[Animats]

Somebody at YC likes "Ready Player One", which is a stupid book. (Essential skill for taking over a big company: ability to play a perfect game of PacMan.) "Snow Crash" was ahead of its time. Yet the plot of Snow Crash would play out the same if everybody simply had modern phones.

Where's the killer app for VR? VR headsets have been around for years. The current generation of technology works adequately. Yet other than first person shooters, there's not much to do in there. You can plug into Second Life or High Fidelity with a VR headset, but few people do. Using a VR headset to simulate a screen so you can watch a movie is more trouble than it's worth.

[avaer]

> Essential skill for taking over a big company: ability to play a perfect game of PacMan.

Upcoming generations see Youtubers as their idols. It sounds stupid on the surface, but the ability to play a perfect game of Pacman wouldn't be the worst thing to bet on if you wanted to take over some big media company. Even if you don't have a tech billionaire stacking the deck.

> Where's the killer app for VR?

Like finding startup ideas, I don't think the killer VR app is going to come about from someone looking for killer VR apps. It's going to start as something silly done by the people messing around with VR today.

[kenning]

> Upcoming generations see Youtubers as their idols. It sounds stupid on the surface, but the ability to play a perfect game of Pacman wouldn't be the worst thing to bet on if you wanted to take over some big media company. Even if you don't have a tech billionaire stacking the deck.

Except talented players are not the most popular youtubers. The best pac-man player in the world is famously unpleasant.

> Like finding startup ideas, I don't think the killer VR app is going to come about from someone looking for killer VR apps. It's going to start as something silly done by the people messing around with VR today.

This is true. Most VR feels gimmicky to me now, but the best VR experience I've seen was 3d video with extremely well-calibrated audio. For some reason, that was the big difference for me, but I doubt anyone would have predicted that to be the case.

[skizm]

You know what's funny? I actually think Ready Player One nailed the only use case that might be a game changer for VR: remote schools. You can just make all learning materials virtual. VR school means no physical real estate, buses, cafeterias, bullying, janitors, you can cut like 90% of support staff, the list goes on. Also if you divide people by location (like we do now) you can still coordinate field trips and/or social events that I'm sure parents and nay-sayers would claim are lost with virtual schools.

Honestly I think if we had the right software we could do remote schools effectively right now. The largest barriers are going to be (as always) legislation, bureaucracy, and cultural. I mean companies still balk at remote workers, I don't see governments jumping at remote teachers and students any time soon unfortunately.

[Animats]

Ready Player One nailed the only use case that might be a game changer for VR: remote schools.

Edison thought education would be the killer app for the phonograph. Zworykin thought it would be the killer app for TV. The One Laptop Per Child people thought it would be the killer app for laptops. The tablet people thought it would be the killer app for tablets.

Education doesn't seem to be a technology problem. Would Udacity or Coursera be better with VR? Probably not.

[dragonwriter]

> The One Laptop Per Child people thought it would be the killer app for laptops.

No, they didn't.

They thought laptops would be a useful enabling technology for a particular model of education, but did not think that education would be the killer app for laptops (a product that was so we'll established by that time that thinking about it even needing a "killer app" at that point is senseless.)

[sbierwagen]

http://pages.ucsd.edu/~bgoldfarb/comt109w10/reading/Kraemer-...

>Negroponte seems to question whether teachers are needed at all. Speaking about providing the rural poor a solid educational basis for development at the 2007 Digital, Life, Design conference in Munich, Germany, Negroponte said: “It’s not about training teachers. It’s not about building schools. With all due respect [to Hewlett-Packard’s e-inclusion efforts], it’s not about curriculum or content. It’s about leveraging the children themselves.

>David Cavallo, OLPC’s chief education architect, says, “We’re hoping that these countries won’t just make up ground but will jump into a new educational environment.”

The OLPC people thought they were going to cause a literal, actual revolution in learning. Didn't happen.

[cr0sh]

This may be OT and a bit ranty...my apologies:

I can't speak for Coursera, but Udacity would be much better if they didn't continue to muck with the platform as you are taking the course.

Seriously - things break all the time, then get fixed, etc; last big thing that happened - and I don't know exactly why, but it had to do with a large update to the site and course system I think - a big chunk of people from the second cohort (of which I am part of) in the Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree - lost access to their original mentor. That might not sound like a big deal, but it kinda was. Then, to get access restored, you had to email one particular support address, that was only posted about (IIRC) in a Slack channel.

By the time I realized that the problem was more widespread than just a simple "service interruption" like everything else and emailed the support about it, they had already assigned the "max number" (whatever that is) of people to my original mentor that I had been communicating with and using since I started last year; I was reassigned a brand new mentor, who knows only what he sees about my progress, and nothing about the other communication and help I had from my former mentor.

It's a bit frustrating, but I'm adjusting to it as best as possible - I'm certainly not going to let it stop me from completing the course (still going strong in the second term, just finished the second project of the UKM and now working towards the localization project) - but I'd rather have a stable platform to work with, especially since I am spending so much money on the course.

/sorry about the rant

[skizm]

I mean we're getting closer. More and more colleges are offering online degrees.

[return0]

> a game changer for VR: remote schools.

A great advantage of VR compared to other interactive learning environments is that it eliminates all distractions and forces you to focus on the subject. I believe it could also lead to revival of MOOCs. We first need cheaper, lighter, no-hassle headsets.

[fudged71]

Yes, until users have the expectation of their phone and other distractions are part of the VR experience. Maybe we'll call it AR.

[bpicolo]

What about the barrier of 1:1 interaction being important? Certainly schools only scale so far on that front.

And probably kids aren't going to just be left home alone all day. That's a very big logistics problem on a country-wide scale.

[goatlover]

So when the parents go off to work, they just leave their kids at home alone to don their VR headsets? Which naturally kids will use to learn and not play games or watch movies.

[6stringmerc]

VR is the Virtual Boy all over again until the physiological hostilities of humans to reject the thing after 30 minutes can be mollified with 80% applicability to the population at large. From what I gather, only about 10% of the population can stand being in a VR environment between 15-30 minutes, and even then have to break.

Very limiting in use-case scenarios for "grand worlds" if you have to pause every 15 or 30 minutes to not puke and/or go cross eyed.

[drzaiusapelord]

> From what I gather, only about 10% of the population can stand being in a VR environment between 15-30 minutes, and even then have to break.

I get intense motion sickness normally but can spend an hour or two in VR just fine. 90fps and teleport mechanics go a long way towards comfort. Considering there are almost 1m owners of Vives, PSVR's and Rifts combined I seriously doubt there was a 90% return rate here.

[Doxin]

> only about 10% of the population can stand being in a VR environment between 15-30 minutes, and even then have to break.

From my personal experience it's much much higher than 10%. Just about no one who has tried my vive reported motion sickness at any length of time. Something I do commonly hear from people who have just used vr for the first time is that for a brief period after the real world seems to take on a surreal quality, but as far as I can tell that effect stops happening fairly quickly with experience.

It's quite possible that "vr-sickness" is something you get over with more experience, like how most children grow out of car sickness. In any case there's a whole bag of tricks to help with vr-sickness that haven't been commonly applied at all yet (virtual noses anyone?). The field is in its infancy and it's unfair to judge it's future by fairly small and solvable problems that only exist right now.

[tluyben2]

Could be; I can play for many hours and I love it. I see what is great about it. Are there any non anecdotal sources for this by the way; anecdotally, non of my friends have that issue. With the Virtual Boy (I have a few of them in working condition) I definitely feel bad.

With the PSVR or the Oculus no problems at all. The helmets can get annoyingly heavy after long play but besides that...

[swah]

> only about 10% of the population

Isn't that due to the latency of the current generation VR? I think I remember Carmack tweeting something similar to that...

[return0]

> You can plug into Second Life or High Fidelity with a VR headset, but few people do.

Which was disappointing to me, because among the crowds in SL/opensim/highfidelity there are many creators and early adopters.

[Animats]

Crowds? High Fidelity? Where? I've tried it, and it's mostly empty.

High Fidelity may have made the mistake of bringing up their world empty. They should have used a terrain generator and SpeedTree to fill the world with virgin, natural terrain. Then let people buy real estate, clear it, and develop.

This would also impel people to do good graphical work. SpeedTree builds a good-looking nature. It would encourage people to try to do as well with what they build.

[return0]

Only SL has some crowd. Highfidelity has some good architectural ideas, but development is moving so slowly. They deliberately chose empty regions, though i think they will eventually have to add extensive in-world building controls to make building more fun.

[DanBC]

> Where's the killer app for VR?

Treatment of mental illness, for example PTSD or vertigo.

[return0]

It's also used for strabismus (https://www.diplopiagame.com/)

But i don't think any of these are killer apps, these are very niche demographics.