Reg man straps on Facebook's new VR goggles, feels sullied by the experience Facebook today announced the availability of the Oculus Go, a US$199 virtual reality headset it revealed in October 2017. I had the chance to play around with the headset for a few minutes in the press room at the company's F8 conference on Tuesday, to get a sense of the device ahead of a proper assessment. My first impression …
That sort of activity has been around a long time. It's different when all you have is text - one-handed typing is a problem - but two people interacting doesn't depend on VR.
The one-handed typing problem might be why they only give you one controller.
They had pairs of hand controllers working with the PS3, and the PS4 has a headset as well, hardly surprising since the Oculus Rift project started out in 2012. Oculus might do some things better but it's the apps it has which will matter more.
I think I shall stick to text.
Is it just the old cynic in me..
No, not at all. I suspect that the sole purpose of the new goggles is that they can now grab your retina information as well as you and your family's entire online social media history,
I am afraid that reality is getting far to close to Charlie Brooker's programme ideas for my liking.
In the same way that daydreamVR samsungVR and other cheapo solutions aren't really VR either.
All this will achieve is to turn people off from VR, as they assume it's representative of real VR (Playstation VR, Vive, full ocolus).
It's like vowing never to buy an audi R8, as you had a ride in a Seat Ibiza once and it was rubbish...
To make matters worse, the price of this is like £50 less than a proper VR - PSVR (ok, I get you need a PS4, but with 80m sold, the likelihood is that you will)
I'd modify that slightly...
It's like vowing to never buy an Audi R8 because you once went in a Audi R3 and the dealer promised you it was the most fun you could have in a car but at the fraction of the price.
The point is that in both markets, the expensive option is great, but the marketing droids can't bring themselves to describe the cheaper version in any less superlative terms.
VR in general has always been something I don't care about and don't really believe in. For the past three decades, I have walked the graphics card treadmill powered by the late 3Dfx, AMD and Nvidia. I have gone from Voodoo 2 to GeForce GTX 980 Ti, passing through a slew of GeForce cards, Radeon 9800 and HD 5870.
I have witnessed screen sizes go from 14" to 19" CRTs, then TFT from 19" to 28" widescreen. Pixel amounts have gone from 1024 x 768 native, to the monster I have now at 3840 x 2160. I have seen game visuals go from pixellated 3D wireframe to full, lush real-time images that are today better than the game cutscenes we had twenty years ago.
And out comes VR, apparently with the same graphics quality we had twenty years ago, the same in-world limitations of a Super Nintendo, and I'm supposed to forget that because I'm "in" the world ?
When I play Minecraft I'm "in" the world as well. When I play 7 Days you can bet your bum I'm in the world, and ears alert to hear the zombies sneaking up behind me.
VR gives me nothing I don't have already and having a sore neck is not worth the feeble world it offers. The day 7 Days runs in VR in the same resolution and level of realism, then call me. I might give it a try.
Indeed. Just another example of the tech sector developing and touting what it thinks is a fab idea, without actually considering whether there is the potential to make a properly working product, and whether there's a substantial market willing to pay.
Because of the disconnect between the body's physical senses and any VR environment, I'm not sure VR will ever work to an acceptable degree, no matter how lush the graphics, smooth the interface, and easy to use the equipment. If, one day, technology can manipulate our senses with the sensation of movement, or heat and cold, or smells, touch and even pain, then maybe by then the interface, physics and graphics will give us something interesting. I'll suggest we call that system "Better Than Life", and should expect it to be available for general release around the year 2350.
One thing to remember is that e.g. for 3D displays, different people vary significantly in terms of how satisfactory they find them; and I presume that the same holds for VR. Even if, for example, only a few percent of people find VR technology useful (or tolerable), that may still be enough numbers for it to become a viable market. I'm not sure I'll be buying into it, but my preference is not likely to be terribly indicative of the wider situation.
"1903: Kitty Hawk, 1909: Bleriot crosses Channel
Just another example of engineers doing something that won't ever have practical applications."
Sometimes it's worth thinking in terms of potential, esp when there are no obvious theoretical barriers to something improving. The 20th century has had a long run of quick progress from ho-hum beginnings (general AI and fusion being exceptions).
I have yet to even try a VR headset, but mostly because none of the games - and I am a gamer - feel like they'd be more than gimmicks.
My interest would actually be more in data representation/coding/visualisation. Neuromancer, not Ready Player One.
No obligation to cheer Oculus Go. But moving on to dismiss the whole technology's potential seems rather premature.
Up in the loft last night, I came across a first edition book by Arthur C Clarke - The Exploration of the Moon.
In another box, I found a special edition of Life Magazine - "To the moon and back" which was about Apollo 11
The time between these publications was only 15 years...
"I don't care"... "VR gives me nothing"... "same graphics quality we had twenty years ago"
It's true it's a bit over-hyped and early days. But for certain games VR is a game-changer. Having played Elite Dangerous in VR there is no turning back for me (and with a good card the graphics are dialed down one notch at most).
I hope it can stick around despite a lack of mass-market appeal for long enough to get there.
This is coming at the expense of firms core products! Example: Take high quality game engine tech or Fortnite / Unreal Engine, as its flavor of the month. If you go to Epic's forums and follow threads for a while, there are 100's of outstanding mid to high-priority bugs. Then there's 1000's of wishlist threads going unanswered as well.
Yet even CEO Tim Sweeney says VR/AR has to go through at least 2 or more evolutionary leaps and is 1-2 decades away from more mainstream adoption. So is this obsession with VR/AR today some kind of Zombie Virus??? Is it going to subside anytime soon.... In short, its not just Facebook. Oh well, Sillycon Valley and all that...
http://www.rollingstone.com/glixel/interviews/epics-tim-sweeney-on-vr-and-the-future-of-civilization-w459561
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/292573/For_Tim_Sweeney_advancing_Epic_means_racing_into_AR_and_VR.php
https://venturebeat.com/2017/08/30/game-boss-interview-epics-tim-sweeney-on-blockchain-digital-humans-and-fortnite/view-all/
Ten to twenty years from mainstream adoption... that's such a long time frame that I feel that maybe some nuance has been lost from Mr Sweeny's context. Did he mean mainstream like a PlayStation ( common enough) or mainstream like a smartphone (near ubiquitous)? Many of the technological pieces are around two years away and are being developed for other applications (such as Micro LED displays, light-based WiFi etc)
Anyway, outside of Silicon Valley here in my part of England, there's some gentle but genuine interest in VR from some of the people who already have games consoles... a gentle interest in a 'wait and see' kind of a way. And just the other night I tried a Google Cardboard demo with a non-gamer (other than Scrabble in her iPhone) and she enjoyed it - in a way that I've seen the Nintendo Wii be fun in mixed company.
Tl;dr: Some hype, not purely hype.
Hehe, you supplied the links before I asked for them, cheers AC!
Right oh, to clarify then, Sweeney by 'mainstream' is talking about everyone having a lightweight pair of VR glasses powered by a smartphone-sized brick in their pocket of roughly equivilent power to today's PC desktop, and a dozen years is how he's extrapolating Moore's Law to have that happen within reasonable power restraints.
That's essentially the level of VR tech in the Charles Stross novel "Halting State", more focused on overlays on the real world, though the bank robbery by a band of orcs with a dragon is wholly in VR. I enjoyed the book, and it's about the people, more than the technology.
V2 will have eye tracking so they can charge extra for the ads you watch and also profile you. V5 will have mind reading/writing as standard. V12 will be an implant from birth. V13 will be a replacement for V12 as that turned nearly everyone into zombies who did nothing but check social media all day long and share weather forecasts, their dietary habits and stoked their own egos with inane posts. Wait, are we sure we aren't already here?
Call me when sensor gloves allow you to manipulate any represented object with your hands and receive the appropriate haptic feedback to simulate the sense of touch.
Ring. Ring. Hi Reg. This is AC here. If you get Gloveone/ Avatar VR and Leap Motion, you can manipulate of VR object with your hands with haptic feedback. Here's a pdf with the details.
After the terror tunnel of multicolored marketing hype, Dave Bowman finally arrives in the Hotel Suite of VR. It's not all what it was meant to be, and soon he feels old and confused and dizzy. Finally lying down for a nap, his most earnest whish is to return to 2-D land of the black monolith. Having done so, he feels reborn.
THE END!
I have a gear vr but the first time I tried it, it cracked the tempered glass protector on my screen. Finally got round to replacing the protector so the gear is going on the shelf till I don't need my S6 anymore and it can live in there. I'd like to know if you can side load your own content and watch it (for the stuff Netflix doesn't have or the holiday snaps and movies). Netflix was my main use, tried minecraft which was good but graphics were notable worse than my xbox one and it would over heat after about 30 mins.
Since you've used the Rift how about a paragraph on the difference in optics and resolution, SDE and godrays, is it $200 better? You talk about the weight, I'm guessing (since you neglected to say) it was heavier than its sibling, the Rift. Watching Netflix / 3D films at imax size with HD resolution or still suffering from pixel envy*?
What about the inbuilt sound, good or bad, 3D positional or stereo? FOV? Comfort?
* Guessing you couldn't answer that with the brief chance you got to play it.
@Tony Paulazzo: The Rift suffers from underwhelming resolution. I've only spent a 15 - 20 minutes in a Rift environment, but I kept getting distracted by the pixels. Reality doesn't appear pixellated, even though its mediated via discrete rod and cone cells. Current technology just can't provide visual VR, let alone tactile, kinetic, olfactory, etc. VR.
Taking on board the comment about tactile feedback, which seems pretty reasonable. Noting also the hype for 3D TV and (as far as I know) still virtually bugger all content and the latest TVs not even bothering.
What application would encourage me to buy a setup? Let us assume that I can get the whole setup including gloves for under £100. Accept that I am not a gamer and unlikely to be in the future.
I spend some time shopping on line for shiny and essentials. I would be interested in being able to pick up and handle objects instead of just looking at photos. I would also be interested in VR tours of houses for sale. There was a brief trend for virtual tours (that is, a video instead of still photographs) but I haven't seen any recently. I would love a VR version of Google Street View with intuitive controls. I could even see a VR version of, say, an OS map which translates contours into 3D rendering so you can match it to the real world around you; that would be really cool if you could use a camera and 3D goggles to synchronise the map with the real world to confirm your exact position.
All of this, of course, relies on content providers investing in the tools to build the VR environment. Unless these tools are very cheap then the content will not be there. Without the content the users won't buy the kit. Catch22 again.
There is a final proviso; the VR has to work without inducing nausea. This may rule it out for me anyway because I can't watch a 3D film without developing massive motion sickness as my eyes argue with my inner ear. Perhaps this is one reason 3D TV never really took off?
"I would love a VR version of Google Street View with intuitive controls."
Googles Street View app works fine in Google Daydream.
I've been working on rendering OpenStreetMap in an OpenSim based virtual world, and also on adding VR abilities to an OpenSim viewer. You feed in latitude and longitude, it renders that part of the world. Wouldn't be hard to feed it your current GPS coordinates.
@onefang: Pray do tell more! I've always dreamed about looking at all the streets (and buildings...) I mapped in glorious 1st person 3D (maybe VR, if I can get it to run on a phone - hey, I'm cheap!) instead of the best-case aerial 2.5D online renders... Kendzi3D is not for loading a city into after all.
"@onefang: Pray do tell more!"
Well, since you asked...
I had long been involved in Second Life / OpenSim. The Second Life viewer was open sourced long ago, and as is typical with crap code, lots of people forked it. The Second Life server was never open sourced, so some people wrote a clean room implementation of the server called OpenSim, which is open source. Almost as crap, and people have forked it. Some company hired me to work on their custom viewer. Some other company hired me as their long term viewer developer, and I also helped run their OpenSim based grid.
With that experience under my belt, yet another company eventually hired me to add Oculus Rift support to their custom OpenSim viewer. This was before Oculus Rift was released to consumers, so I bought a Rift DK2 and ported the Rift code from the CtlAltStudio viewer to this companies custom viewer, which I recall was largely based on the Imprudence viewer. I understand at a trade show Angela Merkel submitted to the experience of my VR code and didn't throw up.
Someone wrote a viewer for Android, which I believe now supports Google Cardboard or Daydream, I've not tried it.
Finally we get to the interesting bit. The local city councilor, being the only person I had ever voted for that actually won, got into a discussion with me at a protest he had organised. I mentioned the above things to him, or some of them. He often uses Google Street View to show people various things around his ward, especially planned changes. He was interested in taking this to the third dimension, and adding his own stuff. So I dragged my Oculus Rift development system to his office, gave them a demo, and we made plans. I was part way through a from the ground up rewrite of Imprudence viewer and OpenSim, since the original code bases are pure unadulterated crap, but that project was no where near ready for this job. He would have preferred a web based option, but there was no mature open source solution for that. So we could wait a few years for the code to be ready, or go with stuff that works now. Who knows, in a few years time he may no longer be a city councilor, so we went with the later option.
So the plan was to use various bits of data, including OpenStreetMaps, to build an OpenSim based grid that replicates the city ward he is responsible for, and to script various bits of the city so that clicking on them switches between existing city and planned city. Either running a viewer on his laptop, or an Oculus Rift, or the Android viewer on a phone, to show the things he was using Street View for. Also letting people have guest accounts, so they can wander around on their own.
I wrote a Lua script to collect elevation data from here, overhead photos from there, building data from elsewhere, and build a small database of data and textures, to be read by a C# OpenSim module & LSL script I wrote that created that section of our city in his grid. Second Life / OpenSim avatars are generally giants, so I scaled things down to be life sized, and even spent a lot of time walking around the virtual / real city with stop watch / tape measure in hand, to keep it real. Basically you stand in an empty grid, enter longitude / latitude for the part of the world you are interested in, watch as the world grows around you, then go for a wander.
The big problem was the building data. OpenStreetMaps has protocols for including building shapes in it's database, but since it crowd sources its data, we had to rely on the crowd to source the data. No one had added any building data to our part of the world. The councilor wasn't able to find a city council source of that info that I could use. So I have created an OpenSim grid that replicated our local council ward, with accurate elevations, reasonably detailed photos of the ground and building roofs, but no actual buildings. sigh
I should dump this project in my GitHub account some day, and find a part of the world with building data so I can finish it. Alas the councilor is stuck with Google Street View for now.
Ya had to ask, didn't ya.
Well, basic OSM building data is just that, basic - lotsa white cubes, some with height data if you're lucky - and last time I checked true 3D modelling was existent but hella scarce, primitive but fiendishly complex / easy to get horribly wrong and somewhat frowned upon as data being stored in OSM. I've only ever seen f4map.com and osmbuildings.org (screwing up roofs like nobody's business) even trying to make anything of this at all, and no true first person offline render clients (or games). Anyway, thanks for the detailed account...
Remember Battlezone with the 3D wireframe tanks? I used to be quite good at that. I far prefer (real) pinball, but sometimes in a pub you have to take what you can get.
I found a Battlezone app for Android. Instead of on-screen touch controls, you turned your tank by turning yourself and the motion sensors figured out which direction you were facing. It lasted all of 10 seconds before I deleted it. It was about as sensible as operating a flight simulator by flapping your arms like wings. Too much fucking effort. If I wanted exercise I'd walk away from the computer.
There are valid applications for VR, such as modelling cars you can walk around and inspect to help car designers. For most of us, though, it is (and always will be) expensive, useless crap. It's not even a solution seeking a problem, it's a problem seeking a solution.
Wanna *play* Battlezone with the 3D wireframe tanks? Rebellion bought the license and made a Playstation VR version (now on PC also since a while back). It has a Classic Atari Battlezone mode, which can be played either with "modern" strafing hovertank controls or the old tank track controls.
It's pretty sweet, and as of yesterday you can play it flat (non-VR) also.
I mean, there's a web version somewhere if you look for it, but it requires flash, and buying a PSVR rig might be cheaper than what flash could do to your system :-)
Expensive - moderately. Useless - who cares? Fun - absolutely. Sturgeon's law applies as always, but as time goes by there's more and more stuff in the remaining 10%
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