>Of course. We want AR/VR/MR to be ubiquitous.
Over the past four years or so I've seen many companies big and small bring their demos to show and tell. They all have bits and pieces of the larger puzzle. Good eye tracking, interesting haptic techniques, next generation display technologies. But most of them are narrowly focused on their thing, and struggle alone to make a successful product. Partially this was just because the market didn't exist but also many of them were/are just trying to boil the ocean. The minimum viable product is now a pretty high bar and that can stifle innovation. We can offer a running start, the traditionally "hard" parts of HMD technology, the things other than GPUs that kept VR niche for so long.
In return we ask that your device leveraging our technology works with our platform. And mostly that is it. We won't ask that it only works on our platform, we won't stop you from targeting other industries. This gives both you and your users freedom of choice and security that isn't dependant on either party's future decisions. It is a pretty good deal really. Our platform has a rapidly growing collection of great content for your end-users so your product won't be an orphan and you don't need to convince anyone to author for it. Day one people can fire up Tilt Brush and have their minds blown by your awesome new hardware.
If Valve games are "locked" to SteamVR and won't play on Oculus, then nobody is going to buy an Oculus. Does Facebook really think that people are going to choose Lucky's Tale over Portal 3 or Half-Life 3? Facebook is going to have to capitulate and focus on their hardware advantage.
It's the opposite. I think you might have misunderstood the quote. SteamVR fully supports the Rift. It even supports the unreleased Touch controllers which likely won't be out until the end of the year. And Valve has made no indication that they're going to change this. In fact, they've suggested that they're very serious about always supporting all HMDs.
But Valve hasn't locked out the Oculus. Plug one into a computer with Steam and it'll pop up a prompt to setup SteamVR just the same as plugging in a Vive. It even includes a link to Oculus-specific instructions: you need to set it up with the Oculus app and change a setting there to enable the Oculus device for use outside the Oculus store.
(Source: anecdotal experience from plugging a Rift into a computer that didn't have a real GPU; no idea if there are any other issues.)
Exclusivity is a two-edged sword. What will happen to Steam if Valve locks others out of their market, but then one of those others produces the magic ingredient that makes VR really work well for the vast majority of people? For example, what if magic leap's multiple virtual focus planes turns out to be simply that good.
This paragraph indicates that Valve seems to appreciate that no one company has really put together the whole package yet. If they know that, then perhaps they will be smart enough to open Steam's VR to the open market, even if that means supporting competitors like Oculus.
At this stage, VR could still implode again like it did in the nineties. The smart move is to do what it takes to ensure there is a VR market a few years from now, not hamstring yourself worrying about who gets the biggest slice.
The VR market right now feels kind of like the 3D accelerator market in the '90s, before Direct3D really came into its own, hardware manufacturers were still half-assing OpenGL support, and lots of games were programmed against vendor-proprietary APIs like Glide.
Would be nice if people had actually learned from that and rallied around a standard API/middleware for VR to start with, rather than trying to "console-ize" VR with hardware-specific exclusives. Maybe Valve/SteamVR will end up being that middleware?
That's probably why they have John Carmack on board. Half Life was a mod to his Quake 2. They had a friendly, cooperative relation so far, so I wouldn't worry.
In all of my experiencing of the new VR products, I am firmly in the position that it's not ready for public consumption yet and won't be for quite some time. The only real reason it's being pushed hard is because people have a fear of missing out. Meanwhile, if I were a company I'd be focusing on AR, because at least there you can push for enterprise customers which won't need the full immersion yet that a general consumer will clamor for. (I also think AR has a much brighter future)
I expect a lot of VR units are shown off to friends and thrown into the closet or put on a shelf to collect dust. It's something you show off, but not something you'll (at least 98% of people) use.
It's weird your comment is so far up and you haven't given any reasons as to why VR is not ready for mainstream. You have a reason for why it's being pushed, but not a reason for why it won't take.
Steam sale numbers show tens of thousands of games are being bought by Vive owners, which is a pretty high percentage of the ~90k Vive units out there. Some games are as high as 50k / ~90k units. People are continuing to buy games and play them.*
Where's your reasons for why it's not ready, and numbers to support they will just sit on the shelf? Other metrics seem to point otherwise.
* Best indication we have for Vive sales numbers is bundled game ownership, SteamSpy shows that Job Simulator has ~65K owners, Fantastic Contraption has ~85K owners, and Tilt Brush has ~90K owners.
Two most popular non-bundled HTC Vive games, Audioshield and Space Pirate Trainer, both have a SteamSpy ownership of ~50K.
I've had my Vive for a bit over a month now. It's definitely past the point of "showing off to friends" and by now I'm pretty sure VR will forever be a feature of any gaming rig I own. I've clocked about 20hrs in Elite:Dangerous, which is a bit above my monthly average, even after having the Vive setup at my company for a week so my coworkers could try it out. Playing games like Elite without VR is now a very real downgrade.
It has all the defects you could expect from a first gen device. It is also way past the point of fancy gimmick and well into routine usage hardware territory.
John Carmack had an interesting take on AR. His feeling is that AR is a more difficult problem to solve, and for artificial objects to blend nicely with reality you'll probably need to redraw the entire field of vision anyway. By this reasoning, VR is a necessary first step along the way to the development of AR.
I think it's clearly not ready for anything like the adoption levels of consoles, but people who own VR products definitely use them. It's too expensive, too low resolution, and too clunky to conquer the world yet, but it's an excellent first generation.
What you're describing sounds more like AR to me. Everyone I know who bought Google Glass showed it off to their friends and then never used it again. I know AR has obviously improved since then, but VR seems to be the more proven technology.
As was the case with early personal computers - until some "killer apps" arrived. For businesses, the killer app was Lotus 1-2-3 and/or WordPerfect. Rest assured that some clever young things are actively working on the killer apps for VR headsets. I assume there will be at least one, and I assume that it won't be a FPS game.
VR fundamentally conflicts with how the eyes focus, and it will never be solved with the current technology. For some people it's not a big problem, but a sizeable portion of the population will be unable to use VR at all or for any extended period without ending up with eye strain, headaches, nausea, and/or a general sense of malaise. It will always be something of a niche technology IMO - very cool, but of limited use.
It's the same basic problem that 3D films have. There's a reason that films are still shown in 2D. I have only ever watched one film in 3D and it was overall an unpleasant experience that I don't care to repeat.
Application developers could work to mitigate the worst of the effects on the eyes, and that's something that would help adoption. That has, however, not happened with films and I doubt it will with games - everyone seems to want to give people as great a sense of depth as possible, which simply doesn't work at all for many people.
AR largely eliminates these problems, and I'm inclined to agree there is more overall promise there.
VR is already being used in enterprise. I know of at least one company that is designing VR software(using common headsets like the Vive) for a major restaurant chain, where the managers will be able to arrange everything in 3D before the restaurant is even built.
> I am firmly in the position that it's not ready for public consumption yet and won't be for quite some time.
Perhaps right now, but come October the PSVR will be out. Its half the price of the Vive and works with your existing PS4. The reviews for the games have been mostly positive and the graphics in them are incredible compared to the shovelware both the Vive and the Rift suffer from. The move controllers seem to have better back-end processing and will probably never match the smoothness and fidelity of Vive tracking, but I imagine it will be good enough. Sony's 60 to 120fps re-projection seems to be working well too. I'm very impressed at what Sony is attempting to pull off here. VR with maybe 1/3rd the GPU/CPU heft of an average gaming PC is quite the technical hurdle for Sony's engineers.
I think PSVR is going to change everything in terms of VR adoption and how the public sees VR.
>I expect a lot of VR units are shown off to friends and thrown into the closet or put on a shelf to collect dust.
I use mine multiple times a week. Its very exciting to see what the new VR game of the week/month is and try it out. Right now, all the Vive owners I know are enjoying Battle Dome, which is a laser tage/Splatoon style game. Its early access and ugly as sin, but a lot of fun. Or if not that PoolNationVR, which is much more polished.
I've also enjoyed spending some time in AltspaceVR. As far as I'm concerned its the metaverse jr. I am looking forward to what the guys at High Fidelity are doing (which is pretty much Second Life in VR), but I think the more managed, simplistic, and curated AltspaceVR approach will win in the long run.
There is tremendous potential for this technology far beyond entertainment. It allows the user to perceive themselves to be in another place with minimal need for imagination, abstraction or suspension of disbelief. Those qualities all lend themselves quite well to entertainment, but they also enable many uses as a tool, such as for industry or education. Zuckerberg is counting on this, though I suspect he is thinking along the lines of the social implications (a family on different continents could sit down and have dinner together, or you could play a card game with your grandmother from 1,000 miles away).
VR enables the use of human-operated tools and machines in places we cannot physically be with a minimum of interface limitations. Consider robotic surgery; the current Da Vinci machine uses a 3D view-port at a large station with three small loops to detect the movement of three fingers on each hand. The upshot is that a surgeon can now see a 3D view inside an abdomen and manipulate surgical tools with almost the full amount of dexterity of a human hand. This differs notably from older surgery methods in that only very small incisions are made to access the abdomen rather than a single very large one, greatly reducing the pain, scarring, and risks of the recovery process (though of course laparoscopy also offers similar benefits, save for the tools' degrees of freedom). VR is close to replicating this with much less expensive technology in essentially any environment you could choose, provided latency is kept low. Soon a surgeon could be in a separate, non-sterile room with a VR headset on and manual controls to enable full hand and wrist movement, and software can intervene with safety measures to prevent sudden unintended movements or accidental damage to important structures like blood vessels or nerves. The scale can be altered so that the body is perceived to be the size of a room and tools can be manipulated on a finer scale than the human hand is capable of (think of performing surgery inside a blood vessel as if you were there, rather than manipulating primitive instruments at the end of a single camera on a catheter as they do now).
We could teach physics in a digital space where you can alter physical constants to gain an intuitive sense of their consequences. We could teach geography as if we were flying over any place on earth. We could reconstruct New York City circa 1900 and walk its streets. Walk the ocean floor and collect samples for scientific study. Defuse a bomb from a mile away as if we were standing in front of it. Clean a nuclear waste zone with no radiation risk. See the full scale of the earth as viewed from the ISS or the moon. Conduct rescue efforts in burning or damaged buildings with no risk to the rescue crew.
A lot of these things are already possible, but VR dramatically reduces the level of training needed to adapt to unintuitive user interfaces. And there will be many applications no one has thought of yet. A few days ago I saw a video on YouTube where a Disney artist talked about how Tilt Brush fundamentally alters drawing in a way that has never been possible before. Sculpture is about subtracting or manipulating something already existing to create art, whereas painting generates something wholly new but only in two dimensions. With Tilt Brush be recreated Ariel and met her as he sees her in his mind for the first time - a three dimensional entity taken directly from his mind with none of the limitations of sculpture and all the freedom of painting.
As with most technologies, entertainment will probably drive the initial development of the technology. And I do expect it to be successful - I've demoed the Vive and it does not feel like a flash in the pan the way previous attempts at VR have (here's looking at you, VirtualBoy). The software will need to be there to drive the market, and growth will be slow in the beginning due to cost considerations. But people also said home video with the VCR was a flash in the pan and it was too expensive to ever be successful, people would always rather go to the movies instead. VR represents at least as much of a shift in culture and technology as home video did, probably much, much more. I'm looking forward to watching it happen.
> Don’t change the user’s horizon line, ever. You can see here how the camera follows the motion and rotation of the character’s head and so it rolls. Your actual head isn’t going to roll when you get killed by an Eyelander, so the mismatch will make you sick.
Here's the presentation's video, bookmarked at the aforementioned insight:
For those of you non-TF2 players, the "Eyelander" is the name of a player-wieldable sword, and when it connects, the victim's head flies off and rolls around the ground. Apparently simulating that effect (changing the user's "horizon line") will make people very sick.
I'm quite sure it's a happy overlap of both: strategically, Valve needs to either be on top of VR or it would bet the farm on VR failing. If someone like Oculus managed to become The App Store for VR gaming, it would be "Valve over", just like if Microsoft ever managed to make the Windows app store attractive to gamers (or to anyone, unlikely to happen anywhere this side of 2060).
At the same time, key innovations like the lighthouse position tracking system (which seems to be implemented in the Vive) have all the markings of genuine engineering curiosity. Curiosity of the kind that is unlikely to spring from a top-down "let's assign n man-years to VR" decision.
> Or maybe too many devs thought VR was the coolist project to work on and moved to it.
I think it's this. That's the problem with hype waves in majority-ruled organizations. Or I'm wrong and people will soon be sitting in the subway with a VR headset on and playing Fruit Ninja in VR.
Half-Life 3 on VR would be the killer app. It would be this generations Lotus 1 2 3.
Though I personally feel VR for video games are a lot like Wii its awesome for a while then its collecting dust throughout the world. I really think the future is Augmented Reality and VR will be for mostly media consumption.
I disagree with that. I played (and finished) HL2 in VR and while it was more of a prototype (e.g. loading screens were static) it already proved modern(ish) FPS games are not the best application of VR. Too many kinks of the genre do not translate well, while other features of VR are left unexplored. For that matter, racing or space exploration games (where the protagonist is seated) translate way better.
So I think the killer for VR will be something else entirely. Still from a first person perspective, but way different from a modern shooter. In the same way it took us a while to perfect what FPSs should be like, or what platformers should be like, we're a bit far from what the perfect VR experience genres will be.
I hope Valve decide to use Half Life 3 as a benchmark VR title. Half Life 1 was a phenomenal take on the FPS genre, Half Life 2 added physics, and perhaps Half Life 3 can be the start of very high quality VR shooters. If Valve were to release Half Life 3 on their VR platform I would certainly have to buy their platform, there is no VR title that I absolutely must have currently.
I think the locomotion issues will be the end of this round of VR. Teleporting around the virtual space is not immersive by any means. Direct movement (e.g. with a joystick) with current head mounted displays automatically results in motion sickness for the majority of users. No solution in sight, as far as I know.
HL3 is a traditional FPS and a lot of people would be unhappy to play it with a teleport mechanism or other solution that solves the simulation sickness/locomotion problem, but drastically changes the game experience. Worse, VR will never have the install base PC's have right now, so Valve would have to skimp on HL3's budget to make it economically feasible as a VR-only game.
Portal 3 on the other hand seems likely. The teleport mechanic is already cooked into the game. You could play it in VR or non-VR without any changes or upsetting fans.
As a Vive owner, I don't want shoehorned in half-assed VR experiences. I want something that properly uses the medium. I think a lot of FPS fans are going to be ultimately be disappointed that standard WASD and or trackpad locomotion are just not an option in VR.
Jeri Ellsworth of CastAR (ex-Valve AR/VR hardware guru) did an interview recently* where she mentioned that Valve was kind of "painting themselves in a corner" by gearing their system's performance to play AAA-title games.
Now owners of those consoles will expect every game to be an AAA title.
I wish they would get back to what they used to do - make actual computer games. I still can't shake the nagging suspicion that the recent VR hype is just the product of the every-decade-or-so fad cycle (similar to what happened in the 80's with it).
I have been using an Oculus Rift for a few weeks and the experience is breathtaking. For example, there is an Apollo 11 educational game where you get to experience the mission from the point of view of Neil Armstrong or Michael Collins. I think it is hard to argue that "experiencing" history isn't far superior than reading about it. And the pure games like EVE Valkrie give you a cold sweat they are so immersive. Just my The cost right now are high, but no more than an iPhone. I think mainstream isn't too far away. My $0.02 at least.
Why wouldn't they? The computer industry is stagnating because people can use phones and tablets for most of their computing needs. VR has the potential to drive sales of high-end hardware again. And Valve has skin in that game.
I've just spent a week here in Shenzhen, China. What was the most impressive thing? There are literally entire floors in the electronics markets here filled with VR headsets. Even if it's early stage hardware, someone has to be buying them.
As for killer apps, like every other technology it's a fair bet that commercial success #1 will be porn.
From a more cognitive standpoint, I've long felt that what segregates spatial awareness from other senses is the sheer volume of data that can be presented, reasoned with and remembered. As old school hunter-gatherer-wanderer primates, it's our highest bandwidth input. This reality will eventually be utilized for problem solving (eg. VR excel spreadsheet visualizations and black box / static code analysis may become a non-gimmick norm).
VR is amazing and the opportunity is incredible. However, I am worried worried that the technology to produce high enough resolution displays will take some time to get here. Without smartphones driving the demand, will we get to 5-10k dpi displays for VR tech? We have 800 or so dpi displays rolling out, with current generation devices filling their FOV with about 500 dpi screens. We're driving 1.3-1.8m pixels per eye, but that is not enough if you want to pretend to gaze at something 20 meters away. The pixel density, especially in the center area of the display, should be much higher. Otherwise only abstract low polygon count content will work.
So one third of Valve is working on VR... absolutely definitely not working on Half Life 3 or Portal 3. Which pushes their possible/probable/hypothetical release dates even further into the future. :-(
They can outsource it to Chinese companies. Gamers nowadays are not choosy and will play anything that has "Half-life" franchise label on it, "Doom" of 2016 confirmed it.
[+] [-] jn1234|9 years ago|reply
>Of course. We want AR/VR/MR to be ubiquitous. Over the past four years or so I've seen many companies big and small bring their demos to show and tell. They all have bits and pieces of the larger puzzle. Good eye tracking, interesting haptic techniques, next generation display technologies. But most of them are narrowly focused on their thing, and struggle alone to make a successful product. Partially this was just because the market didn't exist but also many of them were/are just trying to boil the ocean. The minimum viable product is now a pretty high bar and that can stifle innovation. We can offer a running start, the traditionally "hard" parts of HMD technology, the things other than GPUs that kept VR niche for so long. In return we ask that your device leveraging our technology works with our platform. And mostly that is it. We won't ask that it only works on our platform, we won't stop you from targeting other industries. This gives both you and your users freedom of choice and security that isn't dependant on either party's future decisions. It is a pretty good deal really. Our platform has a rapidly growing collection of great content for your end-users so your product won't be an orphan and you don't need to convince anyone to author for it. Day one people can fire up Tilt Brush and have their minds blown by your awesome new hardware.
If Valve games are "locked" to SteamVR and won't play on Oculus, then nobody is going to buy an Oculus. Does Facebook really think that people are going to choose Lucky's Tale over Portal 3 or Half-Life 3? Facebook is going to have to capitulate and focus on their hardware advantage.
[+] [-] nilkn|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alcari|9 years ago|reply
(Source: anecdotal experience from plugging a Rift into a computer that didn't have a real GPU; no idea if there are any other issues.)
[+] [-] beloch|9 years ago|reply
This paragraph indicates that Valve seems to appreciate that no one company has really put together the whole package yet. If they know that, then perhaps they will be smart enough to open Steam's VR to the open market, even if that means supporting competitors like Oculus.
At this stage, VR could still implode again like it did in the nineties. The smart move is to do what it takes to ensure there is a VR market a few years from now, not hamstring yourself worrying about who gets the biggest slice.
[+] [-] JonathonW|9 years ago|reply
Would be nice if people had actually learned from that and rallied around a standard API/middleware for VR to start with, rather than trying to "console-ize" VR with hardware-specific exclusives. Maybe Valve/SteamVR will end up being that middleware?
[+] [-] tychuz|9 years ago|reply
Aren't you overly optimistic. :)
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] conceit|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ben174|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] partiallypro|9 years ago|reply
I expect a lot of VR units are shown off to friends and thrown into the closet or put on a shelf to collect dust. It's something you show off, but not something you'll (at least 98% of people) use.
[+] [-] marricks|9 years ago|reply
Steam sale numbers show tens of thousands of games are being bought by Vive owners, which is a pretty high percentage of the ~90k Vive units out there. Some games are as high as 50k / ~90k units. People are continuing to buy games and play them.*
Where's your reasons for why it's not ready, and numbers to support they will just sit on the shelf? Other metrics seem to point otherwise.
* Best indication we have for Vive sales numbers is bundled game ownership, SteamSpy shows that Job Simulator has ~65K owners, Fantastic Contraption has ~85K owners, and Tilt Brush has ~90K owners.
Two most popular non-bundled HTC Vive games, Audioshield and Space Pirate Trainer, both have a SteamSpy ownership of ~50K.
[+] [-] sergiosgc|9 years ago|reply
It has all the defects you could expect from a first gen device. It is also way past the point of fancy gimmick and well into routine usage hardware territory.
[+] [-] loudmax|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] burkaman|9 years ago|reply
What you're describing sounds more like AR to me. Everyone I know who bought Google Glass showed it off to their friends and then never used it again. I know AR has obviously improved since then, but VR seems to be the more proven technology.
[+] [-] intrasight|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flatline|9 years ago|reply
It's the same basic problem that 3D films have. There's a reason that films are still shown in 2D. I have only ever watched one film in 3D and it was overall an unpleasant experience that I don't care to repeat.
Application developers could work to mitigate the worst of the effects on the eyes, and that's something that would help adoption. That has, however, not happened with films and I doubt it will with games - everyone seems to want to give people as great a sense of depth as possible, which simply doesn't work at all for many people.
AR largely eliminates these problems, and I'm inclined to agree there is more overall promise there.
[+] [-] gambiting|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drzaiusapelord|9 years ago|reply
Perhaps right now, but come October the PSVR will be out. Its half the price of the Vive and works with your existing PS4. The reviews for the games have been mostly positive and the graphics in them are incredible compared to the shovelware both the Vive and the Rift suffer from. The move controllers seem to have better back-end processing and will probably never match the smoothness and fidelity of Vive tracking, but I imagine it will be good enough. Sony's 60 to 120fps re-projection seems to be working well too. I'm very impressed at what Sony is attempting to pull off here. VR with maybe 1/3rd the GPU/CPU heft of an average gaming PC is quite the technical hurdle for Sony's engineers.
I think PSVR is going to change everything in terms of VR adoption and how the public sees VR.
>I expect a lot of VR units are shown off to friends and thrown into the closet or put on a shelf to collect dust.
I use mine multiple times a week. Its very exciting to see what the new VR game of the week/month is and try it out. Right now, all the Vive owners I know are enjoying Battle Dome, which is a laser tage/Splatoon style game. Its early access and ugly as sin, but a lot of fun. Or if not that PoolNationVR, which is much more polished.
I've also enjoyed spending some time in AltspaceVR. As far as I'm concerned its the metaverse jr. I am looking forward to what the guys at High Fidelity are doing (which is pretty much Second Life in VR), but I think the more managed, simplistic, and curated AltspaceVR approach will win in the long run.
[+] [-] GabeN|9 years ago|reply
VR enables the use of human-operated tools and machines in places we cannot physically be with a minimum of interface limitations. Consider robotic surgery; the current Da Vinci machine uses a 3D view-port at a large station with three small loops to detect the movement of three fingers on each hand. The upshot is that a surgeon can now see a 3D view inside an abdomen and manipulate surgical tools with almost the full amount of dexterity of a human hand. This differs notably from older surgery methods in that only very small incisions are made to access the abdomen rather than a single very large one, greatly reducing the pain, scarring, and risks of the recovery process (though of course laparoscopy also offers similar benefits, save for the tools' degrees of freedom). VR is close to replicating this with much less expensive technology in essentially any environment you could choose, provided latency is kept low. Soon a surgeon could be in a separate, non-sterile room with a VR headset on and manual controls to enable full hand and wrist movement, and software can intervene with safety measures to prevent sudden unintended movements or accidental damage to important structures like blood vessels or nerves. The scale can be altered so that the body is perceived to be the size of a room and tools can be manipulated on a finer scale than the human hand is capable of (think of performing surgery inside a blood vessel as if you were there, rather than manipulating primitive instruments at the end of a single camera on a catheter as they do now).
We could teach physics in a digital space where you can alter physical constants to gain an intuitive sense of their consequences. We could teach geography as if we were flying over any place on earth. We could reconstruct New York City circa 1900 and walk its streets. Walk the ocean floor and collect samples for scientific study. Defuse a bomb from a mile away as if we were standing in front of it. Clean a nuclear waste zone with no radiation risk. See the full scale of the earth as viewed from the ISS or the moon. Conduct rescue efforts in burning or damaged buildings with no risk to the rescue crew.
A lot of these things are already possible, but VR dramatically reduces the level of training needed to adapt to unintuitive user interfaces. And there will be many applications no one has thought of yet. A few days ago I saw a video on YouTube where a Disney artist talked about how Tilt Brush fundamentally alters drawing in a way that has never been possible before. Sculpture is about subtracting or manipulating something already existing to create art, whereas painting generates something wholly new but only in two dimensions. With Tilt Brush be recreated Ariel and met her as he sees her in his mind for the first time - a three dimensional entity taken directly from his mind with none of the limitations of sculpture and all the freedom of painting.
As with most technologies, entertainment will probably drive the initial development of the technology. And I do expect it to be successful - I've demoed the Vive and it does not feel like a flash in the pan the way previous attempts at VR have (here's looking at you, VirtualBoy). The software will need to be there to drive the market, and growth will be slow in the beginning due to cost considerations. But people also said home video with the VCR was a flash in the pan and it was too expensive to ever be successful, people would always rather go to the movies instead. VR represents at least as much of a shift in culture and technology as home video did, probably much, much more. I'm looking forward to watching it happen.
[+] [-] danso|9 years ago|reply
http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/publications.html
One of my favorite tidbits comes in the presentation, "Lessons learned porting Team Fortress 2 to Virtual Reality", on preventing VR motion sickness: http://media.steampowered.com/apps/valve/2013/Team_Fortress_...
> Don’t change the user’s horizon line, ever. You can see here how the camera follows the motion and rotation of the character’s head and so it rolls. Your actual head isn’t going to roll when you get killed by an Eyelander, so the mismatch will make you sick.
Here's the presentation's video, bookmarked at the aforementioned insight:
https://youtu.be/Gpr0FE2ATaY?t=19m36s
For those of you non-TF2 players, the "Eyelander" is the name of a player-wieldable sword, and when it connects, the victim's head flies off and rolls around the ground. Apparently simulating that effect (changing the user's "horizon line") will make people very sick.
[+] [-] kendallpark|9 years ago|reply
Or maybe too many devs thought VR was the coolist project to work on and moved to it. (Valve is known for their flat structure http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...)
[+] [-] usrusr|9 years ago|reply
At the same time, key innovations like the lighthouse position tracking system (which seems to be implemented in the Vive) have all the markings of genuine engineering curiosity. Curiosity of the kind that is unlikely to spring from a top-down "let's assign n man-years to VR" decision.
[+] [-] cleeus|9 years ago|reply
I think it's this. That's the problem with hype waves in majority-ruled organizations. Or I'm wrong and people will soon be sitting in the subway with a VR headset on and playing Fruit Ninja in VR.
[+] [-] baldfat|9 years ago|reply
Though I personally feel VR for video games are a lot like Wii its awesome for a while then its collecting dust throughout the world. I really think the future is Augmented Reality and VR will be for mostly media consumption.
[+] [-] whatever_dude|9 years ago|reply
So I think the killer for VR will be something else entirely. Still from a first person perspective, but way different from a modern shooter. In the same way it took us a while to perfect what FPSs should be like, or what platformers should be like, we're a bit far from what the perfect VR experience genres will be.
[+] [-] Kephael|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] levesque|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drzaiusapelord|9 years ago|reply
Portal 3 on the other hand seems likely. The teleport mechanic is already cooked into the game. You could play it in VR or non-VR without any changes or upsetting fans.
As a Vive owner, I don't want shoehorned in half-assed VR experiences. I want something that properly uses the medium. I think a lot of FPS fans are going to be ultimately be disappointed that standard WASD and or trackpad locomotion are just not an option in VR.
[+] [-] joezydeco|9 years ago|reply
Now owners of those consoles will expect every game to be an AAA title.
* http://embedded.fm/episodes/156 @ 53:20
[+] [-] vocatus_gate|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksec|9 years ago|reply
So Valve now has an better VR Set then Oculus. And all of a sudden every news on VR seems to flowing in Valve direction.
This reminds me a lot of the early days when we move from iD 's Doom to Valve's Half Life.
Note: ( John Carmack = CTO of Oculus and Founder of iD )
[+] [-] croon|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randac|9 years ago|reply
2) id, not iD.
[+] [-] fnazeeri|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JanneVee|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] contingencies|9 years ago|reply
As for killer apps, like every other technology it's a fair bet that commercial success #1 will be porn.
From a more cognitive standpoint, I've long felt that what segregates spatial awareness from other senses is the sheer volume of data that can be presented, reasoned with and remembered. As old school hunter-gatherer-wanderer primates, it's our highest bandwidth input. This reality will eventually be utilized for problem solving (eg. VR excel spreadsheet visualizations and black box / static code analysis may become a non-gimmick norm).
[+] [-] alimbada|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diziet|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] techdragon|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blastofpast|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intrasight|9 years ago|reply
1. Exclusivity on a headset? Replace "headset" with "monitor" and you get how childish, stupid, and impractical that will be.
2. I don't think monitor based games will transition well to headsets.
[+] [-] giskarda|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ungzd|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erikb|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josefdlange|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teslaberry|9 years ago|reply
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