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Nick Wingfield reports at The New York Times that for the last couple of years, the companies building virtual reality headsets have begged the public for patience as they strive to create virtual environments that don't make people physically sick. “We’re going to hang ourselves out there and be judged,” says John Carmack, chief technology officer of Oculus, describing what he calls a “nightmare scenario” that has worried him and other Oculus executives. “People like the demo, they take it home, and they start throwing up,” says Carmack. "The fear is if a really bad V.R. product comes out, it could send the industry back to the ’90s." In that era, virtual reality headsets flopped, disappointing investors and consumers. “It left a huge, smoking crater in the landscape,” says Carmack, who is considered an important game designer for his work on Doom and Quake. “We’ve had people afraid to touch V.R. for 20 years.”
This time around, the backing for virtual reality is of a different magnitude. Facebook paid $2 billion last year to acquire Oculus. Microsoft is developing its own headset, HoloLens, that mixes elements of virtual reality with augmented reality, a different medium that overlays virtual images on a view of the real world. Google has invested more than $500 million in Magic Leap, a company developing an augmented reality headset. “The challenge is there is so much expectation and anticipation that that could fall away quite quickly if you don’t get the type of traction you had hoped,” says Neil Young
At least one company, Valve, believes it has solved the discomfort problem with headsets. Gabe Newell says Valve has worked hard on its virtual reality technology to eliminate the discomfort, saying that “zero percent of people get motion sick” when they try its system. According to Newell, the reason why no one has gotten sick yet is thanks to Valve’s Lighthouse motion-tracking system, a precise motion-tracking system that is capable of accurately tracking users as they move around a space. In the meantime the next challenge will be convincing media and tech companies to create lots of content to keep users entertained. “Virtual reality has been around for 20 years, and the one thing that has been consistent throughout this is that the technology is not mature enough,” says Brian Blau. “Today there’s the possibility for that to change, but it’s going to take a while for these app developers to get it right.”
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2015, @05:59AM
I'm honestly more interested in VR application in areas besides gaming.
I saw some older videos http://youtu.be/DzrlOzmtCV4?t=2m2s [youtu.be],http://youtu.be/izaBq084b0k [youtu.be] that described some of the potential of VR.
Medical training, industrial design, assisting the disabled, physics simulations, et cetera.
In fact, just this morning I was having a conversation with a colleague of mine working in industrial design.
He was roughing some modellings on graph paper, and later in a CAD program, then we started talking about VR and discussed how much easier prototyping would be to work with something virtual, yet tangible and interactive, before actual build process.
Nothing against videogames; I've played my fair share of Quake back when, I just wish they weren't receiving the majority of focus with VR.
(Score: 2) by TheLink on Friday March 06 2015, @10:11AM
But such technology if improved would be useful even as merely an alternative to multiple or larger screens/desktops. You can have very very many screens and they can be very very big.
It's good that Microsoft has started HoloLens. Metro was a boring (even stupid) direction - who gets excited about their powerful desktop PC being turned into a tablet? In contrast, with this direction there's a lot more potential for helping people do more or have more fun, and also potential to use all those billions of transistors Intel has been running out of ideas* on what to do with ;).
* OK the transactional stuff was a good idea unfortunately Intel screwed up and you can't use it safely because of the bugs.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Friday March 06 2015, @02:46PM
I thought this was a great application of AR (not VR): http://hackaday.com/2014/05/23/castar-and-holographic-print-preview-for-3d-printers/ [hackaday.com]
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by darkfeline on Friday March 06 2015, @03:33PM
How about using VR as a display? You will no longer need 3 or 4 monitors and tons of desktop space. Just one headset and BOOM, the entire world is your desktop.
No doubt this will only exacerbate the tab explosion problem though...
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