My friend and longtime game developer Alice Taylor has a really good analysis on Boing Boing of VR hype as it stands now, fairly weighing the pros and cons. Here's a particularly good passage:
OK, some traditional signs of possible near-future mini-doom: a growing lurch of VC investments into VR & AR (over $1.1bn already in 2016) which will pile on the pressure to succeed, as big and as fast as possible. Then there’s the issue that VR isn’t something you can easily do on the bus, or at work when the boss isn’t looking. VR isn’t very sociable yet, either - and if we’ve learned any lessons from the growth of Facebook games and then Mobile games, it’s that social, bus-time and sneaky-work-play are killer use cases.
But there are so many pros. VR’s potential could easily stretch to defense (urgh), tourism, communication, leisure - as you may be reading in all the headlines. We heard all that before with Second Life, or more recently too even with 3D Printing, but there’s a difference with VR: this time we have a phalanx of huge companies visibly on board, very publicly "long play" invested: Facebook, Samsung, Google, Valve, Sony.
I could hair split the second paragraph -- Second Life did have some major tech companies getting visibly on board (beyond one-off marketing experiments), including Amazon and IBM, which built a whole corporate campus in SL. (Which was so prominent, a labor union held a protest there.) For that matter, Sony Home was a direct response to Second Life, as was Google's Lively. (Anyone still remember Lively?) But like I said, that's niggling, because Google, Sony, etc. are putting way more money and effort into VR now than they ever even considered with Second Life. So Alice's point still stands.
Alice's point about investment into VR is a really good one too:
The high level of VC funding of virtual reality companies is usually cited on the pro side of the ledger -- see, look at all these big Silicon Valley venture capitalists backing it! -- but Alice has the right view: VCs typically expect to see strong growth results soon, or they get leery about further investment fast. And with even Palmer Luckey cautioning advocates from expecting mass growth in many many years, those VCs are likely to get cold virtual feet soon.
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The biggest problem with VR hype is the same as with any form of hype.
When the inevitable reality comes out and is known... people will become overly harsh and judgemental about supposed false-promises. Even if those people are the very people who formerly fabricated the false-promises.
SL is case in point everyone here should be familiar with. Many of its later harshest critics were the very media and companies that once hyped it way beyond the hype Linden Lab actually created around it.
They blamed SL for its failure to live up to the lies they themselves told about it...
That is what will happen with VR as well.
The thing is, this is basically as old as the invention of the wheel... if not the invention of fire...
Human beings have been hyping things and then getting resentful rather than fessing up to their own hype for as long as there have been human beings...
And that we still fall for that stupidity is a tragic failing of the species...
VR won't be special in getting burned by its own hype. But it also won't be special in managing to escape its own hype.
What's tragic in that is the people who can't see that this wheel is just like all the other ones we've been carting out for the last few million years of evolution...
Posted by: Pussycat Catnap | Friday, April 22, 2016 at 01:26 PM
The hype will go away quickly. Then we have to learn how to use VR. The headsets are to expensive to get in to every mans home. There are very few applications.
I think it will follow Second life. It is for the few. But we who still use SL and Opensim are hardcore. A very stable gang of followers.
For me i could not live with out my Oculus rift. I fly planes in FSX almost every day and explore SL. I love it. I think most people will never learn how to use VR before putting the think in a box and forget about it.
Posted by: Cyberserenity | Saturday, April 23, 2016 at 12:01 AM