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posted by takyon on Saturday September 17 2016, @01:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the augmented-unreality dept.

What's Popular in Virtual Reality's 3-D World? Netflix and TV.

Companies such as Samsung and Facebook's Oculus promote their virtual-reality headsets by highlighting awe-inspiring 3-D experiences for gaming and virtual travel. But one of the most popular activities among early adopters of the technology is less novel: watching 2-D movies and TV.

"It's been a surprise on the VR circuit because much of the work is driven by people coming from the gaming world, who are fairly dogmatic about what VR means," says Anjney Midha, founder of the San Francisco venture capital fund KPCB Edge. Figuring out what people want to do with headsets is crucial if companies such as Facebook are to make the devices widely popular.

Midha says consumer interest in a new way to view 2-D content shouldn't be surprising given the popularity of watching movies and TV on mobile devices with small screens. A 2-D video viewed using a VR headset can fill your visual field as if you were watching on a giant home cinema screen, even if you're in fact in a cramped dorm room or the middle seat on a budget flight. Virtual-reality apps from Netflix and Hulu even surround their 2-D content with a virtual theater, room, or beach scene to enhance the experience. Flat content is less likely to make you uncomfortable or nauseous, as 3-D content can.

People use the headsets in 3D reality to enter a 3D virtual reality where they can experience a 2D representation of 3D reality.

VR Arrives at Tokyo Game Show, Counted On to Revive Industry

Virtual reality has arrived for real at the Tokyo Game Show, one of the world's biggest exhibitions for the latest in fun and games.

That's evident everywhere. Players at the booths are donning chunky headgear covering their eyes and ears, immersed in their own worlds, shooting imaginary monsters or dancing with virtual partners, at Makuhari Messe hall in the Tokyo suburb of Chiba.

The show, which gave a preview to reporters Thursday ahead of its opening to the public over the weekend, features 614 companies demonstrating more than 1,500 game software titles.

It's still anyone's guess how VR will play out as a business in years ahead. But most everyone agrees that's the way of the future. And Yasuo Takahashi, director at Sony Interactive Entertainment, the game division of Japanese electronics and entertainment giant Sony Corp., believes 2016 will mark VR's debut year, helping revive an industry that has languished with the advent of smart phones.

Is the video game industry in need of reviving?


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Saturday September 17 2016, @03:10PM

    by RamiK (1813) on Saturday September 17 2016, @03:10PM (#403144)

    There's an army of i3wm, vi & emacs users waiting for a light head-set they can use their eyes to move a mouse pointer with:
    1. Look at char.
    2. Press and hold modifier.
    3. Look at another char.
    4. Release to copy.

    All, without lifting your hand off the tenkeyless... And you can browse specs with it much the same way buy binding a few home row keys as mouse binds and switching modes from eye-tracking-with-mouse-binding-and-focus to no-tracking.

    Once the eye tracking gets good enough in the cheap and light models, I'll pick one up and park it at slightly over 160 chars column width. Will bind the edges to switch desktops... Life will be good.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 17 2016, @04:20PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 17 2016, @04:20PM (#403167)

    actually, i can ...uhm ..errr ... see :) a use for 3D or depth for programming (-text).

    for example, a procedure or a function could be "in the back" of the listed programming code.
    a "loop" could really be a loop, the text going-into the monitor at the start of the loop and finishing coming back "out".

    the main somewhere in between front and back ...

    errors/typos could hover really really far in the front, snapping into place after correction?
    people were also complaining about colors and hi-lighting in code ... in a far away time.
    etc...

    • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday September 17 2016, @10:18PM

      by RamiK (1813) on Saturday September 17 2016, @10:18PM (#403238)

      It's an old programming idea that never really took off because of functional impurities and the design of general purpose computer architectures.
      In the DSP world, there are a lot of successful flow chart based compilers\IDEs that produce really good code. But when you don't have pipelining and streams, things get real messy real fast.

      There are some current successes with dynamic languages that have clear atomic instruction a parser can evaluate enough to know what to throw at the interpreter resulting in some useful tools. This latest generation started out with lighttable for Javascript, closure and python but currently I think it's being done with Atom + proto-repl.

      Anyhow, this is all extremely out of my comfort zone so you'd have to look it up for yourself. Closest I got was to using any of it was DRAKON [wikipedia.org] but I didn't really look into it too hard.

      With any luck, one of the modern architectures in development will get some commercial traction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill_architecture) and we'll be able to start taking these ideas out of the niche markets.

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