[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.

[dale_glass]

> The kids really loved Beat Saber, but they played it by sitting on the couch, staring straight ahead, and twitching their wrists.

That's completely missing the point of it. If you're not swinging your arms around like a maniac and aren't lying in a puddle of sweat after a few songs, you're not really doing it right. Also, Beat Saber penalizes you for such minimal movement.

> 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.

Immersion to me is not addiction, it's immersion. Feeling like you're inside the game, for however long that happens to be.