I once loved Second Life. So many science demonstrations (NASA, NOAA, and many museums setup virtual campuses there that are still amazing), gatherings, museums, and educational experiences that only a virtual world can provide. Then it became a ghost town (with some mostly-NSFW exceptions).
The problem is that SL is closed source. I once tried to run a virtual field trip with 10 kids to show them around, but Linden Labs blocked us for having too many users access SL from the same IP address. You have to lease property on Linden Labs servers for a presence there. Why am I going to invest the time and energy into building something amazing on rented space that will vanish the moment I stop paying for it?
If SL were to be released as a open-protocol, like WWW, where anyone can pop a server onto the Internet and host a community, I think SL would thrive again. I would love to see that.
I found a nine-year-old blogpost I wrote on the science attractions in SL. It really was an amazing place. I would really like to see something like it again, but open. I think there's a huge opportunity there for someone with the right technical capabilities.
The problem I've run into is that it runs worse on my brand-new computer than Second Life ever did, and that's even on the mostly-empty demo areas they have.
I'm skeptical that closed source is what's actually holding SL back. I think splintering it into lots of shards would actually hurt something like this, which is closer to a social network. Once you shard it out, you get even further from critical mass, lots of desolate servers with nothing going on and inconsistent rules/user experiences
Just because something is in 3D doesn't make it automatically better -- often times it's worse as you now have artificial constraints that you didn't have before. For example, it's far easier to scroll through Instagram with your fingers (a UI win) and have every photo at 100% scale than to glide through a 3d representation where much more work has to be done. Certainly you wouldn't want the world to scroll you in VR -- you'd throw up.
This was true before with SL, and it'll be true with VR in the future. It'll be great for certain kinds of games, therapy, housing walk throughs, and other contexts for which a synthetic 3D world is useful, but it won't be the panacea that replaces all other forms of UI. Immersion also has a cost -- it's very intense and you don't want it for hours and hours and hours. Just like you'd never want to be on a rollercoaster for 8h, VR for 8h will also be too much (unless the world itself is not an intense game, you don't have a screen 2" from your eyeballs, etc).
I agree with the key point here: VR will not replace all other forms of UI.
It is a mistake to look at VR UIs as strictly 3D. There is no reason you could not scroll through your photos on a 2D screen with your fingers in VR. You can even have the added benefit of spawning multiple giant 2D screens, then grabbing photos off them for a scrap book or a virtual art gallery.
I've shared a great deal of locomotion experiences with other Vive owners. VR sickness seems a lot rarer than it was hyped up to be, and definitely a lot easier to acclimate to. I wonder how many vomiting journalists would be fine if they eased into it over a day or two. I can fly around in Windlands without flinching these days. Don't get me wrong, nausea is still a real design constraint, but we might be a lot more adaptive to VR and weird locomotion.
On the topic of session lengths, I firmly believe this is just an issue with content and ergonomics. I've done a few 6 hours sessions in multiplayer games, the problem is barely any exist. I haven't heard anyone experience "immersion fatigue", but some games will cause actual physical fatigue. Thankfully I already stand all day and it isn't an issue. I think if you already can play a game for 8 hours, VR will be there to provide the same in the future.
Correct. However on the otherhand, walking around a 3D art gallery where each wall is dedicated to one of the accounts you are following would be a benecicial use of the technology. You could easily scan the small framed images for those you like, and click on them to visualise them at full size in front of you.
I think this is the underlying cause for many of the failed projects from the 'Second Life bubble'. Many human activities, especially those related to information intake and processing have a long history of being 2D. From clay tablets to paper books, from the first photograph to 4K television, virtually all of the information designed for human consumption has been 2D. Only an incredibly small percentage is in 3D and even less is designed to be consumed in 3D (e.g. video games are often 3D internally but are designed for 2D consumption). This might or might not change in the future but if it does it will be changing neither soon nor rapidly.
Yes, one can use 2D interfaces inside 3D worlds but any 3D system short of the matrix will have a noticeable quality degradation (e.g. visual fidelity, haptic feedback, fatigue, etc) compared to directly using a 2D interface in real life. A few edge cases might become feasible much sooner, e.g. using VR to emulate large screens but that's hardly 'Virtual Reality'. Until we come up with meaningful ways to represent more kinds of information in 3D and/or create a matrix-style experience, VR will most likely be limited to applications that are inherently 3D.
This obviously includes entertainment (VR games, 'movies', 3D art) and CAD/CAM/3D modelling which are already very much 3D in nature and internal representation, even if they are currently usually projected onto 2D screens. Outside of that, the main 'educational' usage currently consists of building 3D environments (labs, buildings, factories, complex machinery) that emulate real-life environments in order to familiarize trainees with the workflows in those places. This can be surprisingly effective, especially considering how much cheaper VR mockups are compared to e.g. NASA's real-life 1:1 ISS training replica.
These applications are worthwhile in their own right and they will probably be able to sustain a decent market for VR hardware and development. However, I'm personally much more interested in seeing what kind of concepts that aren't already inherently 3D can be enhanced or revolutionized by adding another dimension.
I know this is anecdote and a single data point, but I find it interesting nonetheless.
My mom, 60+ year old, decided she wanted to learn proper English. Being an aircraft controller, she already knew enough to get by on the job (communication is pretty much standardized). But nowhere near enough to get by in the US.
After a few conventional approaches (such as physical English classes), she somehow found out about Second Life and enrolled in a (paid!) course.
Fast forward a couple of years. She can now hold conversations in English and go out by herself without a family member translating. As an observer, the progress was outstanding.
One thing that I have noticed is that it can be way more interactive than "normal" classes. For instance, there was a lesson that took place at an airport. So, instead of just an opening dialog in a book, and then some discussion, their avatars were at a functioning airport. So they could go all the way from arriving at the airport to boarding the plane, having dialogue all the way. Not sure if the airplane did or could take off though.
At another one that I witnessed, they were at a clothing store. So they could actually interact with a human shopkeeper, buy the article of clothing they wanted, then put on their avatar.
Having attended "standard" classes all my life, I was blown away by how much the virtual environment would foster dialogue. Usually, a teacher has a hard time coaxing this kind of interaction in a classroom setting.
Also of importance is that, since you are hidden behind an avatar, shy people seem more comfortable. Things such as race and, to an extent, age, are completely hidden.
Not sure if VR would help anything, except for the "cool" factor, which can't be discounted.
The ability to cheaply simulate environments is at the core of many VR education/training concepts. I hadn't heard of it being applied to language education, that's really interesting!
Second Life specifically excels at being a platform for roleplaying (in the educational sense as well as the D&D sense). The built-in creation tools allow people to very quickly create environments that have enough fidelity to be a significant step up from 'this table is now an airplane' and thanks to the marketplace one can often quickly and cheaply acquire ready-made props for virtually any scenario. Using the more advanced creation tools one can even create video-game-level fidelity however that is usually not necessary for educational environments.
The biggest issue for VR is similar to that of Second Life: outside of gaming, it needs to seamlessly augment reality.
If the pervasive influence of social media in our times has taught us anything, it is that a platform that does interface with our everyday existence will never be more than a cool tech demo.
Off the top of my head, for success VR needs to provide:
* Virtual Conferences
* Remote Home Sale Walk-throughs
* Credit for remote class attendence.
* Remotely Shared Sports Viewing with Friends
Until the VR experience can supplant some of the activities above, I doubt it will take off.
I hear "Virtual Conferences" as a big VR application. But how about we solve videoconferences first? Skype/Hangouts etc. hasn't improved noticeably in the last ten years. Videocalls still suffer from latency and poor image quality.
I recently listened to an interesting discussion[1] about VR on a friend's recommendation. One of the guests had a great test for quality VR: can it perform as a hiking simulator? Can it mimic all the qualities of a good hike -- visuals, body movement, sounds?
It seems to me we're much closer to a great AR experience than truly great and immersive VR.
>> Can it mimic all the qualities of a good hike -- visuals, body movement, sounds?
I've got some VR hiking goggles to sell you. They are cheap, lightweight and totally wireless, but only work in the woods. They were featured on a recent SouthPark episode.
Too many discussions focus on VR being a drop-in replacement for reality. Nobody should expect them to mimic reality any more than they expect computer screens to mimic sunlight. I don't much care if VR helms don't allow me to jog up Everest. I just want to be free to look around as if I were standing on the top.
Do these planned top-down approaches ever work? Especially in education? It seems like when technocrats have questionable ideas they try to shove it down the throat of kids instead of having a more decentralized approach with more choice. Negroponte's failure with the OLPC project comes to mind. A mix of cheap netbooks, tablets, and phones made it quickly irrelevant.
If we see social VR in education it'll be impromptu study groups in Altspace or screensharing in Bigscreen. It'll happen dynamically as kids decide what platform they prefer. Teachers will probably make similiar decisions on a per teacher/classroom way. I've already spent a bit of time in Altspace and Bigscreen and its very impressive from many aspects like usability, discoverability, presence, features, etc. I can't imagine using a SL-like system. Its too messy, ugly, and complex. It feels very Web 1.0.
Also, my god, the uncanny valley in SL is inexcusable. Either do photorealism or use cartoony avatars, there's really no room for middle ground here.
> Negroponte's failure with the OLPC project comes to mind. A mix of cheap netbooks, tablets, and phones made it quickly irrelevant.
To be fair to OLPC, it just predated those other devices. It [the hardware] was developed precisely because cheap laptops didn't yet exist, and then the form and market came into existence and obsoleted a large part of the project's efforts (the physical hardware development, not its educational goals).
Second Life is/was actually great especially in its open content and customization system and economy.
But there's kind of a weird thing about Second Life and VR and video games. Video games have really filled the virtual reality space without being called virtual reality.
For example, the detailed simulation of Los Angeles in GTA 5 or the details and immersive story in The Witcher 3. It isn't usually called virtual reality and doesn't usually involve HMDs, but these types of games are largely what people were thinking of when they started talking about VR many years ago.
Now there are things like GMod (Garry's Mod), Minecraft, Space Engineers, Scrap Mechanic etc. that allow you to satisfying your virtual reality engineering itch with component-based development i.e. snapping things together, which is just much more practical, efficient, and just easier for people who are trying to entertain themselves than doing a bunch of scripting in OpenSim/SL/OpenCroquet/High Fidelity/etc.
Look at the first person perspective in the Mirror's Edge series. Its a very cyperbunk-type vision along the lines of early VR concepts.
Anyway long story short, VR is a massive business, they just call it "gaming" and we don't bother wearing HMDs.
[+] [-] ideonexus|9 years ago|reply
The problem is that SL is closed source. I once tried to run a virtual field trip with 10 kids to show them around, but Linden Labs blocked us for having too many users access SL from the same IP address. You have to lease property on Linden Labs servers for a presence there. Why am I going to invest the time and energy into building something amazing on rented space that will vanish the moment I stop paying for it?
If SL were to be released as a open-protocol, like WWW, where anyone can pop a server onto the Internet and host a community, I think SL would thrive again. I would love to see that.
I found a nine-year-old blogpost I wrote on the science attractions in SL. It really was an amazing place. I would really like to see something like it again, but open. I think there's a huge opportunity there for someone with the right technical capabilities.
http://ideonexus.com/2007/03/03/science-in-second-life/
[+] [-] return0|9 years ago|reply
1. http://opensimulator.org 2. http://opensimworld.com 3. http://highfidelity.io
[+] [-] jff|9 years ago|reply
The problem I've run into is that it runs worse on my brand-new computer than Second Life ever did, and that's even on the mostly-empty demo areas they have.
[+] [-] logfromblammo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brian-armstrong|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azinman2|9 years ago|reply
This was true before with SL, and it'll be true with VR in the future. It'll be great for certain kinds of games, therapy, housing walk throughs, and other contexts for which a synthetic 3D world is useful, but it won't be the panacea that replaces all other forms of UI. Immersion also has a cost -- it's very intense and you don't want it for hours and hours and hours. Just like you'd never want to be on a rollercoaster for 8h, VR for 8h will also be too much (unless the world itself is not an intense game, you don't have a screen 2" from your eyeballs, etc).
[+] [-] BOBOTWINSTON|9 years ago|reply
It is a mistake to look at VR UIs as strictly 3D. There is no reason you could not scroll through your photos on a 2D screen with your fingers in VR. You can even have the added benefit of spawning multiple giant 2D screens, then grabbing photos off them for a scrap book or a virtual art gallery.
I've shared a great deal of locomotion experiences with other Vive owners. VR sickness seems a lot rarer than it was hyped up to be, and definitely a lot easier to acclimate to. I wonder how many vomiting journalists would be fine if they eased into it over a day or two. I can fly around in Windlands without flinching these days. Don't get me wrong, nausea is still a real design constraint, but we might be a lot more adaptive to VR and weird locomotion.
On the topic of session lengths, I firmly believe this is just an issue with content and ergonomics. I've done a few 6 hours sessions in multiplayer games, the problem is barely any exist. I haven't heard anyone experience "immersion fatigue", but some games will cause actual physical fatigue. Thankfully I already stand all day and it isn't an issue. I think if you already can play a game for 8 hours, VR will be there to provide the same in the future.
[+] [-] napworth|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] laksjd|9 years ago|reply
Yes, one can use 2D interfaces inside 3D worlds but any 3D system short of the matrix will have a noticeable quality degradation (e.g. visual fidelity, haptic feedback, fatigue, etc) compared to directly using a 2D interface in real life. A few edge cases might become feasible much sooner, e.g. using VR to emulate large screens but that's hardly 'Virtual Reality'. Until we come up with meaningful ways to represent more kinds of information in 3D and/or create a matrix-style experience, VR will most likely be limited to applications that are inherently 3D.
This obviously includes entertainment (VR games, 'movies', 3D art) and CAD/CAM/3D modelling which are already very much 3D in nature and internal representation, even if they are currently usually projected onto 2D screens. Outside of that, the main 'educational' usage currently consists of building 3D environments (labs, buildings, factories, complex machinery) that emulate real-life environments in order to familiarize trainees with the workflows in those places. This can be surprisingly effective, especially considering how much cheaper VR mockups are compared to e.g. NASA's real-life 1:1 ISS training replica.
These applications are worthwhile in their own right and they will probably be able to sustain a decent market for VR hardware and development. However, I'm personally much more interested in seeing what kind of concepts that aren't already inherently 3D can be enhanced or revolutionized by adding another dimension.
[+] [-] outworlder|9 years ago|reply
My mom, 60+ year old, decided she wanted to learn proper English. Being an aircraft controller, she already knew enough to get by on the job (communication is pretty much standardized). But nowhere near enough to get by in the US.
After a few conventional approaches (such as physical English classes), she somehow found out about Second Life and enrolled in a (paid!) course.
Fast forward a couple of years. She can now hold conversations in English and go out by herself without a family member translating. As an observer, the progress was outstanding.
One thing that I have noticed is that it can be way more interactive than "normal" classes. For instance, there was a lesson that took place at an airport. So, instead of just an opening dialog in a book, and then some discussion, their avatars were at a functioning airport. So they could go all the way from arriving at the airport to boarding the plane, having dialogue all the way. Not sure if the airplane did or could take off though.
At another one that I witnessed, they were at a clothing store. So they could actually interact with a human shopkeeper, buy the article of clothing they wanted, then put on their avatar.
Having attended "standard" classes all my life, I was blown away by how much the virtual environment would foster dialogue. Usually, a teacher has a hard time coaxing this kind of interaction in a classroom setting.
Also of importance is that, since you are hidden behind an avatar, shy people seem more comfortable. Things such as race and, to an extent, age, are completely hidden.
Not sure if VR would help anything, except for the "cool" factor, which can't be discounted.
[+] [-] laksjd|9 years ago|reply
Second Life specifically excels at being a platform for roleplaying (in the educational sense as well as the D&D sense). The built-in creation tools allow people to very quickly create environments that have enough fidelity to be a significant step up from 'this table is now an airplane' and thanks to the marketplace one can often quickly and cheaply acquire ready-made props for virtually any scenario. Using the more advanced creation tools one can even create video-game-level fidelity however that is usually not necessary for educational environments.
[+] [-] arcanus|9 years ago|reply
If the pervasive influence of social media in our times has taught us anything, it is that a platform that does interface with our everyday existence will never be more than a cool tech demo.
Off the top of my head, for success VR needs to provide:
Until the VR experience can supplant some of the activities above, I doubt it will take off.[+] [-] semi-extrinsic|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amateurpolymath|9 years ago|reply
It seems to me we're much closer to a great AR experience than truly great and immersive VR.
[1]: https://www.relay.fm/rocket/20
[+] [-] sandworm101|9 years ago|reply
I've got some VR hiking goggles to sell you. They are cheap, lightweight and totally wireless, but only work in the woods. They were featured on a recent SouthPark episode.
Too many discussions focus on VR being a drop-in replacement for reality. Nobody should expect them to mimic reality any more than they expect computer screens to mimic sunlight. I don't much care if VR helms don't allow me to jog up Everest. I just want to be free to look around as if I were standing on the top.
[+] [-] drzaiusapelord|9 years ago|reply
If we see social VR in education it'll be impromptu study groups in Altspace or screensharing in Bigscreen. It'll happen dynamically as kids decide what platform they prefer. Teachers will probably make similiar decisions on a per teacher/classroom way. I've already spent a bit of time in Altspace and Bigscreen and its very impressive from many aspects like usability, discoverability, presence, features, etc. I can't imagine using a SL-like system. Its too messy, ugly, and complex. It feels very Web 1.0.
Also, my god, the uncanny valley in SL is inexcusable. Either do photorealism or use cartoony avatars, there's really no room for middle ground here.
[+] [-] Jtsummers|9 years ago|reply
To be fair to OLPC, it just predated those other devices. It [the hardware] was developed precisely because cheap laptops didn't yet exist, and then the form and market came into existence and obsoleted a large part of the project's efforts (the physical hardware development, not its educational goals).
[+] [-] ilaksh|9 years ago|reply
But there's kind of a weird thing about Second Life and VR and video games. Video games have really filled the virtual reality space without being called virtual reality.
For example, the detailed simulation of Los Angeles in GTA 5 or the details and immersive story in The Witcher 3. It isn't usually called virtual reality and doesn't usually involve HMDs, but these types of games are largely what people were thinking of when they started talking about VR many years ago.
Now there are things like GMod (Garry's Mod), Minecraft, Space Engineers, Scrap Mechanic etc. that allow you to satisfying your virtual reality engineering itch with component-based development i.e. snapping things together, which is just much more practical, efficient, and just easier for people who are trying to entertain themselves than doing a bunch of scripting in OpenSim/SL/OpenCroquet/High Fidelity/etc.
Look at the first person perspective in the Mirror's Edge series. Its a very cyperbunk-type vision along the lines of early VR concepts.
Anyway long story short, VR is a massive business, they just call it "gaming" and we don't bother wearing HMDs.
[+] [-] simonebrunozzi|9 years ago|reply