| Have... have you actually tried it? Have you actually been "inside" a good demo? You stop thinking about things in terms of looking at a screen. You start thinking about things in terms of it surrounding you. If you have and you didn't get that feeling, that's fine. The tech is still pretty primitive and some people are more readily able to accept it than others (there's a good bit of research recently that shows there is even a hormonal influence). But it's not just a graphics gimmick. It's really a completely different way of thinking about applications. To me, it literally feels like I'm wearing the program. Not the display. The program. Once exploited properly (and I admit, we're fairly far away from that), we will be doing things in it that will make 2D, external displays too unbearably difficult to use. I mean, at the very least, we're going to see a sea-change in how 3D content is authored. It's going to massively drive down the cost of creating high-quality 3D models. It's going to make it more accessible, which means it's going to be used more often for things other than just games. I personally think stereo displays and hand-tracking are a necessary developments to enable in-the-home 3D printing. 3D modeling on a 2D display is too hard for most people to do for even trivial tasks. But we will eventually see a decent modeling program created for an HMD. SketchUp was close, this is going to push it over the edge by making the manipulations far more intuitive. The closest analogy I have is the difference of going from a text-based adventure interface to a 3D, first-person RPG interface. This is the next step after that. I've gone back and played Skyrim in the Oculus Rift, a game I've spent countless hours in, and been re-amazed at the chance to see such familiar places in literally a whole new way. Minecraft-style graphics on an HMD feel more real, feel more like being there, than Crysis 2 on the highest settings on an 2D display, more real than watching an IMAX 3D movie. Having experienced a few "tourism" apps, the feeling is closer on the spectrum of reality to that of being there than that of watching it on TV. And that was a year ago on a Google Cardboard. It's only getting better, and it's getting better very quickly. That's what we're dealing with. |