ledow t1_jbxp4sm wrote on March 12, 2023 at 3:09 PM

Nobody wants it.

We had sci-fi desires of smartphones for decades, we just didn't call them that.

But nobody is sitting there wanting Tron to happen.

Ironically, instead all this pissing about you could make quite normal VR etc. far more mainstream - it's more viable this time round than ever before.

But nobody wants this mixed reality bollocks.

DarthBuzzard OP t1_jbxs6n0 wrote on March 12, 2023 at 3:31 PM

> We had sci-fi desires of smartphones for decades, we just didn't call them that

Yet most people didn't want a cellphone until the late 1990s. Turns out that humans universally reject all hardware shifts, with a chance of redemption when the tech has matured. People didn't like early brick cellphones, they didn't like CLI PCs, they didn't like early TVs with limited programming.

As Steve Jobs said (paraphrasing), the goal is to build products that people will want before people realize they want it. Apple started out as a PC company building out a market that the masses didn't care about until 15 years later, a market that was considered dead, a fad, in search of a use, many times throughout its emergence.

VR will either be accepted or rejected when the tech has matured. When 90% of the planet doesn't know what VR even stands for in 2023, you can't expect them to make a rational decision. When most people right now can't imagine how VR will evolve beyond higher resolution, their opinion carries little weight.

> Ironically, instead all this pissing about you could make quite normal VR etc. far more mainstream - it's more viable this time round than ever before.

> But nobody wants this mixed reality bollocks.

Good Mixed Reality is an objective upgrade to every VR user. It makes VR safer and easier to use even if you don't use any MR-specific applications.

ledow t1_jbxvxrf wrote on March 12, 2023 at 3:58 PM

>Yet most people didn't want a cellphone until the late 1990s

When they became affordable rather than stupendously expensive status symbols.

Humans rarely reject technology so long as it's affordable. Smartphones are the perfect demonstration of this where the DRIVER for them was the ordinary person, not the corporate executive who's had them since the 70's/80's.

Also you mention the PC market and televisions - as far as I'm concerned the same happened there. The home computing market of the 80's was about AFFORDABLE computers in the home, and homes scrambled to have them once they were affordable. Whether that was Atari Pong, a ZX Spectrum or a NES, it wasn't ever a market that people "didn't care about".

Same with TVs, to be honest. I don't know what makes you think the "limited programming" had anything to do with it, it's actually almost impossible to find someone of that generation who DIDN'T have a TV.

And the same will happen with VR... now that there are £300 VR headsets, people are buying them in the millions.

It's about affordability and practicality. VR headsets never went away, they've always been around, but they've always been too expensive or clumsy (I speak as an owner of multiple Vive Pro's). People know exactly what they want and what they'll use them for, it's the "fitting on the head of a pin for the price of a Christmas present" factor that actually brings them to the point people will use them.

And with VR, we were discussing VR back in the 80's, VRML was invented before HTML 2, it was shown on TV programmes, used by architects, incorporated into military headsets, and featured in mainstream movies (e.g. Tron, Lawnmower Man).

MR is a bollocks term attributed as some kind of new extension to VR and AR as if it's something different to AR. It's not. In fact it's so woolly that there's no real definition of how it differs to those two, or what it adds to either.

People are using VR now. Nobody really wants / uses AR and the biggest use of it is in chaperone systems in VR. If you're going to enter another world, why would you want it on top of this one? And MR - as Meta are finding out - is the thing that nobody actually knows what it means, because there is no real fixed definition, it's whatever these companies try to sell it and universally looks like bad AR slapped over bad VR but then mixed with some primitive VRChat bollocks that was literally available in the 90's.

To say that this is going to "be" something is a nonsense. And it can't "be" anything without cheap, commodity VR and AR hardware first. Something which we're only JUST making the first happen. Fact is, people still don't want to dress up like a prat just to "feel" something that's in front of them anyway.

A VR-first console with cheap headsets would have created a new generation of games and games consoles, for instance. But Nintendo missed the boat and went for the Switch, and everyone else is just making PCs and now realising that they should really just sell those games on PC because they are *just* PC games.

MR isn't a thing anyone wants, or can even define, demonstrate or sell. That's why Meta keep failing on it, and nobody else wants to enter that space. VR is not only well-defined, it's available, it's commodity, and people know precisely what it is - from sci-fi. Hell, we're still making TV programmes about the concept - The Peripheral - for instance.

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DarthBuzzard OP t1_jbxxoep wrote on March 12, 2023 at 4:10 PM

> Whether that was Atari Pong, a ZX Spectrum or a NES, it wasn't ever a market that people "didn't care about".

I'm talking about PCs, so the ZX Spectrum as mentioned above, and others like the C64 and IBM clones in general - these had the additional barrier of seeming to have no real use in the home beyond just a narrow selection of usecases. This was the general consumer consensus - either that or indifference.

You can see that here:

Being seen as in search of a use: https://www.academia.edu/320362/1980s_Home_Coding_the_art_of_amateur_programming

Many PCs collected dust: https://wayback.archive-it.org/5902/20150629134551/http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf01313/patterns.htm

They were seen as having no compelling use in the home: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=yS4EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA66&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

It was often considered longer to do tasks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycVyGb5ID90&t=228s

Another report in the low usage rates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H07xxyfLySA&t=761s

Another report on the apparent lack of usecases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8REddtaRG3E&t=1101s

> Same with TVs, to be honest. I don't know what makes you think the "limited programming" had anything to do with it, it's actually almost impossible to find someone of that generation who DIDN'T have a TV.

What generation? I didn't specify a timeframe, but I meant from the mid to late 1920s and 1930s - there just wasn't much enthusiasm for TVs in the home.

> People know exactly what they want and what they'll use them fo

As evidenced above by how people had no idea what they wanted with PCs, this isn't how things usually are. VR is the same, in that people see it only as a gaming device, but the most actively used apps are social apps, which most people without a headset think have no use in VR or don't even know such things exist.

> MR is a bollocks term attributed as some kind of new extension to VR and AR as if it's something different to AR. It's not. In fact it's so woolly that there's no real definition of how it differs to those two, or what it adds to either.

MR has been defined since the 1990s as the spectrum from which VR/AR exists within. It constitutes a device that does both and is indeed different than AR as it is a superset and includes a third term - AV (augmented virtually, augmenting virtual worlds with real objects) which will likely be an important feature for a lot of future VR users in the future. Why? Safety, allowing people to still feel highly immersed while keeping an eye on their sibling, partner, dog, food/drinks, keyboard for typing.

As for pure AR, no one wants/uses AR (as a wearable) because there isn't a single worldwide consumer AR device out there. The market is at best, in the Apple I stages and is awaiting an Apple II consumer launch.

MR hasn't failed and AR hasn't failed. They are both very early on - optical AR especially.