I feel like nobody wants to hear me on this, but for VR to really work we need massive advices in basic physics & biology, like, being able to project images/video/sound directly into the brain and eye so they are literally indistinguishable from "reality". I do think Apple's device is an important and useful step forward -- the first one actually worth trying -- but a baby step nonetheless.
it's like the whole "self driving cars are just around the corner!" and "sentient AI is just around the corner!" arguments. Hard things are hard. I do think eventually we will get there but not on the timescale journalists can get excited about, because they'll all be dead by then.
sometimes I do get sort of aggravated that I wasn't born a thousand years in the future where this stuff can actually happen. Consider that today's most advanced medicine will be considered the equivalent of bloodletting and leeches in 100 years, for example. They'll be horrified by what we were doing, but it was the best we had at the time. We have miles to go before we sleep.
@codinghorror But on the other hand, I feel I really got to live through the neck of the curve, starting out on the C64 and now getting to use workable VR/AR at consumer prices. And I’m not even that old!
@can well, true, we can always move the goalposts, but I'm so curious what things will be like in 1000 years. Even in 100 years. At least my kids will know a bit more!
@codinghorror I feel like you're setting an absurdly high bar for "work" there, one we don't apply to any other technology. It doesn't need to be perfect for it to work, it just needs to do something so compellingly that people don't care about other perceived drawbacks.
Early PCs were TERRIBLE, but they had REALLY compelling use cases, so they "worked" just fine, for example.
(That said, I'm not debating that AR/VR doesnt have that compelling use case yet. That's a given.)
@codinghorror in that case, can you say it about full-on brain-interface VR? What problem does that solve?
But what VR is for, or really XR in general, is to allow us to interface spatially with spatial data. It's a UI, nothing more or less. And because we live in a 3D world, that's a useful thing. It's not there to replace reality and if you expect it to, yes, you'll struggle.
@codinghorror "being able to project images/video/sound directly into the brain and eye so they are literally indistinguishable from reality." sounds like a nightmare in many, many ways. If fake news are terrible now, wait until you literally cannot figure out if what you're seeing is real.
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