[jmyeet]

The lesson here is that simply wanting something to be true doesn't make it possible or practical. We also tend to get carried away with sci-fi becoming reality.

You see this constantly where people desperately hope for some form of FTL. They want it to be true and cling to fringe theories because of that.

Companies have been trying to make VR happen for decades. It's not going to happen. Not only do people not want to strap something to their head, there are fundamental technical limitations around latency, true blacks, depth-of-field and what input feels "natural".

People just take Snow Crash and Ready Player One too seriously.

AR is kind of the between of that but it has fundamentaly technical problems and constraints like processing power, energy, true blacks and lag. A true AR experience would have to constantly repaint the overlay as you move your head at incredibly low response time to feel "natural".

Lag will be a major factor with AI chatbots for probably some time to come. The processing loop is basically text to language to embedding into AI model and then converting that token stream to spoken language. That takes time. We're such a long way from something that feels "natural" like talking to another person.

[Miraste]

VR has a long way to go on the technical side, but true blacks and latency are both basically solved. Vision Pros have a motion to photon latency of ~12ms, which is unnoticeable, and miniLED and OLED allow for true blacks in plenty of headsets. Depth-of-field hasn't been solved yet, but it is doable. Processing power and battery are limitations, but not critically so.

IMO, none of those things are major factors compared to how insanely clunky current VR headsets are. That's where the real fundamental issues show up-these headsets need to lose ~90% of their weight and size before they'll catch on.

[SaberTail]

My impression is that there are a lot of geeks out there who want the Star Trek holodeck, and they see VR and generative AI as a way to get there. But they ignore all the episodes that explored the ways such a technology could be harmful, socially and psychologically and physically.