I honestly don't think we've seen the end of AR/VR yet. The tech continues to improve year over year. There are rumors the prototype Zuck plans to show at Meta Connect this year are mindblowing
Better VR tech won't make people buy VR. You could literally offer them a Star Trek holodeck and they still wouldn't buy in. People don't buy it because they don't see the point.
This was even true in Star Trek. People could do literally anything on a holodeck and the writers still had them going to Risa for a holiday.
There is no chance of VR going mainstream until someone solves the fundamental human problem of people preferring to do things in real life.
> This was even true in Star Trek. People could do literally anything on a holodeck and the writers still had them going to Risa for a holiday.
If anything, that was a failure of imagination on writers' part, somewhat rectified over time and subsequent shows. Even in the core shows (TNG, DS9, VOY), we've seen the holodeck used for recreation, dating, study, simulation, brainstorming, physical training, hand-to-hand combat training, marksmanship training, gaming out scenarios for dangerous missions, extreme sports, engineering, accident investigation, crime scene reconstruction, and a bunch of other things. Still, the show was about boldly going where no one has gone before - not about boldly staying glued to a virtual reality display - so this affected what was or wasn't shown.
Plus, it's not either/or. People went to Risa to have real sex (er, jamaharon) with real people, and lots of (both it and them). This wasn't shown on-screen, just heavily implied, as this is where Roddenberry's vision of liberated humanity clashed with what could be shown on daytime TV. Holo-sex was a thing too, but it was shown to be treated more like pornography today - people do it, don't talk much about it, but if you try to do it too often and/or with facsimile of people you know, everyone gets seriously creeped out.
In TNG we see Barkley get addicted to the holodeck and use it to play out fantasies with female members of the crew. Through the episode we end up learning that Barkley escaped to the holodeck because he was having problems and not being fulfilled in his real life.
There was a similar episode of DS9 where Nog gets addicted to the holodeck due to war trauma.
The central take of the show is that real life is better for these people in this future communist space utopia and the only reason why you'd go to the holodeck is light entertainment, physical training, or if there's something wrong with your life that needs fixed.
so much human potential, natural resources, and anxiety wasted on obsessive pursuit of diddling a few special nerve endings, heaped in a mountain of self-serving social pecking order mythology and ritualistic mystery.
Once we can produce offspring in sci-fi vats, then we can remove the then unnecessary organs from our DNA and not have those worries. We can be just like human ants where the queen is now vats and we just work and maybe think a little.
Totally agreed. It's like the hype around "social media" or "streaming services" or "video games". There's no chance of any of them going mainstream because of the fundamental human problem of people preferring to do things in real life.
VR requires too much setup. I have a PS4, bought a used PSVR set and realized I needed a camera that I did not have. Realized instead of buying a camera, I could upgrade to a ps5 and buy the new headset that did not require a camera, bc I prefer not to have my living room look like a lab. Then there is the social aspect of it.
You can't interact with people around you the same way you do if you play with, say, a console controller. VR is an all encompassing activity that you have to dedicated time for, instead of having it casually just exist around you. Then we have the cost. Only some people can have it, so it will be a lonely activity most of the time when it could be so much more.
I can afford it, but every time I am in front of a new set, I consider my life with it and say "maybe next time". Finally, I have not really explored them, but I have a feeling the experience is limited by the content that exists.
I dream of a VR experience where suddenly all content I currently enjoy on flat screens will automagically be VRified. But I am pretty sure that will not be the case. Only a very limited collection will be VR native.
But I want it all to be, or almost all, before I go all in.
The appropriate response to VR is that we all get a VR/storage/etc room in addition to the existing paradigms of bedroom, living room, kitchen, etc. At the high end we've grown houses to the point that in order to remain boxes they demanded interior rooms without windows, and so far we have varied between refusing to build these rooms because "natural light" and outright banning these rooms for safety reasons, creating sprawling complicated floorplans instead with lots of surface area per volume.
It would be a bit better suited to a civilization that wasn't undergoing a catastrophic urban housing shortage crisis with demographic & economic effects for upcoming generations that are comparable to a world war or the Black Death. We are building huge exurban houses which nonetheless do not have VR-appropriate rooms, and tiny 1-bedroom apartments, and not much else. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZxzBcxB7Zc
The question is whether this is a chicken/egg problem that prevents us from launching next-generation VR plays.
> VR requires too much setup. I have a PS4, bought a used PSVR set and realized I needed a camera that I did not have. Realized instead of buying a camera, I could upgrade to a ps5 and buy the new headset that did not require a camera, bc I prefer not to have my living room look like a lab. Then there is the social aspect of it.
I bought the somewhat dated Quest 2 sometime in the last year, because I could get it for a good price. There's a mobile app I think I used for setup, you can also connect to the PC for Oculus Link, SteamVR, Virtual Desktop or any other number of OpenXR apps or games, but as for the device itself... there was basically nothing aside from logging in and downloading what I want from the store, if I wanted to run things directly on the headset. The controllers and tracking just works, you define the area you want to get warned about getting close to the borders of by just drawing in the room around you.
Actually, the only problems I've had have been in a PCVR use case after I got an Intel Arc - Oculus Link and SteamVR both don't support it natively (an allowlist in the case of the former and support only for NVENC I think in the case of the latter), whereas Virtual Desktop worked with AV1 and Intel QSV out of the box, while also allowing me to launch SteamVR through it.
There are warts and all (especially software like Immersed removing support for physical monitors, what were they thinking), but in general the hardware and everything around it, even hand tracking, are pretty well streamlined, surprisingly so.
> VR is an all encompassing activity that you have to dedicated time for, instead of having it casually just exist around you.
This kind of killed it for me, to be honest. There's more friction than just launching a game on the PC directly (in the case of PCVR: putting the headset on, connecting to the PC, then launching it on the PC, finally accessing it on the headset) in addition to needing to sometimes use the keyboard being especially annoying, since the on screen keyboard is just more annoying to use and having to find your regular keyboard taking a step or two, if you're standing instead of sitting while playing.
That said, VR in general still feels cool, even if it's a bit early.
I think the key there (the “killer app” as it were) is shared experiences. I love co-op gaming and keep in touch with faraway friends by playing those games while Discording. It would be a game-changer (literally and figuratively) if we could game or watch something in the same AR or VR space, with some kind of persona or avatar representing ourselves, and spatially reflecting our audio/voice.
We’ve joked multiple times that whenever the “co-op Skyrim VR” of gaming comes out, we will never be heard from again lol.
Apple is SO CLOSE to this with its Vision Pro hardware, and yet so far… (no “co-op space” implementation, too expensive, too heavy on face)
Imagine seeing a live soccer match in 3D from incredible camera angles like just above the goals, but your buddy who is 3000 miles away is actually also sitting right next to you in that space, and you can see and hear each other…
> There is no chance of VR going mainstream until someone solves the fundamental human problem of people preferring to do things in real life.
Three counterpoints: Online gaming, social media, smartphones. All of these favor "virtual" over "real life", and have become massively popular over the last decades. Especially among the young, so the trend is likely to continue.
its a replacement for the cell phone not escape from real life. At least thats what i think zuck is trying to do he realized apple can kneecap his company anytime it wants just like they did with the whole AD tracking fiasco, he wants to have a foot in the new paradigm which he thinks will be ar/vr.
Think you're off base here and the issue is comfortability. People spend all day on their computers and phones, VR just needs to make some breakthroughs in comfort (maybe built-in fans? Literally include ginger tablets with the headset?) to get people over the initial nausea hump. This plus higher resolution for AR purposes will do a ton.
Now, there may also be a physical laziness factor to overcome, but there are enough people that enjoy moving their bodies to really explode the industry even if all the lazy folks stay 2D.
Sounds like more unsubstantiated hype from a company desperate to sell a product that was very expensive to build. I guess we'll see, but I'm not optimistic for them.
340,000 H100s 600,000 H100 equivalents (perhaps AMD Instinct cards?) On top of the hundreds of thousands of legacy A100s.
And I'm certain the order for B100s will be big. Very big.
Even the philanthropic org Chan-Zuckerberg institute current rocks 1000 H100s, probably none used for inference.
They are going ALL OUT