Oh This Crazy VR Hype

boing
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I have used my Rift almost entirely for games, but all of this talk about 360 video and movies has go me thinking. How dope would it be to remaster Jingle Cats for 3D?

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Actually, it makes watching a movie more like watching a play.

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Sounds like it’s been mastered by someone with pitiful sound equipment, On real speakers, the bass is muddy and overwhelming,

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…if you’ve got a seat on the middle of the stage and are allowed to walk around it.

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You’ll almost certainly need to upgrade. Here’s the trick, though: do it at the rate you’d normally replace your hardware. Skip this generation of VR hardware entirely. There’s no need to be an early adopter-- if the tech survives long enough to mature (and even though I’m not a big fan, there’s no doubt in my mind that it will, and will find itself a niche), later generations of gear will be better and cheaper, and the software designed for it will be as well. If it doesn’t, just lurk eBay five years hence.

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I thought frame rate was the real killer of VR until now, or was that wrong?

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You are completely correct about the sensible course of action, but VR has been scratching at my brain since I saw John Carmack being interviewed about an Occulus Rift prototype. His enthusiasm was quite contagious.

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Macromyopia: The tendency to overestimate the short term impact of a new technology and underestimate the long-term impact.

VR seems the perfect case of the above. Everyone is trying to fit it into existing models – It’s 360 degree film! It’s immersive video games! – but the reality seems to be that VR is a whole new thing. As with all new technologies, the first apps will be enhanced versions of what we already have. But ultimately no one has any idea what a 360 degree space is going to be most useful for. VR is the first technology that allows you to fully embody the visual space of another person (or animal, or daemon), and for that it’s truly revolutionary. Plus, VR art and sculpting with light, VR surgery training, the ability to visit anyplace on (or off) the earth…

I don’t know where VR will be in 5-10 years but I’d be willing to bet serious cash it’s going to change the world in wholly unexpected ways.

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Is this system part of the NSA

O.N.I.

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I wish I could bet against VR, because I’m absolutely certain it won’t. Not in 5-10 years.

I think we’ll be lucky to see any significant VR impact in 20 years.

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What qualifies as “significant impact”?

Is this the sort of thing people usually ask themselves when buying a monitor? “Is this The Latest Thing?”, “Is using this going to change the world?”. If yes, then that’s fine - you’re just weird. If no, then people are using some remarkable double-standards here.

Such skepticisms indicate that one is still buying into the hype, but only in a negative way. As with most things in life, no reaction is the best reaction.

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OK, let’s use monitors as an example. 20 years ago almost nobody had flatscreen monitors for their desktop computers. Today virtually every computer monitor sold is a flatscreen. So that definitely counts as a “significant impact.”

If VR experiences similar market penetration in the next 20 years then I’d say that will certainly qualify as well.

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What does it matter how many people use them? Market penetration sounds more like a problem of consumerism than technology. If people simply treat it like a tool, then the hype is easily dispensed with. A tool can be quite significant without needing to sell one to everybody. I don’t have any airplanes, antibiotics, or thermal imagers, and don’t know anybody who does, but I don’t use these as bases to decide that they don’t still have an “impact”. The significance is in the applications, what they can do, how they change things - rather than whether or not I want to buy one. I’d say that the same goes for nearly any tech, the hype isn’t really about anything.

Was iTunes any more or less worthy of hype when it was SoundJam, before Apple bought it? It was pretty much the same thing. And neither version addressed my needs anyway. Gurgle Glass has created a lot of hype about wearable computing, but I have had a wearable computers for years - whoopie doo. Much of the problem I have with hype is that there seems to be something classist about it - ie what matters is not what’s being done, but who is doing it. That psychology runs completely contrary to my egalitarian thinking that if people are scientific and evidence-based, then the same procedures will work the same way no matter who does it.

Likewise, I think that there are crucial VR and telepresence technologies and applications - but this was the case a year ago, and also five years ago. This doesn’t change any simply because Oculus, HTC, and Sony have decided to do it. But just because the tech has uses doesn’t mean that it has uses for you. The key to hype is understanding the process of how and why hype happens, not what this particular hype happens to ostensibly be about - and then disentangle the two,

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And now I have to clean partly chewed matzah off my iPhone

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Was that autocorrect? Either way it made me laugh

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No, I just sometimes call them Gurgle. XD

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We were discussing “significant impact.” It’s hard to argue that a consumer technology has a significant impact if there aren’t a significant number of consumers using it.

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Sure, but why frame it as consumerism in the first place? Doesn’t this just categorically create an empty rationalization to explain away why it matters? Is there ever any objective reason why it matters if people buy your wares, besides the fact that you assume that it should? That’s a completely subjective motivation.

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I’m framing it in terms of “significant impact = impacts a significant number of lives.”

It will be much easier to argue that VR has had a significant impact if it becomes “a part of daily life for millions of people” rather than “a fun diversion for a relatively small number of techies.” Whether people buy the things or plug in via communal interface at their local libraries is beside the point.

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OTOH in one of his books, Jaron Lanier points out that VR already has had an impact in vertical uses. Here we are after all talking about consumer stuff