Virtual reality? My view on the subject.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ICY6FgJOHc&t=9m39s
While it might have been a strategic acquisition to prevent others from getting the technology and product, they were far from out of money. Beyond the Kickstarter, they had over $90 million that they had raised in two rounds, $75 million of which was raised less than three months ago. I also doubt Facebook is going to gut the technology or let the product die after spending over $2 billion. It's not some little set of IP and patents that they acquired for pocket change to prevent competition down the road. Indeed, Valve and Sony among others have already made substantial investments in VR and there will undoubtedly be multiple VR headsets and related products in the next five years.
Time will only tell if they treat this like Instagram.
Damn 200 years! Now this is a tech I'd love to experience. http://www.foxnews.com/science/2014/...to-read-minds/For now, he added, you shouldn’t worry about others snooping on your memories or forcibly extracting information. “This sort of technology can only read active parts of the brain. So you couldn’t read passive memories – you would have to get the person to imagine the memory to read it,” Cowen said. “It’s a matter of time, and eventually – maybe 200 years from now – we’ll have some way of reading inactive parts of the brain. But that’s a much harder problem, as it involves measuring very fine details of brain structure that we don’t even really understand.”
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I think Sony's VR will be testbed, so to speak, on PS4.
If successful, I'll become interested in Sony's VR when there's significantly more powerful base hardware backing it up, with enough performance to handle next generation graphics at a framerate / Hz level that's needed for a completely smooth unjarring VR experience.
Meaning PS5.
I was able to try 2 tech demos of the Oculous rift at Pax east this year. one was an FPS which essentially just had you carrying a gun and walking around using a little nub on the bottom of the gun. There were no enemies to shoot at, just an environment to walk around in. When all was said and done, it was broken. It didn't track my head movements well, if at all. and the gun I was holding would move in the opposite direction I moved it, and that hardly worked either.
The other demo I tried, I sat in a chair while wearing the Oculous. I was in a classroom of dolphins taking a quiz. Now the object was to look at your classmates' quizes to get the answers. I was looking over the dolphin in front of me's shoulder for answers, turned a complete 180 and saw the paper on the desk behind me, and even leaned to the left and right to see thier answers too. I had to do this all while making sure the teacher didn't catch me, so I was looking out for that as well. The only downside was, it was a low resolution model of the Oculous. I could see exactly what the words on other student's tests were.
All in all, there is some work left to do on these things, but I think some of these devs are moving in the right direction
Didn't give a shit before, don't give a shit now, won't give a shit in the future.
By the time this is truly mastered, I'll be way too old to care.
However, if someone in the porn industry thinks they can make money by getting a loner to pay top dollar to fuck a VR porn star with a champagne bottle, we'll have this by the end of the decade.
“The world has, forever and always, been brimming with shit-heads.” - Dana Gould
VR would be a nice advancement for gaming.
a few concerns though:
- the price(it won't come cheap)
- developer support(will it be complicated to develop for, and how will it affect quality)
and how much time can I play until motion sickness kicks in?
I love realism just as much as the next guy, but i'll pass. traditional gaming for me.
Well, I'm guessing the PS4 headset will retail for $299.99, and will likely be released November of 2015. The actual release version of the Oculus Rift will likely be at least $299.99, but could end up as much as $399.99.
Both will likely include a couple of free VR games and demos.
Now, I'm not sure I'd call $299 or $399 cheap, but if we think back to the mid 90's, and here we are 20 years later with some legit VR for $300 or $400 ? I don't think that's too bad. Now, of course the Sony thing requires you own a PS4, and Oculus requires you own a gaming PC. So, if you consider the true cost, yes, very expensive. But we are in the Stone Ages of VR, so this is to be expected. All things get affordable in time...
Yeah, the good news here is that I think the Indy studios are the ones that are going to migrate towards VR, because I think they are specially equipped to take the most risks, and to think the most out of the box. Big companies like E.A. and Ubi Soft and Rockstar, will probably take a wait and see stance with VR. It will be the chicken and the egg scenario. Sell enough units, and they will all make games. Don't sell enough, and none of the big companies will bother. There are enough indies that will have cool, short, cheap experiences, that I think that VR is pretty much a can't miss phenomenon. It's only a matter of time before somebody releases some killer experience on VR that just has the entire industry buzzing with excitement. I'm talking like Doom in 1993 levels of excitement.
Yeah, the motion sickness thing is definitely a concern. How good will the screens be ? They are going to be so close to your eyes, that if they are super high resolution, super low lag, maybe it will be ok, but I'm thinking the first retail examples of VR are probably going to be a bit rough around the edges for the first couple of generations. If one could wait another 10 years, and then see whats going on with VR, it will probably be a much better experience for them, but for me, I'm not sure I can just sit on the sidelines like that.
Of course, I have to admit that the closest I've got to VR is the Virtual Boy back in like 1996 or something. Had it for a very short time, didn't like it because of the migraines. Of course, that is ancient technology compared to what they have now. Still, I've never tried any of these headsets, and have no idea what the experience is going to feel like.
I might hate it.
Maybe I'll love it.
Who knows...
I definitely want to try it, but I guess I'll have to wait for the consumer version to come out, and I'm guessing they will have demonstrations at Best Buy and stuff like that. I look forward to actually trying it first hand.