Anyone remember that Next
Big Thing was supposed to be 3D TVs? I think VR is similarly misguided (ie, will never go mainstream but will have a healthy niche).
I think this is a great analogy in that there are fundamental physiological limits on how much 3D TV the human body wants to watch, and the answer is “not much”. All the VR/AR products I have seen fall into the same boat—a bit of a lark to use for an hour or so, beyond that, no thanks. It is a fundamentally different experience than reading a screen or listening to earbuds, and I don’t mean that in a good way.
I think you're wrong in saying there's a limit when it comes to AR.
Our smartphones are AR devices, a poorly interfaced cybernetic extension. It's a cumbersome device yet unimaginably successful.
This poor AR device has constraints that will always hamper it. It must be of a certain size to display anything useful/readable and to be a useful touch-operated device.
If people put up with this poor device and it's slow information delivery, due to the poor human-computer interface, then they sure as hell will put up with AR devices of the future.
This new wave of AR need not have near as hampering constraints.
AR has the potential to be more successful than the modern smartphone when products are as uncumbersome, lightweight and comfortable to wear as regular glasses/sunglasses, while having the technical specs to augment reality with razor sharp and useful 2D and 3D overlays, and sound.
I see no reason people will be more reluctant to put on a pair of sunglasses than carry an iPhone in their pocket or purse.
Then there are other AR product forms, like contact lenses.
AR has a wide host of useful applications, both civilian, social (recreational), military, engineering, medicine, etc. That's not the future, for most of these branches it is already in great use. There's a ton of R&D going on in this space.
> I see no reason people will be more reluctant to put on a pair of sunglasses than carry an iPhone in their pocket or purse.
Surely the fact that this is exactly what happened with earlier product releases must count as a reason... And come on, AR contact lenses? In what century exactly? If you think that's what's going to rescue Meta, I've got some FB I'd like to (short) sell you.
> I see no reason people will be more reluctant to put on a pair of sunglasses than carry an iPhone in their pocket or purse.
I agree. I disagree however that VR is already here. It isn’t, not even close. And it will keep getting further away as we push for higher resolution and higher frame rate displays.
I think there needs to be some way to power this thing all day long. Maybe Apple was onto something with its Apple Watch strategy. Create a minimally viable product and only introduce new features very slowly so you can still claim all day battery life in a happy path. Tl;dr I don’t think the limiting factor is VR itself but rather how do we power it. I don’t want something on my head that I have to charge every fifteen minutes.
> It is a fundamentally different experience than reading a screen
It's an interesting thing to say because, one of the pending killer apps for VR is liberating us from our clunky rectangular meatworld screens that can't travel with us. It's still too low resolution now in affordable hardware, but it's at a tipping point and it is going to be quite exciting to see it cross that. I wouldn't rule out that in 5 years from now, a sizeable percentage of the professional computing workforce is using VR just for this reason alone.
I think it’s worth properly segregating VR from AR.
VR shuts you off from the world, and only permits you to interact with people digitally. My view is this is only ever going to be a niche play for gaming and some commerce (e.g architecture, game design).
AR on the other hand at its most minimal is a set of specs, and you only seeing reality. Nothing has to be always on, as someone who wears glasses this is my current world. Now introduce the ability to insert virtual objects (e.g a virtual computer screen) and my world is a little bit better. Wire it together so people can share the augment, and possibilities become limitless.
Alastair Reynolds wrote a good series of books (Blue Remembered Earth) where AR was envisioned rather extensively and it was compelling. As such I view AR as the future of all computing and the market correspondingly huge.
There is a much much lower limit of people willing to wear something on their head for entertainment purposes. Couple that with a cost to buying good hardware and I think VR experiences will be limited to gaming industry. Second Life never really took off as a social space. A 3D social media app would be clunky for end users compared to a phone. I believe the interactions people value the most on social media are seeing others pics/posts and marketplaces for buying/selling things. Neither of those would transfer well to 3D.
If they are betting the company on VR and a "metaverse" then maybe they have reached a cap on unique users already and the growth of FB is done.
There is also a reluctance to abandon the real world, even for short periods, that I think people underestimate. Even if it were perfect, there are plenty of people who just don't want to do things in VR. They want to be in the real world, doing real world things with their real world friends. I think that's where AR has the true advantage, not in the experience of the medium but rather that you aren't fully committing to the virtual world.
I agree that it doesn't have to be a household name but the level of investment and market expectations on Meta/FB is growth. If they have a niche (aka small) and successful metaverse, the larger market won't expect growth and that would reflect in the stock price.
My experience with VR is that there is a period of acclimatization. At first it is tough to go 30min. I got up to being able to use it for an enjoyable 3 hours or at least the full duration of the battery for watching and gaming. I find when I come back from a long vacation with no screens, looking at a monitor for 7 hours is tough.
I used to think the same thing, and had personal experience backing it up when buying my Quest a few years ago. I simply stopped using it after a while when the novelty wore off. What has actually happened though is that I started returning to it and can now spend many hours a day in VR (both for workout and for entertainment).
> Anyone remember that Next Big Thing was supposed to be 3D TVs?
No. I remember TV companies pushing it since it was cheap for them to include and they hoped people would think of it as the "Next Big Thing", but consumers and especially reviewers during the aughts saw right through it.
Only for certain apps. I have friends that got a lot of motion sickness from the original DK2. They don't get it anymore except in games where you walk with your stick. But playing let's say Beat Saber is fine.
I'd be curious what that percentage is now. The tech has improved enormously, as have developers understanding of what to avoid software-wise. Not a single person (dozens) I have shared my Quest with had this problem.
Are we talking about 1/3 of the population is susceptibile to motion sickness in general, or specifically VR motion sickness? Because those are 2 different things and I doubt a significant number of the population was trialed with modern VR in order to get a such a clear cut result.
My Quest 2 doesn't give me motion sickness at all but I am susceptible to motion sickness when someone is driving/flying or on a boat. Still, two very distinct things that make a very different statistic.
To what degree, though? Some people get sick using vehicles in real life, and they still tolerate it for the most part.
It seems probable that motion sickness in VR will be less of a problem in the future as technology and techniques improve. Most people seem to be able to cope with it at the current level.
I think this is something that can be solved with more investment into electronics, alternative optics and display (e.g. Google-glass style display), as well as UX research.
I don’t see how. Motion sickness is a discrepancy between visual stimulus and signals from the vestibular system. If you show people motion and the don’t feel the motion, they will get motion sickness (to varying degree)
There are many VR applications that don't need to move the view separately from user input. Exercise programs for example, and a lot of office telepresence probably falls into this.
3D has come and gone many times over the history of cinema, from the red/cyan glasses, the (Pulfrich) glasses with a single shaded lens, shuttered glasses and polarized screens.
While the image quality and frame rate have improved, there are still fundamental limitations on the technology. One common pushback is that some people will get headaches due to scanning the scene, trying to focus on objects at their false depths.
3D film is a pain, way more than double the work. So most 3D content actually was made 3D in post rather than filming with multiple cameras.
Still, the way you would frame a scene to be 'interesting' in 3D is different from how you would do so in 2D. This usually results in being able to 'tell' whether a movie you are watching was primarily made for one market or another.
VR adds something other than image quality - it adds the ability to be immersed in the content. However you still have the same issues:
- So far, we don't have consumer headsets that enable you to actually focus on the objects in the scene. For example, you can't hold a piece of paper up to your face to read the fine print.
- Trying to capture certain kinds of media is infeasibly expensive in VR, both from a post-production cost perspective and a data size expectation. Live action basically is too difficult.
The latest incarnation of 3D movies were in a sense a clever business maneuver - it created a premium tier of movie experience and got many theaters to start upgrading their older projection equipment and screens to newer digital alternatives.
For home use, 3D movies were weird because they didn't follow the traditional hype curve. A lot of early adoption was by families, where unfortunately the shutter glasses still tended to be too expensive for young hands. But that market has the same thing - manufacturers will eventually take technology and reduce it down to cost, so how can you compel people to buy the newest fancy screen where you still have a good margin?
Note several television manufacturers are now trying to proceed advertising and sales revenue, which is why smart TVs have now taken over - a 15-30% cut on a HBO Max subscription adds up to real money quickly over their typically poor margins on the sale of the set.
100% agree with your point. I don't believe in a broad VR future. A movie, just as an open-world video game, lives of its content and storyline. I watched Avatar in 3D and it was great, but not because it was 3D, because it is a good movie. Even in 2D this would be very enjoyable. Same holds true for video games. I don't think Witcher 3 would have significant more success if it was in VR or the experience would be orders of magnitudes better just because of VR. Same as any shitty game with bad story, unlovely crafted characters etc. will not be good just because it is VR.
If the Metaverse means I can watch hatespeech + antivaxx posts, pictures of peoples lunch on a 3D canvas or cat videos, I pass.
I suspect that a TikTok VR/AR play could push VR usage ahead by quite a bit. Creators could use Kinect cameras to capture their space in 3D, and viewers could project them into their house. VR Chat is already very popular with people who have headsets, but it’s also not a very good experience and is low fidelity.
> 3D has come and gone many times over the history of cinema
So has VR a couple of times in the history of computer based entertainment, so the analogy hold IMO.
> VR adds something other than image quality - it adds the ability to be immersed in the content
Exactly. And it needs content that is noticeably improved by VR without obvious disadvantages, and there have been few examples of where the benefit has been enough to counter the faf. I've played a bit of Elite with an expensive VR setup and it was great but that doesn't hit the movement issue as being sat in a fixed place matches the immersion requirement of the largest part of the game (being sat in a cockpit), and I'm told Half-Life: Alyx is good enough that the constraints imposed by VR don't impact the immersion enough to break it. But those are the only two examples I can cite: you need people like me (a techie who doesn't game much at all these days despite doing so a lot a decade or two ago) and the less techie public to be able to identify more than two or three great examples for the product to have any hope of being more than niche. This isn't just a technology gap (between what we can do now and what people see on TV with things like the holodeck) but also an issue of making suitable content good enough is more difficult to get right.
VR seems more interactive and way stickier, I don’t think you can necessarily compare it to 3D TVs, in the same way a computer and TV are very different.
Having said that, I’m also skeptical of the whole metaverse thing, as we had that stuff a long time ago already (Second Life) and it was a flop. VR needs to become extremely ubiquitous and hassle-free for such a thing to work.
> as we had that stuff a long time ago already (Second Life) and it was a flop
A flop? I remember watching a documentary a while back saying some people were totally addicted to it. I'm not sure if they're still afloat these days, though. Might go the way of Playstation Home (which I genuinely liked!).
I'm sure that you can find people who are huge fans (addicted as a news article might call them) to any technology or gaming product. The world is huge. There are, for example, people who loved Windows Phone and Zune. But just because a product has a fanatical core doesn't mean it'll eventually take off - or even maintain viability.
Quite a few people do here. I doubt I could wear them for extended periods either. I personally have to take a break after wearing headphones for a few hours, I couldn't imagine wearing a VR headset of all things.
The first part of your reply doesn't line up with the second. In what way are 3D TVs a healthy niche? They are mostly dead. I also can't remember anyone actually using their 3D TV or buying a TV because of its 3D capabilities (most TVs at that time had the feature anyway). Whereas stores stocked up on Quest during the holidays because of demand. I don't think your reply accurately describes reality.
Also, this isn't the first go round with VR. Google Glass launched publicly in 2014 and the original Oculus Rift launched in 2016. I remember tons of discussions around enterprise adoption of VR in 2016-2017 with use cases ranging from immersive marketing campaigns to technicians using them to troubleshoot equipment.
