People have been saying that for decades. After spending 10 years in the 3D graphics and VR industries, I just don't see it happening any time soon. The technology, including Oculus, is certainly getting better but it still sucks. It still makes too many people sick. At this point, I am in the "I'll believe it when I see it" crowd.
For me, the motion sickness problem only happens in games where you're moving around freely on the ground like an FPS. If a teleporter is used to move, I'm fine, and for some reason flight sims don't bother me either. It seems like an inherent problem with the tech due to the disagreement between your inner ear and visual cues. Anyone have insight?
Yeah, motion sickness is a non issue at this point for headsets with good 6 DoF tracking as long as you are only doing 1:1 mapped movement (your VR movements match your real world movements). Teleporting is mostly fine but rapid frequent teleporting can still cause some issues. Other forms of locomotion tend to have more issues but some tricks have been developed and best practices figured out to make it viable for many people for reasonably long sessions. Virtual "blinkers" to reduce optical flow in peripheral vision have proved quite effective and are widely used. Pulling yourself through the virtual environment with your hands also seems to work quite well for many people (see Lone Echo for example).
I always thought driving sims would be ideal for VR, since you are sitting still in the simulation as well as the real world, with only the world outside the car moving, you can look around, etc.
Nope, got aggressively nauseous about two minutes in and had to bail in a hurry, or I would have spilled my lunch all over the very nice simulation rig. The lack of inertial forces to match the simulated movement really wreaked havoc on my inner ear.
NCSA had a VR program in the early ‘90’s, and SGI used to demo the Onyx minicomputer with an Apache helicopter simulator on three screens.
Twenty years later people demo slightly cooler things and are disappointed when I’m not excited. I’ve already seen this future. Wake me up when it gets here!
What would you need to see? We have satisfied paying enterprise customers in healthcare (surgical training) and while there are lots of things that will improve with better hardware we have had no issues with motion sickness with hundreds of non-gamer users in this space.
VR ironically might fit the exact definition that he's going for with the iPhone as being a "real trend."
His friends, and many others, definitely have let their headsets catch dust. But there is a core that does use them every day, and probably won't stop any time soon, and it's certainly being put to work in non-gaming use cases.
I think he's being properly cautious, though, using the date as qualifier.
Windows Mobile phones were out for years well before the iPhone was, and were pretty similar in terms of capability and even hardware, but never reached its type of traction.
When it comes down to it, there were only a few key features and a lot of polish (many still argue over how much more polished it really was) which differentiated the iPhone to go on to sell billions, versus competing products from Palm and Microsoft partners to sell a hundredth of that.
Even in retrospect, it's not straightforward to pin the how and why. Back in 2007, it would have been very hard to guess correctly. It's hard to fault people who dismissed the iPhone as being yet another failed mobile project, and also hard to fault people who thought that PocketPC's would revolutionize computing.
While I know that gaming will be huge there are several things that I personally can't wait for in VR:
1: social VR movie going experience. Where you put on a headset in the comfort of your own space to watch a movie on release day in VR along with N other people who are experiencing the movie as well for the first time - but you can change which vantage point to view the movie from - either from audience position, or from the perspective of your choosing within the movie; camera, villian, hero, victim, isometric drone etc. Each movie has a finite number greater than 2 vantage points to watch the movie from.
2: out on VR to attend class events as a viewer: lectures at MIT or a concert at Carnegie or Sydney Opera house. On the night of the concert, from the vantage point of a camera hanging about 15 feet above the heads of the IRL audience.
3: a camera stream from a vehicle: formula car, spaceX launch, ISS, airliner.
VR is overhyped, its use cases are more niche than people are led to believe.
For entertainment, real-estate previews, watching movies together, the experience, learning & simulation, and art modelling its great, but other than that not really. VR social chat is not going to be a big thing, even after gen-Z. People tend to forget what social chat is for, communication. VR just adds no value to that process.
If someone wanted a VR social experience, we've had MMOs for ages. VR social might as well be a VR gaming MMO. It needs to provide a medium to spur social interactions. That market is not very big, although Roblox (10MM average users) would be an interesting market to look at to see where that goes. Your market segment in VR social is going to be smaller than an MMO, which tops at around at 10MM as well. Instagram has 800MM users. Population of america is 300MM+. Put numbers in perspective, its a niche market and won't ever be big. To make a profit, you would have to dump an incredible amount of investment in comparison to making a simple CRUD app. RoI needs to be justified.
VR has already been around for 15+ years, I grew up playing VR games at Disney as a kid. This market is not new. VR is only fun for certain games as well, generally the same games that made Wii and Xbox kinect fun.
Even if VR/AR became entirely portable and seamless, its still not going to have widescale adoption. You can't replace real life.
VR's biggest profit potential is towards small niche groups of people with alot of money to throw around. Much like the mobile game market works, only a few users contribute 90%+ of sales citation needed. Currently, DoD is using VR/AR for leadership & simulation & hypothetical scenario training, because mistakes / setups are expensive and cost lives.
VR gaming will never be a big market until the cost of equipment goes down. And frictionless setup / no context switching. Its still a very high barrier to entry, and a high cost to maintain.
> VR social chat is not going to be a big thing, even after gen-Z. People tend to forget what social chat is for, communication. VR just adds no value to that process.
This is not out experience using VR chat for some of our meetings. We're a fully remote team building a VR product so we're in a somewhat unique position where all our employees have high end VR gear and we have a big need for effective remote collaboration and communication.
A big advantage of VR over voice or video conference calls is being able to see where everyone is looking. This makes for smoother flowing conversations as you're able to look at someone when you pause and want their input. It's a real advantage over video conferencing. This is true even with very primitive avatars that don't reflect any facial expressions. Being able to collaborate around virtual objects in the environment is also useful in some situations, although virtual whiteboards are still quite primitive in most apps. Social VR is a very different experience from an MMO played in a 2D window.
The hardware cost will continue to come down but it's already not a major barrier for many enterprise use cases. Is certainly not a top concern for our customers.
Fair point I did not consider VR collaboration and idea incubation for enterprise level applications, where details have a higher priority.
My only counter argument to VR chat for enterprise level applications is four fold:
1. Its synchronous, like any conference call. Async is still going to be the main form of communication (Slack, git issues, email, etc). Synchronous communication has a higher weighting on just communicating ASAP with frictionless joining, since time lost is expensive for any company. That time lost comes from putting on your rift, turning it on, navigating to the meeting, minor details like that etc. It might really be minimal issues at best if your team is used to it.
2. Replaying VR, or even 360* videos. Information hides in a 3D plane as opposed to just everything displayed on a 2D screen. Mostly for people that did not attend the conference video / webinar etc. I don't know about you but I watch many of my videos at 2x playback speed. That would give me nausea
3. The advantages you are getting in VR over a traditional video conference call aren't that high. You would know more here, do you really value facial expressions and social cues over a simpler environment without 3d head set?
4. People remoting in need to have a VR set. That eliminates your coffee shop / travel nomad employee, is he really going to be carrying VR gear around? Of course he can just use chat / video, but still you want your work culture to embrace your ideals.
My counter argument to VR chat to general social everyday use, is primarly to cost / portablility / mass adoption / convenience. But these will get better over time.
It definitely has applications for things with your SO/best friend who lives in a different city, I can definitely see the appeal in that.
...I might have overstated myself here at least on that statement
I think as a fully remote company doing VR development we're "living in the future" a bit. It's a possible if not inevitable future at least. We use a mix of technologies to enable a remote team working across multiple time zones, some synchronous and some asynchronous: Slack, Zoom, email, Confluence, Jira, GitHub, Google Docs, Dropbox, etc. We also make use of VR: Rec Room, Bigscreen, multi user functionality in our own app, etc. There's no one tool that does everything but VR apps are a useful piece of the puzzle for us.
As I mentioned, we all have high end VR gear and most of us have it at our desks and are already in and out of VR all day as part of our development work. The use case for our project also benefits from us having capable portable setups so yes we do have people joining VR meetings from Starbucks but I don't expect that to be a mainstream thing for a while until the tech improves.
Hi there, I work on Hubs at Mozilla and I'd def love to see if you'd be up for seeing how it works for you. You can hit me up at gfodor at mozilla.com. Hubs is here:
I took a "smart phone application development" class in 2005. Nokia donated a bunch of new devices to my University and we collectively implemented half a dozen or so prototype apps. Everybody knew smart phones would be big, and looking back now, the prototypes were highly predictive of where value would be created later (coupons, gaming, photo sharing). But it wasn't until the iPhone came out years later that the market was ready. I think VR is in the same boat. It's hard to know whether the breakthrough device is 2, 5, or 15 years away, but I'm confident we'll know it when we see it.
