When I watch a movie, I do enjoy it. But there are so much way more interesting and exciting things to do than to watch a movie. So I rarely watch one.
Books? Loooooove books. But they are usually about the real world. Science, biographies, theories ... I wouldn't call them "entertainment".
Never been much into dancing.
Doing sport is super awesome. But is that really counted as "entertainment"? Or do you mean watching sports? I find watching sports pretty boring.
Plays - whats that?
Museums? Hell yeah! But I never heard someone call museums part of the entertainment industry.
> When I watch a movie, I do enjoy it. But there are so much way more interesting and exciting things to do than to watch a movie. So I rarely watch one.
I used to think this, turns out I was watching bad movies. Use time as a filter and watch old movies by directors that are still talked about (Kubrick, Tarkovsky, etc)
And then the people you talk to end up talking about movies and video games and you lose interest because you're only living interested in the real world.
> Doing sport is super awesome. But is that really counted as "entertainment"? Or do you mean watching sports? I find watching sports pretty boring.
Well, there are some good fitness-oriented VR games around. Beat Saber is rad, that's the main one people know about, and there's a bunch of other ones too.
Every pursuit is a distraction until you die. There is no intrinsic meaning to life, you just do whatever you can to keep a steady release of dopamine in your brain. For some people that's watching television, for other people it's Family, for others it might be practicing musical instrument, the list goes on and on but it's purely subjective.
I feel the same way as the parent. Just about everything touted in the entertainment industry fails to hold my attention or generate any desire. I haven't felt the urge to watch a movie, play a game, or really engage with much marketed media in a while. Don't mistake me for being depressed too, I am quite happy.
I get a lot of fulfillment in life from fairly mundane things: work, socializing, exercise, reading about whatever niche I am interested in the moment. I don't think it's abnormal either.
The coolest thing I saw on the Quest was a 3D YouTube video - it was something educational ish about the universe maybe. Very immersive but they only had a few good ones
Its hard to make other use cases work when text is barely readable. The resolution just isn't there for productivity apps.
I'd be surprised if Apple doesn't lean into that angle with their new headset. Pixel density on phones was a problem before the iPhone 4, and they sold the heck out of the retina display. If Apple can make small text readable in VR they'll enable a whole world of new VR applications.
I understand what you're saying, and I agree, but it's like saying a party is boring because there are no books.
The whole "meta" concept is that you're socializing in VR and it feels as if you're talking to your friend directly. I'm sure the resolution has improved in the new model, but even still, super sharp text isn't as important as you'd think to make the fundamental social use cases work
Socializing is one thing you do in the Metaverse. Working is probably the bigger one though.
Lots of people don’t grok this but the endgame for VR/AR is replacing every monitor in every office and home. Probably ditto TVs when every person owns a headset.
It’s going to be a massive game-changer (and a rapid transition) when VR gets good enough to work in.
The question is just whether this is a 5-year timeline or 50. Mark is obviously betting he can get traction in the 5-10 year timeframe.
Why would anyone want to work with a helmet on their head at all times like this? It's like saying the endgame for computers is all communications will be over video phones like on the jetsons. It sounds like a cool scifi concept until you realize even if the technology is there people would often rather not be seen on camera when they talk.
First, note I said VR/AR, so not everyone needs a headset. Many workloads will work in AR, though the black pixel problem means these will be much harder to crack and so will probably arrive later.
But I think once the VR headsets get miniaturized a bit more (give it a generation or three) people will laugh when they think about the current models, just like we do about cell phones vs. the first satellite phones that were bigger than your head. At some point these will be as light as a pair of plastic sunglasses or goggles.
There is nothing forcing you to use VR for something like a call, where you don’t currently need a monitor. But I think we’ll see a tipping point where the face tracking gets across the canny valley and people stop saying “you need to meet someone in person to really connect”. At that point VR calls substitute for in-person meetings, not VCs on a screen.
Consider the move to remote work; if we can get a virtual meeting room to feel like whiteboarding in person, including gaze and expression detection, then you could bounce between meeting room with your distributed team and perfect immersive dev setup without leaving your seat.
For the median worker using a monitor I think the requirements to beat monitors are just good enough resolution for spreadsheets/email (we may be there next gen?), comfort (currently the crux), and a decent story on input passthrough (your physical keyboard rendered in VR? Something else? Seems tractable, we just haven’t standardized any options.)
I see three assumptions in your paragraph that need to be true in order for the technology to work. I'm ordering them by how likely I think they are to come true in the next decade.
* Headsets will have good enough resolution and be generally comfortable enough to replace monitors for office space.
* There is a solution to the pass through input problem that is acceptable for the average office worker. I don't think there is a solution of the passthrough problem that beats a keyboard/mouse, or even a laptop in a cafe. I think it's more likely the average office worker will accept a worse form of text input given the right conditions.
* It's possible to project a 3d image of myself while wearing a headset that doesn't include the headset and passes the uncanny valley. The uncanny valley is wide, and even AAA video games haven't cleared it yet.
That seems like a good list. For 1, I expect to update substantially (either for or against) after seeing how much of a jump Apple’s headset is. I view this one as inevitable unless something crazy like a complete end to progress on SoC density.
For 2, there are demos already; Immersed (and maybe Meta natively?) has a mode where it recognizes your keyboard (like 2 specific models, prototype) and positions the keyboard in VR. Not good enough for hunt and peck but if you touchtype this works. The Quest 3 seems to have better passthrough so again, this generation will provide a good steer. This one seems pretty easy though.
For 3, if we can do deepfakes we can do 3d photorealistic avatars. Can’t be more than 5-10 years away to render a face in real-time. Unreal already has some crazy tech with MetaHuman that would work here already I suspect, given enough compute.
VR headsets are just more compact than laptops, let alone desktops. If you could just replace workstations with a headset, though it will not likely happen in near terms, that’ll be nice.
I find it helpful to invert the perspective; let’s assume we have perfect VR/AR; what would monitors be good for when you can call up arbitrary number of windows anywhere in your visual field?
There are maybe some information-radiator type use cases. Probably things like big screens at live events / shows.
But for individual users, I think anything a monitor can do, an endgame AR display can do, and more flexibly.
Why would you (personally, I’m interested in your viewpoint) want a monitor if you had a perfect AR display that you could dismiss into thin air when you didn’t need it, or conjure up a 6-screen dev environment when you did need it? You could put your keyboard and mouse down at any comfortable chair and be as productive as your current dev setup with your optimal monitor count.
(My claim was even stronger than yours, I don’t think they need to be perfect to be better, but since you volunteered it, let’s explore that extreme.)
I’m assuming “perfect” is something completely unnoticeable like lightweight glasses or contacts BTW, and I think there is a bunch of good stuff before perfect.
> I’m assuming “perfect” is something completely unnoticeable like lightweight glasses or contacts BTW, and I think there is a bunch of good stuff before perfect
If that's the case, and if your perception of your real environment is in no way hindered, then I agree -- monitors wouldn't have an advantage.
Short of that, though, I would strongly prefer monitors over VR.
> you can call up arbitrary number of windows anywhere in your visual field?
This is not something I personally would want to do. I want my computer/user interface to be constrained to a specific part of my visual field. Even if it's all in VR, that's how I would use it anyway.
I'll be interested to see if views on this have shifted this time next week after Apple's announcement.
For my part, I think the notion of putting down giant expensive phyiscal rectangles that are geolocked to one physical position just to use computers is going to seem like a quaint artefact of history in a few years.
I think the socializing part is a hard sell at this point. You'd have Rec Rooms and VR Chat, but both have image issues and are still peddling with content moderation and user interaction issues.
This aspect is way to early to be touted as something worth 500$ to a regular user.
One day, there will be a VR desktop environment with floating windows that I can use.
People have been playing with it - but it's got a ways to go still. I would love working in VR with many, many floating windows all around, instead of contained within the 2 viewing panes in front of me IRL.
Floating windows are cool but VR operating systems will be much more interesting when they start integrating 3d tactile widgets and mixed reality. For example, to access your disk it could look like a shelf you pull down from above or something which renders each directory as nested boxes.
Or a collection of retro games could display in mixed reality as if it were real boxed games on a shelf along your real wall.
Or it could be integrated with a smart home control system so you could just point at a light to turn it on.
I'm honestly surprised there isn't already a VR frontend for Steam that works just like your second example. Valve love upselling on virtual items like profile pictures, backgrounds, trading cards, emotes, so a virtual bedroom full of virtual consoles and virtual doodads that you can show off to other users seems like it'd pay for itself. And they already have a VR team.
We need either VRC or something like VRC with in-world item management, avatar/world creation, and full support for adult content. Anything less is just wasting time.
>> Or a collection of retro games could display in mixed reality as if it were real boxed games on a shelf along your real wall.
> I could see Microsoft making this.
The first quoted part is actually similar to part of the old Microsoft BOB concept. Indeed some Later version of Packard Bell Navigator (which was basically a Bob clone) literally had general programs presented as box software sitting on a shelf.
I bought the new HTC Vive XR Elite last month for just this use case. I had never tried VR before so I really didn't have a feel for whether it would work. It did not. There was so much glare and blurriness that I had to scale the font to huge headline size to read without strain. I returned the system. I'm more than willing to try again if there's a chance it might work.
In real life I do not have issues with motion sickness or claustrophobia. Both of these hit me when wearing the headset, particularly the claustrophobia. The nausea was mild but definite.
Even so it was an extraordinary experience, and I may be more excited about the potential of AR than before.
My experience with trying to play flat games or watch movies in VR is that it shows up the imperfections in the system a lot more than tailored experiences. Until they have some eye-tracking mechanically adaptive optics, there'll always be some imperfections in the system, and a high-contrast perfectly flat rectangle full of text right in front of your face shows off those imperfections far more than a full 3D environment full of naturalistic objects.
Lots of people are complete shut ins and/or tech fanatics. People with a life outside of computers aren't really interested in VR, it's a nice gimmick for a dinner at a friend's place but that's about it. I'd go even as far as to say even full blown basement dwellers aren't so interested in VR
I was really into it ~10 years ago when I was a shut in nerd, back then they were announcing the revolution, fast forward 10 years and literally nothing changed, it's still a gimmick for 99.9% of people.
Not necessarily true. There are some "productivity" apps, as well as streaming (does anyone use that though?), and also exercise apps (admittedly probably falls under the game categeory). And, honestly, I don't see this changing until inputs change. Things like coding, spreadsheets, writing, all generally require a keyboard and mouse. At minimum a keyboard. Maybe GPT powered headset that can really understand you and has the ability manipulate things / OS level access might eventually come about.
SimulaVR markets themselves as a productivity VR headset. Essentially, have as many terminals and other windows as you want floating in the air around you while still having the pass through cameras to see around them. The review copies are just being made now, though. Not really out yet. It is supposed to fit my huge noggin unlike almost every other headset, though, so I certainly preordered.
Is it coming out at some point soon? They've been working on it for so long.
I wish they would focus more on software rather than making us all wait for their super expensive hardware. And yeah I know it's a whole PC you're buying. But I don't really buy expensive PCs in a form factor that has yet to prove its usability.
They're promising they'll ship by the end of the year at the latest. Again, I pre-ordered but I'm also thinking that if the PC thing sucks at least I'll finally have a plugin VR headset that actually fits my head. Go ahead and wait for the reviews to come in before making a decision if you're not in my boat.
I won't buy it either way. I simply can't afford it :) With wages as they are here in Southern Europe it's a non-starter. But I hope their paradigm works out so I can get it from another company or maybe someone ports it to the Oculus Quest. Freely placing windows in space instead of "desktops" or "screens" makes much more sense in VR.
It's stupid. It's a huge market, one where VR tech adds huge value. There's a huge sprawling ecosystem with content and "peripherals" that are motion synced.
Pretending it doesn't exist doesn't help their metaverse ambitions nor their bottom line.
The urban legend is that Betamax eschewing NSFW content lead to their demise in favour of VHS and while that is not entirely true there is certainly some worth to that story.
On the quest there's also SLR. Google it, as I don't want to link directly to it here. They provide a player as well as a library of suitable content you can stream. They're basically the pornhub for VR.
Only issue is that only a small subset of content is streamable for free.
There are a lot of use cases in B2B with VR but they are not easy to sell.
I remember a long time ago Silicon Graphics used to build Reality Centers.
Their best sales pitch was some Oil company was building an Oil rig and using VR they could find - from blueprints - some valves were installed too high and that saved them a lot of money.
I worked for a company that had a software to scan train tunnels for inspection. It was cheaper and quicker than sending technicians there, but the interface -built on PowerBI was a pain. VR could be much better...
... but you need an easy way to build that App.
(btw if someone knows about it, just drop me message)
They already do have enough resolution to do real work. The problem is that for a lot of folks it is physically straining and taxing to be in a VR headset for hours and hours straight. A small portion of people just physically cannot do anything in VR without getting violently sick.
I think that is the reason why I don't feel anything towards VR headsets. While I am totally into technology, I'm just not interested in games.
Actually, I am not interested in entertainment at all.
I wonder what makes people different, so that some are very much into entertainment and some are not?