Something they definitely need a solution for is sanitation, since there will be a lot of reuse of the same headset. I've heard this is a big issue that people over overlook at conventions, and there has been cases of eye herpes going around.
VRCover makes vinyl covers that prevent the foam from sucking up sweat. You can just clean them with a mild spray sanitizer or wipes. This makes a huge difference for any sort of athletic game, otherwise if you take the headset off even for a minute the damp foam will cool off, and it feels absolutely hideous to put a cold damp headset on your face.
I have some of their newer 6mm ("wide-FOV") replacement pads for the Vive and while I found the "cover" style to be fidgety to get and keep in place the replacement pads are a huge improvement. Literally just remove the old foam and slap the new vinyl pad on (attaches via velcro like the OEM pads).
A++ would buy again. Major quality of life improvement over the standard pads.
With vinyl covers I don't see what would stop you from just spraying down the whole surface that comes into contact with your face - assuming whatever you use isn't nasty enough to fog the plastic. I don't do it because it's not really a concern apart from face grease if you bump the lenses, which I clean with a microfiber cloth.
50m could pay for some animated content but considering the average cost of a mainstream live action film is around 400 million, 50 million is like pocket lint in Hollywood. Whoever gets that funding is going to have to get very creative because Imax expects something that is going to cost more than a 400m film to be created with a 50m budget.
Perhaps they could do like what is done when using certain types of medical equipment and ave the part that is in contact with the person wearing it switched out between each use.
The problem is that the body and lenses of the VR set are also likely to come into contact with your face/eyes. This is amplified by the fact that the lenses are really optimized to be right against your eyes. As you go farther and farther out, the field of view gets narrower and the picture gets softer. So most VR users will prefer to play with them cranked in as far as they can go (while still fitting eye-glasses, etc). The "thin"/"wide-FoV" VR covers I posted above actually put you even closer than would normally be possible.
Disposable pads would probably be nice in a commercial setting like a theater, but you would also really need to spray down the body and lenses of the headset with a sanitizer because some contact with the lenses is nearly inevitable. AFAIK this is similar to how 3D glasses are processed for reuse.
I would just like to note that it is an extremely difficult optical problem to get what amounts to a smartphone a half inch from your face with no screen curvature to present an image that covers your field of view adequately, focused at optical infinity, at a relatively constant magnification factor (pixels are the same size), and without such excessive levels of distortion that the rendering cannot be corrected in software. The closest analogy is really the old superwide Nikon lenses that needed to have the mirror flipped up so they could go deep into the camera and perform corrections right up to the film plane.
Really it's a testament to modern manufacturing and lens design that this is possible at any sort of a price that would be reasonable for consumers to own. Molded plastic lenses with aspheric surfaces are amazing compared to what you could do with regular spherical glass surfaces.
Visualization is good, especially for people who don't naturally see things already in their mind's eye. For visually attuned thinkers I think its more a good way to achieve fidelity of a shared vision rather than to simply visualize something.
For example, someone is telling you a story that took place in a certain area in a certain orientation. You can quickly convey that in a virtual environment, harder to do verbally.
The other thing that I am hoping we'll get will be "unlimited resolution screens" which is to say that one will no longer be limited to what is on the one, two, or perhaps three screens in front of you, instead you can have screens above, around, even below you if you want with different bits of data on them. By freeing the organization of your windows from the frame of the monitor to being able to put them anywhere, you can achieve better data awareness.
This is very crass and I apologize in advance if you do not wish to answer. But have you experienced VR porn? I am not ashamed to say that I have, albeit through non-dynamic fixed position video in a google cardboard video (think, split screen from two side-by-side cameras at a wide angle). The experience was rather unpleasant and disorienting, not much of a clear advantage over regular video porn beyond the fact that it takes up much more of your field of view.
In response to more important parts of your comment, the most exciting applications of shared visions and unlimited screens I feel will come through mixed and augmented reality. The sharing experience is much greater when you can also see the person you are interacting with rather than just an avatar. The visual speed of communication will need real, emotional anchors unless you are willing to trade nuance and subtlety for the speed of digital visual communication, which could have disastrous implications for how we communicate with one another. Infinite screens, though, better hope that higher density VR displays will keep coming and processing power will expand with that. Text and traditional interfaces are very difficult in VR right now since everything is sharing what is really a small amount of pixels for how much of your FoV they inhabit.
Not crass, its a reasonable question and the answer is "not really." The only VR app I've seen that was nominally 'porny' was a 3D app with rendered nude figures. If you ever saw the 'nude' hack to the nVidia "Dawn" demo that would be a good starting visualization.
That said, it is a stereotype that pornographers are the first to exploit new technology commercially and that was what I was going for with that comment. What I actually expect the first "VR" porn to be basically actors filmed with one of the new 360 view cameras as the camera person walks around them. Basically replacing the "directors" idea of what would be useful to look at with your own choice. Given my understanding of how these sorts of things are shot, I expect this to be pretty challenging for the actors. The only "degree of freedom" is where you are looking.
I'm a big fan of AR and I really love the CastAR stuff but recognize that what VR has is vomitness AR has in image registration and occlusion.
In AR, the registration requirement is that you have to keep things in the environment pinned in the environment or your brain complains. There were some Google Tango demos that have that issue. When their position is "jittering" or worse moving around, your brain starts rebelling.
The occlusion part is really hard for your eyeballs. Since the world is naturally pretty light anyway, in order to make a pixel appear before you that is "opaque" with respect to the background behind it, you need to either literally block out the pixel behind (using and LCD shutter or something), always insure the background is not "bright" (the CastAR solution with the retro-reflective cloth) or dump more light into your eye to overwhelm its notion of what color the pixel is (putatively the Magic leap solution). The "VR" solution is to put high definition cameras on the headset where your eyeballs would be with a similar field of view and sensitivity and then mix in the "outside" data with the generated data.
And as you point out on the plus side if you can see someone in "real time" its a much better interactive experience.
Google Cardboard video is going to be unpleasant and not representative of an actual VR video experience. The fidelity for Oculus Rift or Vive 180 degree videos are quite large, around 8GB or so for a half hour. They've been perfecting the technique as well, which normally involves very up close and personal scenes, POV stuff because the fidelity makes looking at objects far away look very aliased even at very high bitrates. That said, the experience is shocking in how compelling it can be. A lot of it is up to the skill of the people making the video right now. There's a lot of experimentation but I think VR porn will be a big deal as resolutions increase and bandwidth get cheaper.
> Visualization is good, especially for people who don't naturally see things already in their mind's eye.
A tangent. I'm a person whose mind's eye has visualization capabilities rated at "3/10 double buffered with one of the buffers being /dev/null". I have vivid dreams, but when awake, I can at best visualize something for fraction of a second before it disappears into "I feel it's there but I can't see it anymore" domain. Does anyone know of a way (exercises, maybe) to improve the ability to visualize vividly? Is this even possible? So far I've been doing simple exercises of trying to capture a part of the "image flashes" in my mind and focusing on keeping it visualized, but I didn't get anywhere.
I don't know if its possible. My experience taking a meditation class was that I would visualize things while meditating (annoyingly since the class was going for no visualizations at all). But two things came out of that experience, one was that other thoughts going on in my head interfered with visualization (meditating reduced other thoughts and so visualization happened) and second I could access the visualizations more easily in the context of "a memory of a visualization" rather than trying to see them as present.
To improve the latter I have an informal exercise where I'll sometimes sit down in a room and try to itemize everything I saw in a different room. It is a "no equipment required and externally non visible" way to combat boring situations like waiting to get on a plane or sitting in the dentists chair waiting for anesthetic to kick in. Can I remember what magazines were on the coffee table, how many? how many on other tables? etc. Basically practicing remembering scenes that I have seen recently.
I think bringing robust world simulation down to the level that teenagers can effectively explore and create/invent - without tangible constraints - will be important.
Now that they can't even peek out a window without helicopter parents being terrified that some child molester will hurt them, or that the rest of us are terrified we'll get in trouble with the Gestaltpolizei if we let our kids roam, this will be the perfect way to let our kids experience what we had growing up.
As a midwesterner, I constantly hear this refrain but did not grow up this way myself and don't see much of it in how my students are being raised. Different worlds perhaps.
That said, I also didn't have parents that knew how to support my interest in geeky stuff and would have loved a world for building gadgets.
Take a look at Victor's premise. It's about expanding our capabilities for thinking about engineering and the world, not "tree fort simulator".
Haven't used it for coworking personally, but it's been fun using it to watch tv and hang out with randoms. Just having the body language goes a huge way in making it feel like you're really in a room with the other person.
Showing off real estate is probably going to be big... and once it's good, it'll become the standard for telepresence. Honestly, a few things need to happen, but when they do, the sky is the limit.
Having recently bought a house, I have to disagree. It _may_ help with initial screening but you don't actually get a feel for the structure until you are in it.
There's a lot of little details you are looking for that wouldn't show up unless it was an extremely high resolution. On top of that, you are looking for subtle sounds and movement as you walk through the house. You're seeing if the floor is sagging, does the paint show water damage under certain lighting, etc.
It's good for the initial filter. How do you decide which houses are good enough to spend the time to drive out there and check? I guess your first impression might be 2D images on the Web. Immersive web will just enhance that initial first impression.
I'm going to put my bets on Architecture / Landscape demonstrations. I see a niche market for hosting parties / events using AR. (Think AR laser tag, AR dungeons & dragons, or novelty apps)
But I honestly feel it will be a long time before even those industries utilize it.
There is a market for this technology , it is also a fresh market in terms of application and practical use. I consider it a good oppurtunity for startups.
On the flip side how can you trust the "integrity" of the virtual tour? How do you know parts aren't "photoshopped"? And then you have niche markets like California where buyers are forced to move quickly, you kinda HAVE to see the place to make such a snap decision, right?
There actually 3D scanners that will import the entire room at once. The resolution isn't 'great' but the natural lighting makes it feel like you're there, even on an Oculus DK1.
Wish the Switch supported VR. Then, the first killer app would be the first Nintendo game much as Zelda:Ocarina of Time and Mario 64 were the first killer 3d games. Almost all modern 3d games use design patterns from them.
where's the study of every technology the porn industry adopted that still failed
actually, don't do that study, I get all my investors by saying "historically porn has been a leading indicator of tech adoption, and look they're using it!"
