virtual reality

[Rolig Loon]

8 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

You're not supposed to sit at your computer when using Oculus Quest. It's not a VRheadset for PCs but rather a ... think of it as a game console you wear on your head.

I stand corrected, ChinRey. I prefer to sit at a computer, however, rather than stumbling around the room with hardware over my eyes. That strikes me as a disaster waiting to happen. Also, not being a gamer, I have no interest in a game console, whether it's on the desk on on my head. Again, that's just me but I don't sense a great groundswell of people around me who are any more eager to leap into VR.

[animats]

36 minutes ago, Adam Spark said:

I wonder what took the industry that long. People seriously thought those headsets would go mainstream?

The consumer electronics industry is desperate for the next must-have thing to sell. 3D TV and VR headsets flopped. Most new stuff is just a phone app. The industry now has to compete on price, which means low margins.

There's an upside to that.

The Next Big Thing.  49 inch curved desktop gamer monitors.

Wide displays have been out for a few years, but were expensive and rare. At least eight manufacturers have 49 inch displays now. All display and TV prices are way down, and will probably drop further after the holiday season. 30 inch curved displays now start below $200.

Now you can look around more, without the headgear.

 

Edited December 29, 2019 by animats

[Madelaine McMasters]

1 hour ago, Luna Bliss said:

I imagine it would depend on the quality of broadband any individual user has. 

I don't think connection speed is the bottleneck here. The 3D scene is the same whether you're viewing it from one vantage point (mono vision) or two (stereo).

The difference is that stereo VR requires rendering the 3D scene twice, once for each eye, and doing that at frame rates sufficient to avoid breaking the immersion. That's all viewer side stuff.

[Luna Bliss]

51 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

2 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

I imagine it would depend on the quality of broadband any individual user has. 

I don't think connection speed is the bottleneck here. The 3D scene is the same whether you're viewing it from one vantage point (mono vision) or two (stereo).

The difference is that stereo VR requires rendering the 3D scene twice, once for each eye, and doing that at frame rates sufficient to avoid breaking the immersion. That's all viewer side stuff.

We're talking about the Oculus Quest here, not the Oculus Rift. The Quest is like the VR headsets where you're strapping your phone to your head, but with the Quest the phone is built in with the snapdragon phone chipset doing all the processing (so not dependent on an external computer but instead is connected to broadband).

* streaming is occurring, like with a movie,  and interactions are taking place in real time with other people, and so good connection speeds are essential. 

Edited December 29, 2019 by Luna Bliss

[Luna Bliss]

[Luna Bliss]

47 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

I prefer to sit at a computer, however, rather than stumbling around the room with hardware over my eyes. That strikes me as a disaster waiting to happen. Also, not being a gamer, I have no interest in a game console, whether it's on the desk on on my head.

Not trying to convince you to try VR, but do need to correct the misconceptions.

The Quest keeps track of where you are as you walk around, and the room immediately becomes visible through the headset if you approach a boundary. In the past movement was more dangerous, but they've fixed that.

I'm not a gamer either, but there are many things to do in VR that are not games...they're called Experiences.  Like traveling through the cosmos and interacting with planets, or watching a movie with a friend where you actually feel like you're really in the movie theater. Traveling to other locations. So much more!  Now I will shoot some clay pots once in awhile, which surprised me, as I'm not fond of shooting anything...but something about hearing the clay break up as it exploded was too much fun.

[Elise Banx]

no thanks i have no interest in strapping anything on my head to be in SL im fine just as is...

[Rolig Loon]

22 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

Not trying to convince you to try VR, but do need to correct the misconceptions.

The Quest keeps track of where you are as you walk around, and the room immediately becomes visible through the headset if you approach a boundary. In the past movement was more dangerous, but they've fixed that.

Thank you.  I truly appreciate that information. I am not normally prone to walking into walls or bookcases, although it has happened, but it's nice to know that the hardware will try to protect me.  I actually worry more about tripping over the edge of the rug or some small object that shouldn't be in the middle of the floor, but it's too much to hope that any device is going to armor me against native stupidity.  I'm safer sitting down.   

[Lillith Hapmouche]

By the way, I'd like to see the numbers and the research that "we as a community" want a remodelling of SL into some VR stuff ... just because the OP seems to like it.

[Sandy Schnook]

As someone becoming more and more mobility challenged, I see nothing that really speaks to myself and others like me, about using VR.  Most games I've seen appear to need you to be mobile.  I would personally have no real benefit from strapping something to my head and moving around my room, except for maybe another broken femur with another 3 months of rehab.  In truth, if I could move as much as I see users do now, I'd prefer a walk around the neighborhood or the real outdoors.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

17 minutes ago, Sandy Schnook said:

As someone becoming more and more mobility challenged, I see nothing that really speaks to myself and others like me, about using VR.  Most games I've seen appear to need you to be mobile.  I would personally have no real benefit from strapping something to my head and moving around my room, except for maybe another broken femur with another 3 months of rehab.  In truth, if I could move as much as I see users do now, I'd prefer a walk around the neighborhood or the real outdoors.

As someone who has a Vive, most VR games I've played are very much playable in a seated position (even if there isn't an explicit "seated mode"), since you can have locomotion directly with the controllers.

There are exceptions of course (eg. SUPERHOT), or games that need to be tweaked with settings or third-party mods (eg. Beat Saber) for them to be playable.

Edited December 29, 2019 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Lyssa Greymoon]

2 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

We're talking about the Oculus Quest here, not the Oculus Rift. The Quest is like the VR headsets where you're strapping your phone to your head, but with the Quest the phone is built in with the snapdragon phone chipset doing all the processing (so not dependent on an external computer but instead is connected to broadband).

* streaming is occurring, like with a movie,  and interactions are taking place in real time with other people, and so good connection speeds are essential. 

If it's just streaming gameplay from a remote server, well that doesn't have an encouraging track record. I trust no one is counting on a cell phone running SL.

[Qie Niangao]

1 hour ago, Lyssa Greymoon said:

I trust no one is counting on a cell phone running SL.

You know Lumiya had a VR mode for Cardboard, right? I don't know if it worked -- couldn't have worked well, if it did -- but it was a thing that existed.

Not that Cardboard/Daydream are still going. Nor Lumiya. There's still SL, though.

If SL ever caught on as a VR app, it wouldn't be for gaming. Probably sex, surveillance, and advertising. What the internet is for.

 

[Lucia Nightfire]

59 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

If SL ever caught on as a VR app, it wouldn't be for gaming. Probably sex, surveillance, and advertising. What the internet is for.

LL can't/won't even fix the issue where anything attached/rigged from the neck and above shows in mouselook while sitting and not while standing.

Apparently they don't think/care that users might want to use mouselook during e-sex, let alone combat or driving/sailing across the grid.

Edited December 30, 2019 by Lucia Nightfire

[Lindal Kidd]

11 hours ago, CaerolleClaudel said:

I know nothing about VR Chat, which people bring up occasionally, but VR in general seems to pretty have been something that sounds far better in theory than it is in practice. I guess it has an audience, but doesn't seem to have caught on like some people expected (probably people who had a financial interest in it doing so).

I've watched some YouTube videos made in VRChat.  It looks sort of like the worst griefer/joker/show-off infested Infohub you can imagine, except more frenetic.

[CaerolleClaudel]

9 minutes ago, Lindal Kidd said:

I've watched some YouTube videos made in VRChat.  It looks sort of like the worst griefer/joker/show-off infested Infohub you can imagine, except more frenetic.

I saw some sex like that last night when making my rounds...

[Evah Baxton]

I have been skeptical of VR for quite a while. Some of the things mentioned in this thread though sound promising. If the headset can warn you when people enter the room and quickly go AR to let you see around you when you need, it would be more interesting to me.

I would love to build and code in AR and not have to worry about monitors ever again.

Years ago when I had my Alcatel Idol with the VR headset I was able to try out a VR VNC APP where you could remote into a VNC session on this enormous AR screen. You could still see RL around you. It made you sick and had terrible resolution, but the idea was perfect.

Perhaps being able to switch between fully immersive VR and an AR projected screen in the headset itself would bring the two worlds together.

The Alcatel headset, my 4 pairs of Sony 3D Glasses for my 3D TV, some other VR headset and my cardboard are all sitting in a box somewhere though. That's that for now.

Edited December 30, 2019 by Evah Baxton

[Bree Giffen]

I agree with the OP that VR is amazing but I also agree with everyone else who says that SL is not going to VR. The complicated designs made by creators in SL are the complete opposite of what is needed in VR. You can't simply have people design for VR either because you'd end up with sims that are designed with as few polygons and textures as possible. Which is not what SL is about.

[ChinRey]

19 hours ago, animats said:

The industry consensus about VR is now "not yet".

They've finally caught on then.

We can't ignore it though and I think the next generation of virtual world needs to be equally suitable for screen and goggles and try to minimize the gap between the two.

SL is fundamentally very well suited for VR headsets, that's what it was originally made for after all. It needs some changes though:

1. 1st person POW. VR goggles are all about immersion and you don't really get that if feel like a disembodied ghost hovering high over the scenery.
2. Realistic proportions, sizes and movement speeds. Those are inevitable consequences of a switch to 1st person POW.
3. Simpler, more intuitive controllers. You can't really use a keyboard effectively when wearing a VR headset so you need an easier way to access the basic controls.
4. Less lag. That's mostly about content. The high vertice and texture densities we usually see in SL today simply won't do.

All of this is doable in SL with fairly minor modifications to the software and they would also be great improvements for "screen users" looking for better immersion and for people with lower spec hardware.

But:

Second Life's three big advantages over opensim are that there are more people here, there is a variety of public access regions and there is a huge amount of ready made content. None of this is relevant in a VR headset context. Content made for SL is generally useless either because of the scale or because of the lag or - as often as not - both. And the people in SL are for the most part not interested.

In other words, there is no point in making a VR headset friendly Second Life. You'll have to make most of the content specially for it and you have to recruit most of the users outside SL and that means you might as well save a ton of money and do it all in opensim instead.

 

[Luna Bliss]

19 hours ago, Rolig Loon said:

Thank you.  I truly appreciate that information. I am not normally prone to walking into walls or bookcases, although it has happened, but it's nice to know that the hardware will try to protect me.  I actually worry more about tripping over the edge of the rug or some small object that shouldn't be in the middle of the floor, but it's too much to hope that any device is going to armor me against native stupidity.  I'm safer sitting down.   

Don't tell anyone, but I rarely get up out of my chair!      I'm supposed to be exercising though, at least that's how I justified one game purchase...           When I do get around to it the kitties will be safely behind closed doors in another room, and the floor cleared. Hopefully I will avoid my TV and other glass items in the living room..

[Tolya Ugajin]

I don't see VR as being all that useful for what most people use SL for.

Most of us are here for interacting with people.  VR really doesn't add much to just talking and getting to know folks.

VR would be cool for things like parks, flying, etc. but I'm not sure that's central to what many people do here.  Maybe if someone built very good VR versions of tourist spots that people couldn't afford or viably visit in RL, that would be popular.

There is sex, and it's a big part of SL's world, I suppose, but there is already plenty of VR porn IRL and some of it is even interactive, so unless someone has a hentai fetish, not sure why it would be a big deal for the sex side of SL.

Really not sure what a major investment in VR for SL would add, and definitely wouldn't put more of my RL money into SL without seeing a definite benefit.

[CaerolleClaudel]

8 minutes ago, Tolya Ugajin said:

I don't see VR as being all that useful for what most people use SL for.

Most of us are here for interacting with people.  VR really doesn't add much to just talking and getting to know folks.

VR would be cool for things like parks, flying, etc. but I'm not sure that's central to what many people do here.  Maybe if someone built very good VR versions of tourist spots that people couldn't afford or viably visit in RL, that would be popular.

There is sex, and it's a big part of SL's world, I suppose, but there is already plenty of VR porn IRL and some of it is even interactive, so unless someone has a hentai fetish, not sure why it would be a big deal for the sex side of SL.

Really not sure what a major investment in VR for SL would add, and definitely wouldn't put more of my RL money into SL without seeing a definite benefit.

That describes me exactly. Although things are certainly far prettier now, and have better detail, I was better served by SL when the graphics quality was far lower than it is now. As you say, what I would like to do is mostly to socialize with others, particularly having conversations with them (honestly, I probably am more consistently served for what I want here in the Forums than in SL itself~), and that has little to do with a more immersive visual experience. Perhaps other current users would get more out of SL, and maybe more people would join, but VR doesn't solve any problems for me.

Absent a comeback of places for me to socialize, which I guess LL can't really do anything about, the things that would make the most difference to me are pretty mundane, and I guess must be hard-to-deliver. Things like LESS EFFING LAG (I realize that seems to have little to do with social interaction, but is highly relevant to the things I actually get to do in SL these days), better discovery tools, and better shopping experiences. I guess none as that is as cool as BOM or VR or whatever though.

[Pussycat Catnap]

On 12/29/2019 at 9:40 AM, Luna Bliss said:

 

I think the younger virtual world users will prefer a VR environment eventually, yes, and that us oldbies here are going to die out in the coming years. So I'm not sure what's going to happen to SL, going out 10 or more years from now.

Since it's New Years predictions time, I predict that Facebook Horizon will be the #1 location for social VR.

nah...

I think it goes the other way around. If you're not a Boomer or Gen-Xer... you're too busy on your iPhone to bother looking at VR.

Older folks want to recreate a 1980s genre novel...

Younger folks want AR... They are also leaving Facebook to the Boomers...

[Tolya Ugajin]

40 minutes ago, CaerolleClaudel said:

Absent a comeback of places for me to socialize, which I guess LL can't really do anything about, the things that would make the most difference to me are pretty mundane, and I guess must be hard-to-deliver. Things like LESS EFFING LAG (I realize that seems to have little to do with social interaction, but is highly relevant to the things I actually get to do in SL these days), better discovery tools, and better shopping experiences. I guess none as that is as cool as BOM or VR or whatever though.

LL could definitely help places to socialize come back.  There have been almost no improvements to managing groups and land in the decade I've owned or managed sims.  Better tools to ban people (particularly alts), manage who comes to a sim, track membership, assign different rights, advertise (ie. improve search), are all low hanging fruit they simply refuse to pick.

Lag is not as easy, but would definitely make the SL experience better.  At a minimum, being able to definitively identify what is causing lag would help, rather than the current system of a bunch of tools that tell us "it COULD be this, or this, or that, or the other thing" and everyone looking at it having a different opinion.

[Lindal Kidd]

I don't think SL could ever be a success with VR, unless they also implemented mirrors.

Too many of us enjoy looking at our own avatars.