Consumer VR is Here

[A Black Falcon]

Well, it's released, anyway. I don't have a computer good enough to run the Rift or Vive, much less the money for one right now... but have been following it, of course. It's interesting stuff; I like the Virtual Boy (and Sega's 3d shutter-glasses for the Master System), and it's cool to see consoles finally try VR again but with much better technology. I haven't used either one of these headsets myself, unfortunately, but I'd like to try. Given how I don't have much negative effect from the VB, I imagine I wouldn't have much of an issue with nausea and such.

Of course, VR advancing to this point raises questions about the future -- sci-fi stories are full of horror stories of future tech gone bad, and VR like this is a step towards that. Does it allow good things too, of course, but also a lot of bad... like, hackable brain implants? People living only in VR worlds and not in reality? Etc etc. It's a step towards at least some of those (mostly bad) sci-fi scenarios becoming reality. And that's not even mentioning things like global warming, etc. But I'm a natural pessimist like usual of course, I'm sure others think of this much more positively.


But as for the actual hardware as it is now, while I may not have one I like watching game videos on Youtube, so I have watched all 11+ hours of Giant Bomb's Oculus Rift stream when it released, and then all of their similarly long HTC Vive stream when it released a few days back, so I think I have a decent sense of where the tech is right now. The Rift and Vive are very cool tech, but they are also quite expensive, too much so at the moment unless you have a lot of extra money lying around. And the games? Well, some look cool, but a lot look early, sometimes Early Access early. And many are overpriced as well, compared to regular Steam game prices. Giant Bomb's opinion so far seems to be to wait until more games that make good use of VR are released (and maybe also lower prices) before buying. Of course the Giant Bomb guys are very jaded and critical of many things in gaming, but still, some of those games... yeah.

The other issue is the thing which differentiates the Rift and Vive -- the Rift comes with a regular 2d controller and a head-tracking headset, while the Vive comes with a pair of motion controllers and cameras to track your physical location in a room, on top of their head-tracking headset. It's $200 more of course, but you get more... hand-tracked motion controllers clearly add a lot to the games, when you compare the two lineups, or those livestreams. The Vive looks more interesting to me than the Rift. The Rfit will get motion controllers of some kind, but not room-scale VR with cameras that track you moving around an actual physical space, apparently. The Vive has better hardware in the box, too, it seems -- slightly bigger field of view is reported. And the Oculus Rift is owned and released by Facebook, a somewhat evil company who wants all your personal information so they can sell it to advertisers. The HTC Vive is released in partnership with Valve, whose Steam isn't the best, but isn't quite as evil as Facebook.

So is the Vive better? Partially, it sounds, but there are two big issues with the Vive, though -- that that room-scale element requires you live somewhere with a LARGE square open space in a room with your most powerful computer in it, and warp-to-move isn't great for many genres. On the first point, most people aren't going to have enough space for the Vive to work as intended. Until people can have holodecks in their house or full-immersion brain implants (with all the serious concerns such a thing would cause), the space requirement (15x15 feet is ideal apparently, or more) is a huge issue. Room-scale is a neat idea, but you can't move around, really, just move around a few-foot rectangle. Jeff of Giant Bomb was saying how he sounds like he wishes he could get a Vive, but just doesn't have the space --particularly with this space needing to have your main PC in it. I wouldn't either, sadly. And how do you move around beyond that rectangle? Warping. You point one of the hand-controller cursors at the floor, hit a button, and it warps the square to that location. That's fine for an adventure game or dungeon-crawler RPG, but a platformer, fighting game, FPS, etc? Forget it, that wouldn't work at all! And you can make games that use regular controllers, that will be better for some kinds of games, but motion controls would be great for some kinds of things that they aren't due to the controls. There are issues here that room-scale VR causes and can't fix.

As for the games, some in each stream looked interesting, but I haven't tried any of course so I can't say too much. I will say, though, that despite their criticism, that tube racing game? It's in my Steam wishlist now, I'll get it for sure once it goes on sale.

But anyway, yeah, VR is here. What does anyone else think? Someone tried it yet?

Giant Bomb Oculus Stream: part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imlbNXF6gpM part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ODZstD2nLU (There's a ~15 minute gap between these that is covered in the shorter videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDsm1crphWE )

Giant Bomb HTC Vive stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OknS2wfHi9E

[Dark Jaguar]

So the Oculus is just a headset you jam on your head while sitting in a chair. Moving my head around just as a camera thing seems pretty gimicky, especially since I can't look behind myself without turning my chair around, getting the cable on my controller spun around myself in the process.

The Vive is a lot more like what people think actual VR should be, since you're getting up and actually moving your own body. However, I think ultimately this will demonstrate just how ill-conceived that idea has always been. It's just too easy to injure yourself, and as you say it would require having a big empty and above-all "safe" space to play with it in.

ABF, these are frickin' TVs strapped to your head! This is nothing like your sci-fi distopias. You're picturing scenarios this tech can't possibly lead to. Video game addiction was already a thing long before you could stick the camera right up to your eye, so I really don't think this is changing anything.

Getting tech in our brains seems like the best thing that could happen to humanity, but sometimes I do fear what might happen to such a device if it actually COULD be attacked remotely, namely what could be done with it in the hands of a true psychopath. I don't think we should avoid it because of that, but if even one person experiences a literal eternity of hell due to that tech, that's way too much, so it's a problem that'll need to be solved.

[Weltall]

Think about it this way: when we are to the point where we have brain implants that can do things such as immerse consciousness in virtual reality, it probably means that we understand fleshy brain meats well enough that regular brains could be hacked, too.

[Dark Jaguar]

Not necessarily, there's really no interface short of directly trying to tap into it. Further, altering the actual neural connections isn't so straightforward. There wouldn't be a way to send commands to "write over" this or that section "Eternal Sunshine" style, for example, simply due to the way brains work. They don't really have a typical "write" command, and learning in general is accomplished through gradual repetition, most likely having to do with certain chemical reaction chains which reinforce and so on. Brains really do work on a completely different level than circuits, so the typical programmatic method of "attack" just wouldn't work. Interfacing would involve making modules that can respond to requests from that neural mass. The neural mass (what's left of it after the surgery) would still be doing what it wants, but if the implants are well-made, they'd cooperate with it. The module wouldn't be able to "overwrite" neurons, but it could still feed false data to the brain, and maybe brainwash someone over a longer period of time, if done in a subtle way the person wouldn't notice. Look at it this way, when we see a typical optical illusion, we know our senses are lying to us and are generally able to cope without buying the lie. A more subtle optical illusion would be one that didn't tip off the rest of our brain that something was "wrong", not until it was too late. I suppose an optical illusion would be an example of a brain "hack".

I'm still terrified at the potential for human suffering that mastering the human brain could unleash. It's an issue that will need an absolute and uncompromising solution, because it's one thing to torture someone to death over the span of months (about the worst thing a person can do to another person in this world), and another to torture someone for an accelerated billion years of actual "burning in a lake of fire" accompanied by an implanted sense of guilt over that particular psychopath's interpretation of what sins the victim committed, all in the span of a few seconds so that it's literally impossible to "stop" the torture before it's already done it's full cycle. The sheer scale of that level of human misery is so far beyond anything in our experience that we really need to think long and hard about what needs to be done to make such a thing effectively impossible BEFORE we reach that technical level. What I'm saying is that sort of thing CANNOT happen, EVER, and if we can't find a way to prevent it, with a population in the billions, it will happen at least once, and it would be better for our race to go extinct than to allow it to pass.

I'm being pretty harsh here, but I just can't suffer that possibility. It's just beyond my ability to stomach.

[A Black Falcon]

... what seriously awful possibilities. It seems to be so much easier to imagine a dark future than a happy one in science fiction, but reality may be heading that direction too. :S I hope not, but the digital future has some very worrying elements to it, some mentioned here in this thread. (And yeah, DJ, that's one real nightmare scenario for sure.)

[A Black Falcon]

On the subject of human suffering, apparently Oculus creator Palmer Luckey, as you probably heard, is apparently a probably racist Trump supporter spending some of his very large amounts of money funding an anti-Hillary right-wing meme group called "Nimble America"... and he was stupid enough to admit this to a press person who asked in an email. Afterwards, after the scandal blew up, he released a statement claiming that he wasn't the person he had just admitted to being, and claimed to be supporting Gary Johnson and not Trump, but both of those things are obvious lies as the past email trail and his and his girlfriends' apparently very alt-right-infused Twitter accounts show -- lots of the usual alt-right racist/etc. stuff on both, apparently. And there is also video of him leaving a Trump rally, too.

So what is Facebook's response? So far, to do nothing. They seem to think that his questionably true statement is all that is needed here, ignoring how this is not some normal political campaign, not with Trump running an explicitly racist and sexist campaign, and how Luckey isn't just a supporter, but someone funding a pretty bad cause.

... So yeah, for anyone who isn't right-wing and bought an Oculus Rift, you helped this guy's cause out, unfortunately. It's too bad that we are seeing this growing young racist right congeal together on the internet, will this nation ever learn? It seems like for every step forwards this nation takes, it takes one back... now, I do think overall we are progressing -- the whole Black Lives Matter movement is proof of this, because actually protesting that situation shows a huge step forward versus just ignoring it as everyone used to do -- but the alt-right's growth shows that unfortunately racism is alive and well even with younger audiences. Again, sad stuff. :bummed:

[Dark Jaguar]

At least buying the Rift AFTER the guy was bought out makes it a bit better.

Please remember though that for every major traded company, there's no telling how many racist rich people own major shares and benefit every time you buy a product from that company. It's basically impossible these days to make sure your money ISN'T, at some point in the chain, going to fund some cause you despise. The big difference in this case is someone managed to find out about it. It's also worth pointing out that no one stopped buying iPhones when they found out the conditions under which they are manufactured (and the singular fact is that company is responsible for components for MANY more companies than Apple).

[A Black Falcon]

At least buying the Rift AFTER the guy was bought out makes it a bit better.

Please remember though that for every major traded company, there's no telling how many racist rich people own major shares and benefit every time you buy a product from that company. It's basically impossible these days to make sure your money ISN'T, at some point in the chain, going to fund some cause you despise.

I'm sure this is true, yes, but Luckey has been a very prominent figure thanks to his pushing VR. This isn't just some random person, but Oculus's most prominent figure, the person who founded the company before he sold to Facebook and its top PR figure, or at least he was before this. Luckey was even on the cover of Time Magazine earlier this year, wearing a Rift headset! He hasn't been fired and Facebook seems to have little interest in actually facing the issue, so they might try to keep him in his very public role, but that will be difficult to impossible now I'd think. Some things will be impossible now, like trying to convince people he cares about diversity in the VR world when we know the truth (he spoke at some conference for minorities in VR development, or something like that, before this, for example)... but Facebook seems to want to shove this under a rug, so will they just ignore all the negative press and continue on anyway? I hope that if that happens the press doesn't let up on them until they crack and admit they have a problem. Yes, people are entitled to their own personal views, but this is worse than that, he revealed himself as someone supporting a group loaded with racist, sexist, and antisemitic thought and imagery. That's way worse than the kind of "people are entitled to their political views" spin Facebook is trying to pretend this is.

Oh, and Facebook also apparently is locking all threads critical of Palmer on Oculus's forums. However, an a thread with a link to a typically awful Breitbart article? That's fine, that stays open. That is not okay.

The big difference in this case is someone managed to find out about it. It's also worth pointing out that no one stopped buying iPhones when they found out the conditions under which they are manufactured (and the singular fact is that company is responsible for components for MANY more companies than Apple).

That's true, unfortunately sometimes people just don't care enough to keep pushing a company when it refuses to take any action towards good causes like reducing stuff gotten from questionable or clearly bad sources, against sexism, or what have you. Nintendo seems to know this well too, as this also helps them get away with stuff. Too bad.