VR is still like tablets and PDAs before the iPhone and iPad. No surprise that Zuck hasn't done what Jobs did.
I'm enjoying (in a friendly way) that many people have already given up on the technology and think it's going to fade away again. Because anyone that doubts VR is real and going mainstream is going to be in for quite a surprise!
Oculus is still figuring out what the killer app for VR is, which means they've done a pretty bad job. That's what has slowed progress so much. Even this attempt at encouraging developers is weak. Where's the actual funding?! It's almost as if they don't get how big what they're doing is.
To be fair though, transforming computing can take many months even in the modern world.
Oculus should put games on the back burner and ask themselves what really cool life-improving things they could do with VR if they weren't limited by consumer pricing. They need to jump start the industry with a truly compelling experience and that might not be easy at $300.
Business customers can afford much, much more.
Just like VisiCalc launched the personal computer, so could a VR app that enables virtual offices, for example. Every tech worker could be afforded a $1-$3k head mounted display if it improved their productivity even slightly. Something like a 16K-16K display. That's a solid multi-billion dollar business that they can use to bring the amazing version mainstream.
VR could plausibly trigger a seismic shift towards remote work, transforming cities, economies, and the world. That ought to be a big enough thing to get VR off the ground initially.
To be fair Oculus are one of the ones in the industry looking beyond games. Look at Oculus Medium[1], it makes something that was extremely fiddly and required hours of practice into something instantly intuitive.
I don't actually think VR will hit the mainstream, work like spreadsheets just don't benefit much from being in 3D space. The true magic of VR is the hand tracking, being able to interact with computing with both hands in 3D space.
Definitely feel VR will find it's workplace niche in the creative space rather than standard office work. Worth mentioning too that games are an innovation driver, so don't discount them so fast.
They are too busy trying to build a walled garden. They hired a bunch of console people and they see everything from that perspective, so the main goal is to sign exclusives to short term gaming hits as a way of getting more users locked into their services, not to create a general computing platform.
We're finding out the cost, now, of the extreme centralization of these platforms, especially caused by their device-locked app stores. Doubling down on the idea because people "seem fine with" it is a bad idea, especially now that we have hindsight. It's no mistake that the big innovation of the era, cryptocurrency, is happening largely outside of all the platforms you listed.
Also, I know that you can run SteamVR apps - I develop a VR game with hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales on Steam, but I've been locked out of the Oculus store for...unknown reasons? Someone behind the black box must've made a decision to block it.
I think the lock-in is more regarding Oculus-exclusive content. My understanding is the community has mostly gotten those working on other headsets by now, but Oculus itself certainly hasn't helped.
Here's a free startup idea: the "mirror cafe". Two cafes, one in SF, one in NYC, with exactly the same layout inside (down to the positions of the tables). VR links the two spaces together. Once you put on the headset, you can see and talk to people in both places. You'd be able to "grab a coffee" with someone across the country (though you'd have to drink it with a straw to keep the coffee cup from colliding with the HMD)!
That's very neat. I think there's a lot of power in having physical spaces mapped to VR. Essentially you can simulate what AR will be like in 10 years without having to wait.
I've owned an HTC vive for a while now. Throughout all experiences, the ones that stood out the most to me were the social ones. I thoroughly believe that the future of work from home meetings will be done in VR. Playing social games and being able to convey messages through mic + body language and hand gestures is a very interesting experience. I have communicated with people who do not have any microphones, using simple hand gestures combined with motion.
> To be fair though, transforming computing can take many months even in the modern world.
I'm can't think of anything that has transformed computing within months out of nowhere. Usually decades of research and trial-and-error happen before everything falls into place and a new way to do things becomes 'obvious' within a short time. But you cannot ignore the decades of work that went into it, even if it isn't visible from the outside. VR is no exception, it's the 3rd decade (or more?) of serious VR research, and I guess it takes a few more decades until everything falls into place and VR becomes 'obvious' (or more likely, disappear from the public for another 20 years until the next hype cycle). Still, what happens right now is very important work for the coming generations.
In which country do you do office work 12 hours per day ?
More importantly : no one is forced to look at their computer screen for 8 or even 12 hours a day. You can take a break when you want. You can stare at the window or the roof or your nails every 5 minutes if you want. On the contrary, with a VR headset, you would have to pull it off even for a 2 seconds break. It would be a nightmare, no one is going to accept that and no one should be forced to do that (except maybe in North Korea ?)
This is one of the reasons VR will disappear once again. On the contrary, AR (augmented reality, e.g. hololens) may very well be the next big thing, once they resolve the current issues with hololens (resolution and most importantly field of vision)
That's the beauty of VR. You can set your environment to that of a beach so you can look away at the waves crashing. Or you can in a cozy cabin in the middle nowhere with snow falling around you. Your work screens can remain stationary while you look around.
I'm not saying nobody wants to use VR in their day job. Hell, I'd love to! But I also don't want to wear an HMD (as they currently exist) because they're big and clunky and sweaty.
I think that's kind of the point of OP. Oculus needs to design a lightweight, comfortable version that won't be bothersome after a few hours. Not everything needs to be software.
> Oculus should put games on the back burner and ask themselves what really cool life-improving things they could do with VR if they weren't limited by consumer pricing.
Or as Alan Kay puts it, imagine what you would like to have 15 year from now, not what you can get today (or something like that, paraphrasing).
The one thing I consistently wish for, and maybe I should get on it...
Field trips. Highly accurate (to the best of our ability) and high quality, free-roam field trips. Present day, or through time. I would LOVE to visit historical sites from various time periods, to see them in their (as known) beginning, prime, and decay.
The amount of research and work to be done to accomplish that would be staggering... but the potential for improved global and historical understanding, the impact on education, and just weeknight entertainment would be immense.
I've seen a couple primitive efforts, and they were a bit disappointing.
Let me walk around a living 19th century England. Let me visit Dylan Thomas in his writing cabin. Let me see the Parthenon and Han Dynasty China.
I would love to have this 15 years from now. Sooner, if possible!
> Oculus is still figuring out what the killer app for VR is, which means they've done a pretty bad job. [...]
To be fair though, transforming computing can take many months even in the modern world.
It can take years or decades (or more) for people to figure out how to really use a new technology.
People tend to assume that the sorts of timescales that apply to applied research or product development, apply to cases like this (figuring out what to do with VR) which are basic research.
I’ve said this since before vr was released, but the closest analogy is sound cards and 3D video cards when they were first released. Most people with PCs weren’t spending $100 for a sound blaster so they could play games. They waited until sound just came with PCs.
VR won’t be a thing until headsets just start coming with new computers, and the base models of new computers have video cards fast enough to run them. It might take 5-10 years before that happens.
For me that is what makes it interesting though that you can still get in at the ground floor and have plenty of time to figure out things and be an expert before the crowd.
What we'll have 5-10 years from now will be far, far more advanced than what we have now, unless it all collapses. If the market for them holds steady I expect we'll start seeing package deals within a couple of years.
Your comment got me curious, so I went on VRChat's steam page. This was the second "most helpful" review:
"
Today I sat at a virtual bar and pretended to drink with a cat, a xenomorph, and a tiny anime girl.
What am I doing with my life.
UPDATE:
So a bunch of bu's from dragon ball just invaded a cafe I was working in and started asking if we wanted to invest in bitcoin. I can't make this stuff up. This is their discord; <address>
"
If that's the killer app, I wouldn't be too optimistic.
>If that's the killer app, I wouldn't be too optimistic.
You could have said the same thing about the internet after seeing the web in Mosaic.
People are using VR Chat, and adoption alone is what makes a "killer app." Complexity and depth and such can come later, but only after the masses have cared long enough to build on the foundation.
- VR only works well for some (fairly unpopular) gaming genres, like hardcore flight- and car-racing simulations
- it's expensive besides the headset you need a powerful gaming PC at a time when the majority of 'normal' people just use their mobile phone for some light gaming
- wearing a VR headset for more than 30 minutes becomes really uncomfortable
- the new sensation quickly wears off, same as motion controls, everyone is back to gamepad, or mouse+keyboard
- even though VR is available for mobile phones, it's not common to hang around in public with a VR headset on
> VR only works well for some (fairly unpopular) gaming genres, like hardcore flight- and car-racing simulations
Those two genres are a strange choice considering the most popular VR titles fall into entirely different categories. The VR gaming ecosystem is actually fairly diverse. The main issue is 1. too many shooters and online multiplayer titles 2. Most games are short (mainly because the economics of the size of the market pushed things that way right now)
> wearing a VR headset for more than 30 minutes becomes really uncomfortable
I'd dispute "Really". Very much depends on the headset.
> the new sensation quickly wears off, same as motion controls, everyone is back to gamepad, or mouse+keyboard
This isn't true for me and many others. I'm over a year in and still regularly have that "wow" moment again. I don't think we've scratched the surface of what's possible in VR even with the current technological limitations.
> Those two genres are a strange choice considering...
Ah ok, I didn't have commercial success in mind, only that 'cockpit games' are a more natural fit for VR than other genres (you're sitting in a cockpit, and you're usually sitting in the real world, unless you have a enough space for room-scale VR), and the fixed reference point of the cockpit frame seems to be better for avoiding VR sickness.
It's also extremely good for RPGs and MMOs, neither of which are unpopular genres.
We haven't seen a lot of either yet, because both require considerable investment, but the first VR MMO, Orbus, is going very well, and Skyrim VR on PSVR is one of the first VR apps to really sell headsets.
(My own VR RPG also did very well, and convinced me it's a great use of the medium.)
Sounds more like a bug than they just decided to hide the entire form from people who select Mexico...although I didn't bother to start the application process to verify that.
VR will never have mass market adoption if they don't solve VR sickness first. Recent studies even show that it especially affects women due to physiological differences in visual and vestibular systems and may explains why only 5% of oculus/vive owners are females. Instead of funding lots of mediocre games, Oculus should really dedicate some resources in solving this particular problem, which excludes a large portion of our population from using VR.
Plenty of wildly successful mass market products from videogames to deodorant are marketed specifically to men, some always have been -- there are a few billion men after all. There's no reason women necessarily have to buy a product for it to be either successful or viable, and vice versa, products solely for women can also be a huge success.
VR will get better; focusing on women who are far less likely to spend thousands of dollars on a hardcore gaming setup is not sane. I know a guy who bought, successively, a PS3, a high-end PC, and a PS4... and a copy of GTAV for each. How many women spend that kind of money gaming? Who is the average customer for a racing wheel, a flight yoke, a VR headset, an arcade fight stick, a set of 3 curved LCDs, etc?
Your argument is an appeal to prevailing politics and emotion, not market logic and economics.
Irrelevant. If candy crush isn't selling VR headsets or expensive systems capable of playing VR games, it doesn't matter if 100% of women are playing it 24 hours a day. It's irrelevant.
The only relevant thing is how do women fit into the VR market and do they constitute enough of an opportunity to divert resources from the hardcore game dev program to female biological ergonomics (i.e. addressing the motion sickness, instead of the small game library).
If you want to sell another 5 million VR headsets, the sole relevant question is, what is the most effective way to achieve that? Is it
1] making more & better games
or
2] making VR more female-friendly
the answer is 1, apparently. Billion dollar companies spend time researching these things before pulling the trigger.
The definition of gaming in that study was pretty shoddy, if i remember correctly. It wasn't the type of gaming that would also get people into buying high end pcs and vr headsets.
Is VR sickness still an issue in games without artificial locomotion? Most games these days tend to at least include an option for a locomotion system that doesn't result in VR sickness. (Like teleportation.)
Yes, but I think people are getting better at finding ways of working around it. The locomotion problem in VR reminds me of the camera problem in the early days of 3D games. It's hard to imagine now, but when games became 3D nobody knew what was the best thing to do with the camera. Should it be in a corner of every room you walk into so you could watch yourself walk by? Should it follow you? If so, how does it follow you through a door, or when back into a corner. All the conventions that you take for granted in games took a couple years to figure out.
Unquestionably artificial locomotion greatly exacerbates VR sickness, but I and many others still get it even after an hour or so in "seated" experiences. This naturally varies from person to person, and supposedly one can develop "VR legs" if the comments I see on forums are to be believed. I'm certainly not prepared to train my body in my free time to get better at this if it involves repeatedly making myself feel sick.
I personally regard the 800ish dollars I invested in a Rift + Touch setup the worst technology investment I've ever made, and the concept of VR style gaming was the stuff of childhood dreams for me. I really hope this gets much, much better before I would consider dipping my toe again.
Video games have shown a gender parity for the past 10 years. 76% of facebook users are female. Blatantly ignoring and excluding this demographic is going to be the nail in the coffin of VR. ....but who knows maybe VR's 3rd wave in 2028 will get it right?
Unfortunately for Oculus, the Vive won this race. It's so much better as hardware. Further, when Facebook bought Oculus it became clear it was only a matter of time before the Rift was going to be contaminated with the increasingly unpopular (with young people, anyway) Facebook products.
Oculus was a failure for Facebook, or, rather, Facebook was the failure of Oculus.
I'm enjoying (in a friendly way) that many people have already given up on the technology and think it's going to fade away again. Because anyone that doubts VR is real and going mainstream is going to be in for quite a surprise!
Oculus is still figuring out what the killer app for VR is, which means they've done a pretty bad job. That's what has slowed progress so much. Even this attempt at encouraging developers is weak. Where's the actual funding?! It's almost as if they don't get how big what they're doing is.
To be fair though, transforming computing can take many months even in the modern world.
Oculus should put games on the back burner and ask themselves what really cool life-improving things they could do with VR if they weren't limited by consumer pricing. They need to jump start the industry with a truly compelling experience and that might not be easy at $300.
Business customers can afford much, much more.
Just like VisiCalc launched the personal computer, so could a VR app that enables virtual offices, for example. Every tech worker could be afforded a $1-$3k head mounted display if it improved their productivity even slightly. Something like a 16K-16K display. That's a solid multi-billion dollar business that they can use to bring the amazing version mainstream.
VR could plausibly trigger a seismic shift towards remote work, transforming cities, economies, and the world. That ought to be a big enough thing to get VR off the ground initially.