Oculus announced this morning that the consumer version of its virtual reality headset will be in the hands of everyone in the U.S. that wants it in early 2016. FINALLY! I feel like I’ve been reading about this unicorn of a video game device for the several years.
Also, Oculus didn’t offer very many new details, only noting that its headset will come with “compelling content, a full ecosystem, and a fully-integrated hardware/software tech stack designed specifically for virtual reality.”
I wonder if VR will be to me the way computers or smart phones are to older people. I wonder if all of our kids will be wide mouthed, sitting on a couch all day long with VR headsets on their faces. I cram to understand. This must be how it feels to get old.
Someday we’ll have nanobots that will form structurally sound walls and climbable surfaces as you “walk/run” around on a moving surface of the ‘bots. You will have a suit of nanobots on your body that will change temperature and react to each other’s magnetic field as well as create physical locks between each other to create resistance and stops in joint movement accordingly in order to similar to touching, holding, lifting and hitting objects of various textures, weights, etc. Each ‘bot will recognize it’s position in space relative to the others, mapping your body and allowing the most detailed motion sensing, specific to each user.
The nanobots will slightly indent themselves against your body with varying amount of force and shape to imitate impact of projectiles and other forces on the body. Then somebody will hack the system and instruct the nanobots to create sharper, harder “impacts”, piercing and killing users in real life when they die in-game. Or get in fights in virtual movie theaters with virtual people hitting on their virtual girlfriends. So, there you go. That’s the plan. Feel free to take it and make it. I just want to play. If this is “virtual reality”, then what are we going to call the holodeck when it’s invented, maybe “virtually real virtual reality”?
The biggest drawbacks to Virtual Reality that I’ve seen have been, the hardware not living up to the promise. It’s the seamonkeys effect. The hype is great, you’re onboard, you’re ready to do this but in the end you just get brine shrimp. However, the killer reason to own one is the hurdle nobody has achieved yet. VR has been used for everything from engineering training (mechanics working on jets, nuclear power plants etc) to medical treatments for phobias (fear of heights, insects etc). Yet none of the applications to which it’s been applied in the last 20 years have stuck because ultimately you can do the same thing much more cheaply and almost as convincingly with other methods. That said the big thing for consumers, aside from compelling content – some killer apps of some kind, for example – is pricing, which remains a big question mark at this point. Oculus might clear that up at the E3 Expo next month. I’m still a gamer on a budget. A midcore guy who plays a handfull of titles a year on my one gaming device and I still need to get a PS4. I’ll wait this one out.
-Dagobot
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