Comments like yours make me want to throw my arms up in the air and leave the site. Maybe nobody will miss me, and that seems fine. But comments which attack people on a personal level are not okay, especially ones peppered with insults throughout the entire thing. Do the site guidelines even matter?
Your comment is a strange combination of mistaken and a rehash of what I've previously said. For example, I was an original backer of Oculus. It's sitting right next to me, in fact. I speak from experience, rather than from breathless fanboyism.
Telepresence has been tried. It fails. Oculus won't succeed either. Why not? Because humans value eye contact. Your Oculus won't have that, and hence it will fail for that reason.
Nobody places any weight on social interactions through VR because we can't simulate what a person actually looks like. Rendering is a crude approximation of reality. It looks noting like reality, in fact. Especially when it comes to facial features and animation. Ever read Snow Crash? You know how one of the characters was famous for developing the killer feature of the VR experience? The feature was near-perfect facial expressions, along with low latency responses, i.e. time between the user making a facial expression and that expression being projected into the VR world. It's no coincidence that the author of Snow Crash spent at least a few paragraphs explaining why this was so critical: It's absolutely crucial for immersive social experiences, and that feature is literally impossible with our current technology and rendering capabilities. Nobody anywhere knows how to make your face appear into a VR world in a convincing way.
3) My personal fav use case, and IMO one that will probably eventually (in the next 5 years) sell more headsets than gaming will be productivity-related usage. Once resolutions hit 4-8K (CV2-CV3), you will have the equivalent arc-resolution of traditional HD screens, but you know, anywhere you look. If you can't connect the dots there, I won't bother.
This makes no sense. 8K pixels? If I were a rude person like yourself, I'd take this opportunity to make a cutting remark like "You must not be very familiar with graphics programming, heh!" But I'm not the type of person to make baseless assumptions like that. Instead, I invite you to do some arithmetic about the performance characteristics of pushing 60 images per second at 8k resolution. The technology simply doesn't exist for pushing that many pixels. Not unless you're suggesting strapping on a backpack with a portable power source plus a beefy GPU.
On the other hand, if you're suggesting 8k pixels for the desktop version, then that might be possible. However, the concept of a "productivity-related feature" implies that you're talking about personal productivity, like exercise, or something, which doesn't really make sense for the desktop version. It's hard to know, since your comment was light on detail and heavy on handwaving.
Look, I appreciate that you put a lot of work into your comment, but you have a very shall we say positive outlook about what Oculus will ultimately achieve. Here's an alternate reality: Oculus V1 will fail to deliver anything that consumers initially wanted except gaming, and hopefully that gaming experience will be enough to offset the huge losses that Facebook incurred by spending so much time developing features that people neither care about nor are feasible, like telepresence. Not that Facebook is hurting for cash.
I'm not trying to be overly harsh or offensive here and I'm heading to a new year's party so I'm not going to write another wall of text, and I don't think any further replies are going to be particularly productive anyway since your mind seems to be made up, but I will say that stating opinions strongly doesn't make them true.
Do a search for research on "avatar eye-gaze" and look at the developments in consumer gaze tracking technology by Tobii and others if you want to understand why I and others are optimistic about VR telepresence.
As for your objections on resolution, while 8K 60Hz 4:2:2 8-bit clocks in at about 32Gb/s, 2x4K would fit comfortable under the HDMI 2.0 spec. 4K alone btw gets you to to 20 pixels/degree arc-density at 110 degree HFOV, which is perfectly cromulent for all kinds of use-cases, but as an expert on such matters, I'm sure you are fully aware of all of this already.
4K gaming is already a thing with very-high-end PC setups, 8K is just 4x more, so it's not exactly 'science fiction'. This is for desktop GPU of course, not mobile.
But: I think gaming won't actually be the 'break-through' application which brings in the masses, but instead recorded or live short 'movie experiences', stuff like helmet camera recordings from base jumpers or parachuters, or those crazy Russian kids who climb sky scrapers. A VR Google Street view where you can explore distant places, or 360 degree Rover material from Mars, a 360 degree camera attached to the outside of the ISS. All those small viral videos which drive Facebook and reddit.
For these 360 degree movies you don't need an expensive and power-hungry GPU, the simple mobile GPU in your existing smartphone will do, and you also don't have the uncanny valley effect.
I think 3D cameras will soon be common in smartphones, and full 360-degree GoPro style cameras will be standard for everything where a normal GoPro is used today.
> Telepresence has been tried. It fails. Oculus won't succeed either. Why not? Because humans value eye contact. Your Oculus won't have that, and hence it will fail for that reason.
I don't want to get in the middle of the love affair between you two, but just want to add my 2 cents that telepresence will likely play a huge role in VR over the next 5-10 years.
Technology isn't quite there yet, but there are several interesting initiatives in this area. Philip Rosedale (yes, the same Philip from Linden Labs/Second Life) has been actively researching and pushing the boundaries of facial expression with his High Fidelity project [1]. Not sure it'll ever become a consumer product, but the potential is obvious. I saw him demo'ing his alpha version earlier this year, and it was amazing. Even though it was an avatar-based chat, the fact you can see the eyes moving and the face conveying emotions, brings the experience to a whole new level, well beyond the uncanny valley.
The addition of facial expressions and other forms of body language are obvious extensions for Oculus. Case in point: they just acquired Nimble VR [2], and will likely incorporate their hand tracking technology into a future CV1 or CV2. Facial expression and eye tracking is likely a bit further down the road, but not that far.
Your comment is a strange combination of mistaken and a rehash of what I've previously said. For example, I was an original backer of Oculus. It's sitting right next to me, in fact. I speak from experience, rather than from breathless fanboyism.
Telepresence has been tried. It fails. Oculus won't succeed either. Why not? Because humans value eye contact. Your Oculus won't have that, and hence it will fail for that reason.
Nobody places any weight on social interactions through VR because we can't simulate what a person actually looks like. Rendering is a crude approximation of reality. It looks noting like reality, in fact. Especially when it comes to facial features and animation. Ever read Snow Crash? You know how one of the characters was famous for developing the killer feature of the VR experience? The feature was near-perfect facial expressions, along with low latency responses, i.e. time between the user making a facial expression and that expression being projected into the VR world. It's no coincidence that the author of Snow Crash spent at least a few paragraphs explaining why this was so critical: It's absolutely crucial for immersive social experiences, and that feature is literally impossible with our current technology and rendering capabilities. Nobody anywhere knows how to make your face appear into a VR world in a convincing way.
3) My personal fav use case, and IMO one that will probably eventually (in the next 5 years) sell more headsets than gaming will be productivity-related usage. Once resolutions hit 4-8K (CV2-CV3), you will have the equivalent arc-resolution of traditional HD screens, but you know, anywhere you look. If you can't connect the dots there, I won't bother.
This makes no sense. 8K pixels? If I were a rude person like yourself, I'd take this opportunity to make a cutting remark like "You must not be very familiar with graphics programming, heh!" But I'm not the type of person to make baseless assumptions like that. Instead, I invite you to do some arithmetic about the performance characteristics of pushing 60 images per second at 8k resolution. The technology simply doesn't exist for pushing that many pixels. Not unless you're suggesting strapping on a backpack with a portable power source plus a beefy GPU.
On the other hand, if you're suggesting 8k pixels for the desktop version, then that might be possible. However, the concept of a "productivity-related feature" implies that you're talking about personal productivity, like exercise, or something, which doesn't really make sense for the desktop version. It's hard to know, since your comment was light on detail and heavy on handwaving.
Look, I appreciate that you put a lot of work into your comment, but you have a very shall we say positive outlook about what Oculus will ultimately achieve. Here's an alternate reality: Oculus V1 will fail to deliver anything that consumers initially wanted except gaming, and hopefully that gaming experience will be enough to offset the huge losses that Facebook incurred by spending so much time developing features that people neither care about nor are feasible, like telepresence. Not that Facebook is hurting for cash.