This would have been great if it was introduced 15 years ago when pretty much each phone model had it's own special charger, but not so much know when they're almost all entirely standardized. Except for Apple, of course. They're special.
This is he first time for me where an emergent new technology in the gaming world feels like a proper thing with actual potential, and not a just a novelty gimmick like motion controls, 3D and previous attempts at "VR" were. I had the chance to try the new Oculus Rift S and the HTC Vive over the holidays with some Beat Saber and Superhot and it was a really amazing experience. I have honestly never felt such awe for a game since my childhood days where I'd witness a brand new graphics engine like Source for the first time.
There is definitely a bright future for VR as the technology will only get better, cheaper and more accessible with time.
Yes, really, You are the exception. By now there is quite a few people who have tried VR in some place or another and the market has clearly shown sales are not skyrocketing at all. It's a very slow growth, we are talking about a few millions headsets per year, which is just pocket money market wise compared to smartphones or even PCs at large. Also, most of the software is utter crap (with a few exceptions like Beat Saber, Tetris Effect) and not convincing enough for anyone who cares about their spending.
The Altair 8080 is considered the first PC and it was released in 1974. The IBM PC was released in 1981 and PCs became widespread only in the 1990's, when they started adding multimedia features. So about 20 years for mass adoption.
The first touchscreen phone was introduced in 1994, the IBM Simon. Yet the first true modern smartphone to get mass adoption was the iPhone, 2007. And truly massive adoption worldwide happened after iOS and especially Android took off, a few years later.
VR has been around as a purely techie idea for 30 years but we haven't really had the tech for something worthwhile until recently. I'd say that we're probably 5-10 years from mass adoption, once we have some lighter high-performance headsets.
Early VR is 1960s ... it's been around longer than personal computers.
(oh sure, for military and experimental applications for the most part for a long time - and with a really high price tag - but it existed!)
If we're stretching things to go with the earliest examples of the tech, then computers go back even further with ENIAC in the 1940s. Even earlier if you count electromechanical devices.
Well, we're talking about mass market adoption. If they make 1% of people feel sick, that's tens if not hundreds of millions of people who will be actively campaigning against your product. This is definitely into early adopter territory.
Then you need super high graphical fidelity (resolution, refresh rate, field of view, etc.) and super portable equipment.
The current VR devices aren't the first commercially available ones. My first VR experience was in the late 80's and I think it was driven by an Amiga. Thirty years has passed since then and I think that maybe the market is what it's going to be.
AR has a ton of potential though (e.g. windshield HUDs).
Obviously, we're still at very early stages with this tech. It's silly to compare it with smartphones and PCs, since it's a very different class of product. There are some barriers for entry but, as I said they will eventually get ironed out. The price of a full set with a fidelity grade matching the current high end sets shouldn't exceed the price of a games console in a few years.
There has definitely been a huge increase in interest with titles like Boneworks and the upcoming HL Alyx. The Valve index has been sold out almost instantly and there's reportedly a huge backlog of pre-orders for it.
Your first paragraph has been the goto defense for VR for a decade now. I used it myself five years ago. But it's gotten old now. Tech is supposed to solve these problems faster than this.
The Valve index sold out because it is the only way to play one of the most anticipated games of all time.
there is no space for gaming to evolve at the moment without VR. The only thing that next generation consoles are bringing to the table is more advanced graphics. VR offers a truly innovative space for gaming to move into and whilst its not there yet in terms of hardware and software, I can see it being 'the future' as it were.
I think there's potential for things like Apple's U1 chip and Google's Soli chip to add cheap and accurate gesture control to consoles without the need to hold controllers at all. Add an array of mics and the next gen of Guitar Hero can be based on a group's singing and dancing but graded on a per-voice / per-body basis.
Because of a console's placement in front of a group instead of attached to a single person's head, I think it's better positioned for a wide variety of entertainment experiences.
Large TVs are now cheap enough that they can fill an entire group's field of vision with a shared experience as opposed to having to buy 1 headset per person. Obviously turning your head ruins the immersion of a TV, but I would argue that's not always a bad thing. Sometimes it's fun to be "trapped" in VR, but sometimes it just makes the experience more isolating and difficult to operate (eg how do I watch my kids playing on the other side of the room while I have a headset on?).
That same argument could have been made for 3D tech in TVs a few years ago, and we all know how well that technology took off. It seems most people seem to want an incrementally “better” experience, not a fundamentally different one.
I'd prefer physically accurate skeletal animation because even with all the mocap, animations still look sooo fake. Maybe neural network post processing step would do some good? Maybe some life-like flexibility in interactions instead of everything being little finite state machines?
Maybe some neural network game optimisation to be more fun for given player?
My experience with this is very different. I used to know a few kazakh fellows and their views on Borat were resentful to say the least. They said Sacha Cohen is a universally hated figure in Kazakhstan, along with the Borat movie itself, to the point where a lot of people genuinely want him dead. I have no doubt some Kazakhstan citizens actually enjoy Borat but to generalize it as being seen as "high comedy" over there is a vast and incorrect exaggeration.
Yep. I know that your version is correct, as well. My only point is that there are several young kz thst are not offended by it. They just don't associate it with Kazakhstan, and take no offence. It's just like the red sonja movie or whatever with Schwarzenegger, in russia, they just think it's disconnected fun, and has nothing to do with Russia. But i agree sir
Despite once being my favorite game series and developer and I stopped caring about Half-Life and Valve sometime around when they made it obvious they only care about milking their vapid Dota franchise and they have no interest in developing any of their core IPs. I can't force myself get excited about this even if someone paid me to. The ship has sailed a long time ago.
The way I look at it is there was really no way to make Half Life 3 interesting while following their method of integrating emerging tech into it as a primary focus. Flat gaming on PC has been stale for a very long time. Now that we've got VR, there's finally a new and fresh thing to use in FPS games.
Personally I find Portal so enjoyable that I'm happy that I have the original Portal and Portal 2.
However, at a first glance it seems like it should have been relatively straightforward to create sequels that just have more levels. But maybe it's not that easy to actually do it.
Where are you getting this data from? 2 years for a new CPU? My gaming pc from 2015 that cost just a little over $1k runs all recent games on ultra just fine.
So let's say you have an old YT account that you don't use anymore tied you your gmail account and there a few dozen family holiday videos you uploaded years ago to show friends (which was kinda the original purpose of YouTube) and completely forgot about. Does this mean that one day you might wake up with access to your gmail completely blocked off because an algorithm on YT decided that your channel is not profitable?
Not entirely true. Take the recent controversy around YouTuber Markiplier having users' accounts shut down (including both YouTube and Gmail) for spamming his YouTube livestream chatroom.[1]
I also did a quick search and it's been a while since both Gmail/Google accounts and YouTube accounts are tied to one another.[2][3]
I’d argue that YouTube is a for-profit business. They have every right, within legal bounds, to do whatever makes economic sense to them.
If you want an archive, go with archive.org. But even then, nothing is free. If somebody thinks a footage deserves to be archived and preserved, somebody needs to pay for the cost anyhow, e.g. via donations.
As a user I am not interested in YT's profits. However, what I am interested in is being able to access useful content. For all intents and purposes, YT has become the central place for people to upload such footage and of course the prospect of its removal is worrying to me. There are vast amounts of indispensable knowledge and information uploaded to YT that is far from being deemed as profitable to Google and as such are under risk of being permanently and irreversibly lost.
Hence my confusion at the OP's description of the situation as "a good thing".
There are alternatives. We just need to use them if we care a little about it. e.g. your own web server (e.g. blog) / p2p network (e.g. zeronet / dtube) or even 'the modern social network' (e.g. facebook / twitter)
> Obscure and/or old archive footage which usually doesnt get that many views is one of the best things about YT.
and one of the costs youtube bears, since by definition they can't make money off those videos, but has to pay for storage.
I dont know if there's a solution - perhaps non-commercialized accounts can't upload more than X gigabytes of vidoes, or be forced to have ads? Or you (the channel owner) pay for the storage?
> and one of the costs youtube bears, since by definition they can't make money off those videos, but has to pay for storage.
Sure they can make money off them - they just need to be creative. For example, you can have a category of 'archived videos' to which you need to pay to be able to access. The payment is for the service, not for the video so it does not matter what are the specific settings on a specific video.
Even consumer SSD's are around 10 cents per gigabyte of storage. These videos wouldn't get many views, but they don't need a ton to recoup storage costs.
Indeed - going further, the long tail is the only advantage centralized systems hold over decentralized ones. The day YouTube only shows the top 99% of content is the day we can all switch to BitTorrent and not lose a thing.
