[wpietri]

Back in October, when Facebook made a lot of "metaverse" noise, I wrote a thread looking at the history of stereoscopic 3D from the 1850s to the present as a way of explaining why I think facehugger VR is going nowhere. Somebody turned up to complain that going back to the Civil War era wasn't sufficiently big picture for him:

"You need a long view. All the serious players are still in the Mercury phase. The Gemini and Apollo phases of XR are coming this decade and into the 2030s. An $800b company will likely spend $100b+ getting there. You need a wide aperture to understand what is going on."

https://twitter.com/williampietri/status/1454135053697519619

What I didn't realize until later was that the rando reply came from no less a presence than Rony Abovitz, Magic Leap's exiled founder, who apparently now spends his time vanity searching for "Magic Leap" so he can reenact XKCD 386. There are many things I find jaw-dropping about his views, but my biggest question is: Why did he raise and burn $3.5 billion dollars if that's only 3.5% of the cost of "getting there"?

Which is a roundabout way of saying I think kguttag is right when he says, "ML2 looks like a product designed for the consumer market, but it was seen that it would be far too expensive for that market, it was recast as an 'enterprise' device." To me it's a not-great solution desperately looking for a problem.

[nwatson]

The same Abovitz that did this abomination of a TEDx talk ... https://youtu.be/w8J5BWL8oJY

[wpietri]

What, and I mean this sincerely, the fuck?

I have been to a bunch of experimental theater over the years, so I was prepared to accept the initial setup. But he didn't pull it together at all!

[DonHopkins]

Frank Zappa wrote a song about the Magic Leap investors:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_WgCGOWae4

https://www.google.com/search?q=cocaine+decisions+lyrics&oq=...

[stickfigure]

I wonder if he's singing about what he named his kids.

Man the 70s were special.

[DonHopkins]

The only drugs Frank Zappa did were nicotine and caffeine.

[disambiguation]

omg I'm in tears, its like a low budget David Lynch skit

[rl3]

2001: A Waste Odyssey

[l33tman]

I just love the youtube comments on this. They were satirical even just after the talk posted.

"This crazy art form corresponds to the crazy significance MAgic Leaps technology will have on mankind. IT IS THE NEXT BIG THING WE HAVE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR."

...

[mdoms]

What the fuck was that?

[nikanj]

The kind of person who can raise $3.5 billion without a working prototype, let alone any products or revenue

This iteration of IT bubble is particularly into charismatic founders.

[smoldesu]

> Which is a roundabout way of saying I think kguttag is right when he says, "ML2 looks like a product designed for the consumer market, but it was seen that it would be far too expensive for that market, it was recast as an 'enterprise' device." To me it's a not-great solution desperately looking for a problem.

Microsoft did the same thing with Hololens. First it was supposed to be an entertainment device for the home, where you could enjoy interactive experiences and mess with little Minecraft models on your coffee table. Well, that didn't pan out. Next they made a bid for the creative professional market, who might get a kick out of being able to manipulate 3D models in realtime through a headset. Oops, you can do this with a $300 Oculus Quest and a free Blender plugin. Okay, how about the enterprise market? They've got much deeper pockets, and we can just toss together a few productivity apps to make it seem attrac... what do you mean they don't want it?

Fine, we'll take it to the one place that will burn money on a nothingburger no matter the cost. We could bring these people a gilded pile of scrap metal and they'd pay 10x market price. There's only one customer that meets this criteria: the United States military!

[fuzzfactor]

Rony sez: "You need a long view. All the serious players are still in the Mercury phase. The Gemini and Apollo phases of XR are coming this decade and into the 2030s. An $800b company will likely spend $100b+ getting there. You need a wide aperture to understand what is going on."

He should know, he went to Nova and he's been as deeply familiar financially in this exact effort as anyone for 10 years.

But from 1850 to 2020 that's 170 years so it looks like about the year 2190 would be the lower end of a not-big-enough-picture. That does make the offhand estimate of 2030 look a little optimistic. But optimism is the name of the game. You don't go into this if you thought it would take that much more than a lifetime. That's just the kind of thing you find out later. Sometimes later than others.

Looks like in "today's dollars" the Gemini program was over $10 Billion and Apollo over $200 Billion. Plus it took about a dozen years to spend it, seems like a long time to get to the moon but by comparison you could say sheesh NASA went through that money fast. And what do they have to show for it?

You do need a long view. Nothing happens overnight.

So I guess $100 Billion for the total AR dream would be a good deal since it would only get you halfway to the moon anyway. Wouldn't buy much else either, at today's prices.

>Why did he raise and burn $3.5 billion dollars if that's only 3.5% of the cost of "getting there"?

Do you really want my answer? Well if you did I could probably come up with something . . .

[samplatt]

Quick link to XKCD 386, for others - https://xkcd.com/386/

[dale_glass]

Read your thread, but I don't think you have quite the right idea.

There's certainly a long history of static 3D imaging with photography and then movies. But that's not all that related to the modern tech started by the Oculus Rift. Yeah, 3D doesn't make photography or movies fundamentally different for the most part, because with some rare exceptions we already can fill in the blanks.

Consumer VR itself is a pretty new development and does introduce new things to the table that weren't there during the civil war and whatnot. Eg, things like Robo Recall and Beatsaber have gameplay that just doesn't work without VR. You could sort of try with something like the Kinect or the Wii I guess, but it'd be much more awkward and clunkier.

And some tech indeed takes a while to develop. Mobile telephony is a tech more than a a century old, if you could the very oldest prototypes. Analog, consumer mobile phones first appeared in the 80s, 42 years ago. The first smartphone is from 1993, and the first iPhone was released in 2007. I'd say at this point a smartphone morphed into something completely different, to the point that it's really a very portable computer that sometimes happens to make calls.

The Rift CV1 is from 2015, so that's pretty recent. And it takes an amazing amount of high end tech to make a headset work, so I do expect there's still lots and lots of room for development.

Now on the Magic Leap, I don't know if that's going to go anywhere or not. The company itself, probably not. But unless there's no way whatsoever to make it usable, I think somebody will eventually come up with an affordable and useful version.

[wpietri]

Sorry, but I'm not persuaded. Does some tech take a while to develop? Sure. But some tech never develops. If you're only including happy-path examples, that's a biased sample. If you're trying to do analysis and not propaganda, you have to look at both routes and see what the differentiators are.

If you want to suggest this time it's different, you have to explain why it's different. My point is pretty simple: Stereoscopic 3D is an attractive nuisance. There are many times historically people have confused its admitted novelty value with actual utility. There is every reason to think this is one of those times.

Facehugger VR is a marriage of two concepts: 3D virtual worlds and stereoscopic imaging. There is lots of proof that the first is hotly desired; anybody who has tried to pry a kid away from Minecraft or Roblox knows that, and I was the same way with Doom and Quake. But there is very little evidence that stereoscopic 3D has more than novelty value. And there's 150 years of evidence that people, even very smart people, confuse that novelty value with something that will last.

[dale_glass]

> If you're trying to do analysis and not propaganda, you have to look at both routes and see what the differentiators are.

Well, the thing I see immediately is that you're not really doing an accurate analysis. Stereoscopic 3D from a fixed point of view is indeed an old concept, and definitely not enough. But we've moved well beyond that already.

I think the actual value proposition is immersive stereoscopic 3D + good in-world body-based controls. That changes things in a way something like a 3D TV can't.

Eg, for games, you can't really get more immersive than acting out your character's movements yourself. Something like Superhot lets you do Matrix-like moves in VR that just nothing else does. You can find games with slow-mo like Max Payne, but they don't make non-VR games in which you can actively move your head out of the path of a bullet and have that work naturally.

Or something like Racket NX is a very real workout that works very naturally.

The downside of course is that the tech has considerable limits and constraints that will still take time figuring out. Normal computer games worked out their mechanics over decades, so if you go back far enough to something like Dune 2, it feels very clunky.

On a longer term, I'm hoping for the day I can replace my monitors with a VR helmet and just display anything I need anywhere in an arbitrary position and amount. One can't ever have enough terminal windows.

[wpietri]

I again don't think you're grappling with my point. There are certainly differences between each of the 5+ waves of excitement over stereoscopic 3D. Each time people argued that really, those differences made the difference. And each time they were wrong, because they personally found the idea exciting. Instead of addressing the pattern seriously, to me it seems like you are repeating it.

[dale_glass]

But it's not about just stereoscopic 3D, I'm saying. That's old. Immersion is what is new. Eg, take this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1wStc0m86M

That's a VR specific experience. You're not just clicking a mouse button and watching a soldier die, you're sticking your sword in their eye socket with your own arm. Even though that game is lacking polish still, the experience of doing that is unsettling in ways that no PC game is. Because it's really you doing that, without any abstraction over it.

[wpietri]

I agreed previously there are differences. And clearly these are differences you find intellectually exciting.

But that was true about previous generations. 3D TV was going to bring the experience right into the home! It was a game-changer! Not just movies! Not just TV shows! But live events like sports, where 3D perception would make a big difference!

And still, it sank like a stone.

There have been VR-specific experiences since the 1990s. I have tried many of them. They are neat! But take Superhot and Beat Saber, two "only in VR examples". I rented a Quest and they were indeed cool. But Superhot sold more non-VR copies, so obviously the experience works well enough without VR. The kids really loved Beat Saber, but they played it by sitting on the couch, staring straight ahead, and twitching their wrists. And when they got tired of having a sweaty, heavy thing on their head, they went back to their Switches and the PS4. When I sent the Quest back, they never even noticed. Whereas if I'd gotten rid of the PS4, it would have been armageddon around here.

The truth is that existing games are already very immersive. Getting the kids out of Minecraft or Roblox or Horizon takes a crowbar. if you want do demonstrate that this new technology is truly more immersive, you'll have to show not just that you think it's cool, but that a mass audience actively prefers it and won't go back.

That has certainly happened with entertainment technologies in the past. Look at color film and later color TV: people were willing to pay up, and the new tech almost entirely drove out the old in short order. Compare that with 3D movies and 3D TV: people care at best a little.

So far, everything I see suggests that facehugger VR is the latter category. If you have data otherwise, I look forward to it.

[jayd16]

I don't know. I would say the historic trend is computing becomes more and more ubiquitous. Truly ubiquitous computing would need an always available display and AR wearables seems like the solution there.

"Its too expensive right now" isn't really a damming argument, is it?

[wpietri]

The thing with trends is that they all end eventually. At the start of the automobile era, cars were quite slow, and they got faster over time. If we just draw out the dotted-line trend, we'd all be driving around at supersonic speeds.

It's true that computing has become more and more ubiquitous in recent decades. Will that continue? We'll see. Will it continue with VR and AR? Maybe, maybe not. Your approach to this is fine for asking "Is this SF short story plausible?" But it's not at all sufficient to justify billions of dollars in spending.