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The door to mass-market virtual reality is about to burst open. Engineers have solved most of the hardware challenges, driven down the price to just a few hundred dollars, done extensive testing, and gotten software tools into the hands of creative developers. Store shelves will soon be teeming with head-mounted displays and hand controllers that can paint dazzling virtual worlds. And then the first wave of VR immigrants will colonize them.
You might think the first adopters will be gamers, but you'd be wrong. The killer app for virtual reality will more likely be something to enhance ordinary social experiences—conversations with your loved ones, a business meeting, a college class—but carried out with a far richer connection than you could establish by texting or talking or Skyping.
Jeremy Bailenson, founder of Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, and his coauthors predicted in these pages in 2011 that such "social VR" was on the horizon. "Current social networking and other online sites," they wrote, "are just precursors of what we'll see when social networking encompasses immersive virtual-reality technology. When people interact with others for substantial periods of time, much as they do now on Facebook but with fully tracked and rendered avatars, entirely new forms of social interaction will emerge." With the variety of head-mounted displays—including the Oculus Rift, Sony's PlayStation VR, and the HTC Vive—going on sale later this year, that future is now here.
Prediction: hacking avatars to get through long meetings will become a "thing."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 26 2015, @02:47AM
> [...] fully tracked and rendered avatars [...]
This is key and I'm not sure how much focus this aspect is getting yet.
The key difference between traditional online social venues and VR is the immersive dynamics of in-person expressiveness.
Without the avatar conveying facial expressions and body mannerisms then there's no point to pretending to be hanging out as if in person.
Unfortunately, it would seem VR goggles get a bit in the way of cameras and optical facial tracking.
On the other hand, they offer a perfect place to add some myographic+eeg sensors that might be able to pick up sufficient data?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Zinho on Saturday December 26 2015, @04:16AM
+0 agree :)
I just got around to reading Snow Crash, and I'm amazed at how much it still seems fresh and predictive after all this time (published in 1992)! Stephenson makes a big deal about the difference in experience between a good social avatar and a bad one, pointing out that "flat" avatars (incapable of rendering the person's expressions) are jarring and break the immersion of the experience.
This article seems to be saying that all Second Life needs in order to be the Next Big Thing (TM) is a VR headset. I don't see it happening, and your point is one of the big reasons why. A forest of flat faces & flying phalluses doesn't grow flowers because you've got an Oculus Rift fused to your face.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin