Everyone read that one Vernor Vinge novel and decided to get on the gravy train before Chicago gets nuked. /s
Speaking more seriously: I think you're right in the short-term, wrong in the long-term, but getting at a fundamental truth, which is that *applications* are what will drive development and adoption. And they have to be fully-formed and wedded to the form factor, while still being accessible.
AR/VR will revolutionize general computing, but if you can't figure out how yet - clearly, they have not - the focus should be on the applications that are already well-envisioned (and, in the past few years, as you've said, well-executed) on the platform.
Further, it helps if the killer-app is emotionally engaging, allows and anticipates the failure of the user within the app's internal UX logic, and doesn't interfere with a user's crucial assets or processes (related to work, health, etc.) until the platform's kinks are worked out.
Sounds like games fit the bill quite nicely. It is truly weird that execs taking home eight figures or more can't (or refuse to) wrap their heads around that. Gaming is anathema amongst a certain portion of the population, I suppose.
People keep thinking that stereoscopic 3D will revolutionize things, but they've been consistently wrong about that for more than 170 years.
It starts with the Brewster Stereoscope [1] which was shown at the Great Exhibition of 1851. [2] It was a huge success, and in following years hundreds of thousands of viewers were sold, with lots of content following. Eventually the fad blew over, ending up as antique-shop fodder.
Next up was the ViewMaster; the US Department of Defense bought 100,000 units because it was going to revolutionize military training. Then came the 1950s wave of anaglyph 3D movies, the 1990s VR boom and bust, the Avatar-driven resurrection of 3D movies in 2009, which was quickly followed by a wave of enthusiasm for 3D TV. Then, most recently we have the resurrection of VR, this time with the Metaverse attached.
I think 3D worlds have revolutionized a chunk of gaming, from Quake to Minecraft and onward. But the available evidence suggests that stereoscopic 3D interfaces are an idea much more popular in theory than in practice. As best I can tell, the most representative 3D technology is not facehugger VR, but those Magic Eye stereograms [3] that go in and out of popularity. They are a fun novelty, but they never transform everything. There's a big hype cycle and everybody gets excited, but after a bit of use they quickly go back to 2D and most are just fine with it.
Yeah, I said this about videophones in 2002 or so. I was sure I was right. Videophones had been reinvented five times over. You could only use it at home, sitting on the couch, giving it your full attention. Who would want to have regular conversations that way enough to pay for a videophone with limited compatibility?
Now I go to the supermarket and people are holding their phones out at arm's length having FaceTime conversations at full volume with their adult kids.
Once 3-D works and integrates with physical objects it's going to be a big deal. We just keep failing at that.
The reason I think videophones is a bad comparison is that video conferencing systems were economically successful in the corporate space well before you started saying that about videophones. There was a demonstrated value proposition; it's just that costs had to come way down for consumers to find it worth it. (Which I suspect demonstrates that that don't care very much about it, in that they pay $0 for video calls in both up-front and per-minute terms.)
But even if you were right, some social stuff changing isn't proof that other social things will change soon. It's just as plausible to me that the cost, in terms of money and inconvenience, will have to drop just as far for VR as it did for video calls. Meaning that it would have to be included in every phone or every pair of glasses for free and with approximately no additional effort to use. Which is something that we are surely decades away from.
>People keep thinking that stereoscopic 3D will revolutionize things
I'm not one of them. The revolutionary aspect of AR/VR/XR/MR/WhateveR (or, at least, one of them) is the ability to uncouple appearance or apparent make-up from function. It does for physical objects what the web did for paper.
> It does for physical objects what the web did for paper.
I don't think that's the case. The web was a pure addition to paper, taking most of the existing design vocabulary and radically adding to it through interactivity as well as by dropping the marginal cost of publishing and delivery to zero. The informational content on every piece of paper in the world could appear on a tablet the size of a slim book.
WhateverR of current and plausible near-term hardware is hugely subtractive. VR turns existing physical objects into things you can't see but might trip over. The rest at best adds a gloss of appearance, but a loss of touch, dexterity, and much of the normal interactivity of objects. I've seen interesting ideas for, say, MR board games, where you have some carefully chosen generic objects that get a visual gloss via facehugger image overlays. But I have a hard time seeing that be anything other than a highly niche experience; it's not clear that it would delivery notably more fun than games on the standard living room 2D screen. It's much, much more limited than what the web did for paper.
On the other hand, isn't it quite typical for good ideas to be recognized as such many times before the technology is actually mature to implement them properly?
Edit: most morbid example that comes to mind - flying machines.
That can be true, but you see the same pattern with bad ideas. Look at perpetual motion machines. People keep trying to invent them, but that doesn't prove they'll eventually succeed.
We could also consider jetpacks and flying cars and food pills. People have been inventing and re-inventing them for years. I'm sure if I looked I could find new generations of people taking another swing at it who haven't really reckoned with why all the previous waves failed.
> but that doesn't prove they'll eventually succeed
Of course it doesn't prove anything. But there's certainly a difference between the "hardness" of designing sufficiently high quality 3D glasses using well known technology, and doing something that breaks a physical law.
My point with perpetual motion machines isn't that good VR violates physical laws. It's that some ideas are attractive enough that people will keep trying and failing to make them real, without bothering to look at why the other attempts failed.
My impression is that even 2D screens are still rather lacking (they're big, heavy, very bright, need a big power source, rather expensive, sometimes difficult to interact with). In many situations a book or some papers are still superior to "virtual 2D reality".
Not sure if this indicates VR is conceptually flawed or if it means we're just still early in the development of the technology.
In my opinion, the other attempts happened because people think 3D is cool. Both as a concept and as a novel experience. And the other attempts failed because they went out and built a lot of stuff based on that coolness, without testing to see whether there was lasting value.
And we certainly see that repeating here. Magic Leap burned $3.5 billion. I'm not sure how many tens of billions Meta has spent on their vision of a Metaverse. But what's pretty clear is that so far there's very little long-term usage, very little value creation.
Might it work someday? Sure. But it's perfectly plausible that it will remain a practical failure until something like the holodeck or programmable matter becomes a reality. So it could be another 170 years before VR is a success.
Stereoscopy isn't VR. It isn't even required to use it, put a person with one eye in a VR headset and they'll be able to use it's fundamental feature set just fine. It's the positional tracking that allows for perspective correct representations of anything desired that's the point. This has a lot of practical use beyond making things pop out for effect.
I agree that stereoscopy isn't the only thing going on. But are you saying there are VR headsets that don't have stereoscopic 3D, and that I should therefore change my analysis?
I don't think spatial experiences are particularly new.
Quake was the first game I recall playing that was intensely spatial. So much so that after a couple of hours playing I had trouble readjusting to meatspace; the positional part of my brain was still carrying enough of the virtual world that i was easily disoriented. The same thing happened to me with Minecraft. Years later, I still have vivid spatial recall of some of the bases and mines I built.
You could certainly argue that VR controllers are an exciting step forward in spatial interaction. But things like the Wii and the Switch's (less capable) motion control mean they're only a step forward, not a leap. And that also makes clear that motion control and VR are separable concepts. I look forward to seeing the fancier controllers migrate to other platforms to see how that goes.
So I think what makes facehugger VR unique is stereoscopy. And stereoscopic 3D is a thing with a long history of faddish excitement followed by a total crash. You could argue that's not relevant here, but an awful lot of VR advocates make their cases in terms of 3D.
Obligatory pedantry: True Names was a novella, not a full novel. And the better for it.
Or you were referring to Rainbow's End in which case I'm embarrassed about my comment.
More seriously: I was really excited by True Names when it was published (and a bunch of us at MIT talked about it a lot) but by the time Snow Crash came out it seemed pretty obvious that real world metaphors weren't really desirable in virtual environments. Certainly the web and its abortive competitors (like apple eWorld, and many others) made it clear for those not paying attention: nobody wanted to "walk" from Gap to Williams Sonoma in some virtual mall: they just wanted to click over and get satisfaction. Nobody likes long boring travel in an open video game; a little is OK to avoid breaking the spell, but soon something has to happen or you need a convenient elevator. The same applies to movies.
BTW you're 100% right about gaming being the killer app. Once people are used to that perhaps they'll want to do other things. But without a reason to develop the right metaphors, affordances, and experiences, there's "no there there".
>Or you were referring to Rainbow's End in which case I'm embarrassed about my comment.
Sorry, Gumby, it's the Play-Doh press for you.
I feel you. RE is probably going to end up being wrong about a lot of things, too; in particular, Vinge even kind of hinted at how the lack of haptics would cause the "mirror world" and virtual object schemas to break down, at least as far as immersion and utility go. Ultimately, I don't think we get to the world he described without the tech that was just nascent within it. That's analogous to the inapplicability of real-world translation metaphors to the pop-into-existence data stream that is the web, as you said. I realized this the moment that I reached out to touch the 3D model of a character I'd created and nothing was there.
Gaming short-circuits perception and gives leeway in a lot of ways that are conducive to a haptic-less experience, though. Good movement and animation can make up for a lack of embodiment that would kill a more serious experience (Second Life as a virtual office or retail branch...), and while animation is much less reliable of a tool for VR, I'm sure that other affordances can be found if devs are allowed to just... play around with it (pun intended).
The presentation kind of disappointed me because I didn't see an understanding of the situation that they face.
> Certainly the web and its abortive competitors (like apple eWorld, and many others) made it clear for those not paying attention: nobody wanted to "walk" from Gap to Williams Sonoma in some virtual mall: they just wanted to click over and get satisfaction. Nobody likes long boring travel in an open video game; a little is OK to avoid breaking the spell, but soon something has to happen or you need a convenient elevator. The same applies to movies.
What's funny is that I think (having not experienced it) that I would like to basically set various files and applications around a virtual space, because I'm eternally frustrated with all window managers and other 2d application management tools. I just don't want to wander through someone else's "carefully curated" hall of t-shirt JPEGs.
People seriously underestimate the potential entertainment or even utility of being able to take your digital photo collection and, just, spread them all around your floor or walls or whatever. Grab them, stack them, group them with natural gestures. After that, the next time you open a PC-based photo manager, you will feel trapped, poking around a bucket full of files with a stick.
Speaking more seriously: I think you're right in the short-term, wrong in the long-term, but getting at a fundamental truth, which is that *applications* are what will drive development and adoption. And they have to be fully-formed and wedded to the form factor, while still being accessible.
AR/VR will revolutionize general computing, but if you can't figure out how yet - clearly, they have not - the focus should be on the applications that are already well-envisioned (and, in the past few years, as you've said, well-executed) on the platform.
Further, it helps if the killer-app is emotionally engaging, allows and anticipates the failure of the user within the app's internal UX logic, and doesn't interfere with a user's crucial assets or processes (related to work, health, etc.) until the platform's kinks are worked out.
Sounds like games fit the bill quite nicely. It is truly weird that execs taking home eight figures or more can't (or refuse to) wrap their heads around that. Gaming is anathema amongst a certain portion of the population, I suppose.