Maybe the Killer App for Virtual Reality is Actually Reality

Regular reader Eza made a very good point in last week's post about mass market adoption of virtual reality head-mounted displays (or HMDS):

As Arcadia points out, HMDs will have use cases outside of virtual reality. As a sports fan, I got excited about the future of the Rift when Zuckerberg mentioned possibilities like virtual attendance of football games. People like me already pay for premium sport channels and online streaming services for games that aren't local. If I could put on an Oculus Rift and my headphones and suddenly a 3D camera or whatever lets me see and hear games all around the world as if I were in the stands that'd be very compelling. At least it'd be a slightly more interesting value proposition of what I'm already paying for. And that's all it needs to be.

For Ezra, this may be more compelling from a mass market sense than VR per se:

I'd bet on ideas like virtual attendance over virtual reality. Not to put the latter down given I'm very much engaged with it, but when we're talking about gaining the interest of and offering value to 1 billion people, I believe ideas like teens slipping on HMDs and getting the illusion of being 20 feet from One Direction will get us there much more likely than a virtual boy band no matter how great facial animation tracking gets. So the success of HMDs has to be separated from the success of virtual reality. It's quite possible that virtual reality of Second Life's DNA will be as niche on the Oculus Rift as it has been on PCs. There's more than a billion PC users in the world but that doesn't mean much for present day VR.

This sounds right to me. And indeed, at SVVR a couple months ago, I saw a pretty impressive demo of live video captured for display in an Oculus Rift VR. This may actually be the way HMDs become mass market -- with virtual reality becoming a smaller use case to that one. Which is totally fine with me. Consider how smartphones are mass market now: Only a fraction of Android/iOS users are hardcore gamers on their phones, but most everyone who owns a smartphone has played Angry Birds or another top game at least a little bit. That may be similar to the future of VR HMDs too -- only some of us will use them for actual hardcore virtual reality, but all of us will use them to watch the Olympics or the World Cup or performances by Psy Jr. and Bieber the Third.

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Comments

[Inara Pey]

The BBC here in the UK has already achieved the world's first VR-based transmission of a sporting event.

I covered the work here: How the BBC achieved a world’s first in live event VR streaming

The work was only an initial foray into the potential of using VR, as a part of a whole slew of Internet-based broadcasting the "Beeb" is looking at.

Further work is going to be carried out using VR with one of the BBC's popular nature series ("Springwatch") in 2015, and there are even mutterings of them including VR as a part of their coverage of the 2016 Olympics.

[Iggy]

Now we are on some solid ground about a killer app for VR rigs. I really enjoy live music, but too often the venues are far from me and the main act at a club starts playing at, say, 10pm.

I'd love to be able to experience the event, from home, with my choice of beverage, the sound set to "less than deafening," and no chance of a DUI.

SL delivered a simulation of the experience and, when lag permitted, a pretty good experience. But seeing Suzanne Vega's avatar is not quite the same as being virtually present at a RL concert by her in a distant town, for the price of a ticket.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I think it's a good starting place. And the lines between "virtual" and "real" are already blurry. I'm not a big sports fan, but I am a big graphics fan, so I'm bemused when I see things like a... whatchamacallit, first down line or whatever... imposed on a football field like it was painted there.

I do want fully immersive and interactive game environments, but I'm perfectly happy to start with watching the Battle of Helm's Deep or the Avenger's defense of Manhattan from the POV of someone in the middle of the action.

[Pathfinder]

Sounds like you're imagining *this* endgame.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGwQ74cH5O0

Take a seat in your stem chair...

[Arcadia Codesmith]

Personally, I'd prefer an interface that would give my tired old body a workout while I wander through the virtual wonderland. Bonus points if it actually improves my modest real-life fencing skills (because you never know when rapiers will be back in vogue and a lady should always be prepared).

Would it be preferable to travel to Spain and study with a wizened master of the art? Perhaps. I will report back when I have the means and technology to make a fair comparison (i.e. never).