There are two reasons why the field is focused on gaming and not productivity: fidelity and familiarity. It's hard to build high-enough fidelity into the hardware at a reasonable price point. And even if you did make VR goggles that were great for giant spreadsheets at $1000, it would be a weird enough idea that it would have to be massively better than $1000 worth of monitors to get people interested.
In gaming, on the other hand, the unfamiliarity of the tech is not a risk but an asset, making the experience more novel. The fidelity doesn't have to be sufficient to overtake an existing process, just to support a fun experience. That's a more scalable business with lower technological barriers to entry, so that's where businesses are focused.
Same reason we had Pong before PCs. You might also see major tech advances in products for specific targets, like military use, medical, or advanced manufacturing, that then trickle down to mainstream productivity applications. But until they get the tech good and cheap enough, expect progressively better games!
> It's hard to build high-enough fidelity into the hardware at a reasonable price point. And even if you did make VR goggles that were great for giant spreadsheets at $1000, it would be a weird enough idea that it would have to be massively better than $1000 worth of monitors to get people interested.
I doubt that. If you make a VR/AR/?R version of a Bloomberg terminal or Factset then finance firms will literally roll up wads of cash and throw them at you. It doesn't have to be massively better. It just can't be worse which is the real hurdle. Granted I'm not an expert on the subject but every VR/AR app I've seen that claims to be the "$APP Killer" simply sucks.
This is the same reason nobody has dethroned Excel in finance. There's plenty of things that solve specific sub problems but the generic, "I have tabs of data and I want to slice and dice it" always goes back to an analyst exporting data to an Excel file.
I've never worked at a financial firm but I have a hard time imagining the uptight social culture of finance being one that embraces employees being spotted wearing goofy headsets and waving their hands around. The boost in productivity from any such app would seemingly be negligible, especially when you consider that the popularity of the Bloomberg terminal lies in its chat function:
* Impromptu breath holding contests complete with prop bets and name chanting
* Chairs shoved, phones slammed, mice thrown, (full) drinks thrown, (Other people's) paper piles toppled, soooo much profanity.
* One time a trader yelled FKING FK very loudly as our EVP of Trading was giving a tour of the office to a business journalist. To which the EVP turned to the journalist and very calmly said, "With us, you always know where you stand."
I worked on two different (energy) trading floors. One was a fairly large venture (30 or so trading desks + mid/back office + dev/ops/DC teams + management). The other was one of the huge banks. Both were in Stamford CT.
I spent well over 5 years there and never once did I see those sorts of shenanigans.
There was some stuff: the guy that liked to throw a football across the floor, occasionally smashing a monitor; the guys that bet $1000+ each over who could lose the highest % of body weight in 2 months (or was it one month?); and the occasional swearing, but nothing near the "like a sailor" level I hear about.
Pretty much everyone I worked with was highly professional. They were profit motivated (for sure), but even there I personally witnessed people making fair deals where they could have squeezed someone dry and unwinding deals at a loss to keep a good counterparty relationship.
I'm so glad I never worked with the handset smashing, drug abusing, loudly swearing, king of the world, type-A assholes that I hear about.
Been there done that. Was the big bank one, the one with the keys in it's logo ? If so, you were using the Desktop OS build I designed :)
> I'm so glad I never worked with the handset smashing, drug abusing, loudly swearing, king of the world, type-A assholes that I hear about.
I think these days, thats largely confined to the Hedge-Fund traders. And those guys are EXACTLY the sort of people would love AR/VR based trading UIs - anything to make more money is always welcome in their world.
I have a VR system and I wear it knowing that it makes me look like a total doofus. You also have zero ability to discern what's going on around you, e.g. to easily socialize with someone walking by. The productivity advantage a VR application would have to be huge for it to be worth doing things by VR, and the fact is that the fidelity just isn't there yet. I would also argue that even with fidelity, the usecases seem specious. But I also thought that the "Minority Report" scenes (which didn't involve a siloed-VR-helmet experience), while cool-looking, seemed like an extremely inefficient way to solve crimes.
Frat-like behavior on trading floors is for members of the rich kids club or those willing to go through the initiation rituals. The lower-level staffers who support the traders are not invited to participate in such japes and are expected to look and act professional, not to be goofy individualists who have just as much fun at work as the traders.
>>I've never worked at a financial firm but I have a hard time imagining the uptight social culture of finance being one that embraces employees being spotted wearing goofy headsets and waving their hands around.
Put some time in at a long/short or quant fund. This would be par for the course. I've been there.
One important thing about VR goggles is that they are literally for your eyes only. You can be shoulder to shoulder with other people, and be sure they can't eavesdrop.
This can be quite important in certain circumstances.
lol @ uptight social culture of finance. Most trading desks are just ex-frat boys with quant skills or a connected uncle. They're all in on tech gadgets; they all have the latest smartphone / wearables / TV / smart home.
the regulatory compliance of Bloomberg lies in its chat function. seriously, type "sold for 10million" in there and it's a deal, reported to the SEC and sucked into end of day reporting
Some hedge funds do not have any uptight culture and they will most likely readily embrace the goofy glasses and gloves. Way better than a cluster of 6 monitors.
You might be able to collect a few wads of cash from finance firms who want a cooler-looking Bloomberg terminal, but I doubt this strategy could actually displace Bloomberg unless there's a technological edge that (1) delivers real, ongoing value and (2) can't be matched by Bloomberg within 1-2 years.
Problem #1 is what you mentioned with VR/AR $APP Killers - they mostly suck. They create value via novelty, which wears off. Bloomberg delivers value by addressing a really consistent set of needs in a solution highly familiar to many users across a whole industry, to the point it's hard not to buy it if you're in finance. It's like the industry's craigslist - lousy in many ways but good enough to stay entrenched (though Bloomberg's entrenchment is driven more through familiarity and brand rather than network effect, which makes it somewhat easier to compete against).
Problem #2 (being matched by Bloomberg) comes from Bloomberg having such domination of its market, and such deep pockets, that unless you are doing things they can't do they will just learn from and then kill you should you attain sufficient success. Although it might be easier to buy you!
You're not going to displace Bloomberg - the amount, quality and timeliness of the information they provide is on a completely different level (and a completely different business).
You're going to get wads of cash from people eager to consume their Bloomberg data in a better way.
I can assure you, the majority of people who regularly use the Bloomberg terminal are not eager for any change whatsoever to how they consume the data.
Any change, no matter how much it improves the workflow or UI is met with bitter resistance, because the users do everything from muscle memory, and small changes break that and slow them down.
I think this might be one place where that rule is broken. I started seriously using VR a while ago and I was blown away by some of the little things that make it 1000% better than a standard screen for some applications.
The most poignant example I have comes from gaming, but I think it illustrates the point. In Elite: Dangerous, some of your menus are to the left and right of your avatar. Normally, you'd have to press buttons to focus the camera on these menus; in VR all I have to do is look at where that menu is and it pops right up for me to use.
It actually made the interface _way_ more intuitive, easier to use, and significantly faster because it played on my expectation of the result. If something similar could be designed on top of Bloomberg data, I think you'd see finance people trampling each other to get it.
This would be particularly true if you played into their existing behaviors and motions; they wouldn't have to learn anything, it would "Just Work".
I have no trouble believing you. I'm in the financial industry, although as an IT guy and not a finance one, but I gave back that utter abomination of the Lenovo Carbon X1 second generation because of the atrocious keyboard (touchstrip, ESC relocated, Tilde relocated, "split" Del/Backspace key etc).
Same reason I won't buy the new Macbook pro - they fucked with the ESC key, they instantly stopped existing as a viable product for me.
At no point did I suggest messing with their keyboard - just give them better visualization possibilities.
This reminds me of somewhere around 1998. I was on-site technician for a market-data software company that had was complimentary (live charting) to Bloomberg terminals. That year, we were updating our software from DOS to Windows NT. I spent a LOT more time than I ever imagined I would teaching men two to three times my age how to use a mouse. Many did not enjoy the change and most were quite adamant about saying so colorfully.
Those guys could run circles around me in the DOS version with just a keyboard. Seeing them use it now reminds me of watching someone with a decade+ experience with vim or emacs.
It's been a while since I've been in the AR/VR/3D space but last time I was there you just couldn't do high density text well at all.
Look at the effective resolution of your monitor and consider the percentage of the field of view that it occupies. You'd need to get something in the area of 6-8k resolution screens if not more to match the same effective resolution.
Well, the airforce had a laser scanner for their maintenance personal beaming pdf documents directly into the eye. Super sharp. Looked a bit like Google Glasses.
Like in this picture: https://www.x.company/glass/
Yes it can. The resolution of AR/VR glasses is less than my iPhone or my laptop monitor.
Now you’re telling me that plugging in a big bulky headset is somehow going to deliver a not worse experience than thee other devices that don’t require an unparalleled level of immersion (both a pro and a con) yet able to show less detail?
I think he was stating that "can't be worse" was a requirement, not a fact. As in, it _must not_ be worse than existing options ($1000 in monitors), ie: resolution, as easy to do everything you already do, etc.
That's on purpose. Resolution is nothing in VR, reaction time is everything. You only need a very wide field, like 800x200px. This would be luxury VR glasses.
However for other, more non-immersive applications, like AR resolution became more important. Which leads go slower reaction times. Which can lead to sickness and lawsuits.
Another reason is that productivity has very specific integration, security, and deployment requirements before it is used. You would never look at a financial terminal that wasn't secured. A video game on the other hand? Sure, why not?
I’m afraid it’s a fact, the fidelity of current VR/AR tech just isn’t high enough. Money really is being thrown at the problem, but there is no magic wand available at any price. These advances take time.
When I was at <fairly large financial research website company> they had a prototype VR research project that was shown to a few people. Never seemed to gain any traction, and I didn't hear why.
Oh wow, that’s interesting. I thought it was still super common. Do you have a link that I can read to learn more about every bank using custom software?
They aren't all using custom software. But all are using banking software provided by one of the big 4 providers in the industry: FIS, Fiserv, Jack Henry, and D+H
I believe they control 95%+ of the banking market.
Those are valid points, especially your point about fidelity, current tech is good enough for gaming and apparently not good enough for work (or we haven't figured out how to use it right). So they can sell it for that right now.
But this and other comments are vastly underestimating the resources that people would be willing to exchange to make their work better. For what I described, a "reasonable" price point could easily be around $10,000. Apple is selling their new iMac at a starting price of $5,000 and there is nothing particularly revolutionary about it, it's an upgrade of what is already available. When you are spending all day using it, and it is the tool you use to make your money, it is worth a lot.
What is the rate of spending in industry on displays vs computers? My general feel is people skimp on displays and over spend on compute. So it would be hard to fight that trend.
Secondly with VR as a desktop replacement... This is simple math. A 4k (or higher) 30" monitor will always be easier and cheaper to build and worst case the same. Except it's at 3' from your face. Shrink that monitor massively and stick it inches from your face. More expensive. Now do the trig on how many and how small of pixels would be required to pay that same resolution from 3' to 1"... Massive downscale... But great we'll get there on display density.... Except, and this is the kicker... For a lot less you can just upgrade the 4k monitor.
Basically unless something fundamentally changes in display tech or we hit a Max resolution that people care about... Miniture displays will mathmatically lag large displays. Yes smartphones tipped the balance but it all got rolled into desktop displays and tvs.
So you lose on econimics and math.
A display tech with massive resolution but something that inherently keeps it from scaling would be a big kicker. Or as some people have said... Hitting 16k or so resolution on VR screens per eye and your dream is there.
Till then gaming is a massive tech driver... Not people using spreadsheets
I don't need a virtual 4K monitor. I can turn my head to see more, just like I do in real life. How close do you have to be to see the pixels in a 4K monitor, and at that point, can you see the entire monitor without looking around?
I want the portability, and then the resolution just has to be good enough. If we could get a virtual 1080p display that would be amazing and good enough. But to your point, the VR display would probably have to be 4K just to be able to properly represent a 1080p virtual display.
you're not doing the math... this is not meant as a slight but:
how big is your virtual 1080p screen representing? and at what distance. give me those numbers and I can tell you what display tech it needs to be, but it's going to be on the order of 10-20x density. it's all about pixel radians.
Also, 1080 is quite small for reading, macs have retina displays which is nearing print when running anti-aliasing.
And don't think I'm attacking you, I want this too. It's just that I did the math.
I guess I'm ok with a virtual screen taking up most of the view. Of course it would be better if it didn't. But I'd still pay for one where I could pretty much only look at one screen at a time, with enough space around the edges to see if there was another screen to look at. And to avoid eye strain I'd need to not have to focus a few inches away.
So if I could focus like it was 6 feet away but it was big enough it took up most of the screen from that distance, and it had a 1080p resolution, that would be good enough. And then I'd buy the upgrades when they came around :) The rough math I was doing in my head was that anything that wasn't 1:1 would need probably 4 pixels for every one virtual pixel. So 4K would about do it.
I pick 1080p because most laptops today still have that resolution, and several laptops that I still use have less resolution than that and are still usable.
a virtual 1080 display that looks like the real thing would be a big gamechanger. Most companies don't buy 4k displays for their employees because 1080p is generally a lot cheaper and also good enough, even for reading. I still have 2 Dell Ultrasharp 1200p IPS displays at home that are 12 years old but reading/writing text on them is totally fine at the normal viewing distance. I'd want 4K mostly for more real estate.
Just got a $399 50" Samsung TV on BlackFriday. Base on the review, it supports 4:4:4 which is a must as PC monitor. Hook up the one yrs old cheap HP laptop to it via HDMI port.
Looks great! 4k video streaming from Youtube works very good.
4 x 1080 Tiled windows - perfect for productivities.
I don't do gaming. The latency is less of an issue for me.
There is also talk about how we actually only mentally process a small focus point in high resolution, and a renderer that could track our focus point could use a lot less GPU compute for a scene if fast enough.
>And even if you did make VR goggles that were great for giant spreadsheets at $1000, it would be a weird enough idea that it would have to be massively better than $1000 worth of monitors to get people interested.
I'll admit that I might not be the "average person" that this is target, but I completely disagree.
I've often said that developers should have powerful machines and tools, pretty much regardless of price. Salaries are often over $100k/yr, and at that price if something makes you a few percent more productive but costs a few thousand dollars, it will (in theory) pay for itself in less than a year.
And for something like this, it would easily make me more than a few percent more productive. Just being able to take the equivalent of 3 monitors with me when I'm on a plane, or am working somewhere other than my normal workstation alone would be worth it. Plus the fact that i'm no longer limited to screen realestate means that when i'm actually "in the zone" and really getting shit done, I'm not going to be struggling with frustration at needing 3 console windows open, plus 2 editors, 2 browser windows, and a chat window. Just being able to throw a console or 3 at a spot where I can glance without having to take my hands off the keyboard or alt+tab through several windows in some cases would be a giant QoL improvement!
For me, this would truly be revolutionary. A headset that lives up to the promise of "a 1080p screen, but everywhere" would change so much of how I work it would be completely revolutionary. And I'd easily be willing to throw a few thousand at a product like this without even thinking about it (with the caveat that it would need to look like it's going to be supported for a while, and won't just ship a device and never release software for it again).
> It's hard to build high-enough fidelity into the hardware at a reasonable price point.
It's more than that. With the current state of the art, it's impossible to make a "virtual monitor" that can match the display density of even a plain 1920x1080 display. You can make "giant spreadsheets", but only because you have to blow up everything to multiples of normal screen size for text to be readable in the VR environment.
> And even if you did make VR goggles that were great for giant spreadsheets at $1000, it would be a weird enough idea that it would have to be massively better than $1000 worth of monitors to get people interested.
If it took up less space than multiple large monitors, it would already be better by one criterion.
>> You could effectively work anywhere in any position, laying in a hammock, on a crowded train, at night in bed when inspiration hits
> have to be massively better than $1000 worth of monitors
Just read these two quotations, and you have the answer. Yes, high-resolution low-hassle googles would be massively better than 3-4 decent monitors for quite some people. At $500 for 2K resolution, that would be an instant hit.
I think that it's a convenient text input device that is missing from the picture. A lot of power users can't touch-type yet.
Another problem is the hassles: either cables or poor battery life. Bandwidth is important outside of gaming, too, else you'll hear the complaints about janky page scrolling instantly.
In gaming, on the other hand, the unfamiliarity of the tech is not a risk but an asset, making the experience more novel. The fidelity doesn't have to be sufficient to overtake an existing process, just to support a fun experience. That's a more scalable business with lower technological barriers to entry, so that's where businesses are focused.
Same reason we had Pong before PCs. You might also see major tech advances in products for specific targets, like military use, medical, or advanced manufacturing, that then trickle down to mainstream productivity applications. But until they get the tech good and cheap enough, expect progressively better games!