Virtual Reality

[MartyG]

I think it can work in some environments, but for the vast majority, I'd say not. Especially not at that price and because you're not going to get people to wear big clunking headsets for long periods.

AR where headsets are like glasses, helping with things like identifying parts for fitters, bringing up instruction lists, and checklists, and identifying hazards, and pathways - that sort of thing, very much so.

[Dogg Thang]

AR where headsets are like glasses, helping with things like identifying parts for fitters, bringing up instruction lists, and checklists, and identifying hazards, and pathways - that sort of thing, very much so.

Yes, I agree with this. But I also don't think they are mutually exclusive. I'm not saying VR is needed for most work. It's not. But I can see it being very useful in many ways for many jobs. Certainly in my work, a creative business, I could see it being wonderful for reviews and meetings with presentations and notes and draw-overs, head and shoulders above a video call with screen sharing.

[MartyG]

I'm saying one has a much stronger business case for getting the funding for it over the other.

[QualityChimp]

I keep trying to think of VR in the workplace, but I just keep going back to Disclosure where Michael Douglas is using VR to access all the files he's been restricted from IRL by Demi Moore, who is framing him for incompetence or summat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disclosure_(1994_film)#Plot

[wakka]

As with all things Metaverse, VR and AR, I think we are still a good twenty years off the technology being useful enough to truly embed into daily life. I've said this before, but to compare to smartphones/PDAs, current VR headsets are like an Apple Newton, when it needs to be an iPhone before it'll really become useful.

[Dogg Thang]

As with all things Metaverse, VR and AR, I think we are still a good twenty years off the technology being useful enough to truly embed into daily life. I've said this before, but to compare to smartphones/PDAs, current VR headsets are like an Apple Newton, when it needs to be an iPhone before it'll really become useful.

Yes, I think you're right. And I also completely understand the desire for a company to be in there right at the start. The infrastructures that dominate, even if that takes 20 years, could be huge. And in all likelihood the companies that will come out on top probably don't even exist yet. But it makes sense for some companies to be exploring this and pushing into this even now, in my opinion.

[wakka]

100%. We would never have gotten to the iPhone without products like the Newton, Handspring etc that did the foundational work.

[Asura]

100%. We would never have gotten to the iPhone without products like the Newton, Handspring etc that did the foundational work.

Yeah, I've seen a lot of people online suggesting something similar - that the present VR landscape does have a similar feel to back in the 00s, when we had Handsprings, Palm Pilots, XDA's, Psion etc. who were seemingly all chasing something that didn't exist, but everyone in tech kinda had this blurry vision of it.

[wakka]

Yeah, I think it's easy to deride the idea now of VR/AR becoming a mainstream part of our everyday interaction with the world. The idea of starting your work day by clamping a current VR headset onto your head and launching into a clunky PlayStation Home style office space seems pretty ludicrous.

But it's kind of like telling someone that one day everyone in the world is going to own a Psion and use it for all their correspondence, banking, as their newspaper, etc. People would've been like, boy, wouldn't like to see the bill for that! Or commented on the battery life, the slow performance, the poor quality screens, clunkiness of the software, difficulty of typing, unpocketable size of the device, etc etc.

At the same time there are technologies that never reach their purported potential. The dream of the 3DO Company was 'One in every home', but as we all know the 90s hype about 'multimedia' never really came to fruition.

I think we have a long way to go to find where VR/AR fits in every day life, where it can actually make things easier and better. I think there will be ways we will use it eventually that will seem totally obvious in hindsight but which we can't currently foresee. Equally I think there are much-touted uses now that will fall by the wayside and never really take off.

[MartyG]

For some like this to realistically work, it needs a wearable you don't know you're wearing, and for virtual objects to have weight and physicality - if you've tried those painting packages, or writing on a virtual whiteboard, or just lifting stuff and holding it out in front of you - it's tiring and awkward and feels wrong. And you need space so you're not knocking stuff around in your physical environment if you're holding and using virtual stuff.

I think this is more than the 12-year gap between Newton and iPhone away - we're not close to the miniaturisation needed, and the physicality side of things is decades and decades away.

[Dogg Thang]

for virtual objects to have weight and physicality - if you've tried those painting packages, or writing on a virtual whiteboard, or just lifting stuff and holding it out in front of you - it's tiring and awkward and feels wrong..

People are already doing what you're describing with no problem. This really reads as "it's different and therefore can't work". And I hear the same stuff I heard about drawing on an iPad compared with paper and yet now probably the majority of artists draw and paint on an iPad. It's not the same, sure. That doesn't mean it won't happen.

[wakka]

Agreed that we are a long way off the technology. Oculus Pro is just a bells and whistles Quest, for example.

The physicality point is interesting though. I'm not sure if we do necessarily need that. At the moment we are obviously held back by the technology in this regard. Wielding these great big wands is basically incredibly rudimentary still. But I think we are also held back by the urge to make our interaction with the VR world ape our interaction with the real world. More sophisticated interaction systems might allow us to write on a whiteboard in VR much more easily and quickly than we can in the real world, since we're unencumbered by the reality of physics, and it might eliminate the need for a sense of weight or physicality.

I think it's possible we will be able to use subtle, low energy finger movements, for example, to manipulate things in VR spaces, or which are AR objects we are seeing within the real world.

I'm confident that people would be able to learn those kinds of interaction paradigms quickly once there is an obvious utility to them and the user experience is refined (we all became experts at typing 50wpm on a tiny piece of glass pretty quickly, for example).

[MartyG]

People are already doing what you're describing with no problem. This really reads as "it's different and therefore can't work". And I hear the same stuff I heard about drawing on an iPad compared with paper and yet now probably the majority of artists draw and paint on an iPad. It's not the same, sure. That doesn't mean it won't happen.

It's not the same thing - drawing on a graphics tablet is a direct physical digital equivalent - you're holding nothing and interacting with air in VR. If you can have a VR system where it feels like you're holding a pen or a brush or a 10KG weight, that has a physical resistance when using it, that is where it needs to get to.

That's something that I believe can be done if we can understand how to manipulate the right fields - but stepping away from that fantasy, if you want mass adoption, it has to be the same level of ease of use as a smartphone. We are a long way from that at this point. And, yes, whilst you can use hand gestures to do manipulation in VR I'd agree, I've done it - it's a huge compromise currently. Those virtual drum kits are terrible as is that virtual piano.

Probably better for Meta to be throwing all the money into this and for someone more socially responsible to come along later when the tech is viable to provide the services

[wakka]

When you say 'manipulate the right fields', what does that mean?

Sorry if a dumb question, lol.

[MartyG]

You'd want to be able to manipulate local gravity ideally