I think that the Vive is a little like the release iPhone. It has all of the pieces, but it's also clunky and extravagant.
You had to have a pretty good imagination to look at any 2004 phone and envision the iPhone, but once you had the 1st gen iPhone it's pretty easy to imagine a modern smartphone. It's pretty much just the same thing only more so.
I don't know, that first iPhone was pretty special. Just having a fantastic web browser (mobile Safari) was a game changer. The gap feels bigger with VR, to me.
The first iPhone cost $600 after subsidy, you had to wait for pages to load forever over EDGE, and it had literally no software. Seems like a decent analogy of current VR.
Before the iPhone, nobody had any idea what improvement on the smartphone would be required to get them in the hands of everyone. All anyone could say was "a smartphone isn't for everyone". With VR, just in this thread half the people are saying "I just hated the resolution, lack of portability and software", similarly specific objections like people had with the initial iPhone.
I actually had the opposite experience to you. The first iPhone wasn't very special to me. "So what, it accomplishes everything my current phone does, only with pinch zoom". My first Oculus dev kit experience, terrible 720p display and all was captivating.
Agreed that the first iPhone was special, it let me move across the country without knowing a soul for two thousand miles with confidence.
The limitations were obvious though. The small screen and low resolution made it hard to read much text. It was really slow, both in processor and in its 2G connection. And it was clear that there was a lot of work to be done on the software and design technology side.
The Vive feels pretty special to me too. Presence, that feeling of being in another place, a fictional place with fictional rules. Perceptually perfect hand and head tracking. The chaperone system to let you move around the room with confidence.
The limitations are obvious: high system reqs, cords everywhere, low resolution, flaky software, and again we need to question a lot of our assumptions about the kind of software that we write. All of that's being aggressively engineered away. I'm bullish.
There was also that old man Rand McNally. Or stopping somewhere and asking for directions. I think you might've managed fine without the iPhone.
It's nice to get accurate directions when you really, really need it. There's also something to be said for getting lost or wandering every now and then.
You didn't have to buy and configure a gaming PC to use the release iPhone, though. There's a certain out-of-the-box simplicity that's missing from the Vive and Oculus.
For sure, people can see the potential of the interface and it just needs the hardware to catch up.
Which I think will look like:
- Inside-out head tracking (hololens and project tango)
- Dedicated VR GPUs (heat and power issues)
- Better resolution (4k per eye is getting close to desktop screen res)
Then phones will go into 'VR mode' as we're seeing today with daydream, so it essentially rolls out automatically and without additional spending from consumers.
All incremental improvements to really take it mainstream
I love this analogy. A similar one I've been using is that the Vive is like the Nintendo Entertainment System (1985).
Sure you could technically play video games in your house on the Atari 2600, but they were so much worse than arcade games they were sort-of still a gimmick.
The NES was the first home game system whose games were good enough to get lost in. But that doesn't mean there wasn't tremendous room for improvement.
You had to have a pretty good imagination to look at any 2004 phone and envision the iPhone, but once you had the 1st gen iPhone it's pretty easy to imagine a modern smartphone. It's pretty much just the same thing only more so.