I'm not seeing how virtual reality fits into social connection.
The first thing I thought of was a children's anime series several years back, "Dennou Coil". DuckDuckGo it, and spend about 10 minutes with any given episode (sadly, I've only seen the first four).
If you can get past this being a program aimed at younger children with age-appropriate themes, it's actually a pretty refreshing and cogent fantasy of how real and virtual worlds might one day not only coexist, but also affect each other.
And yes, the key visual conceit was wearing "smart" glasses. Way back in 2007.
The first thing I thought of was a children's anime series several years back, "Dennou Coil". DuckDuckGo it, and spend about 10 minutes with any given episode (sadly, I've only seen the first four).
If you can get past this being a program aimed at younger children with age-appropriate themes, it's actually a pretty refreshing and cogent fantasy of how real and virtual worlds might one day not only coexist, but also affect each other.
And yes, the key visual conceit was wearing "smart" glasses. Way back in 2007.
You realize that VR has been around for a bit longer, right?
yeah another bad purchase, facebook is looking very desperate there. They bought a geek toy with no real everyday use for the everyday consumer. I think Mark is trying to be like google by inventing in technology for the no other reason that it looks cool. I am so glad I took my proof off the table before he started pissing away the money.
18 months ago, a guy with an idea comes to Kickstarter with an idea and a plea for quarter of a million Dollars.
9522 people helped this guy giving him nearly 2.5 million.
18 months later, this device is still not a unit that anyone can buy.
Did those 9522 people, games companies and other investors spend their money and time allow this guy to build the device he was dreaming of?
No, all it did was allow this guy to build a brand that sells nothing and then sell that brand for billions to a company who really doesn't have a clue.
What's better than completing your life's work? Making a ton of cash sitting around doing nothing.
Oculus took too long to release a product, now FaceBook will reduce the specs, scare off games companies and not develop it for the reason it was originally designed for. Hopefully, other companies will make their own versions and get the idea back on track.
OHH NOOOOO!! Stay away from this revolution hitting the gaming industry! This has nothing to do with friends sharing photos and messages! .. SHAME on you FACECROOK!
18 months ago, a guy with an idea comes to Kickstarter with an idea and a plea for quarter of a million Dollars.
9522 people helped this guy giving him nearly 2.5 million.
18 months later, this device is still not a unit that anyone can buy.
Did those 9522 people, games companies and other investors spend their money and time allow this guy to build the device he was dreaming of?
No, all it did was allow this guy to build a brand that sells nothing and then sell that brand for billions to a company who really doesn't have a clue.
What's better than completing your life's work? Making a ton of cash sitting around doing nothing.
Oculus took too long to release a product, now FaceBook will reduce the specs, scare off games companies and not develop it for the reason it was originally designed for. Hopefully, other companies will make their own versions and get the idea back on track.
After Mr. Luckey's business partner died, I think he was rudderless and probably had second thoughts about what he was doing. I'm betting Oculus is basically dead now and he'll be leaving soon. Zuckerberg fell for a demo and overpaid...again.
You know… I thought to myself, “Self… let’s maybe get one of the release models of these. After all, we have a few games on hand that can implement it, particularly SpaceEngine. It could be fun.
Not happening now. Nor ever. Not until the parent company is bankrupted and turned to dust.
A month ago I had lunch with one of the founders of Oculus. I told him his company would be bought out by Microsoft. I never imagined Facebook would have any interest in this technology.
The first thing I thought of was a children's anime series several years back, "Dennou Coil". DuckDuckGo it, and spend about 10 minutes with any given episode (sadly, I've only seen the first four).
If you can get past this being a program aimed at younger children with age-appropriate themes, it's actually a pretty refreshing and cogent fantasy of how real and virtual worlds might one day not only coexist, but also affect each other.
While wearing glasses, you can either go the route of having transparent ones like Google Glass or opaque like Oculus. If they are opaque then you can't see where you're going without attaching dual cameras on the front and superimposing virtual reality on top so the idea of sharing real-world experiences with virtual users is hard. If the glasses are transparent, you end up with semi-transparent overlays of the virtual content as it projects onto one eye, which doesn't look real enough - if they did both eyes then again you'd have trouble seeing where you were going.
With opaque goggles, they could perhaps use body capture tech like MOVA:
[VIDEO]
The guy who did OnLive and upcoming pCell was involved in that and it has been used in movies. With a scan of the face stored, they'd really just have to track eye movement, blinking and mouth in real-time to be able to recreate a virtual representation of your face that can exist in the virtual world as your avatar or I suppose you could create your own one and you can map facial movements onto it in real-time. Realism would be important.
This becomes like the setup in the movie Surrogates:
[VIDEO]
They used robots in the real-world while the people stayed at home. The VR setup would be more like Second Life and the avatars would walk around in what would effectively be a video game.
In terms of someone experiencing the life of another person (they'd just have cameras while someone had opaque glasses), that could be interesting but the head tracking wouldn't work because you'd try to look a certain way and they'd be doing their own thing, that might induce nausea.
In a virtual world, there is the added difficulty of how you move in it. While you can use a controller, you'd really want to walk around and the treadmill idea won't be all that appealing.
Still, one scenario could be where you login with your real face scans (this would be flagged as authentic or not) and you can have a virtual meeting area. You can then pick out people to hang out with and play a game in a virtual world that exists like GTA. You could do thing like parkour in Mirror's Edge but partner up like in Ico.
This might allow relationships to blossom where they wouldn't otherwise. Like Japan for example, young people aren't having relationships enough:
"Aoyama cites one man in his early 30s, a virgin, who can't get sexually aroused unless he watches female robots on a game similar to Power Rangers."
"The Japan Cherry Boy Association currently boasts of 517 members whose ages range from their teens to their 40s. Many join the association in the hopes that women will visit its website and try to pick them up."
"Aoyama says the sexes, especially in Japan's giant cities, are "spiralling away from each other". Lacking long-term shared goals, many are turning to what she terms "Pot Noodle love" – easy or instant gratification, in the form of casual sex, short-term trysts and the usual technological suspects: online porn, virtual-reality "girlfriends", anime cartoons. Or else they're opting out altogether and replacing love and sex with other urban pastimes."
The problem is that there's a lot of unattractive people in the world. Walk down any street and attractive people are around 1 in 20. Seinfeld had this rough stat:
[VIDEO]
It holds up and this is where online porn and webcams have taken hold. Look at the following image:
The girl on stage is Katya Sambuca and you can see the reactions of the different people. You have the one beautiful nude girl loving the attention from all the unattractive guys (I'm not sure what the guy on the far right saw but he doesn't seem to like it) and in the background, you can make out the girls with all folded arms not getting any attention.
Unattractive people or even just socially awkward people have turned to the online world as it removes the stigma of their permanent real-world identity. In the real-world, there's an unwritten rule that people have of matching attractiveness. That was where the Godaddy ad caused a stir:
Given this reality of the prevalence of unattractiveness and social rules, it drives people to look online. This has happened in the App Store with apps like Tinder, Grindr, OK Cupid:
"more interesting are the stats and facts from Tinder regarding how women use the app. Even though women are usually thought of as seeking marriage/long-term relationships/true love, Friedman notes that "45 percent of Tinder users are women — and they seem to be just as comfortable with the app’s low-commitment objectification as its male users."
Then there was the old trope that, unlike superficial men, women need detailed information on a guy before they decide they’re interested. This, too, is disproved by Tinder.
Still, more and more we're judging people — and being judged — by how we present ourselves online, which is generally a carefully curated, Instagram-filtered mere sliver of our true, complicated, multifaceted personalities and lives. Can you really tell if you'd have a fun night of cocktails with someone based on a couple of pix and a Breaking Bad quote?"
Reviewers have mentioned that people curate their photos and don't appear quite as attractive when they meet up and it demonstrates the constant need people have for social acceptance - "just monkeys wrapped in suits begging for the approval of others".
Is the ever-growing influence of technology in our lives the answer to the problem here or in part the cause of it? Why bother dealing with social inadequacy and unattractiveness and the effort involved in fighting the social rules and trying to convince someone attractive to be with you when you can go online and bypass that?
[VIDEO]
The downside to real dating is this:
[VIDEO]
Someone turns up, they're not what you expected and you have to deal with it. Maybe VR is where dating goes. You have your real or virtual avatar and if you don't like how things go, it's just a click to stop it. But then it gets into the same cycle like Chatroulette where people just very quickly skip through the unattractive or non-genuine avatars to get the genuinely attractive people.
Social VR will be an interesting experiment but I suspect it will end up like this:
18 months ago, a guy with an idea comes to Kickstarter with an idea and a plea for quarter of a million Dollars.
9522 people helped this guy giving him nearly 2.5 million.
18 months later, this device is still not a unit that anyone can buy.
Did those 9522 people, games companies and other investors spend their money and time allow this guy to build the device he was dreaming of?
No, all it did was allow this guy to build a brand that sells nothing and then sell that brand for billions to a company who really doesn't have a clue.
What's better than completing your life's work? Making a ton of cash sitting around doing nothing.
Oculus took too long to release a product, now FaceBook will reduce the specs, scare off games companies and not develop it for the reason it was originally designed for. Hopefully, other companies will make their own versions and get the idea back on track.
All Oculus built was a great demo. A demo is not a company.
All Oculus built was a great demo. A demo is not a company.
What? They built actual hardware. Two generations of it. Development platforms, sure, but they had dozens of big companies supporting the platform and hundreds of people making their own games and demonstrations.
Half of that is gone now that Facebook owns them. It’s only a matter of time before Valve pulls out, too, and that’s the end of it.
What? They built actual hardware. Two generations of it. Development platforms, sure, but they had dozens of big companies supporting the platform and hundreds of people making their own games and demonstrations.
Half of that is gone now that Facebook owns them. It’s only a matter of time before Valve pulls out, too, and that’s the end of it.
Yes, you're right. However, has their hardware passed the patent infringement test? There are decades of actual products out there and I'd wager the Rift infringes on hundreds of patents.
In what is perhaps the most confusing news I've read this morning Samsung is working with Oculus for it's own VR-enable media headset. :???:
A few days back Sammy said they had one in the works (Don't they have their own version of every single rumored piece of tech anyone else might be bringing to market?). Today they offered more details including a partnership of sorts with Oculus, who is owned by Facebook. http://www.engadget.com/2014/05/30/samsung-oculus-partnership/
In what is perhaps the most confusing news I've read this morning Samsung is working with Oculus for it's own VR-enable media headset. :???:
A few days back Sammy said they had one in the works (Don't they have their own version of every single rumored piece of tech anyone else might be bringing to market?). Today they offered more details including a partnership of sorts with Oculus, who is owned by Facebook. http://www.engadget.com/2014/05/30/samsung-oculus-partnership/
Samsung would make their own version of a dead raccoon if they thought they could sell them.
Comments
I'm not seeing how virtual reality fits into social connection.
The first thing I thought of was a children's anime series several years back, "Dennou Coil". DuckDuckGo it, and spend about 10 minutes with any given episode (sadly, I've only seen the first four).
If you can get past this being a program aimed at younger children with age-appropriate themes, it's actually a pretty refreshing and cogent fantasy of how real and virtual worlds might one day not only coexist, but also affect each other.
And yes, the key visual conceit was wearing "smart" glasses. Way back in 2007.
You realize that VR has been around for a bit longer, right?
www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality
yeah another bad purchase, facebook is looking very desperate there. They bought a geek toy with no real everyday use for the everyday consumer. I think Mark is trying to be like google by inventing in technology for the no other reason that it looks cool. I am so glad I took my proof off the table before he started pissing away the money.
18 months ago, a guy with an idea comes to Kickstarter with an idea and a plea for quarter of a million Dollars.
9522 people helped this guy giving him nearly 2.5 million.
18 months later, this device is still not a unit that anyone can buy.
Did those 9522 people, games companies and other investors spend their money and time allow this guy to build the device he was dreaming of?
No, all it did was allow this guy to build a brand that sells nothing and then sell that brand for billions to a company who really doesn't have a clue.
What's better than completing your life's work? Making a ton of cash sitting around doing nothing.
Oculus took too long to release a product, now FaceBook will reduce the specs, scare off games companies and not develop it for the reason it was originally designed for. Hopefully, other companies will make their own versions and get the idea back on track.
After Mr. Luckey's business partner died, I think he was rudderless and probably had second thoughts about what he was doing. I'm betting Oculus is basically dead now and he'll be leaving soon. Zuckerberg fell for a demo and overpaid...again.
You know… I thought to myself, “Self… let’s maybe get one of the release models of these. After all, we have a few games on hand that can implement it, particularly SpaceEngine. It could be fun.
Not happening now. Nor ever. Not until the parent company is bankrupted and turned to dust.
You hear that, Facebook?
While wearing glasses, you can either go the route of having transparent ones like Google Glass or opaque like Oculus. If they are opaque then you can't see where you're going without attaching dual cameras on the front and superimposing virtual reality on top so the idea of sharing real-world experiences with virtual users is hard. If the glasses are transparent, you end up with semi-transparent overlays of the virtual content as it projects onto one eye, which doesn't look real enough - if they did both eyes then again you'd have trouble seeing where you were going.
With opaque goggles, they could perhaps use body capture tech like MOVA:
[VIDEO]
The guy who did OnLive and upcoming pCell was involved in that and it has been used in movies. With a scan of the face stored, they'd really just have to track eye movement, blinking and mouth in real-time to be able to recreate a virtual representation of your face that can exist in the virtual world as your avatar or I suppose you could create your own one and you can map facial movements onto it in real-time. Realism would be important.
This becomes like the setup in the movie Surrogates:
[VIDEO]
They used robots in the real-world while the people stayed at home. The VR setup would be more like Second Life and the avatars would walk around in what would effectively be a video game.
In terms of someone experiencing the life of another person (they'd just have cameras while someone had opaque glasses), that could be interesting but the head tracking wouldn't work because you'd try to look a certain way and they'd be doing their own thing, that might induce nausea.
In a virtual world, there is the added difficulty of how you move in it. While you can use a controller, you'd really want to walk around and the treadmill idea won't be all that appealing.
Still, one scenario could be where you login with your real face scans (this would be flagged as authentic or not) and you can have a virtual meeting area. You can then pick out people to hang out with and play a game in a virtual world that exists like GTA. You could do thing like parkour in Mirror's Edge but partner up like in Ico.
This might allow relationships to blossom where they wouldn't otherwise. Like Japan for example, young people aren't having relationships enough:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/20/young-people-japan-stopped-having-sex
http://www.asianoffbeat.com/post/Japanese-Playboy:-1/4-of-Japanese-Men-Between-30-to-34-Still-Virgins-news-567
"Aoyama cites one man in his early 30s, a virgin, who can't get sexually aroused unless he watches female robots on a game similar to Power Rangers."
"The Japan Cherry Boy Association currently boasts of 517 members whose ages range from their teens to their 40s. Many join the association in the hopes that women will visit its website and try to pick them up."
"Aoyama says the sexes, especially in Japan's giant cities, are "spiralling away from each other". Lacking long-term shared goals, many are turning to what she terms "Pot Noodle love" – easy or instant gratification, in the form of casual sex, short-term trysts and the usual technological suspects: online porn, virtual-reality "girlfriends", anime cartoons. Or else they're opting out altogether and replacing love and sex with other urban pastimes."
The problem is that there's a lot of unattractive people in the world. Walk down any street and attractive people are around 1 in 20. Seinfeld had this rough stat:
[VIDEO]
It holds up and this is where online porn and webcams have taken hold. Look at the following image:
The girl on stage is Katya Sambuca and you can see the reactions of the different people. You have the one beautiful nude girl loving the attention from all the unattractive guys (I'm not sure what the guy on the far right saw but he doesn't seem to like it) and in the background, you can make out the girls with all folded arms not getting any attention.
Unattractive people or even just socially awkward people have turned to the online world as it removes the stigma of their permanent real-world identity. In the real-world, there's an unwritten rule that people have of matching attractiveness. That was where the Godaddy ad caused a stir:
[VIDEO]
There's even punching-above-your-weight contests:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2587816/We-edit-wedding-photos-Fiancee-punching-weight-contest-winner-confesses-shes-aware-partner-no-Tom-Cruise-personality-counts.html
Given this reality of the prevalence of unattractiveness and social rules, it drives people to look online. This has happened in the App Store with apps like Tinder, Grindr, OK Cupid:
http://jezebel.com/what-tinder-reveals-about-how-women-look-for-online-hoo-1443431082
"more interesting are the stats and facts from Tinder regarding how women use the app. Even though women are usually thought of as seeking marriage/long-term relationships/true love, Friedman notes that "45 percent of Tinder users are women — and they seem to be just as comfortable with the app’s low-commitment objectification as its male users."
Then there was the old trope that, unlike superficial men, women need detailed information on a guy before they decide they’re interested. This, too, is disproved by Tinder.
Still, more and more we're judging people — and being judged — by how we present ourselves online, which is generally a carefully curated, Instagram-filtered mere sliver of our true, complicated, multifaceted personalities and lives. Can you really tell if you'd have a fun night of cocktails with someone based on a couple of pix and a Breaking Bad quote?"
Reviewers have mentioned that people curate their photos and don't appear quite as attractive when they meet up and it demonstrates the constant need people have for social acceptance - "just monkeys wrapped in suits begging for the approval of others".
Is the ever-growing influence of technology in our lives the answer to the problem here or in part the cause of it? Why bother dealing with social inadequacy and unattractiveness and the effort involved in fighting the social rules and trying to convince someone attractive to be with you when you can go online and bypass that?
[VIDEO]
The downside to real dating is this:
[VIDEO]
Someone turns up, they're not what you expected and you have to deal with it. Maybe VR is where dating goes. You have your real or virtual avatar and if you don't like how things go, it's just a click to stop it. But then it gets into the same cycle like Chatroulette where people just very quickly skip through the unattractive or non-genuine avatars to get the genuinely attractive people.
Social VR will be an interesting experiment but I suspect it will end up like this:
In reply to Marvin’s stuff, this. If you don’t want to watch it on YouTube, hit up your Apple TV, go to PBS, look for FutureStates, and watch Play.
That’s where I saw it, at least.
More money than sense the Facebook lads.
All Oculus built was a great demo. A demo is not a company.
What? They built actual hardware. Two generations of it. Development platforms, sure, but they had dozens of big companies supporting the platform and hundreds of people making their own games and demonstrations.
Half of that is gone now that Facebook owns them. It’s only a matter of time before Valve pulls out, too, and that’s the end of it.
Yes, you're right. However, has their hardware passed the patent infringement test? There are decades of actual products out there and I'd wager the Rift infringes on hundreds of patents.
Since the Facebook purchase, I’ve gone from hoping not to hoping so.
A few days back Sammy said they had one in the works (Don't they have their own version of every single rumored piece of tech anyone else might be bringing to market?). Today they offered more details including a partnership of sorts with Oculus, who is owned by Facebook.
http://www.engadget.com/2014/05/30/samsung-oculus-partnership/
Samsung would make their own version of a dead raccoon if they thought they could sell them.