A great desktop experience is hard. VR lens blur. AR display dimness and fov. Cost of resolution. Fixed focus depth. Heavy thing on your head. Tethered.
A nice VR gaming experience is hard. Immersive means you can't see the real world, so your balance rides on rendering, requiring high fps, low latency, and thus lots of gpu. Means a high bar for avoiding "immersion breaking" hardware and software visual oddities.
The perceived near-term market for VR gaming is larger than that of VR or AR desktops, so that set of hard has gotten investment, and the other, not so much.
Market structure, especially patents, discourages commercial exploration of smaller markets. Say you want to build and sell your great system, and that it happens to need eye tracking. One eye tracking provider sells very expensive systems to industry and government, and your volumes are far too small to interest them in cheaper. Its competitors have been bought by bigcos, and no longer offer you product. Patents, and your small market, block new competitors. So eye tracking is not available to you or your envisioned market.
Community communication infrastructure is poor. Suppose all the pieces exist somewhere. People interested in desktop experiences, willing to throw a few thousand dollars at panels, tethered gpus, eye tracking, and so on, willing to be uncomfortable, to look weird, to tolerate a regression in display quality; a 2K HMD with nice lenses; a similar 4K panel; the electronics to swap the panels; some tracking solution; and so on... Even if all those pieces exist, the communication infrastructure doesn't exist to pull them all together. Neither as forums, nor as markets.
The poor communication degrades professional understanding of the problem space. People are unclear on the dependency chains behind conventional wisdom. So high resolution is said to require eye tracking or high-end gpus. VR is said to require high frame rates. And the implicit assumption of immersive gaming is forgotten. I've found it ironic to read such, while in VR, running on an old laptop's integrated graphics, at 30 fps. Wishing someone offered an 4K panel conversion kit, so a few more pixels escaped blurry lenses. A panel I could still run on integrated graphics, albeit newer. So part of the failing to pull together opportunities, is failing to even see them.
Perhaps in an alternate universe, all patents are FRAND, all markets have an innovative churn of small businesses, and online forums implement the the many things we know how to do better, but don't. And there's been screen-comparable VR for years. But that's not where we're at.
10 years ago there was a booming scene of open source natural user interface projects. People building huge multitouch interfaces, experimenting, releasing open SLAM tools, and exploring what you could do with DIY AR/VR/projection maping/natural feature tracking/gesture interfaces. Post the success of the first Oculus dev release all of the forums went quiet, the git repos started being unmaintained and outright scrubbed. The main contributors to the community got scooped up by the motherships and any supporting technologies locked down in what felt like about six months to a year. Leap Motion was a standout company from that time. They have been selling the exact product they built then with almost no improvement until recently. Somehow they weathered the storm, didn't sell, and are doing some really neat stuff now. Structure IO took up the stewardship of OpenNI and if you look hard enough you can still find cross platform installers that have the banned original kinect tech that Apple bought and is extremely litigious about keeping off the internet.
Sigh. Yeah. Last year I was kludging some optical hand-and-stylus tracking above laptop, keyboard as multitouch surface, and head-tracked screen-and-HMD 3D desktop, sort of laptop-nextgen for my own use... but didn't find a community left to motivate sharing or demos. :/ Thanks for your comment.
A nice VR gaming experience is hard. Immersive means you can't see the real world, so your balance rides on rendering, requiring high fps, low latency, and thus lots of gpu. Means a high bar for avoiding "immersion breaking" hardware and software visual oddities.
The perceived near-term market for VR gaming is larger than that of VR or AR desktops, so that set of hard has gotten investment, and the other, not so much.
Market structure, especially patents, discourages commercial exploration of smaller markets. Say you want to build and sell your great system, and that it happens to need eye tracking. One eye tracking provider sells very expensive systems to industry and government, and your volumes are far too small to interest them in cheaper. Its competitors have been bought by bigcos, and no longer offer you product. Patents, and your small market, block new competitors. So eye tracking is not available to you or your envisioned market.
Community communication infrastructure is poor. Suppose all the pieces exist somewhere. People interested in desktop experiences, willing to throw a few thousand dollars at panels, tethered gpus, eye tracking, and so on, willing to be uncomfortable, to look weird, to tolerate a regression in display quality; a 2K HMD with nice lenses; a similar 4K panel; the electronics to swap the panels; some tracking solution; and so on... Even if all those pieces exist, the communication infrastructure doesn't exist to pull them all together. Neither as forums, nor as markets.
The poor communication degrades professional understanding of the problem space. People are unclear on the dependency chains behind conventional wisdom. So high resolution is said to require eye tracking or high-end gpus. VR is said to require high frame rates. And the implicit assumption of immersive gaming is forgotten. I've found it ironic to read such, while in VR, running on an old laptop's integrated graphics, at 30 fps. Wishing someone offered an 4K panel conversion kit, so a few more pixels escaped blurry lenses. A panel I could still run on integrated graphics, albeit newer. So part of the failing to pull together opportunities, is failing to even see them.
Perhaps in an alternate universe, all patents are FRAND, all markets have an innovative churn of small businesses, and online forums implement the the many things we know how to do better, but don't. And there's been screen-comparable VR for years. But that's not where we're at.