Please describe the VR equivalent of what I did last night, I legitimately can’t picture it:
For 2-3 hours, me and two other people sat cuddled on a couch, alternating in a pretty free flow way between speaking with each other, speaking about the show we were watching, and just watching the content passively — based partly on small tactile, visual, or auditory invitations to shift attention.
VR seems to propose completely removing that dynamic and human contact, that free flowing interaction, with distance and barely more than passive consumption of content.
Because I can picture the AR equivalent, and that situation is the bulk of my TV time. So for me, I just can’t see what VR is offering outside of a few really limited times I want to be deeply in a fake world, alone.
VR does not have to compete with anything resembling a perfect life or a perfect moment (although I am sure it can and it will). Think of it as a drug, a tool for the sick and the unhappy.
Betting against VR feels like betting against drugs. I do not see any future where it will not be absolutely massive.
My point is that VR treats some rare condition while AR is like viagra: betting on VR over AR seems to seriously misunderstand human wants, and betting on sickness/isolation over healthy interactions.
VR just isn’t that useful, even by your tacit admission you can’t think of how it directly competes in a situation where it’s obvious how AR would fit in.
I vehemently disagree. VR has the potential to medicate the two biggest illnesses of our time, namely growing old/frail and being lonely -- not necessarily in a healthy way, but, again, think of it as medication to manage pain.
This is not a case against AR. AR has the potential to enhance many lifes. VR has the potential to create fake new ones.
I'm not sure VR "seriously misunderstands human wants." Collaborative immersive entertainment with unlimited creative potential is a pretty common human want. It's not the only one. No one claimed VR was a cure all, especially not in its current form. But it's still directionally very sensible.
>No, the activity I was engaged in has survived many versions of media: stories, live music, recordings, radio, and TV.
Lots of other activities people used to do haven't survived, for example gathering in houses where they played music themselves (eg. on the piano). Heck, visits to friends have almost been killed by social media today...
I think no one is really assuming VR will replace your particular activity. TV didn't replace going for a walk either. There's more than one thing a person can do a day, and more than one mode of interacting with the world.
I agree with your point and that's probably not the primary audience for VR.
A more likely audience is the millions of people who, for example, played Call of Duty together last night. Most of those players were connected remotely via a virtual world and voice chat and did not share a geographic location much less the same room.
This is a pretty specific use case. Sure, VR won't replicate that anytime soon, and it doesn't need to. AR might, but that's not the point.
VR can supplant other experiences many of us spend time on. Like, a multiplayer video game. Or watching a movie alone (reading comments here I feel like I'm a weird person by watching alone, even though I can't see how you can immerse yourself and truly enjoy a deep movie if you keep talking with your friends or spouse). Or casually hanging out with people halfway across the country.
VR is not, and should not be, a 100% or nothing tech. You should be able to enjoy both virtual and real experiences during your day, as you see fit.
My point is that outside of hardcore gaming (and a few other specialty uses), AR can perform all of VR’s uses, but VR can’t match AR and degrades nonaugmented events by trying to shoe horn it in. By contrast, AR augments those events.
So the bet that VR will be massive, and particularly that it will be larger than AR, seems unlikely.
I think it will have a place — in the same way high end gaming rigs currently do, but not even at the level of penetration video game systems have, and certainly not like cellphones.
By contrast, AR seems to be on track to be as common as cellphones.
With that, I can agree. AR will definitely be bigger at some point, because it can in principle be used in any scenario. It's meant to augment, not replace.
That said, let's remember that AR today does not exist. HoloLens demos barely qualify as AR. Google Glass was essentially a trimmed down ~2006 feature phone blocking some of your FOV. And before someone says this, Ingress and Pokémon Go do not qualify. It's not really AR until you can overlay images on top of the real world, and until those images are contextually relevant.
With the current trends I see in both spaces, VR has plenty of space to explode before AR becomes ubiquitous, or even usable.
While this may be a specific use case, it is a rather typical social interaction to shared media and it is something that will challenge VR for some time. It will be interesting to see how broadband addresses in-person communication like touch and pheromones.
Hm, from my experience, hot-seat VR removes only visual contact between people on the couch and the person in VR. But there is still conversation, there is still commenting about what is going on and giving hints. Much more so, than when watching a show or a movie together with someone else - in which case it usually means passively watching, exchanging maybe at most one or two sentences along the way.
From the two, I'd say watching TV together is what is "barely more than passive consumption of content", VR feels more much active, because the people involved create the action, rather than just consume it.
Interestingly one of the more popular VR apps is Bigscreen which let's you watch video content on a large virtual screen in a shared space with other remote users. The use case is consuming passive and mostly 2D content while chatting with your friends which is quite similar to what you're describing but for people who aren't physically in the same space as the people they want to consume content with.
It's not something I've found much use for (but I don't own a TV so your scenario isn't one that has much relevance to me) but it is a common thing and one that already translates quite successfully into VR.
You will obviously not be able to have tactile contact with other human beings in VR anytime soon unless you are physically co-present. But you can still interact with them in most ways that you can in real life given sufficient tracking and software.
So, to answer your question: perhaps you won't be able to ideally replicate your experience in VR. But you will be able to come close. Why bother? Because you can have that experience with any human on Earth instantly, instead of the privileged few who happen to be taking up extraordinarily close coordinates to you in real world space.
> For 2-3 hours, me and two other people sat cuddled on a couch, alternating in a pretty free flow way between speaking with each other, speaking about the show we were watching, and just watching the content passively
Let's ignore the fact you were watching the content passively and thus making your argument moot given we're talking about a technology designed to hold your complete attention.
The VR equivalent of that is simple: you keep doing that, but with a headset on. Now all of you are still within ears reach of each other and can continue to talk, but the audio for the simulation is shared among those in the room, and only the visuals are private and slightly different to compensate for your slightly different "physical" location in the 3D space, just like the real world.
Now you're flying over the top of the rings of Saturn listening to Brian Cox explain how they formed and using a controller (perhaps single handed and optional), to click on things and reach out into the 3D space and explore what's going on elsewhere... now you can flip down the private audio option on the headset and listen to Professor Cox give you a private tour of a moon around Saturn. You're free to return to the shared experience as and when you wish.
That technology probably could exist today, but it's certainly available yet. But given the article is talking about future implementations, well there you go.
And no one is saying it'll replace what you've described, just augment it.
But what you described doesn’t augment what I was doing: it lowers the local interactions, eg by removing subtle visual cues for interactions between people, while not offering something I see as better.
I’d rather interact with the people next to me than fake touch things while adjacent to other people. Further, if I want to fake touch things with other people — why would I do it with us both wearing immersive displays instead of AR and a shared projection we can collaboratively touch?
In this case, AR seems like a genuine augmentation of what I was doing, while VR sounds like a regression in quality.
What you describe sounds like what a planetarium would install, not anything I need in my living room — precisely because I have limited need to be engaged with content over adjacent persons.
> Let's ignore the fact you were watching the content passively and thus making your argument moot given we're talking about a technology designed to hold your complete attention.
Yes, that’s precisely what I’m trying to call out: in one situation I’m freely switching between passive content and local interactions, while the other insists on my full, continuous attention. They’re not really equivalent activities, so I’m confused why they’re compared.
I have very little use for a full attention display, because that’s the minority of content I engage with or interactions I want to have.
>But what you described doesn’t augment what I was doing: it lowers the local interactions, eg by removing subtle visual cues for interactions between people, while not offering something I see as better.
Which is great for introverted people, people who are bored with their spouses/s.os, and people who don't care for "subtle visual cues for interactions between people" compared to the possibility to experience an alternate reality.
It's as if some people can't understand why others would rather escape in an alternate reality than have "quality time"...
>I’d rather interact with the people next to me than fake touch things while adjacent to other people. Further, if I want to fake touch things with other people — why would I do it with us both wearing immersive displays instead of AR and a shared projection we can collaboratively touch?
Because that way you don't immerse yourselves into another world, just project stuff into your living room.
>They’re not really equivalent activities, so I’m confused why they’re compared.
They don't have to be "really equivalent" for one to eat in (or overtake) the other, it's enough that they compete for people's spare entertainment time in the house. Nothing before TV was "really equivalent" to TV, and yet it replaced what people did before in their living rooms by a large margin.
The point is, many forms of entertainment do not require complete attention and they are extremely successful. Passive to complete attention is a spectrum, and there's many users who do not want to pay full attention.
Seeing the current failure of VR proves that the example of flying around the rings of Saturn in VR is not compelling enough vs. seeing that scene on a TV.
I think you're looking at it wrong. It'd be like asking why you need an iPhone/facetime/texting when your wife is right next to you.
Rather, think of the hundreds of people who AREN'T right next to you: out of town parents, friends, your wife when she's on vacation, etc.
It won't replace everything, but'd be nice to play a game with a friend on the opposite coast, collaborate on a project with a remote coworker, or have a conversation with a relative far away.
I'm not seeing much prospects in VR myself, but can answer those questions trivially.
>How would I turn to my wife and make a comment
You just turn your head/gaze to your wife's avatar in 3D space and make a comment to her...
>how would whatever your answer is going to be actually be any better than AR?
If we're talking "escaping together" you could be inside some virtual world (e.g. a virtual game of thrones 3D environment) watching events or playing together.
AR would just add some extra figures and/or annotations on top of the real world, but it wont be as immersive.
> You could be inside some virtual world watching events or playing together
And not being able to enjoy your friend/partner's reaction, facial expression, or simply what they're doing. That mutual participation is half the fun. No, looking at an avatar mimicking your partner's movements doesn't count.
>And not being able to enjoy your friend/partner's reaction, facial expression, or simply what they're doing
Err, you could see your friend/partner in the VR world trivially, facial expressions and everything.
Besides, when you're looking to escape, this could include seeing your partner 24/7. Not everybody has just fallen in love yesterday...
>No, looking at an avatar mimicking your partner's movements doesn't count.
Yeah, like exchanging texts with friends as opposed to hearing their voice on the phone or going to hang out with them "doesn't count", and yet everybody does it to the detriment of the former activities...
Besides, if we're making arbitrary "laws", then I say it counts double!
Sounds like you've never played a multiplayer video game before. Sure, sound alone is not even half the emotional communications bandwidth, but people can work around those limitations. We already do in text, and in video calls, and it mostly works. With VR, you get to also have low-bandwidth body language, like movements of the head and limbs (and nothing is stopping the tech to slowly incorporate more and more cues).
VR ain't gonna be a perfect simulacrum of the real world, but it doesn't have to be. It only needs to be good enough to let people express themselves somehow, and people will figure out the rest.
But right now people who interact with their own partners/housemates in MMOs, chat, etc. when in close proximity to each other are a tiny minority (although probably a heavily overrepresented one at HN). I don't see why that would change with VR.
You also can't conveniently eat, drink, or go to the bathroom while using VR, and those are very common things for people to do in the midst of a period of social interaction. Imagine in how many households any given night the following happens in a group of friends or a family: people are watching TV or a movie, someone gets up, maybe goes to relieve themselves, stops by the kitchen to grab a snack or a can of pop, asks if anyone else wants anything, grabs what was asked for, comes back, hands over the item, sits down, and resumes watching.
Because TV and movies tend to be designed to be comprehensible with partial attention, that person very well have kept track of what was happening. Maybe they have to ask "who's that guy?" This kind of thing might happen multiple times a night. This doesn't have to be a planned or organized event -- it's a totally casual domestic interaction.
VR as it currently exists, and as far as can be reasonably predicted based on our understanding of the technology, is something that requires a great deal of physical and mental focus. That will necessarily limit its reach, unless it manages to fundamentally rewrite human society. (And I don't think I, for one, am eager to see what that new society would look like.)
I think there's a lot of interesting opportunities for VR technology. But should I live another 4-5 decades I doubt that I will live to see VR attain anything close to the social pervasiveness of video games, much less TV.
