing on virtual whiteboard in VR just doesn't feel right, there's no tactile feedback. It's doable but doesn't beat a real whiteboard (nothing beats a real whiteboard)
2) Observe people working at a whiteboard. It's predominantly an asynchronous one to many form of communication. Multiple people writing on the same board at the same time isn't how we communicate with each other.
The best in class tool I've found to date is Microsoft's Whiteboard app running on their 84" Surface Hub. Anyone who has the budget I highly recommend taking a look at it.
>1) Writing on virtual whiteboard in VR just doesn't feel right, there's no tactile feedback. It's doable but doesn't beat a real whiteboard (nothing beats a real whiteboard)
Well, the main benefit of writing on a whiteboard is for you to draw your thoughts and for others to see what you wrote/drew. Not to get tactile feedback.
Besides it would be trivial to actually write on a whiteboard on your office while wearing a VR headset and have it be seen by others in VR space in different offices/countries (thus getting the "tactile feedback" as well).
> Multiple people writing on the same board at the same time isn't how we communicate with each other.
Chalkboards are actually a great way to communicate and collaborate in small groups, and have been for a long time one of the main forms of communication in professional mathematics and some other technical fields.
The chalkboard is a very democratic medium, because anyone can more-or-less produce the same output, it is easy to add notes over / adjacent to other people’s writing (including formulas, diagrams, ...), and the possibilities are very free and open-ended. This stands in contrast to fancy typography and bespoke technical diagrams, which are often slow to produce, difficult to modify, and require great expertise to do well.
Using a chalkboard well as a collaborative thinking tool takes practice though.
He was saying that we don't communicate via everybody writing on the board simultaneously, not that its not a valid form of communication in groups. People take turns.
What he/she said is that “it's predominantly an asynchronous one to many form of communication”.
And it is true that this is the way many people use whiteboards, as a kind of presentation tool rather than a thinking tool. But that is largely down to lack of practice with the chalkboard/whiteboard as a personal, one-on-one, or small group tool.
There are plenty of people who successfully use white boards as a tool for routine technical conversations in small groups, with multiple participants writing on the same board.
“Not everyone is writing literally simultaneously” would be a vacuous and uninteresting statement, so I’ll give the previous poster the benefit of the doubt that he/she was saying something more substantial. No kind of conversation involves every interlocutor literally simultaneously talking/writing in the same space at the same time: that would just be a cacophony of monologues, not a conversation at all.
This observation is crucial to how we approach collaborative technology, though: the assumed goal has always been to achieve lower latency and finer granularity of changes to create the experience of simultaneous editing with instant feedback.
What this means in practice is that we have a lot of software that makes it easy to bring a group of strangers in to pseudonoymously vandalize a whiteboard by drawing dicks on it - a true "cacophony of monologues." See also: most comment threads.
Having the technical capability to all speak/write at once is wonderful. It cuts friction in the conversation. (Think of the difference between a phone call and a sequence of voice memos.)
That doesn’t mean people collaborating won’t be taking turns as a practical matter, enforced by social convention.
I think one of the issues is you're never sure what someone is about to do. There is something about seeing someone take control of the drawing space where in VR your avatar would begin motioning towards the board or pickup the writing utensil.
Sometimes I'm hesitant to start scribbling on the drawing space because I don't have the social queues to not step on someone else's thoughts. Maybe this Whiteboard app solves that?
Are you talking about the iPhone?? That's not a virtual keyboard. Your finger knows when it's touching the screen. Also, tapping on designate target and freeform drawing are two very different things
There's no possible such affordance in virtual space. You're literally writing in air.
>Are you talking about the iPhone?? That's not a virtual keyboard. Your finger knows when it's touching the screen
But it doesn't feel that it's hitting a button (because the button it's virtual), and people then had made this point repeatedly (e.g. in favor of Blackberry).
I would've made that argument then, and it's the reason I have a Blackberry today. It's just straight up not as good, in my opinion. But yes, people in general seem to be fine with it. I just wanted to push back against the idea that "Well, everyone said it would be bad and then it was fine.". The people who thought it was awful in many cases probably still do, they're just quieter about it 'cause it's a lost cause.
There are haptic capabilities to give some feedback... and the software can place the whiteboard where there is a physical wall for you to press against if you wanted it to, it doesn't have to be "writing in air".
forget the whiteboard, imagine a regular 2D monitor with regular code on it except it wraps your field of view, so all the files of the entire codebase are open at once, let’s assume there is retina resolution everywhere, and it is collab edit like googledocs with a laser pointer attached to each cursor. Pair programming multi-cursor!
Jane is clever, thought Greg, more clever than Jose, but not that clever.
BigCorp had introduced the VR goggles about eight months ago, and though it was initially a boon, most of the dev team had come to hate them. Sure, working at home was nice at first. You didn't have to wear pants anymore, you could cook fish in you apartment and not get death-stares, the commute over the Bay Bridge was gone along with the tolls. But it quickly became apparent that you still had to 'put ass to seat.' Initially you could skip out, take a long lunch, go to the dentist, take the dog out when you were bored stiff from the monotony.
But then that first update came out.
Thing was, in order to downplay the nausea effects from the screens, the goggles tracked your eyes' saccades, pupil dilation, and a bunch of other bioengineering stuff Greg barely knew about. It really did help with the nausea, not the Greg really suffered from it to begin with. His ex-girlfriend certainly did, making VR-sexting nearly impossible with her back in NYC.
It wasn't so much that the VR-goggles could track exactly what you were looking at, that data stream was just too much to parse, it was that they knew you were there at all. Once most of the dev team was no longer in the bullpen, and instead they were off actually living a life, productivity skyrocketed.
Well, initially.
Greg's boss, Jose, had loved it. But as the product reached it's natural limits, sigmoided to the economy, the squeeze began. At first, the number of tickets became the metric to game. Then it was peer-feedback, which naturally came to an armistice between all of them. One thing after another, as Jose was squeezed from all of this many bosses. Until eventually, you had to have 'continuous telepresence' during work hours.
Sure, when the new JK Rowling product came out, the entire virtual office became Hogwartz, complete with the ghosts and staircases. Fridays were a reliable beach scene. Mondays had that dark humor of a Dilbert strip in the skin and layout of the office. But Jose had each scene constructed so that he could monitor if you were there. Like a manager in a Cuban Cigar factory, his seat was higher. He could easily see if you were there in his goggles. A little red mark in Jose's HUD came up when you pulled out of the office. He had to, it was one of the few metrics he knew about and that he could manipulate to appease the matrix of his bosses. 'Put ass to seat'.
But Jane knew people. Greg didn't know who she knew, maybe one of the hardware guys at the VR goggle plant. But Jane was faking it. Greg has seen it, cataloged it, and studied it. The times she would message him, idly talking about some show, all of them were pulled from the NYT's RSS, easily a chatbot she'd actually paid for. The voice was just that side of choppy. And the way her head moved, that here eyes scanned across Greg's virtual face, totally scripted. He'd seen her replay the exact facial scan at least six times in one meeting. Greg knew: Jane was faking it.
Hot dogs, horseshoes, and hand grenades (essentially a shooting range simulator with almost 300 accurately modeled firearms and plenty of game modes with more content added pretty much weekly)
Beat Saber is a VR rhythm game, and I adore rhythm games
Multiple driving/racing sims, including assetto corsa, project cars, and Euro Truck simulator (though I struggle to play that one in VR)
VTOL VR is an incredible near future Flight and military simulation seemingly focusing on weapons handling
I have over 30 VR applications, and at least 10 I would consider full fledged "games", but those are what I spend most of my time in
What real-world use case does putting all the [insert job function] in a single virtual room solve? This is a case of tech looking for a solution.
I pick up the phone or email people in the same building. I'm not sure jumping into a virtual room with people in different physical locations is a need.
I love my VR headset for gaming, I have a really hard time seeing it implemented in our workplace: software company with development offices in US/UK/India.
Being able to see each other's face is not how a lot of work is done imho. Collaborating using tools like MS Whiteboard on a surface hub to express and ideate on a design is where work gets done in my experience.
My wife is currently on a plane to NYC for a business dinner & conference, leaving me a solo parent for the next 3 days. I certainly wish she could pop on a headset during working hours, schmooze with the other investors involved, and be home for dinner and bedtime. My son can't talk yet, but he probably does too.
Her job description is basically investing several million dollars at a time into projects that a large number of participants in her industry (impact investing) believe are worthwhile, but no one fund would bankroll on its own. A key part of that job description is working to build partnerships & syndicates of investors whose goals are aligned. A key skill for that is building trust and rapport - the foundations, family offices, entrepreneurs, and hedge funds involved all need to feel like the deal is in their interest and they will be treated fairly, both if it goes well and if it goes poorly.
There's a bunch of social science that's shown that repeated in-person interaction builds trust in a way that e-mail, phone calls, written communication, and videoconferencing does not. It's not just the facial expression and emotions - there's something about interacting in real-time within a shared environment that makes us trust each other. And that's what I'm referring to by "good as there" telepresence - existing systems are not good enough, because there's still a big gulf between VCing with your coworker across the country and chatting with your officemate about a cool new opportunity. I don't know whether VR will ever be good enough to bridge this gulf, but I'm saying that if it can, that would be revolutionary.
If it were just a matter of deal terms & conditions, we could stick all that in a blockchain and let computers hash it out. That's my field, and I keep telling her that eventually the world'll move that way. But humans don't work that way; as long as we have squishy emotions and depend on a lot of subconscious cues we can't even describe, then looking at a screen is not going to change peoples' decision making. If you could somehow capture all those subconscious cues so it really is indistinguishable from physical presence, that may change, but that's a big if.
I've been thinking about this recently, and I feel that the "shared environment" aspect is the key, much more than facial expressions. Uncanny valley aside, I feel that brains have it much easier to recognize presence of a person despite a weird body. I've already had this kind of feeling with regular multiplayer 3D games on a flat screen. I feel virtual environments might alone be sufficient to do the trick of crossing the gulf you talk about.
I think you might be right. It's weird, I often felt closer to people that I played MMORPGs with or fandom folk on AIM than coworkers on VC, even though in many cases I never even knew what the former looked like. A lot of that was the sense of shared experience; while my whole experience was a chat bubble at the time, so was their whole experience.
I'd argue a video call is worse for facial nuances. The nature of having both camera and screen is the person you're teleconferencing is never actually looking at you.
Modern VR headsets already have eye tracking, it's not too out of the picture to imagine some rudimentary face tracking to capture the rest of the foundations of expression. In my experience the sense of "thereness" is much greater in a VR room than a teleconferencing session; but it's difficult to compare since VR presupposes better audio conditions.
Business travel by airplane is extremely common. The fluidity of face-to-face communication aids cooperative work in a way that hasn’t yet been duplicated at scale, despite many efforts to date.
That’s part of what VR aims to disrupt and achieve.
Yes, but who are these people and what are they doing when they travel?
VR is just a video conference call on steroids. Business travel is 'common' but relative to the rest of productive output at an average business it's peanuts. Also what portion of those business travelers absolutely need to be there. Would you buy from (a) a salesperson who took the time to travel to your workplace or (b) some telepresence pitch?
How about option c) donate the plane ticket to buy carbon offsets so as not to act "cheap". Even better, give the client that choice and see if they readily choose to pollute the environment (twice).
Maybe I'm an outlier but I've had more productive video conferences with salespeople than I have with ones who've flown out to talk. Sure, you don't get the free steak lunch on a video call, but you also don't have to spend that lunch break being pitched on how amazingly cool their company is.
I feel like there's a definitional problem with that for vr: you're still wearing the big black glasses/head gear, so if you can see everyone naturally, you can't actually see their faces
The software would presumably know what you look like and can record your facial expressions and map it onto your avatar in real-time. There's technology now to create faces that never existed on a real person, and there's been technology for 15 years or so to do motion-capture of facial expressions and map it onto a computer-generated texture.
Plus I would hope that the big black glasses eventually give way to something sleeker, more akin to an eyepatch or sleeping mask.
>Failing that, I see it as a niche product that'd revolutionize the entertainment industries but doesn't change much outside of them.
Entertainment is certainly not niche by any definition. If VR replaces gaming consoles alone we're talking several Billion dollars. Let alone TV, Movie theaters, internet porn etc
>The only condition where I'd see this being true is if VR leads to "good as there" telepresence, where you can feel like you're having the sort of spontaneous conversations that arise from physical presence at a workplace.
"All the tedium and productivity-killing of corporate meetings now in your telecommuting job" (tm)
I doubt it. If this was true, we'd already be there. We have teleconferencing and long distance communications already, and this doesn't really happen.
You would have to go beyond mere conferencing, and create specialized tools that can be interacted with in VR so people can produce something together that they couldn't before. There is little value in just having everyone pretend they're in an office.
Try something like Rec Room on the Vive or Oculus before you proclaim it no different than video conferencing. This is a human perception problem and the feeling of being there and hand signals alone makes an enormous difference. You have to try it to understand. There are all these big and small factors for why video conferencing doesn't replace all communication. VR can in the long term remove most if not all of them, except for latency.
I respect Marc, but I totally disagree. AR has so many practical business uses that VR just doesn't have. Look at the AR demos Microsoft has produced for industry...they are super impressive. And they work along with sensors and other IoT devices. This is for a headset that is in its infancy.
The only way I can see VR having higher value is gaming. AR certainly will not be a gaming device (imo) but HUD to display valuable information is the future. Once it's at a state of being compact it can penetrate the consumer market, right now it really only has business uses.
VR headsets are kind of already ready for gaming...but who do you know that games with one of the sets? It's few and far between. Obscuring your vision entirely just makes people feel silly and vulnerable. I also think gaming is a sedentary activity, people aren't really that interested in moving around. If they were, they'd go play paintball.
VR is already seeing significant adoption in business for training. Anywhere where training on the real thing is difficult or dangerous, where the real equipment is expensive and / or hard to transport or where the real training scenario is difficult to recreate physically. Even where these factors don't hold very strongly, the combination of immersion and repeatability has value over traditional training approaches.
We're seeing success using VR for surgical training but it's also seeing use for training in aerospace (Boeing both for pilots and maintenance engineers, NASA for astronauts), factory work (Volkswagen), sports (NFL) and retail (Walmart). Training and education is going to be a huge market for VR and for many scenarios VR is better than AR.
Another big one is mining. Often the machinery doesn't have a duplicate, and the mine loses millions of dollars per hour of downtime, operating on already thin margins. Reducing maintenance times and risks by having the apprentices practice first in VR so they aren't a burden on the experienced technicians is a huge opportunity.
>VR is already seeing significant adoption in business for training. Anywhere where training on the real thing is difficult or dangerous, where the real equipment is expensive and / or hard to transport or where the real training scenario is difficult to recreate physically.
As someone familiar in the training industry, it's still nowhere much to be seen...
While VR can be used for training in the use cases above I would think AR would be better and used much more often in their day to day jobs. Imagine a retail employee scanning everything with AR goggles or an airplane tech having AR to read manuals or display info while they are fixing stuff.
I think you're right about AR having more business uses than VR, and VR bring mostly for gaming. But I also think the gaming market for VR is and will be much bigger than the business market for AR.
Most of the AR business uses are dubious or downright stupid (kind of like a lot of IoT stuff) whereas there is already a real market for VR gaming.
I can see AR working in cars with HUDs that highlights everything on the road for you at night. We are already adding all the sensors in the cars that are produced today.
I see AR integrating much more in our day to day lives, small things like screens, keyboards, and other UIs. VR is for more immersive experiences, be it for entertainment or for business. A lot of industries are testing VR for tasks such as oil and pipeline exploration.
There are simply more hours in a day to spend on business than there is on gaming. Enterprise spending is nearly $4T whereas gaming is $150B, that’s a 26x difference.
There are signs that Microsoft may be thinking that AR could win out in the end in gaming as well. They've got some gaming demos that are nearly as impressive as their industry demos.
Studies have shown it will always be safer and less disorienting to leave people at least their peripheral vision when playing games where they move about a physical environment, and if you are going to do that you might as well make that physical environment a part of the game.
There's always going to be games that are more immersive in full opaque VR than AR, but games have been immersive in 8-bit on a tiny CRT screen, the small "quality" difference between AR "partial" immersion and VR "full" immersion may not matter in the long run to good games.
I think AR for table top gaming could be huge, even turning Minecraft into a Lego like game. I'm not entirely convinced of many other use cases in gaming though.
I think the same reason table top gaming works so well, you might see a lot of advantages to "wall-mounted" gaming. Most existing games could work well, just sending a bit more of their existing depth buffers to AR systems. Certainly easier than what a lot of VR ports of traditional 2D monitor games need to go through (particularly if they hope to avoid motion sickness concerns).
Also, as I said, I think the safety factor of AR pushes it to be more useful in "full room" games than opaque VR, and there's a lot of room for interesting games in that space, and probably a higher ceiling in terms of interested players in AR than in enclosed VR because of the safety/motion sickness/etc issues.
AR is really only useful when the object or information you're visualising is smaller than the room you're currently in. That includes a lot of things and works for a lot of situations but most of the world doesn't fit inside a room.
I'm not sure VR headsets are the future of gaming either.
I had one of the PSVR headsets and it makes gaming even more isolationist.
Playing a console (where I believe the majority of gamers come from) is quite casual, you sit on the couch quite a distance from the screen with a basic controller.
Playing on the PC is more serious endeavour, often with headphones and sitting quite close to the screen.
VR is even more serious than playing on the PC, you need a dedicated space (to run around), you're completely cut off from the outside world.
VR means you really want to set yourself up for a long gaming session, due to the headset it is always going to be quite isolationist in ways other avenues are not.
If the past two years have shown me anything, it's that people are becoming skeptical of the technologist mantra that "technology will make people's lives better." Not always; and with Apple introducing Screen Time and people trying to figure out how to "break" from their cell phone and social media usage, I think anybody who believes that the mass market wants to live in some VR simulation is tone deaf.
Maybe AR will never be like Minority Report, but I think if AR could get to a point where no goggles are needed, or if the equipment is light enough to not be a burden to the user (unlike VR headsets), then I think AR will be much bigger than VR. The average user just don't want that crap on their face and they don't want to live in a simulation like so many in the Bay Area would like to believe.
When people talk about the Bay Area/Silicon Valley monoculture/hivemind, I immediately think of VR enthusiasts. I'd also throw cryptocurrencies and blockchain enthusiasts into this category as well. Both of those technologies solved "problems" that the general population wouldn't agree to being problems in the first place.
If you asked people before the age of cars how to improve transportation, they'd ask for a faster horse.
That being said, I am skeptical of the claim that VR will be orders of magnitude more popular than AR, simply because humans instinctually do not like to have their vision occluded.
> If you asked people before the age of cars how to improve transportation, they'd ask for a faster horse.
This is a made-up quote, and what they would have asked for was a faster, warmer, safer carriage (which they got with cars), a faster cart (which they got with trucks), and a lower maintenance horse (which they got with motorcycles.) Nobody wanted horses; they used horses to move carriages, carts, and themselves.
True, but the is also a flipside. Technologists solved the transportation problem, but introduced health and urban planning problems as a result. The point is that people are becoming more savvy at spotting the downsides of technologies. In particular, using VR will probably result in more sedentary hours, which is something that people seem to want to move away from.
The most popular VR games require significantly more physical activity than traditional video games (https://vrscout.com/news/man-loses-138-pounds-beat-saber/), so if VR does take off it could be a solution for sendentary hours, not a cause.
As t→∞, you could imagine technology improving to the point where VR headsets don't feel like they're occluding your vision. The holy grail would plugging directly into your brain to replace your ocular input with a digital feed.
Of course I'm talking about a sci-fi future here, nothing that's on the horizon in the next 10-20 years.
I'd like to strongly challenge this line from MA: "I just think that’s only true for people who live in a really interesting place in the real world. But only something like .1 percent and 1 percent of people on Earth live in a place where they wake up every morning and think, Wow, there are so many interesting things to see."
I'm not really sure what he means by 'interesting', but I think it captures an arrogance we in the Silicon Valley can have about the rest of the world.
Each town region has varying levels of interestingness depending on ones own depth of engagement with that community. A tourist might be more interested in the history of a place or landmarks (and in my read, this seems to be MA's working meaning of 'interesting'). But a local has many more things to be interested in and ways of participating in the community. Whether the store is open, how to walk to an unfamiliar house, etc.
Whether or not AR is the right technology to help with this I do not know, but people tend to find their local environments more interesting than this gives them credit for.
As a parting thought, I don't read this as a statement MA put a ton of thought into, so I actually chalk it up to imprecision rather than malice. But approaching the world with an assumption that it is not interesting is a great way to force the conclusion (if only for yourself).
People already choose the Internet (Facebook, Fortnite, or reddit) over their real-life communities, just consider how they allocate their time, Internet wins by a big margin.
VR gambling will also be a multi billion dollar industry, complete with massive, detailed virtual cities dedicated to just casinos / gambling and porn. The large supporting business demand to take gambling into the VR realm will fund the construction cost of those detailed worlds over time. It's primarily a question of who will do it, what regulations will exist and where, rather than if it'll happen.
At the risk of outing myself as a VR porn consumer...
VR porn is completely different to watching regular porn. With POV 3D VR porn, you are literally there, present, in the room. It's something that needs to be experienced to be fully understood. Obviously, like all porn, it won't be for everyone, but it's not something you should just dismiss as more-of-the-same.
The brain is a funny thing and can be tricked really easily.
> But only something like .1 percent and 1 percent of people on Earth live in a place where they wake up every morning and think, Wow, there are so many interesting things to see. So for everyone who doesn’t already live on a college campus or in Silicon Valley or in a major other city, the new environments we’re going to be able to create in VR will inherently be much more interesting
Both AR and VR aren't just about entertainment. Also sounds kind of pretentious to say that VR will more interesting than where 99% of people live.
You know, I'm usually reticent to join in with the "screw Silicon Valley and its myopic rich guy bubble" crowd, but this was kind of gobsmacking. "People here in the Valley don't see the potential of VR in all those places that aren't as wonderful as it is here, where lonely, desperate people could use to escape the tragedy of not living in Silicon Valley."
Oh, you mean from this article by Beau Cronin?[1] And this one? [2] "Andreesen saying Harris' thoughts reflect the "reality privilege" that elites have, and that most people don't have better experiences away from the internet."
[2] is worth a read. Andreesen on the nature of reality is strange.
> Also sounds kind of pretentious to say that VR will more interesting than where 99% of people live
Oh boy was it. If you're bored, then you're boring, imo. Every place is interesting or boring depending on how much effort you're willing to put into it.
Currently "AR" and "VR" are used to differentiate to separate (but mostly decoupled) distinctions:
- Hardware: VR means full eye buffer coverage of both eyes with no transparent glass, AR means partial eye coverage with all pixels sharing visual field with incoming world photons.
- UX: VR typically means full environmental replacement with basic room and body tracking and AR means real world augmentation with virtual entities.
In the long run these are separate concerns. We are either wearing headsets with transparent surfaces or we aren't in the long run. This seems clear will have a 0/1 resolution. For the UX side, it seems unrelated -- presumably you should be able to move up and down the spectrum of full environmental override at any moment.
In the hardware sense, I expect VR style opaque hardware to win (with passthrough cameras to enable them to simulate transparent glass perfectly.) In the software sense the distinction becomes irrelevant. Through the lens of hardware full eye-covering visors seem to be likely to beat glass on the capability/cost curve readily over the next 5 years so my bet is on Jordi-like visors not glasses for daily drivers.
Imagine wearing an "AR" HMD, a nice HMD with an LCD occlusion layer so it can render black. A black dinosaur is perched on your bookshelf. Great AR. Now you turn around. Half your room is gone, replaced by the rolling hills of a Cretaceous lowland. Great VR. But your laptop seems unchanged, sitting on a Cretaceous rock shelf where your desk was, next to a tree stump where your chair was. Great...err, hmm. You turn halfway back. On your left is hills; on your right is a wall and a bookshelf with a dinosaur. Are you doing VR or AR? Both? Half and half? One eye each?
Sigh. We so need to disrupt the technology society uses for thoughtful analysis and its dissemination.
Or say I'm wearing my VR HMD. But it's showing only my laptop's desktop. Is that still VR? My custom environment has a spatial geometry, and a response to head motion, that is variously aphysical. I joke that VR is in its user-onboarding skeuomorphic UI phase, and I'm much more interested in expert UIs for XR... without the "R". Resemblance to reality as UI design smell. Is that still Virtual and/or Augmented Reality? There's a camera ducktaped to the front of my HMD, providing a video passthrough background. So is that AR? What if I cut side windows in the headset blinders so I can use the real world for balance (old laptop with integrated graphics). Is that AR yet?
Unfortunately, VR HMDs still have the unblurry resolution of a 1980's VGA monitor, so I take off the HMD and look at my laptop screen. Is that AR? No? But I'm wearing anaglyph or LCD shutter glasses, and I'm headtracking, so there's fixed-in-realspace 3D content. Is that AR? But what if my desk has several displays, all doing synced high-resolution (but gappy) 3D, across much of my field of view. Is that AR yet?
The XR+ design space seems quite broad and rich, but much underappreciated.
Well put. I think the moment of "?R takeoff" is when the first person manages to wear a consumer grade standalone VR headset for most of their day using passthrough. It will probably be an experience for nobody but those with the most hardened stomachs, but it will be an existence proof that you can then build software that can assume you have a raster buffer between your retinas and the incident world photons throughout your day that is 'full-cover' (ie every incident photon to your eyes is software proxied and modulated optionally by world photon sensor information via code, not physical properties like transparent glass.) That is basically the "final visual platform" for compute imho. Transparent AR glasses, if anything, are clearly a transitionary technology since they do not provide full software control over photon delivery to the eyes. (Also, I expect this event to happen quietly and unrecognized in late 2019 probably buried in a forum thread somewhere.)
From there, it will just take the hacker community to build apps that provide some type of 10x augmentation by a fully software-proxied visual system and a little bit of cultural normalization of it (probably within circles of teens/kids) to incentivize the acceleration of development of passthrough visor hardware that works better, is smaller, and has longer lasting batteries. But these will be mostly linear engineering problems, except perhaps the frame prediction algorithms needed to deal with camera sensor latency. Whereas the path to a set of AR glasses that mask out the world with full FoV seems a much more theoretical future that stretches the limits of known physics, this seems to be imminently becoming the problem of arranging bits not atoms with the arrival of fairly capable consumer standalone VR headsets with workable passthrough cameras.
If you think about it hard enough, if you woke up in 5 years and there was a market with good AR glasses and good VR goggles, but nobody tied the software together to enable all-day VR goggle wear via passthrough, clearly someone would do it and suddenly those devices are insanely more capable than the AR glass equivalent since they can take over your entire visual field and deliver all the same applications of the glasses. So it seems pretty inductive to me, if you buy into a few fairly simple assumptions, that this is our future, assuming that a software-proxied visual system can deliver value to daily life. The only counter argument (and in fact, one of the admitted theses for many people working on AR glasses) is that wearing a VR visor all day will make you look silly -- sometimes that's enough to tip things over for quite a while, but in the limit people are going to converge on what improves their life the most on net. (See: the segway has finally had it's day with the arrival of cheap electric scooters.)
Full-cover, rasterized vision seems to be the end game for how our visual system will interface with software systems.
True, he seems to be addressing high-resolution immersive AR vs VR. Is that because he's looking for something to invest in?
If so, it's definitely putting the cart before the horse for the average software dev, since AR can be very low fidelity and still be effective. It just has to add some value to reality to be a pretty big win. Mapping software is the main example to me.
But maybe mapping is not even AR anymore — it's its own thing? What about Pokemon Go? Is that AR in this context?
VR has the same problem 3D TV has -- it's an all or nothing experience. You can't just casually watch a 3D movie or casually participate in a VR experience while doing something else. You have to be 100% dedicated to it.
Some people like that. People who play COD for three hours at a time are the kind of people that would do that.
But that's not most people. For example, I have kids. I can't do anything at home for more than a few minutes at a time without interruption. I will never be able to enjoy VR at home, at least not for 10ish years until my kids learn to go do their own things.
I just don't see VR taking off, much like 3D TV failed to take off. Some people love it, but most people ignore it.
Isn't it already? VR isn't huge, but it's definitely non-zero and there's a plausible case to be made for more growth in the forseeable future. AR appears to be indistinguishable from zero right now, and the case for growth in the forseeable future remains fairly hard to make. ("Forseeable" is a bit of a fuzzy term, but let's call it 10 years for concreteness. In 50 years, sure, AR everywhere, but on a timeframe even a long-term investor thinks on? Not sure I see it happening.)
> Isn't it already? VR isn't huge, but it's definitely non-zero and there's a plausible case to be made for more growth in the forseeable future. AR appears to be indistinguishable from zero right now
What are we considering AR and VR here? Pokémon Go is an AR game and seems to have a player base that’s several times larger than the playerbase of every existing VR game lumped together.
It's just anecdotal but everyone I know who play Pokémon Go has disabled AR. I used it for a few minutes until I realized that playing the game is much easier with AR disabled. Pokémon Go isn't really an "AR game". It is a mobile game which has an optional AR feature.
Sure but I'd argue the success of Pokemon Go is not because of AR but in spite of AR.
I am very skeptical people play Pokemon Go for it's AR integration considering other AR games aren't nearly as popular and frankly the gameplay itself is pretty poor.
Pokemon Go seems popular because it's Pokemon on mobile.
And the game is also unplayable until you turn the AR off, unless you love wasting all your Pokéballs because one arm can't quite flick the balls in the right direction while the other arm awkwardly holds the phone just so.
It seems he was specifically referring to wearables in this context:
> More useful for our founder readers may be Andreessen’s predictions around tech and, because he’s asked about them specifically, his predictions when it comes to wearables
The iPhone X* phones were some of the best-selling phones of the last year and they all have AR. Tons of cars have AR HUDs at least as an option, like the Toyota Camry, which you can't exactly call "niche".
The justification for VR is pretty depressing. Could be true, I know many people who enjoy losing themselves in digital worlds, but the idea of escaping so purposefully just doesn't sit right.
"I just think [AR as the more useful technology] is only true for people who live in a really interesting place in the real world... So for everyone who doesn’t already live on a college campus or in Silicon Valley or in a major other city, the new environments we’re going to be able to create in VR will inherently be much more interesting."
We have virtual worlds now. Second Life. Sansar. VRChat. Sinespace. High Fidelity. The technology is good enough that we can see what they're like. They're OK, but not compelling. They mostly appeal to people with too much free time. Like Everquest, in the early years.
We even know what a fully immersive full body VR experience is like. Lucasfilm and Disney have one running at Disneyland.[1] They have good cordless VR gear, good position tracking, and a custom-built space you can move around. The space is just blank walls with an occasional prop you can touch, and it lines up with the VR.
They have a neat trick to make the space seem bigger. It turns out that in VR you can get people to turn a little while they think they're walking in a straight line, if you slowly rotate the visual world. So you can make the players go in big circles and think they're covering a lot of distance.
This is close to the "holodeck". It works now. And it's just another Disney ride.
(Is Marc Andressen thinking of the Ready Player One model as a way to allow the real world to suck more while keeping the peons happy? Only the 1% have a good real life, everyone else goes on line and pretends.)
I got to try the VOID Star Wars attraction shown in the video (although it might have been set up in a smaller space than the Disneyland installation).
It was a short, scripted, minimally interactive experience. The hand and prop tracking were pretty glitchy and somewhat immersion-breaking. The equipment was heavy and ridiculously cumbersome (even compared to current consumer VR headsets). I'm sure the cost/work of setting up a system like that is basically prohibitive too.
I don't think it's a great reference point for predicting the VR market in the next 5 years or so, as the cost comes down and more polished and inexpensive mass-market systems come out (like the Oculus Quest) that are cordless with good tracking.
Millions of people spend huge amounts of time playing games on tiny rectangles they hold in their hands. I think it's overly skeptical to assume they won't want holodecks, if the cost is $400 and the HW/SW isn't terrible.
I expect it'll at least be an increasingly less-niche gaming platform as not-terrible standalone devices come out (I tried a tennis game that was pretty fun, I'm not a gamer but I could see myself playing some VR games if it was a way to get real exercise).
The current non-gaming uses like corporate/sports/military training probably will grow too as the quality and ergonomics improve.
I'd really like to try a system with good body/face/eye tracking. I think that is kind of the minimum for social applications with really huge appeal. It's hard to get an idea of if it's compelling or not (or how far away it is, what needs to be improved, etc) without trying it though.
> the idea of escaping so purposefully just doesn't sit right.
I know this feels like a VR thing, but I have found the same sort of issues with Minecraft, Ark, Terraria, etc. It seems like escapism is a huge part of the "survival" genre. VR will obviously magnify this problem a hundred fold, but the problem already exists now.
Minecraft in VR is still one of the most immersive experiences I've had with it-- I wouldn't hesitate to pull that out on a plane, or just about anywhere else I'm stuck sitting for a while and want to shut out the world. I believe John Carmack also made comments about finding it rather compelling.
Yea, the book "Ready Player One" really made me feel queasy about the effects it could have on our lives. Already I see it, myself and other people escaping into Farming/Business/Life simulating games to simulate the success we might not find in the real world.
Success, and control. This is an unfortunate side effect of our civilization. Out there in the real world, between the laws that protect us, corporate interests that manipulate us, the haves that have more say, the neighbours of which we don't - and can't - know more than 0.1%, the jobs that are so hyperspecialized that not many of us contribute an atomic piece of value to anything - between all that, we find ourselves with little real autonomy. Little influence on the environment. Little space to grow. And we can't have that, we can't have autonomy and fun, because that would be destructive to the fragile fabric of society. This is the one aspect about progress that depresses me. We're slowly morphing into a civilization-scale organism, where an individual does not matter, and is nothing more than a single cell is for one's body.
(People from smaller towns and villages may disagree; but this is how living in a 21st century city feels to me. It's a wonderful place, but also a straitjacket.)
Given all that, I can entirely understand the kind of escapism that tries to make you feel that you matter, or that you're a part of something that matters, or that you and your friends have some meaningful control over the shared environment, don't have to deal with as many people, escapism where there's no jail time attached to half of the fun things one may do.
It seems to me that VR is, in some sense, inherently awkward in ways that AR isn't. In either, your real body is in the real world, but VR disables most of the mechanisms that you have built-in to cope with the real world. With VR it'll always be necessary to deal with interruptions from the real world, bumping in to things, looking like a flailing weirdo to Real or Augmented Reality participants... In contrast, AR lets you decide on the appropriate amount of virtual.
VR has been around longer simply because technology allowed for primitive VR long before AR became possible. That means we've collectively had longer to think about how it might develop, and so it is easier to imagine uses for VR than with the relatively new AR.
My bet is that AR will be bigger than VR, by approximately a factor of 904.
Obviously he played a big role in Mosaic and Netscape back in the day, and a16z has also been quite innovative, but he gets way too much attention when he’s just talking his book.
My unpopular opinion (based on reading this thread) is that VR's killer app will be sports. Sports is a great fit:
-Once set up, it should be very straightforward to get cameras set up in a repeatable way. Venues have the money to set this up
-Fans willing to pay lots of money for an immersive experience
-No need to deal with many of the issues around the user needing to move around
The biggest challenges will be getting processing/rendering good and quick enough to respond in real time. I personally can easily imagine a future where you can buy the equivalent of a front row seat to a Giants game as part of a season pass just as you would from mlb.tv
The NBA is already rolling this out with VR games on League Pass and from what I gather it's getting to be pretty slick. I 100% agree that sports is the killer app here and am surprised to see it barely mentioned.
With all of the naysayers on here about VR I have to wonder how many of you have used the Oculus Rift or the HTC Vive for an extended period of time?
Even in it’s current state it’s pretty damn impressive. If it never moves beyond a platform for video gaming it is still a multi billion dollar industry.
The veneer of innovation over the monopolies of the FAANG companies is pretty thin on most days, but VR and AR are two things that cause my suspension of disbelief to collapse entirely. Can I get up to pee while "immersed" in VR? Can I find my popcorn? Does anybody realize that the AR demos online are showing phone screens, and not the reality that you will see without a screen in front of you? (On some level, on that last, they do. But the hype seems built upon an off-by-one error in representation.)
We are no longer in an age of innovation and disruption with regard to the Internet. It has been thoroughly colonized, and any innovation will be bought by one of the big fish, in order to prevent the disruption of fairly lucrative relative monopolies that face no, or only the most glacial, threats from commoditization. VR is not it. AR is not it. From here on out, it's ML to try to improve on k-nearest-neighbor with k==1 to drive recommendation engines.
Much like the Moon Program propaganda informs outmoded (what I regret to call) virtue signaling around STEM, propaganda from the era of the rise of the FAANG group drives the same among ink-spillers around The Next Big Disruptive Innovation.
Here's a hint: Whatever the next disruptive thing is, it's not going to come to you via TechCrunch relaying Andreesen's ravings about which thing is bigger than what. If it happens at all. It's entirely possible that nothing will rise from the ashes of Facebook, for example.
Infinite window space surrounding me? Yes please. Let me cascade those 42 windows I have open trying to track everywhere this stupid JavaScript callback goes so I that I can lay it all out in front of me, and let me keep Netflix going in the upper left for giggles.
For anyone who's had time to listen, do we know what he means by "bigger"?
To me it seems obvious that AR will be far bigger then VR as AR becomes "ambient" technology while VR remains "somewhere you go", but I'm not sure what his metric is.
Two weeks later: "Marc Andreesen Launches VR Startup _____"
Personally, I hope VR doesn't catch on. Reminds me of the humans in WALL-E. Like others in this thread have said, VR at that scale would almost certainly be founded on addiction. No thanks..
Active usecases (games, design, meetings) will tend towards VR and passive usecases (news, info overlay, prompts) will tend towards AR. There's plenty of money to be made in both of those.
VR will certainly be big, but it'll be a while until it gets there. What we have at the moment is... not that. It's a nice tech demo with a few uses for gaming and training purposes, but it's a far cry away from what people would want to use on a more regular basis.
When it gets to the point of direct brain connections and input controlled directly by your mind/body (like say, The Matrix or many fictional works with 'lotus eater machines'), then that's where the market will take off. Gaming would see its biggest tech leap since 3D became a big thing in the 90s, theme parks would see a boom in activity, remote working would become virtually indistinguishable from the real thing and the internet would see a bit of a revolution too.
But while clunky helmets and controllers/mice/whatever are needed, it's not gonna take off or go mainstream.
The current crop of VR software is way past the ‘tech demo’ phase. Once the new Oculus comes along ditching the cables and PC requirement, things will move very, very fast.
What about AR? I've heard a lot of people make the 3D/VR comparison prediction. I think it's reasonable to think VR and AR could have very different fates.
"If you can do things overlaid over the real world, that should be inherently more interesting than having to construct a synthetic world.
I just think that’s only true for people who live in a really interesting place in the real world. But only something like .1 percent and 1 percent of people on Earth live in a place where they wake up every morning and think, Wow, there are so many interesting things to see."
I disagree with this sentiment and it really portrays SV elitism, aka "most of the world is a shithole except where me and my friends live, so I'm compelled to show 99% of the rest of humanity what they're missing." It's also wrong from a business sense, where "ARish" type product like Airpods, Apple Watch and other passive product are doing well globally.
I think his point about podcasts and other audio is on the money, but it undercuts his argument for VR:
> They have this Bluetooth thing in their ear, and they’ve got a hat, and that’s 10 hours on the forklift and that’s 10 hours of Joe Rogan.
In other words, audio is successful because it's used as a complement to what we're already doing, not an alternative to it. We can't quit our jobs to spend 10 hours in VR, but it's easy to imagine lightweight AR HUDs for everything from entertainment (e.g. impromptu podcast menus) to specialized on-the-job uses.
Seems like AR will require inherently lower friction and less trade-off with the real world.
I feel like AR would fit better inside of my company than VR. I imagine a day when we sit around a desk and create
"things" in a shared 3d space that we can all touch and interact with.
To be clear I am very much hoping AR can replace the white board.
Why do we care what this guy says? He wore Google glasses while promising us Bitcoin was the way of the future. Who cares what he thinks? AR isn't that big besides SnapChat and Pokemon Go so why is this news?
Apparently HTC's Vive division had a poor 2018, and that kind of made me afraid. I dropped $600 on my Vive kit and absolutely love it, but if the company cuts it off, I don't think I have any way to continue to play VR stuff as mine deteriorates or breaks, or no upgrade path (if I need one)
I'm not convinced the kind of VR I enjoy is going to become mainstream, and therefore I'm not sure it will be anything other than a tiny market
Hmmm...I saw another commenter mention that they think VR will go the way of 3D televisions. I really doubt that. I can't imagine anyone was really ever in love with 3D televisions. There is a modestly different experience vs 2D but nothing substantial. I've honestly always thought 3D "looked worse" than regular television. I'm not sure if there's something funny with my eyes or other people experience it but it never looked as clear.
In contrast, for some users, VR really is amazing. It is substantially different from the experience of interacting with a computer screen. Possibly oculus or the htc vive are a littler early to market but having the entire class of technology go away is unlikely in my opinion.
It is interesting to think though that 3D still seems to be popular in theaters (which I also do not enjoy). I wonder if "going the same way as 3D" could mean that VR will be something that is generally experienced at theme parks or theaters or something but not be a technology that average consumers own?
Slightly off topic, but I can't play first person shooters--or, heck, even Minecraft--because I get motion sick from simulated motion with no actual motion. It's so bad that when I used to try to play, I'd continue to be sick if I watched, after I'd get sick and stop, someone play from across the room.
The odd thing is that I don't get seasick, which is (mostly) from actual motion with little, no, or confused apparent motion. Go figure.
It does get better with practice. Many small sessions are better than one long session. Take it off right when you feel sick and don't try to push through. Try these exercises to increase your tolerance: http://elevr.com/yoga-for-building-vr-tolerance/
Fitness market and video game market both have ~30-40 billion in revenue in the US. That suggests that there is roughly similar appetite for real life vs. fantasy.
I sincerely hope and pray it doesn't. I have already ruined my life with a smartphone to the point that without a phone I feel powerless and rudderless and am constantly fidgeting. A smartphone is also toxic in surfacing constant negativity. I find myself endlessly reading Reddit. Can't imagine what a world where all of us are wearing around funky headsets and interacting with virtual Avatars will look like. Terrifying.
I think VR's first breakthrough would be in boring service sector jobs. Most of us have interesting surroundings and dont want to "escape from it" but if you work in a boring service sector jobs like a call center, VR tech, even if imperfect would be an improvement over the current surrounding. Add a bit a gamification and people may actually like these jobs a bit
Whatever happened to the decentralized ideal of ad-hoc networks? Shouldn't we expect a much bigger payoff and a much better world if investments actually made the real world better for the consumer? What if VR made the wearer smarter, stronger, nicer, wiser? Is that really so hard to imagine, given that it's the bare minimum we expect from technology today?
OT - on personal front i am not at all interested in wearable or gadgets like echo/home. Not against any advancement in those region but look at the impact smart phones alone has had and now we had to enforce rules like no smartphones on the dinner table. Not sure what not to turn off to have a personal connect in future.
I'm not sure I agree. AR is like a HUD for your life. It didn't take off with Google Glass but I still believe it will improve one's current life; only a subset of folks want to truly escape virtually. VR is still very cool, but I can't see it being as widely adopted (or practical) as AR.
> AR is like a HUD for your life. It didn't take off with Google Glass
Google Glass isn't AR. AR is not a limited look-up display, it’s 3-D overlay on your field of vision with awareness of location and, ideally, recognition of and interaction with objects in your field of vision. In the limit case it subsumes VR, since the generated imagery can replace as much or as little of the real imagery as needed for the application.
A VR system that lets you walk around your house will have to detect the tables/chairs/walls in your living space and place some kind of digital content in their place so you don’t bump into stuff. VR without perception won’t work. That kind of #VR is essentially #MixedReality
> AR and VR are going to work, and that we’re going to have heads-up displays that are going to remove the need for what we have now, which is this little pane of glass that we’re expected to experience the whole world through
Any idea what kind of head up displays he's talking about?
Thanks for that - I've been tinkering with a Looking Glass over the last few evenings, and had found the relationship between it and VR to be awkward to articulate.
Both VR and AR are going to go the way of 3D TV. While there is definitely initially a novelty factor, it wears off pretty quickly.
The holographic display technology, such as the LookingGlass (https://lookingglassfactory.com/) posted here a few days ago, seems likely to have a more long lasting success.
several of my VR friends who have VR headsets don't seem to use them very much, often going for months without using it. I would guess that means the current experience is underwhelming. there's still a lot of work to be done here.
What nonsense. Less people dying of heart attacks will just result in more people living with chronic heart diseases. An net decrease in quality of life.
Prolonged stretches of being unable to see the real world, invoking feels of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty are completely alien to those who work in huge, warehouse-sized, empty rooms in secure facilities, trying out what they assume everybody will want to put in their ornately decorated front rooms.
There's a disconnect between the tech industry and the "real world", so to speak, and it really makes you appreciate companies who can see the limits of certain technologies in certain domains. Take Apple, working to make AR easy and friendly on iOS; if, one day, VR takes off, then Apple is already prepared with plenty of machine learning and physics frameworks.
Until then, they present AR as the next best thing to VR in a safe, controlled, and non-threatening way; we can see the real world very clearly both through our devices and around them, we don't need to pay for prescription headsets or eyewear, and we are all free to put our iPhones and iPads away at any time.