The State of VR 2016

Major VR headsets are to debut in 2016. What's the state of VR and will it ever be more than just a gimmick?

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcomed up. Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks of the future says, ever since I
was younger, I was into video games. I'm Lauren buck

(00:22):
Obama and I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're going to
be revisiting a topic that we've talked about on the
show before. But I felt like we were due for
an update. Yeah, because those back in when we talked
about the first time, December, which is late in the year,
was like all the way in December. I think there's
a few months after December. There's no February. The topic

(00:46):
today is going to be virtual reality. Oh shoot, because
I looked at virtual realty, oh, like like like lands
you would buy in in in like some city or something.
Oh that that wouldn't be a bad topic in itself. Actually,
maybe some uses of virtual reality in the future will
involve selling homes at low, low prices. Yeah, I'm pretty

(01:07):
sure they will actually, so Okay, So in this original
episode in we went really deep into the history of
virtual reality, including a lot of uses outside of the
gaming industry, like an therapy and training program stuff like that.
That history, as far as we know, has not changed.
As long as no little police call boxes with a

(01:30):
defective chameleon device have landed somewhere in the past and
messed things up. I'm pretty sure all the VR news
are fixed points in time. I'm pretty sure they are.
I mean, unless we're dealing with one of those like
Bahnstein Bear issues, that thing is still messing me up. Man.
All right, well, that's that's fair. I'm more of a
Weeping Angels kind of guy myself. But yeah, so we

(01:50):
wanted to to revisit this specifically because VR was one
of those things that went through an incredibly rough patch
shortly after the term got popularized. Yeah, and I think
that's because versions of it were being brought, would you say,
to market I don't know, at least to consumer experience
in a way. Even if people weren't buying things to

(02:12):
keep in their homes, people were going to malls and
shows and stuff like that where they can get into
some kind of virtual reality experience. And it was underwhelming. Yeah,
the the expectations did not meet. Uh, we're not met,
I should say, especially based upon the amazing depictions we
got from Hollywood like lawnmower Man, you know, phenomenal depictions

(02:38):
of VR experience, Yes, exactly, but but certainly lanmore Man
is less nauseating than some of these early virtual reality headsets.
For you, I can speak from experience because we're talking
about the nineties, right, Yeah. I think I actually said
this in our In fact, I'm sure I said it
in our episode, which I did not go back and

(02:59):
listen to. But I am. I can't imagine that I
would have let a VR discussion go by without talking
about my personal experience of playing Dactyl Nightmare or whatever
it was, or Dactyl Terror, the polygon pterodactyl game that
was a VR game. They used to showcase it in
a mall that's not too far from where we are now.

(03:19):
And I would go to this mall and spend five
of my heart earned dollars to spend five minutes feeling
very sick in this very primitive yeah, which vaguely pterodactyl
shaped polygons. Yeah, coming after me. It was not as
as awesome, like I could see the potential even then,

(03:41):
Like the head tracking software was amazing, the idea that
I could turn my head in real life and my
view in the virtual world would change as a result
of that. It was a cool idea. The latency issue
was terrible because that's what starts to create that feeling
of being nauseated, right, and that this is the problem

(04:03):
where the the hardware can't quite keep up. It's not
able to serve images to your eyes at just the
right speed to match how you're turning your head, so
instead there's this kind of dragging FCT that's swimmy kind
of feel. Now that was the case back in the nineties. Uh,
Today we have much more powerful processors, including video processors

(04:25):
graphics processors, where we've managed to and by we, I
mean people who actually work on this stuff, have managed
to reduce that latency to a point where it is
not really detectable by humans and and we're surprisingly good
at noticing that. So that was a big challenge. Yeah,
And that was the news that we were reacting to

(04:45):
when we talked about this and when we sort of
asked the questions, after so many bad incarnations over the years,
is virtual reality just dead forever? Or can can it
really come back? And can new innovations in VR make
the technology more attractive? And even thing that will become
the new way to have you know, virtual, immersive or
gaming experiences. Right, could this potentially be the replacement of

(05:09):
your traditional console or gaming PC. And there have been
some interesting developments on that question already. I've seen some
tech journalists calling twenty sixteen the year of VR. Understandable
that may be that may be premature, since we've only
made it a little bit into twenty sixteen, but they
might have a good reason for doing that. Because I
want to report on some survey results from the Game

(05:31):
Developers Conference State of the Industry Survey for sixteen, which
came out January sixteen, and it's based on feedback from
more than two thousand game developers who were attendees of
this conference, and they said, in the past year, the
percent of participating game developers working on VR projects has

(05:52):
more than doubled. So in seven percent of game developers
were working on virtual reality in two sixteen, sixteen percent.
We're right. So this also reminds us that doubling is
not necessarily a huge number if you're starting with a
relatively small one, but still significant. So I'm actually surprised

(06:14):
that it's that low, honestly, just because VR is one
of those things that has so much buzz behind it,
even even considering the multiple delays we have seen, or
at least the perceived delays we have seen in the
release schedule for the hardware. Like some of the biggest
names in VR hardware as of the recording of this
podcast have yet to come out, but they're scheduled to

(06:34):
come out this year. Well, it seems like a big
gamble now because there really are I think there's only
one major VR headset available for the consumer right now,
isn't there. Well, yeah, and even then it's one that
considered actually VR. Yeah, we'll get into that later. So yeah,
I mean, this is a thing where you don't already
have that pretty dependable delivery methods. So if you're developing

(06:57):
a game for the Xbox or the PlayStation, you've already
got a base number of people who have this console
in their homes, and you can depend on some subset
of them to download it or buy it in the
store and pay for your product. With VR, we don't know,
I mean, you don't have a whole lot of people
with VR headsets in their houses. You have to you
have to create the market first and then sell to

(07:20):
that market. Yeah, so it is a gamble and you
so you can see why it would be slow to
pick up. But these numbers are making it look like
more and more people are making this gamble and saying
where we think VR is the future. And that lines
up with other numbers from this survey. For example, cent
of developers said that their next game project will incorporate

(07:41):
virtual reality, and that was up from six percent who
said this last year. This one is promising. Seventy five
percent of respondents held the opinion that quote VR slash
a R is a long term sustainable business to be
in a R of course, being augmented reality. The difference
with virtual reality and augmented reality is with augmented reality,

(08:03):
you are looking at the real world through whatever. Yeah,
it might be through a transparent screen, or it might
be through a display that has a camera mounted on
the other side, so that you're getting a video feed
of the world around you. And on top of that
you have some sort of digital information that is overlaid
on on the real world. Yeah, so virtual reality is

(08:23):
all fake stuff. Augmented reality is real world plus fake stuff. Yeah, yeah,
more or less. Yes, um, I'll agree to that. And
and now, of course part of the problem with that
question is that by grouping both VR and A are together,
it may be that some of them have very strong
opinions on one and opposite opinions of the other. That's

(08:43):
exactly right. Yeah, I made that note that, Um, we'll
have to take that kind of prediction with a grain
of salt because we don't know, you know, maybe they
meant that, Oh, some people think a R is going
to be really big. Yeah. But and another one along
these lines is the question to game developers, how soon
will VR slash a R devices surpass the consumer adoption

(09:04):
rate of game consoles in which is about so, how
soon are they going to be bigger than game consoles are? Now?
When when are we going to see a VR headset
get greater sales than a PS four or an Xbox
one or whatever the equivalent is, which which they're saying
is a is a base level of the population of

(09:25):
about Yeah, so a hilarious group said oh, it'll happen
by that was one percent of respondence. That is incredibly aggressive.
That's a that's a small but mighty group. You have
to admire their optimism. Yeah, forty four percent said this
would happen by six and fifty four percent, so a

(09:46):
majority said it would happen. By said they thought it
would never happen. That you're never going to have VR
a R becoming more popular than game console. And if
you add all those numbers up and you say, wait,
that's more than hundred percent, you can remember that that's
say it happens by essentially includes and the one percent
who said by well, I think it will happen, but

(10:12):
not like we have totally surpassed it and we've gone
to it. The next thing. No, no, I mean, I'm
yet again invoking tardist base. Gotcha, gotcha. So the interesting
thing to me is that it's by six still seems
I guess pessimistic is the best word for it, because
you think that's ten years out. So you're saying that

(10:34):
less than half of them thought that even in ten
years the technology would be not just mature enough, but
priced at a level where it would sell greater than
whatever the comparable console of the time would be. Yeah,
but that is talking about exceeding console performance. Sure, And
also you're to be fair asking a potentially biased group
of humans are employees of the game industry, and these

(10:59):
are the people who know what they're talking about, but
it also their future kind of depends on the answer.
There's also there's also a weird shift right now. I'm
not weird. There is a shift right now where for
a while we saw console gaming being really dominant in
the industry, and now it's another PC centric population. I
would say, like, I mean, I still know lots of

(11:20):
dedicated console gamers. That's the way they game and that's
all they do. But PC gaming has experienced a real
renaissance over the last five years. I would say absolutely.
If you had asked me when the Xbox had been
out for a few months that the first Xbox that
I would have said that PC gaming would never make

(11:40):
a comeback the way that it has well, And it's
one of the you know, I think it's a cycle.
We are a pendulum at least right where you see
it swing one way versus the other. Where. If you
get to a point where the consoles are sophisticated enough
where you're getting of satisfying gaming experience from them, uh,
and you don't have to worry about upgrading them constantly
so that you can keep up with the latest games,

(12:01):
then it makes sense that there's a move to the consoles.
But then when you get to a point where PC
performance has reached a level where you're not outstripping it
as quickly, it's also not as difficult to upgrade as
it used to be, and you're getting incredible delivery systems.
The Steam delivery system has done wonders for the PC
gaming community. Uh that you can see why this pendulum

(12:26):
swings each way. So that's probably also a factor. You know,
it's not just that will ease overtake consoles, it's framing
that in if you already have a bias against consoles
because you developed for the PC and you think that's
the future of gaming, that might also guide your response
to a question like this on the survey. Absolutely okay,

(12:46):
but so that was with forty of households that last
survey question. What about a slightly more more modest proposal. Yeah, so,
like the idea that vr A R hardware will be
in ten per cent of US households, when did they
that would happen? Well, thirty eight percent said by it
would be there in ten percent of US households. Eighty

(13:07):
six percent said it would be there by and nine
percent said and never gonna happen, and we'll we'll have
more to say about this, because it may very well
be the VR becomes one of those things that is
a is a sort of a niche technology for a
slice of the gamer population, or really the computer population,

(13:30):
computing population, because it's not just for the purpose of
using in gaming. But yeah, I agree with especially the
six percent by saying at least ten percent of households
in in the US will own some form of VR headset.
I think that's pretty realistic. But you've actually you've used

(13:51):
an Oculus rift, haven't you. I have, I've almost almost
recovered from it. Yeah, to be fair, it was an
older one. Yes, the Oculus dev Kid. Yes, the dev
kid I used was version one. It wasn't even version two.
Version two was the one that had uh the reference
dots on the outside and used an external camera to

(14:11):
help get better external tracking of the device. Um, the
one I used did not have that, so it's really
just the head trackers that were relying upon the accelerometers
in the heads of itself. It was still a little
bit Yeah, I may have mentioned. I don't know if
I had used it when we did our first episode,
but when I did try it out. The demo I

(14:34):
used was just walking around, virtually walking around a villa,
like an Italian villa. There's a lovely little seaside villa
that I'm I'm walking around. I got so motion sick.
And then my friend who owns the Oculus he works
for Google, said, all right, you're ready to try the

(14:56):
spaceship game. Heck, no, I do not want to cover
your keyboard and vomit is what I said to him,
And he thought, thanks me for the thoughtful reply, And
then we just played the Spacecraft game without using the
VR version. Yeah, well, I think we should take a

(15:16):
look at the lay of the land as things are
today with the big players in in virtual reality, like
what's out there right now, what's and what's on the horizon? Yeah,
because when we did this, it really was basically just
the Oculus rift on the horizon, and there were kind
of like some independent developers working on a few things,
and there were some rumors that a few people be

(15:38):
getting into some things, like there was there was the
mention of a Sony Morpheus, but no one really had
any information about that. That, by the way, has totally
changed names at this point. Yeah, now it's the Neo,
it's the blue pill. Uh and and there were a
couple of others as well. But yeah, the some of
the big names that people are really anticipating this year

(16:00):
and even really been talked about back at least not
in wide circles. Sure, sure, so okay. So, so the
only product that we can really reliably talk about because
it has already come to commercial market is Samsung's Gear VR.
And unlike the other products that we will talk about,
this isn't something that you connect to anything as powerful

(16:20):
as a game console or a desktop computer. It runs
off of a Samsung Galaxy smartphone, off of one of
four models. Specifically, you just you just snap your phone
into this headset and it goes, well, it doesn't. It's well,
it's not quite that simple, but yeah, it's a it's
it's a headset you snap your phone in, and there

(16:41):
are Android platform apps that you can install to work
with a base Oculus app that will allow you to
play games, explore virtual environments, you know that sort of thing. Yes,
Samsung developed the headset in collaboration with the folks at Oculus,
the makers of the Rift. So the headset itself contains
a proximity sensor that detects when it's being worn, which

(17:04):
most phones actually have, Like they know if you're holding
your phone up to your head. So if you ever
have noticed that the light on your smartphone has dimmed
just as you're putting it up to your cheek, that's
the proximity sensor saying all right, there, Jonathan's putting his
phone up to his big fat head. I don't have
to have the screen on anymore. It makes it really
hard to dial numbers with your cheekbones. I don't have

(17:26):
well defined cheekbones, so I just find that offensive. I'm
sure Benndet Cumberback is mad every day every day. It
also has a few more sensors. Okay, so what else
does it go? Yeah, it's got an accelerometer in there,
a girometer, and a geomagnetic field sensor. Yeah yeah, that
that one can help determine the device's position relative to

(17:46):
magnetic north, which apparently is a thing that a lot
of mobile devices do and I just haven't heard of
it before. Essentially essentially a digital compass. Yeah yeah, I
just think that's great anyway. So yeah, in order to
interact with with whatever virtual VI you're in, you can
move your head and then either a swiper clicker both
using the four directional touch pad that's on the right

(18:08):
side of the headset. Yeah. I saw a video review
of this with a writer from The Verge where she
was trying this out in public. Like she was like, well,
I do most of my mobile gaming on you know,
on the subway or public transportation or something, so I
want to see how well it works on those things.
Apparently there is a problem if you're playing a game

(18:29):
or something that tracks your your head motion when you're
going around curves. So like if you if your car turns,
or if you go around a curve in the subway,
it will interpret that as you turning your head. I'll
just imagine trying to play a VR game aboard a
moving platform would make me feel motion sickness way faster. Well,

(18:51):
you wouldn't. You wouldn't be getting the external stimuli of
It's not like reading a book in a car because
your your field of natural vision is totally blocked. Yeah,
but what when you're looking at a virtual world and
let's say you're standing still while you're playing the game,
but you're moving in relation to you know, you're in
a train. That's moving your inner ear is still doing

(19:12):
a thing. Your your brain is probably just saying, like, guys,
something is wrong. I'm just going to send a message
down to Mr Tummy to evacuate and then everything's gonna
be cool. Yeah, right, And and this is the kind
of problem that wouldn't happen probably with most of the
other devices we're going to talk about, because those have
full blown positional tracking um, which reduces some of that issue. Yeah,

(19:37):
this one does not. Also, it's it's interesting to me
that the interface is largely a kind of a touch
directional pad that's on the device itself. So in other words,
you know, it's not like it's an external control, although
I would imagine you get cyclops reaching up to our
jority kind of Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.

(19:57):
Those were exactly the two example is that come to
mind when I think of this, the idea of lifting
the hand up to the temple and adjusting something. But
also I would imagine in the future you could probably
create some functionality with Bluetooth enabled control. So they already have.

(20:17):
Actually there's uh, the the only one that I've read
about being available at the moment is that there's a
controller that Microsoft uses for for other Windows and Android
based systems. It's Bluetooth. It's you know, like a like
a console gaming controller. So it's not it's not anything
too fancy, but yeah, you can. They caused like seventy
bucks retail and and they're they're compatible with some of

(20:39):
the games. It's interesting because this this particular approach, this
particular device, once you set aside the price of the phone,
like if you already own the phone, then you're not
talking about the cost of it. But it's funny because
then the controller costs almost as much as what this
device does. Yeah. Yeah, the price tag on the system
right now is here in the United States, it's it's
a little bit, well, it's it's about equivalent in the

(21:02):
other places. In about that one. And I was trying
to think of if it was available throughout the European
Union or not. It's that that was the pause. I
know what the UK is called. Um but yeah, yeah, so,
uh so that's a bonus because certainly a lot of

(21:24):
the other systems that are out there are way more expensive.
Let's talk about one of them this well one more
one more thing are actually two more quick things, um
that reviewers have been talking about they really appreciate that
it's mobile, that it's a truly mobile device. You're not
tethered to anything, so you have a much better freedom

(21:44):
of motion, which you can use at your own peril, because,
of course, if you're exploring a virtual world, you have
to remember that things like tables are still present in
your own world. Subway tracks, subway tracks, Yeah, you can
still run into all of these cooligans aboard the train. Yeah. Um.
A lot of them were also saying that it's the
kind of system that's best used with independent headphones because it,

(22:08):
you know, just the sound out of your smartphone, as
lovely as it maybe, and these are modern times, uh,
it is, Yeah, not not as immersive. You're not very directional.
Like you, you couldn't tell where the sound is coming
from necessarily. I mean, you know what's coming from the phone.
I'm just saying, you don't know what direction relative to
where you were looking, it's coming from. And then, of course,

(22:30):
the other obvious thing is that the device and the
screen resolution are only ever going to be as powerful
as the smartphone that you possess, right, And also the
smartphone is essentially dividing the display into two Right, you're
getting one image for the left eye, one image for
the right eye, and so that also, you know, is limited.
Your resolution is limited by the size of the division,

(22:53):
which also is a factor when we talk about Google Cardboard,
which we'll get to a little bit later in this episode.
But yeah, some of the some of the big, powerful,
impressive ones. Yeah, so the big one, the big guy
I think that most people are familiar with, although I
would argue is not necessarily. The one that's gonna win
over the most converts is the Oculus Rift. This was

(23:18):
a project that's been around for years. We talked about it,
I'm sure. In so, it's a head mold display has
head tracking technology that again you know the basic premises,
that tracks the motion of your head so that it
can reflect your change in perspective within the game you're playing.
So that way, you know, if you're looking straight ahead

(23:39):
and you have one view, you turn your physical head
to the left, your perspective changes as if your virtual
character has turned his or her head to the left,
and um same you know, basic idea of any VR headset.
It also connects to a computer, unlike the Samsung Gear
that we just mentioned, so in this case you you know,

(24:00):
you can't just have the Oculus by itself. You have
to have it paired with a computer and uh and
not um so weak computer either. It needs to be
a fairly beefy machine to be able to run the
Oculus rift at at a good clip. Um. Also, this
is a company that was purchased by Facebook, and when

(24:24):
that happened a lot of people who had been supporting
Oculus cried out in anguish, very much like all the
people on Alderan, just as the death Star targeted it.
Obi Wan felt the pain of all the Oculus backers.
When Facebook made this, there was a huge disturbance in
before ye who is in this case? Would this be

(24:46):
Jaron Lanier? I'm just gonna say possibly, because I mean
that's the guy who popularized the term virtual reality or
possibly coined it even he isn't sure, but at any rate,
the Oculus headset has some other bells and whistles that
give it some cool features beyond just the regular head tracking.

(25:09):
First of all, it has positional audio, so you get
these headpunds that come with it. Um and sound will
appear to come from specific directions, so if you hear
something coming from your left and you look to your left,
you you should be able to see whatever virtual thing
is making that noise. Uh. Elso's positional tracking. External positional tracking.
This is what I was talking about before with the

(25:30):
second Developer Kit, where it had the reference points UH.
In this case, you have a camera pointed back that
can tell the orientation of the headset, not just when
it's moving. So one of the things that these head
tracking systems are really good at is determining when you're
looking left, right, up, or down. They're not necessarily as

(25:51):
good if you were to tilt your head to the
left or right so that you were getting sort of
a diagonal view, but with external tracking you can do that.
You could even do things a little more extreme. So
for example, let's say you walk up to a virtual
table within a game and you decide you want to
look underneath at the underside of that table. So you
squat down in real life and you tilt your head

(26:14):
up as if you're looking underneath this table. With something
like this, you could actually get the result in the game,
assuming that people had programmed programmer program and it maybe
that you see a secret message under that table, like dude,
you've got too much spare time in your hands or something.
Um but the idea being that you it gives you
a lot more flexibility in in the way that you

(26:35):
interact with the virtual world, which at least in theory,
creates your sense of immersion when you are in there.
Also later on in this year, the year recording this is,
if you are in fact listening to this in some
other year, Hello from the past. Oculus will release some
more controls, physical controls to go along with the headset

(26:59):
there called Oculus Touch. I believe uh these will help
create an even deeper sense of immersion so that you
can interact with the virtual worlds in a way that's
a little more natural than holding a video game controller. Yeah. Now,
I think I've already seen that some of some of
these things have been demoed, like it's a thing you
put around your wrists or something that tracks the motions

(27:20):
of your hands. There are some third party ones that
have been shown off, and some and some different concepts
that have been shown off that won't necessarily make their
way into a consumer products. Some of them might, some
of them might not, but the there have certainly been
several different interfaces that have been experimented with and demoed
to kind of give an idea of what it might

(27:41):
be like to interact with this technology. And the whole
goal of this is to try and remove some of
those barriers that the gamers would feel, or just customers
would feel when using this technology, so that they feel
like they really are a part of this virtual world.
You know, the more stuff that we have to do
to accommodate the virtual world, the less likely will feel

(28:04):
like we're actually there. So if you have to hold
a video game controller while you're walking around a video
game world, it may be that you always feel like
you're playing a game. Whereas if you're able to create
an interface that is largely invisible, like you're not actually
holding a device in your hands, whether it's just your
control or you've got some sort of glove device on

(28:25):
or whatever it may be, then you're more likely to
feel like you are actually in that virtual environment. Right,
You're not just playing a video game and you happen
to be wearing the screen instead of looking at it.
And this was this, this whole project started off as
a crowdfunding campaign. It wasn't originally just you know, a
company coming out with a product. This was this is

(28:48):
a true start up. Yeah, well, it's easy to forget now.
The Oculus was a Kickstarter baby, Yeah, good old Palmer
coming up with this idea and saying, hey, originally this
was just gonna be about provide kits to people VR
kits for them to put together themselves. But it got
so much early attention, and it really it hits so

(29:08):
much success that it then went on to become beyond
just a kit, to let's create a finished product, to
the point where you get folks who were coming over
from Valve and saying, maybe this is something I want
to work on instead to Facebook acquiring the company. So
it was on the business side, something that was rapidly successful,

(29:29):
even though we had not yet seen to date, as
we record this, we have not yet seen a consumer product.
Um probably one of the most anticipated pieces of hardware
in sixteen from a gamer perspective, I what else is
competing with it? Other VR headsets may in a moment,

(29:50):
I think I've read that the Oculus is still the
most popular platform with VR game developers. It wouldn't surprise
me simply because it's the dev kit has been out
for so long that a lot of people have had
the opportunity to think about how they would design an
experience that would be fun and immersive when wearing an

(30:11):
Oculus Rift. Uh, they got a pretty good head start.
The downside of that is that gamers have been waiting
for it for a few years. Again, I've had all
all of that media attention drama up. Yeah, and the
question is by the time it comes out will one
will gamers still care and to will it live up
to the hype? Part of the problem, maybe not problem.

(30:34):
One challenge that they face is the fact that making
this technology isn't cheap and it doesn't look like it's
going to be sold as a loss leader type of peripheral,
at least not initially. Keep in mind that any young
technology when it comes out as a consumer product for
the first time, tends to be mega expensive. I remember

(30:56):
when CD players came out and they were like hundreds
of dollars for a CD player. Well, you're you're really
paying for the development at that point, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
So in this case, uh, we've we now know how
much the Oculus Rift costs because pre orders opened up
in January and it costs five hundred dollars, which is

(31:17):
more than any of the current video game consolets. So
a lot of people kind of not more than the
computer it would take to run the Oculus Room. This
is true. Yeah, if you wanted to, if you wanted
to figure out how much the computer would cost, well,
tech Radar uh kind of did uh you know, back
of the napkins sort of of calculation, and they estimate

(31:39):
which side of the napkin is the front, the part
that you put your mouth on when you ring, when
you and then you turn the napkin face down. You
don't want to look at the stuff that had been
clear on the ranch, right, Uh? Never right on the ranch, man,
That's that's leisure time when you're on the ranch. They
estimate it would cost about one thousand, thirty dollars. That's

(32:03):
in addition to the six hundred dollar Oculus Rift headsets.
So you're talking about a six dollar investment assuming you
don't already have a computer capable of running at the
specs that are recommended for the Oculus Rift. Now, I
I wonder, oh man, this is probably going to create
a whole genre of hilarious YouTube videos of people trying

(32:26):
to run Oculus Rift on the computers that are extremely
underpowered to do so. It makes me think of the
videos we saw when Tesla released the driver assist autonomous mode,
where people like one of the things that says, hey,
this isn't meant for you to take your hands off
the wheel and just lean back and act like the
car can take you there, which is exactly what everyone did,

(32:49):
and they shot videos of it, and then you know
when when accidents happened, they were like, well, the technology
is not ready, idiot. It says, right there, do not
do the thing the thing you just did. Why is
it that when we tell people not to do something,
the first thing they go out and do is that thing.
And not only do they do that thing, they video
themselves doing that thing. I mean, I wonder if it

(33:11):
will have fail safes built in to detect like, hey,
the computer you're trying to use to run this thing
on is gonna make you sick and maybe you shouldn't
do it. I think it'd just be funny if it
just starts running like you know, an eight bit version
of of of Donkey Kong, or or a Galagha or
something like that immersive Gala. I'm on board. So also

(33:34):
that sixteen hundred dollars I mentioned doesn't include the touch
controllers that will come out later in However, if you're
wondering is this going to be a barrier? Is this
going to truly kill the oculus before I can ever
have any success? It depends upon whom you ask. Because
c nets Jeffrey Morrison wrote that the demonstrations he had

(33:57):
experienced had convinced him C hundred dollars was worth it was.
It's totally worth that price. It is it is an
experience that is so compelling. Six hundred dollars is not
a problem. Now. Granted, keep me mind, six hundred dollars
is not a problem for people who have six hundred
dollars to spend on a computer peripheral, right, I assumed, yes, yeah,

(34:20):
And other people have said, including they're a writer for
The Verge has said that this suggests that VR may
remain a luxury technology, something that only a niche is
able to afford and enjoy, and therefore it will never
really blossom because the market won't be big enough to

(34:42):
support the amount of development you would want for a
really robust world, like a library, a real library of
games and experiences. Well, I imagine that'd be the case
early on. But I mean again, I don't see why
you couldn't think that at some point VR hardware will
will be a loss leader technology. Just what consoles are

(35:02):
You know, you've got people developing games for them, and
they're going to make money back on those games, as
long as you have a way of making money back
on those games, right like if you if you have
it where there's some sort of licensing fee in order
to be able to use that technology, because if it's
not your company that's developing the games, you have to
find some other way of of monetizing that, right Otherwise,

(35:23):
otherwise you made the hardware, but other people are making
the software that runs on it. Um another. And if
that's the case, if all you're doing is making the
hardware and you're not making the software, it can't be
a loss leader. It's just a loss because you're you
don't have anything else to sell. So it's definitely one
of those things that still a question mark. Uh. My
hope is that it would be like other consumer technologies

(35:46):
that we mentioned before, where the initial price is relatively high,
but then we see it decrease over time and more
people can adopt it, and so you have, you have
like that long tail, right, you've got the early adopters
who have the cash to spend on this sort of stuff.
I mean, just think how cheap virtual boys are now. Yeah,
let's not talk about that at any rate. At any rate,

(36:08):
So that that's the big daddy is the Oculus Rift.
But there are other players. There's another big daddy, I think, so, well,
there's a couple I would argue, but Sony's PlayStation VR
is a is a definite big one, and it has
a huge advantage over the Oculus Rift in that you
already have an established base of gamers who would be
capable of using this technology because it's compatible with the
PS four. So this is a peripheral for the PlayStation four,

(36:32):
And unlike the Oculus Rift, where even if you're a
PC gamer you may not have a machine capable of
supporting the Oculus you know your audience in this case, yeah,
you've already got an established base, and granted only a
percentage of that base is likely to go into the
VR world, but you still know they're they're right kind

(36:54):
of games they buy, You know how much money they're
willing to spend. You don't have to convince them to
buy a new machine because they already have a machine
that works with and uh, there are some downsides to this, obviously.
PC is one of those things where over time you
can upgrade it or you can buy a new one,
and it's going to be more powerful and the games
can therefore take advantage of that increase in power, whereas

(37:16):
with the console you have a cap, a hard cap
of how much power it can put out. Well a
few exceptions where occasionally you'll get a console where there'll
be some way of upgrading it, but that doesn't happen frequently. Yeah. Well, yeah,
these days you've got like memory chips and stuff that
you can add in. Yeah, and sometimes sometimes there's a
firmware upgrade or something. But sure, sure, but but for

(37:38):
the most part, your processors are going to remain your
processes from the life of the product, which is what
is it these days, five to seven years. They the
goal usually Sony aims for is ten years. That's what
they wanted for the p S three, So the PS
four and Xbox one I think are both they were
they were trying to future prove them as much as
possible so that more money could be made along the

(38:01):
game's side, and you don't have to go and launch
a new console and completely negate all the stuff you've
already made. Also, it would be compatible with Sony's move controllers.
Those are those little wands that have the balls on
the end with a led inside that can change different colors,
So you could use a couple of those along with
the headset to interact with the virtual world. They could

(38:24):
be like, you know, there could be guns. They could
be a sword, they could be a light saver. Uh,
I really want to really want to cool Star Wars
virtual reality, like because they'd be huge crab claws that
could be they could be you know, a paintbrush. That
could be a mop. It could be pretty much anything.
Excuse me, I need to go start a savings account.

(38:44):
Hatchet guys. Yeah, uh yeah, it could be. It could
be any number of things. It could be you know, uh, spaghetti.
It could just be a lot of spaghetti. That's what
your hands are. I would play that. I would play
that My Hands are Spaghetti game every day I have.
I have often played it, usually whenever I don't want
to deal with something. This is a great idea. It's

(39:07):
a franchise of games where we have to do things
like you have to defuse a bomb, but your hands
are spaghetti. You laugh. But there is the game Octo Dad,
which is essentially that, right, Octodad is not that different
from the concept of my hands are spaghetti. You also
have to prevent the chief from finding out that you're spaghetti.
If if any of you make a game in which

(39:29):
the character's hands are spaghetti, I want credit at least
I want to at least based on an idea by
Jonathan Strickland. Uh So it can also work along with
the PlayStation camera, which not everyone has, but you know,
it was one of those add ons that you could
get with the PS four, but the camera could allow
for some of that positional tracking that we talked about
with the Oculus as well, the same sort of thing. Um.

(39:50):
And one of my favorite demos that I got to
see was something called Job Simulator. So you're laughing at
at spaghetti hands Johnson. Latter was the funniest video I've
watched today, and I've watched a lot of them. So
Job Simulator starts off where you're in like a cubicle
that is absolutely lousy with stuff like coffee mug and uh,

(40:14):
you know, books and binders and staplers, and there's like
a copy right there in a terminal. You're supposed to
be playing an office drone in twenty uh. The person
who wrote up the little description said, I assume you're
you're doing jobs that are too menial even for a robot.
And as it starts, like all the all the person
does is start picking up everything in the little cubicle

(40:37):
and just throwing it across the office. Like there's a
point where they pick up the coffee mug, pour creamer
into the coffee, tilt the coffee mug back as if
they're drinking, and you hear like a glug glug glug
noise as soon as it's empty, throws it across the screen,
then like grabs two staples and starts firing staples like
like they're like John Wu style all over the place.

(40:59):
It was phenomenal. I was immediately like, well, this is
like goat simulator. It's one of those games where you
you can't really see yourself playing it for a really
long time, but you can see yourself laughing your butt
off for a good like ten fifteen minutes with your
friends while watching someone just go eight inside an office.
I'm not sure. I'm not sure that I have a

(41:20):
top limit on how much I like to throw things. Also,
I guess it helps when you think, like, if you've
had a really bad day at work, you can exactly
out in the virtual world and just totally trash your workstation.
Um oh yeah, yeah, if you could build your own
workstation like I, I do not know exactly what levels

(41:44):
you can do. Also, in the demo, there's one point
where they put a red swing line stapler in the
copier and start making copies of it while also destroying
and throwing things everywhere else in the office. I'll show
you the video after this is done, because it is hilarious. Excellent. Okay,
that's not it. There there other there's other hardware on
the way, right. Yeah, let's let's wrap this up with
a couple more quick descriptions. So this, this is one

(42:08):
that I think is a real contender. The HTC Vibe,
the Home Man Vibe. I was calling it viv A yeah,
I understand, and a lot of people are like, is
it viv Is it vibe? Well, when they were first
talking about they had read dash Vibe, which tells me
that it's going to be five. But I've heard of
people say Viv as well. I've never heard Viva until today,

(42:30):
but congratulations. Oh no, I guess it would be v
I don't know, like like vive Le France. Yeah, I
understand yet that well, it makes sense, but it is
the Vibe as far as I am aware. So HTC
Vibe is coming out with another dev kit version before
it comes out with a consumer product version. The dev
kit version is going to be the Vibe pre This

(42:52):
is the headset that is backed by Valve, which is
the company that that does the Steam platform for game
district you should game playing computer PC game PC gamers
and a really well known name in PC gaming. Uh.
And so the consumer version of it is scheduled for
release in April. We still don't have a price as

(43:14):
of the recording of this podcast, but we can assume
that it's going to be probably not dissimilar to Oculus Rifts,
somewhere in that range. Like it would shock me if
it's less than five dollars, It would not surprise me
if it's six hundred or thereabouts. But this one's got
a got a different camera set up, right, It's got
an outward facing camera. Yeah, the So a previous def

(43:36):
kit version used external cameras that were attached to your
computer to map the room you're in. The idea being
that you would be able to use the physical dimensions
of your room to wander around inside, and the the
system would protect you from walking face first into a
wall by alerting you that you were getting close to
the wall. It would show like a little grid, kind

(43:58):
of like the hollow deck in Star Trek Shimmer. Similar
to that, it would show you that to let you
know you're getting close to an obstacle, so you should
stop moving forward or you're going to injure yourself. The
most recent version, instead of using those external cameras, uses
a forward facing camera on the or i guess rear
facing camera really rear facing camera on the device, where

(44:19):
it's it's facing outward into the world, and it can
detect when you're getting close to an obstacle. So if
you're walking close to a wall in a real physical space,
you get the virtual alert so that you don't slam
your face into it. Now, this gives you a lot
more flexibility. You can move around in an actual physical
space and have those motions translated into in game actions

(44:43):
or in world actions if it's not a game. Um,
and so it's not just holding a controller and pressing
forward to make your character walk, you could actually do
some walking. Now, I think most of us probably don't
have an enormous room we can dedicate to this kind
of thing. So it creates some channel inges to create
a game where you know you're doing this sort of

(45:03):
action where it's not just gimmicky, where you're not just
like dodging a dodgeball or something. Yeah, I mean you've
got to kick someone that you live with out of
your house. You've got to empty their room out right.
In my case, like I have an office where that's
where my PC is, and if I put my if
I made it my gaming PC, which is essentially what
it is at this point, I'm not using it for
much else. Um, there's a desk in there, there's a

(45:26):
couch in that room. There's not a whole lot of
floor space for me to move around in. So I'd
be very limited in what I could do. So the
kind of games I could play would have to be
pretty limited to I can't imagine playing a big, open
world sandbox game, right. I couldn't play like a modern
day legend of Zelda game and and run across high
Rule because I could only go three steps and then

(45:47):
I have to stop. Uh. I have seen some interesting
research in VR outside of this, where there have been
worlds designed where it gives you very subtle hints to
turn earn so that you change your pathway you're not
and it feels like you're walking in a straight line,
but in reality you're actually walking in a circle. But

(46:08):
you have to make that a pretty big room so
that you can make it a big circle because it
has to be subtle. Sounds like yet another ticket to
nauseation Land, right, you're just turning in circles and your
nausea nausea. Yes, uh, I think that's a good word.
Annaucigation nation. That sounds like a terrible wrestling stable. But

(46:31):
at any rate, um yeah, So it's it's a cool
idea though, the idea of actually incorporating your physical surroundings
so that you can interact with them in a virtual way,
including things like detecting that there's a chair, a physical
chair in front of you in the real world and
presenting a virtual chair in the virtual world and you

(46:51):
could actually reach out and touch this chair and sit
down in it because it's really there in your room,
but it's also there in the virtual reppers station of
whatever world you are in. That's that's something that this
system is capable of doing, and I think it's one
of It's also one of those that well, sorry, I'm
just imagining. You're running around in sky room and every

(47:12):
now and then there's an office chair or a treadmill
or something that should just be a throne. It's just
a throne that's in the middle of nowhere for no reason,
but it's shaped exactly like an office chair. It would
be pretty funny. Yeah, what would be really funny is
if it's a throne, but you sit in it's actually
an office chair on casters and you roll it at
the throne itself just slides across the landscape. That'd be hilarious.

(47:32):
I would I would watch the YouTube videos that would
result from that. But would you play it? Probably? I
gotta be honest. It look skyrom so um but so
so so this isn't this is similar to augmented reality, Yeah,
a little bit. It's kind of a it's kind of
a bridge between augmented reality and virtual reality because the
world that you are experiencing isn't entirely virtual. It's dependent

(47:55):
upon the physical space you are in. But it's not
really augmented either, because you could have a completely virtual
representation of your environment. It's just incorporating physical elements so
that you don't break your legs playing. Yeah, the term
would be it would be the inverse of augmented reality.
It would be like realized virtuality. What would it be?

(48:17):
Isn't that a song? But augmented virtuality? Augmented virtuality? Yeah, yeah,
there you go, There we go. We've invented a whole
new genre. And and you know, you could also pair
this with something else, like we've we've seen some interesting
peripherals that are designed to allow you to run are
in different directions without actually moving anywhere. So one of

(48:39):
the ones I talked about it looks kind of like
you're running in a giant walk. It's it's a hemisphere
may metal, and you wear these very low friction booties.
You can run in place, and you're on the pestle
that actually has a bar around it. So when you
inevitably if you can only eat it so hard, exactly,

(49:00):
you can't eat it totally like you're not gonna go.
You're not gonna go rear end over tea kettle, right,
You'll just slam your face into you, guys. I can't
walk on regular fricative surfaces. I haven't seen this in person.
I heard that it was at c E S, but

(49:20):
I didn't get a chance to go to the VR
on a R section, which really I'm sad about because
I wanted to have I wanted to get a chance
to see because I've seen the pictures of it for years,
but I've never had the chance to actually experience it
and see what it was like. There are also other
peripherroles that are similar to allow you greater amount of
movement within a physical space to translate that into virtual actions.

(49:42):
But probably the biggest advantage of the viv Or Vibe
now i'm doing it, is that it's backed by Valve,
and because the Steam platform is so popular, has a
big advantage. Again, You've got a huge known audience, and
that might make it more a active to A consumers
and B developers. Yeah, so I think I think that

(50:04):
one's got and and also I've just seen a lot
of really positive reviews saying that the experience using HTC
Vibe feels more immersive than a lot of the competitors,
although I've seen some really positive stuff about the Sony
VR headset too, So all of these have had pretty
enthusiastic reviews about them, even the ones where they like

(50:25):
here are a couple of things we think need to
be fixed. But um, but the vibe in particular, I
think gets a lot of really you know, positive press.
All right, is that pretty much what's out there right now?
Or what else? What else do we have? You get
some VR light stuff, Yeah, kind of like half steps
towards VR, Like like if you guys have heard of
Google Cardboard, which is a VR slash, a R platform

(50:50):
from Google that turns your phone into a headset sort
of the same sort sort of the same way that
the Gear VR does, but a little bit more low fi. Yeah,
it's uh. It's largely used as an educational tool these days,
actually to the point where people have talked about using
it for virtual field trips. So but I mean, which
makes sense, Like if you're talking about a field trip

(51:11):
to a place that is too remote for a class
to go to, for example, if or if your parents
wouldn't sign the permission slip, well, well I just think,
like I grew up in rural Georgia. If they gave
me the opportunity to take a field trip to Washington,
d C. Virtually, that would certainly be more realistic in
the sense of what my school was capable of doing

(51:32):
than actually busting a whole bunch of potential lawsuits off
to our nation's capital. And um and so this, you know,
I can totally see it from that perspective. So yeah,
it uses your smartphone. The smartphone tends to have, you know,
a rear facing camera which can take in the scene
of the external world for the augmented reality purposes um

(51:54):
VR stuff is pretty simple. The interface tends to be
based on magnetic interaction, where again it's it's manipulating that
digital compass where you bring a magnet near the phone
and because the compass will detect the presence of the magnet,
that could be a way of putting input into the device. Now,

(52:14):
they are also capacity of touch surfaces that will interact
with the screen um and there's usually on the very
top of the one side of the the cardboard, so
you you know, it can run your finger across that
and use that for the input. But again it's it's
not like an external control that you would use with
some of these other devices. It does have the wireless

(52:36):
advantage the gear does. You can walk around and trip
over lots of things while wearing it. And if you
wanted to make your own, if you have an Android phone,
actually it's not even just Android now, Google Cardboard is
available on other platforms. But if you have a phone
that's compatible, like of a compatible size, you can get
the schematics from Google on how to build one yourself,
or you could order one. There are a lot of

(52:56):
companies that make kits. Yeah, I mean for for like
twenty or thirty bucks. It's a pretty cheap. It's it's
by far the cheapest experience, and a lot of them
are actually made out of cardboard. They really are made
of cardboard, and some of them are really high quality cardboard.
But yeah, with the Burger King crown and some tape.
Some of them are made of more robust materials. Like

(53:16):
there's some that are clearly made out of plastic or
other stuff. There's one that looked like a an old stereoscope.
It was yeah, well yeah, like the like the one
where you would put a stereoscopic photograph on a little
platform which would be a certain distance away from your eyes,
and then you have a viewfinder that would focus the

(53:38):
lenses on that image so that you get that three
D effect. So it's like a steampunk version of Google
Cardboard essentially. That's what it comes down to. It looks
like it would fit right in with a steampunk world.
Um so yeah, it's very similar again to the gear.
Uh and there are a few there are a ton
of other ones too, but yeah, yeah, well and and
one one thing, one thing before we move away from

(53:58):
the from the cardboard specific Some critics say that we
really shouldn't call it VR, particularly because in most of
the apps that are currently available for it anyway, you're
you're not controlling the movement of the camera through the environment.
You're you can control your gaze within the environment. But
it's more like a movie that's choosing where to take you. Right, So,

(54:19):
so it's like being on rails you can look anywhere,
or on a roller coaster. Think of it that. Yeah,
like you're you're on a roller coaster, which is fun,
but you have to go the way the roller coaster
goes or things have gone terribly wrong. Uh, And you
can look any direction you want as you ride the
roller coaster, but you're still going in the direction of
the coaster, same sort of thing, um, which limits the

(54:41):
feeling of immersion and also interactivity. Obviously. Yeah, there are
also other ones. There's a lot of third party ones,
a lot of you know, smaller companies that are trying
to get into the space or trying to take advantage
of the trend. But for the most part, I would
argue that they're aiming for the market of parents who
don't really know what it is their kids want for Christmas,

(55:03):
so they go out and buy that thing. Yeah, you
know what I'm talking about, the police station for Yeah, yeah,
it's I'm not saying all of them are in that category,
but a few of them could be. Okay. So that's
basically what the virtual reality landscape is looking like right now.
What are we What do you guys think about the future?

(55:25):
I mean, how how do you guys think this is
going to shake out? You know, I hate to invoke
the killer app mindset, but I really do think it's
the kind of situation where it's going to depend on
games or experiences or content or whatever you want to
call it, because no matter how good the hardware is.
I think it's just not going to take off until

(55:46):
there are some several pieces of content on this medium
that people won't stop talking about. I can tell you
right now what I think a killer app would be,
and I'm I'm being totally serious. I'm not making a
joke here. I think if someone can make a truly immersive,
terrifying survival horror game in a virtual reality style where

(56:10):
you are put in the position of somebody who's in
like a super creepy house, and it's you have to
walk around that creepy house by yourself, and you've got
that positional audio coming into your headphones. Your perspective is
limited to whichever way you're looking. That's gonna sell systems.
I would really enjoy that. But I don't know. I
don't I don't even have a good sense, I guess

(56:31):
of how popular horror games are in general. I just outsiders,
aren't they. I think I think they're relatively I mean, yeah,
you think of things like that, they're Some people have
sold some copies of Resident Evil, I mean, and there's
been there's been a real renaissance recently two with things
like five Nights at Freddie's that's a PC game that
has gotten insanely popular, and it's a very simple premise,

(56:52):
but it's it's a survival horror style or Emily wants
to play. That's another new one that's fantastic. I don't
even heard of these. I'll talk to you about them
after the show. They're great. Yeah, okay, well I would
have I'm my heart rate increased just thinking about like that.
I'm not sure if that would be for me and
my old delicate age. I have a pretty good idea

(57:14):
of I think what the killer app is going to be,
and it's something I read about earlier today, apparently coming
to the Oculus rifted and PlayStation VR, Penn and Teller
present Desert Bus to this time. It's in VR, So
give a quick give a quick rundown of what Desert
buses for the people who have not heard about Jonathan,
I haven't played it. I think you have, so you

(57:35):
should say what the original Desert Bus is. So, Desert
Bus was a game that Teller had proposed in a
Actually it was Penn who proposed it in a one
of their books a few years ago, several years ago now,
and the idea they had they actually came out with
a I think it was for Sega c D. They
came out with an idea that never actually made it
to market, but later on was released in bits and pieces.

(57:58):
One of the games they came up with based upon
their experiences touring as a as an act, and they said, well,
what if we made the world's worst video game where
you are a tour bus driver and you're driving a
bus from I think it's Tucson, Arizona, to Las Vegas, Nevada,
and you're going along like a desolate highway. There's no traffic.

(58:20):
You're in a bus that's top speed is fifty five
miles per hour, might be, but at any rate, any rate,
it's it's somewhere in that range. The bus always pulls
a bit to the right, so you have to constantly
correct for that, and it time passes in real time,
and it really does take you eight hours to drive

(58:41):
from Tucson to Las Vegas. And when you can, you can,
you can pull off to the side of the road,
but then you you know, you're just sitting there, You're
not doing anything. It's just times just passing um. But
you you keep on going and when you get to
Las Vegas. You get one point and then you turn
around and you have to head back to Tucson and

(59:02):
and uh so this has actually been used by a
couple of Well by One charity group in particular, where
every year they do a marathon session to try and
get more points than they did the previous year. And
it's also every point is eight hours of gameplay. Yeah,
and I can't remember nothing happening. I can't remember what
that high. Yeah, but they do. They do rotate out

(59:24):
people playing, so it's not one person being tortured for
like days on end, but the eventually the system would overheat.
They rate Yeah, because a boid the demands on that
are so high. But yeah, they raise a lot of
money for charity through through that kind of marathon system.
But well, anyway, Pendalette says, Desert Bus two is coming,
So this would mean that you would coming in full

(59:45):
virtual reality? Would you would have the I talked to
Joe earlier said this would really be impressive to me
if you could add in audible but incoherent mumbling, so
like like the people you are driving or having a conversation, Yeah,
but you can't make out what they're saying. You can
just hear that they're having a conversation, and occasionally someone's
getting excited about something, but you still can't make out

(01:00:07):
what the conversations about. And it'd be even better that
if you turn around and look behind you, you just
see a curtain. You can't see into the back of
the bus about who is talking. All you're looking at
is just a blank curtain. And then you have to
just turn back and look at the desolate highway ahead
of you as you continue your seemingly endless journey. That
I think would truly bring that experience to life. So

(01:00:29):
for you, this is the ultimate future of VR. This
is what we are going to see in the next
few years. I think we're gonna see a lot of
different attempts at using VR. Whether or not they'll be
successful remains to be seen. But I've seen a lot
of products that are looking at using VR headsets not
as a means of creating games, but other types of experiences,

(01:00:51):
like a really immersive film. One of the products I
saw at ce S was the three sixty fly camera,
which is capable of capturing three reads a video. So
this solves a problem that some filmmakers have encountered where
they thought, I want to use this VR headset to
film a scene of some sort in three degrees, so

(01:01:11):
that the audience can choose where to look at any
given moment in the scene and see something different, and
even have characters surrounding the audience member. You could even
create such an experience where you are a passive participant
in this scene. Maybe you are a character within the scene,
but you you don't have any lines or anything, but

(01:01:31):
you you are representing someone who is actually there while
all this other stuff is going around you. That could
be a possibility. Um, and this is a camera that
helps filmmakers who want to make such an experience do that. Obviously,
filmmaking in that style would be really challenging. I mean
you have to figure out how to light the scene
and get the sound and do that without the film

(01:01:51):
crew being there, because that would just be weird. Like
you're looking ahead and you're seeing this amazing scene and
you turn around and there's the gaffer. You know, you
could all this problem by having by by that old
writer's trick of having everything take place on movie sets.
You could do that. That would that would solve it.
Where you know, you are maybe sitting in the director's chair,

(01:02:12):
and of course then you have an enormous camera blogging
your view straight ahead, but everything really interesting is going
on behind you anyway. Now, the question remains, is this
going to push VR into a must have piece of
technology that gets wide acceptance or will it just remain
kind of a gimmick, sort of the way three D
has been for particularly for the television market, where you know,

(01:02:34):
it's usually one of those things that's just an add
on feature that hardly anyone ever uses. When they get
their their television that's three D capable, they don't use
it very much. That's a possible outcome of VR. I
honestly don't know the answer to that. I hope that
it becomes a viable piece of technology, but you know,
there's some pretty big hurdles to overcome in order to
get there. Yeah, I think that the VR boom is

(01:02:55):
going to come, and I do genuinely think it's going
to come relatively soon. Non entertainment sectors, in uh, stuff
like sales and marketing and design. Development of that technology
and the public's comfort with it through those kind of
channels could then lead to a boom in the entertainment sector.
But I think that first it's going to be stuff

(01:03:16):
that people who like making money can use to make
more money, which I just honestly don't think gaming is
going to be the first the first bit that that's
that that's going to happen in UM for for example,
UM like in in the United States, UH, we have
we have a big box chain called Lows that does
like hardware and appliances and home design stuff like that,

(01:03:37):
you know, UM And in a few select stores around
around the country, they offer what they've called the Hollow Room,
in which customers can lay out of virtual kitchen or
bathroom using and in store iPad app and then explore
their design using a developer level Oculus rift kit, and
you can then save your design to lose customer website,

(01:03:58):
you can export it to a YouTube three sixty video
so that you can watch it at home on a
cardboard or something like that. And according to representatives from
the company that the tool has increased sales in stores
that have been using it. Interesting, now, this is something
that I would imagine a are also coming in really
handy because then you could use that sort of thing

(01:04:18):
in your actual home environment and see what those overlays
look like. Oh exactly. Yeah, Yeah, I think that that
kind of thing for for the for certain class of
people is going to be right, because I mean because
because who has it's the kind of person who has
enough money to buy a like six hundred dollar headset
that they then used to contemplate buying what I can

(01:04:38):
only imagine is a ludicrously comfortable share. I could just
imagine this being used for comedic purposes in a in
a television show or movie in which you have that
stereotypical scenario where you've got the couple and one of
them is demanding the other one move a piece of
furniture to another part of the room in order to

(01:05:00):
see if it looks better there, except in this case,
they're both just wearing headsets like, no, I think I
liked it better over in the other corner. Can you
put it back over there? Throws it yeah, like like
like in like in the job simulator, Yeah yeah, or
or at that rate, it would solve a lot of
couple fighting problems in stores for people going like I

(01:05:21):
really don't think this color couch is going to work. Yeah,
if they if they've got a three D rendering of
their home, then they could see right, and if they
had any sense of well, if they had sense of taste, Yeah,
that's a separate issue. It would not work for me.
As far as I can tell, no one has been
able to market a sense of taste yet. Um. One
more thing I did want to want to bring up.

(01:05:42):
There was a really great piece on c net just
today about how VR demos are being used this week
at the National Retail Federation's yearly conference, which they called
the Big Show, which, having hung out with wrestling people
too often, reminds me of a whole different, separate issue,
but is big so for for example, one luxury home

(01:06:02):
retailer demoed an app for the gear VR that lets
you move through a virtual catalog, which sounds so boring
in one way, but in the other way is probably
a really clever marketing tool like letting people letting people
use that kind of thing to spend more of their money.
Microsoft showed off an app that's that's basically a virtual

(01:06:23):
brochure for Virgin Atlantic's upper class flights, which which is
a whole hilarious thing. There's like guided meditation. I don't
know anyway, but but yeah, so it's the sort of
thing that could be used at trade shows to help
sales reps demonstrate their their products or their product experiences.
In this sort of case, I could I could see that, like,

(01:06:46):
you know, again, anything that makes it easier for you
to to have people get an idea of what something
is about, especially something that's so like luxurious and high end,
trying to convince the people who have the money to
spend on such things. I could see that being a
very valuable marketing tool. So that's an interesting of you.
I know, whether or not that would ever trickle down

(01:07:07):
to a more broad base is an interesting thought as well. Uh.
I think we will probably revisit this, maybe an early
twenty seventeen, once all these headsets have come out and
had had some time in the market place to see,
you know, how things are shaping up, had a holiday season. Yeah, yeah,
I mean it's a lot of these are coming out

(01:07:29):
well ahead of the holiday shopping season, so it's a
good question to see, like, well, are they going to
get some early adoption? Will it be very limited? I
suspect it will be pretty limited at least early on,
but h and will it live up to the hype? Well,
people actually think, oh this was worth the way, Yeah,
but this was really fun. Guys. Uh and you listeners

(01:07:50):
out there, what do you think about virtual reality or
is it something that you're ready for? Is it something
you have absolutely no interest in. Is it something that
you've tried and you hope is finally ready. Are you
old like me and you remember the really bad VR
from the mid to late nineties. Let us know, and
let's know if you have any suggestions for future topics

(01:08:11):
as well. Email address you can reach us at is
f W thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or
drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter. At Twitter
we are FW thinking. Just search fter you thinking in
Facebook will pop right up and leave us a message
and we'll talk to you again virtually. Willison. For more

(01:08:34):
on this topic in the future of technology, I'll visit
forward Thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's
go Places,