The State of VR 2016

was like all the way in December. I think there's a few months after December. There's no February. The topic today is going to be virtual reality. Oh shoot, because I looked at virtual realty, oh, like like like lands you would buy in in in like some city or something. Oh that that wouldn't be a bad topic in itself. Actually, maybe some uses of virtual reality in the future will

involve selling homes at low, low prices. Yeah, I'm pretty sure they will actually, so Okay, So in this original episode in we went really deep into the history of virtual reality, including a lot of uses outside of the gaming industry, like an therapy and training program stuff like that. That history, as far as we know, has not changed. As long as no little police call boxes with a defective chameleon device have landed somewhere in the past and

messed things up. I'm pretty sure all the VR news are fixed points in time. I'm pretty sure they are. I mean, unless we're dealing with one of those like Bahnstein Bear issues, that thing is still messing me up. Man. All right, well, that's that's fair. I'm more of a Weeping Angels kind of guy myself. But yeah, so we wanted to to revisit this specifically because VR was one of those things that went through an incredibly rough patch

shortly after the term got popularized. Yeah, and I think that's because versions of it were being brought, would you say, to market I don't know, at least to consumer experience in a way. Even if people weren't buying things to keep in their homes, people were going to malls and shows and stuff like that where they can get into some kind of virtual reality experience. And it was underwhelming. Yeah,

the the expectations did not meet. Uh, we're not met, I should say, especially based upon the amazing depictions we got from Hollywood like lawnmower Man, you know, phenomenal depictions of VR experience, Yes, exactly, but but certainly lanmore Man is less nauseating than some of these early virtual reality headsets. For you, I can speak from experience because we're talking

about the nineties, right, Yeah. I think I actually said this in our In fact, I'm sure I said it in our episode, which I did not go back and listen to. But I am. I can't imagine that I would have let a VR discussion go by without talking about my personal experience of playing Dactyl Nightmare or whatever it was, or Dactyl Terror, the polygon pterodactyl game that was a VR game. They used to showcase it in a mall that's not too far from where we are now.

And I would go to this mall and spend five of my heart earned dollars to spend five minutes feeling very sick in this very primitive yeah, which vaguely pterodactyl shaped polygons. Yeah, coming after me. It was not as as awesome, like I could see the potential even then, Like the head tracking software was amazing, the idea that I could turn my head in real life and my view in the virtual world would change as a result

of that. It was a cool idea. The latency issue was terrible because that's what starts to create that feeling of being nauseated, right, and that this is the problem where the the hardware can't quite keep up. It's not able to serve images to your eyes at just the right speed to match how you're turning your head, so instead there's this kind of dragging FCT that's swimmy kind

of feel. Now that was the case back in the nineties. Uh, Today we have much more powerful processors, including video processors graphics processors, where we've managed to and by we, I mean people who actually work on this stuff, have managed to reduce that latency to a point where it is not really detectable by humans and and we're surprisingly good

at noticing that. So that was a big challenge. Yeah, And that was the news that we were reacting to when we talked about this and when we sort of asked the questions, after so many bad incarnations over the years, is virtual reality just dead forever? Or can can it really come back? And can new innovations in VR make the technology more attractive? And even thing that will become the new way to have you know, virtual, immersive or

gaming experiences. Right, could this potentially be the replacement of your traditional console or gaming PC. And there have been some interesting developments on that question already. I've seen some tech journalists calling twenty sixteen the year of VR. Understandable that may be that may be premature, since we've only made it a little bit into twenty sixteen, but they

might have a good reason for doing that. Because I want to report on some survey results from the Game Developers Conference State of the Industry Survey for sixteen, which came out January sixteen, and it's based on feedback from more than two thousand game developers who were attendees of this conference, and they said, in the past year, the percent of participating game developers working on VR projects has

more than doubled. So in seven percent of game developers were working on virtual reality in two sixteen, sixteen percent. We're right. So this also reminds us that doubling is not necessarily a huge number if you're starting with a

relatively small one, but still significant. So I'm actually surprised that it's that low, honestly, just because VR is one of those things that has so much buzz behind it, even even considering the multiple delays we have seen, or at least the perceived delays we have seen in the release schedule for the hardware. Like some of the biggest names in VR hardware as of the recording of this podcast have yet to come out, but they're scheduled to

come out this year. Well, it seems like a big gamble now because there really are I think there's only one major VR headset available for the consumer right now, isn't there. Well, yeah, and even then it's one that considered actually VR. Yeah, we'll get into that later. So yeah, I mean, this is a thing where you don't already

have that pretty dependable delivery methods. So if you're developing a game for the Xbox or the PlayStation, you've already got a base number of people who have this console in their homes, and you can depend on some subset of them to download it or buy it in the store and pay for your product. With VR, we don't know, I mean, you don't have a whole lot of people with VR headsets in their houses. You have to you have to create the market first and then sell to

that market. Yeah, so it is a gamble and you so you can see why it would be slow to pick up. But these numbers are making it look like more and more people are making this gamble and saying where we think VR is the future. And that lines up with other numbers from this survey. For example, cent of developers said that their next game project will incorporate virtual reality, and that was up from six percent who

said this last year. This one is promising. Seventy five percent of respondents held the opinion that quote VR slash a R is a long term sustainable business to be in a R of course, being augmented reality. The difference with virtual reality and augmented reality is with augmented reality,

you are looking at the real world through whatever. Yeah, it might be through a transparent screen, or it might be through a display that has a camera mounted on the other side, so that you're getting a video feed of the world around you. And on top of that you have some sort of digital information that is overlaid on on the real world. Yeah, so virtual reality is all fake stuff. Augmented reality is real world plus fake stuff. Yeah, yeah,

more or less. Yes, um, I'll agree to that. And and now, of course part of the problem with that question is that by grouping both VR and A are together, it may be that some of them have very strong opinions on one and opposite opinions of the other. That's exactly right. Yeah, I made that note that, Um, we'll have to take that kind of prediction with a grain of salt because we don't know, you know, maybe they meant that, Oh, some people think a R is going

to be really big. Yeah. But and another one along these lines is the question to game developers, how soon will VR slash a R devices surpass the consumer adoption rate of game consoles in which is about so, how soon are they going to be bigger than game consoles are? Now?

When when are we going to see a VR headset get greater sales than a PS four or an Xbox one or whatever the equivalent is, which which they're saying is a is a base level of the population of about Yeah, so a hilarious group said oh, it'll happen by that was one percent of respondence. That is incredibly aggressive. That's a that's a small but mighty group. You have to admire their optimism. Yeah, forty four percent said this would happen by six and fifty four percent, so a

majority said it would happen. By said they thought it would never happen. That you're never going to have VR a R becoming more popular than game console. And if you add all those numbers up and you say, wait, that's more than hundred percent, you can remember that that's say it happens by essentially includes and the one percent who said by well, I think it will happen, but not like we have totally surpassed it and we've gone to it. The next thing. No, no, I mean, I'm

yet again invoking tardist base. Gotcha, gotcha. So the interesting thing to me is that it's by six still seems I guess pessimistic is the best word for it, because you think that's ten years out. So you're saying that less than half of them thought that even in ten years the technology would be not just mature enough, but priced at a level where it would sell greater than whatever the comparable console of the time would be. Yeah,

but that is talking about exceeding console performance. Sure, And also you're to be fair asking a potentially biased group of humans are employees of the game industry, and these are the people who know what they're talking about, but it also their future kind of depends on the answer. There's also there's also a weird shift right now. I'm not weird. There is a shift right now where for a while we saw console gaming being really dominant in

the industry, and now it's another PC centric population. I would say, like, I mean, I still know lots of dedicated console gamers. That's the way they game and that's all they do. But PC gaming has experienced a real renaissance over the last five years. I would say absolutely.

If you had asked me when the Xbox had been out for a few months that the first Xbox that I would have said that PC gaming would never make a comeback the way that it has well, And it's one of the you know, I think it's a cycle. We are a pendulum at least right where you see

it swing one way versus the other. Where. If you get to a point where the consoles are sophisticated enough where you're getting of satisfying gaming experience from them, uh, and you don't have to worry about upgrading them constantly so that you can keep up with the latest games, then it makes sense that there's a move to the consoles.

But then when you get to a point where PC performance has reached a level where you're not outstripping it as quickly, it's also not as difficult to upgrade as it used to be, and you're getting incredible delivery systems. The Steam delivery system has done wonders for the PC gaming community. Uh that you can see why this pendulum

swings each way. So that's probably also a factor. You know, it's not just that will ease overtake consoles, it's framing that in if you already have a bias against consoles because you developed for the PC and you think that's the future of gaming, that might also guide your response to a question like this on the survey. Absolutely okay, but so that was with forty of households that last

survey question. What about a slightly more more modest proposal. Yeah, so, like the idea that vr A R hardware will be in ten per cent of US households, when did they that would happen? Well, thirty eight percent said by it

would be there in ten percent of US households. Eighty six percent said it would be there by and nine percent said and never gonna happen, and we'll we'll have more to say about this, because it may very well be the VR becomes one of those things that is a is a sort of a niche technology for a slice of the gamer population, or really the computer population, computing population, because it's not just for the purpose of

using in gaming. But yeah, I agree with especially the six percent by saying at least ten percent of households in in the US will own some form of VR headset. I think that's pretty realistic. But you've actually you've used an Oculus rift, haven't you. I have, I've almost almost recovered from it. Yeah, to be fair, it was an older one. Yes, the Oculus dev Kid. Yes, the dev kid I used was version one. It wasn't even version two.

Version two was the one that had uh the reference dots on the outside and used an external camera to help get better external tracking of the device. Um, the one I used did not have that, so it's really just the head trackers that were relying upon the accelerometers in the heads of itself. It was still a little bit Yeah, I may have mentioned. I don't know if I had used it when we did our first episode,

but when I did try it out. The demo I used was just walking around, virtually walking around a villa, like an Italian villa. There's a lovely little seaside villa that I'm I'm walking around. I got so motion sick. And then my friend who owns the Oculus he works for Google, said, all right, you're ready to try the

spaceship game. Heck, no, I do not want to cover your keyboard and vomit is what I said to him, And he thought, thanks me for the thoughtful reply, And then we just played the Spacecraft game without using the VR version. Yeah, well, I think we should take a look at the lay of the land as things are today with the big players in in virtual reality, like

what's out there right now, what's and what's on the horizon? Yeah, because when we did this, it really was basically just the Oculus rift on the horizon, and there were kind of like some independent developers working on a few things, and there were some rumors that a few people be getting into some things, like there was there was the mention of a Sony Morpheus, but no one really had any information about that. That, by the way, has totally changed names at this point. Yeah, now it's the Neo,

it's the blue pill. Uh and and there were a couple of others as well. But yeah, the some of the big names that people are really anticipating this year and even really been talked about back at least not in wide circles. Sure, sure, so okay. So, so the only product that we can really reliably talk about because it has already come to commercial market is Samsung's Gear VR. And unlike the other products that we will talk about, this isn't something that you connect to anything as powerful

as a game console or a desktop computer. It runs off of a Samsung Galaxy smartphone, off of one of four models. Specifically, you just you just snap your phone into this headset and it goes, well, it doesn't. It's well, it's not quite that simple, but yeah, it's a it's it's a headset you snap your phone in, and there are Android platform apps that you can install to work with a base Oculus app that will allow you to

play games, explore virtual environments, you know that sort of thing. Yes, Samsung developed the headset in collaboration with the folks at Oculus, the makers of the Rift. So the headset itself contains a proximity sensor that detects when it's being worn, which most phones actually have, Like they know if you're holding

your phone up to your head. So if you ever have noticed that the light on your smartphone has dimmed just as you're putting it up to your cheek, that's the proximity sensor saying all right, there, Jonathan's putting his phone up to his big fat head. I don't have to have the screen on anymore. It makes it really hard to dial numbers with your cheekbones. I don't have well defined cheekbones, so I just find that offensive. I'm sure Benndet Cumberback is mad every day every day. It

also has a few more sensors. Okay, so what else does it go? Yeah, it's got an accelerometer in there, a girometer, and a geomagnetic field sensor. Yeah yeah, that that one can help determine the device's position relative to magnetic north, which apparently is a thing that a lot of mobile devices do and I just haven't heard of it before. Essentially essentially a digital compass. Yeah yeah, I

just think that's great anyway. So yeah, in order to interact with with whatever virtual VI you're in, you can move your head and then either a swiper clicker both using the four directional touch pad that's on the right side of the headset. Yeah. I saw a video review of this with a writer from The Verge where she

was trying this out in public. Like she was like, well, I do most of my mobile gaming on you know, on the subway or public transportation or something, so I want to see how well it works on those things. Apparently there is a problem if you're playing a game or something that tracks your your head motion when you're going around curves. So like if you if your car turns, or if you go around a curve in the subway,

it will interpret that as you turning your head. I'll just imagine trying to play a VR game aboard a moving platform would make me feel motion sickness way faster. Well, you wouldn't. You wouldn't be getting the external stimuli of It's not like reading a book in a car because

your your field of natural vision is totally blocked. Yeah, but what when you're looking at a virtual world and let's say you're standing still while you're playing the game, but you're moving in relation to you know, you're in a train. That's moving your inner ear is still doing a thing. Your your brain is probably just saying, like, guys, something is wrong. I'm just going to send a message down to Mr Tummy to evacuate and then everything's gonna

be cool. Yeah, right, And and this is the kind of problem that wouldn't happen probably with most of the other devices we're going to talk about, because those have full blown positional tracking um, which reduces some of that issue. Yeah, this one does not. Also, it's it's interesting to me that the interface is largely a kind of a touch

directional pad that's on the device itself. So in other words, you know, it's not like it's an external control, although I would imagine you get cyclops reaching up to our jority kind of Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Those were exactly the two example is that come to mind when I think of this, the idea of lifting the hand up to the temple and adjusting something. But also I would imagine in the future you could probably

create some functionality with Bluetooth enabled control. So they already have. Actually there's uh, the the only one that I've read about being available at the moment is that there's a controller that Microsoft uses for for other Windows and Android based systems. It's Bluetooth. It's you know, like a like a console gaming controller. So it's not it's not anything too fancy, but yeah, you can. They caused like seventy bucks retail and and they're they're compatible with some of

the games. It's interesting because this this particular approach, this particular device, once you set aside the price of the phone, like if you already own the phone, then you're not talking about the cost of it. But it's funny because then the controller costs almost as much as what this device does. Yeah. Yeah, the price tag on the system right now is here in the United States, it's it's a little bit, well, it's it's about equivalent in the

other places. In about that one. And I was trying to think of if it was available throughout the European Union or not. It's that that was the pause. I know what the UK is called. Um but yeah, yeah, so, uh so that's a bonus because certainly a lot of the other systems that are out there are way more expensive. Let's talk about one of them this well one more one more thing are actually two more quick things, um that reviewers have been talking about they really appreciate that

it's mobile, that it's a truly mobile device. You're not tethered to anything, so you have a much better freedom of motion, which you can use at your own peril, because, of course, if you're exploring a virtual world, you have to remember that things like tables are still present in your own world. Subway tracks, subway tracks, Yeah, you can

still run into all of these cooligans aboard the train. Yeah. Um. A lot of them were also saying that it's the kind of system that's best used with independent headphones because it, you know, just the sound out of your smartphone, as lovely as it maybe, and these are modern times, uh, it is, Yeah, not not as immersive. You're not very directional. Like you, you couldn't tell where the sound is coming from necessarily. I mean, you know what's coming from the phone.

I'm just saying, you don't know what direction relative to where you were looking, it's coming from. And then, of course, the other obvious thing is that the device and the screen resolution are only ever going to be as powerful as the smartphone that you possess, right, And also the smartphone is essentially dividing the display into two Right, you're getting one image for the left eye, one image for the right eye, and so that also, you know, is limited.

Your resolution is limited by the size of the division, which also is a factor when we talk about Google Cardboard, which we'll get to a little bit later in this episode. But yeah, some of the some of the big, powerful, impressive ones. Yeah, so the big one, the big guy I think that most people are familiar with, although I would argue is not necessarily. The one that's gonna win over the most converts is the Oculus Rift. This was a project that's been around for years. We talked about it,

I'm sure. In so, it's a head mold display has head tracking technology that again you know the basic premises, that tracks the motion of your head so that it can reflect your change in perspective within the game you're playing. So that way, you know, if you're looking straight ahead and you have one view, you turn your physical head to the left, your perspective changes as if your virtual character has turned his or her head to the left, and um same you know, basic idea of any VR headset.

It also connects to a computer, unlike the Samsung Gear that we just mentioned, so in this case you you know, you can't just have the Oculus by itself. You have to have it paired with a computer and uh and not um so weak computer either. It needs to be a fairly beefy machine to be able to run the

Oculus rift at at a good clip. Um. Also, this is a company that was purchased by Facebook, and when that happened a lot of people who had been supporting Oculus cried out in anguish, very much like all the people on Alderan, just as the death Star targeted it. Obi Wan felt the pain of all the Oculus backers. When Facebook made this, there was a huge disturbance in before ye who is in this case? Would this be

Jaron Lanier? I'm just gonna say possibly, because I mean that's the guy who popularized the term virtual reality or possibly coined it even he isn't sure, but at any rate, the Oculus headset has some other bells and whistles that give it some cool features beyond just the regular head tracking. First of all, it has positional audio, so you get

these headpunds that come with it. Um and sound will appear to come from specific directions, so if you hear something coming from your left and you look to your left, you you should be able to see whatever virtual thing is making that noise. Uh. Elso's positional tracking. External positional tracking. This is what I was talking about before with the second Developer Kit, where it had the reference points UH.

In this case, you have a camera pointed back that can tell the orientation of the headset, not just when it's moving. So one of the things that these head tracking systems are really good at is determining when you're looking left, right, up, or down. They're not necessarily as good if you were to tilt your head to the left or right so that you were getting sort of a diagonal view, but with external tracking you can do that.

You could even do things a little more extreme. So for example, let's say you walk up to a virtual table within a game and you decide you want to look underneath at the underside of that table. So you squat down in real life and you tilt your head

up as if you're looking underneath this table. With something like this, you could actually get the result in the game, assuming that people had programmed programmer program and it maybe that you see a secret message under that table, like dude, you've got too much spare time in your hands or something.

Um but the idea being that you it gives you a lot more flexibility in in the way that you interact with the virtual world, which at least in theory, creates your sense of immersion when you are in there. Also later on in this year, the year recording this is, if you are in fact listening to this in some other year, Hello from the past. Oculus will release some more controls, physical controls to go along with the headset

there called Oculus Touch. I believe uh these will help create an even deeper sense of immersion so that you can interact with the virtual worlds in a way that's a little more natural than holding a video game controller. Yeah. Now, I think I've already seen that some of some of these things have been demoed, like it's a thing you put around your wrists or something that tracks the motions

of your hands. There are some third party ones that have been shown off, and some and some different concepts that have been shown off that won't necessarily make their way into a consumer products. Some of them might, some of them might not, but the there have certainly been several different interfaces that have been experimented with and demoed to kind of give an idea of what it might

be like to interact with this technology. And the whole goal of this is to try and remove some of those barriers that the gamers would feel, or just customers would feel when using this technology, so that they feel like they really are a part of this virtual world. You know, the more stuff that we have to do to accommodate the virtual world, the less likely will feel

like we're actually there. So if you have to hold a video game controller while you're walking around a video game world, it may be that you always feel like you're playing a game. Whereas if you're able to create an interface that is largely invisible, like you're not actually holding a device in your hands, whether it's just your control or you've got some sort of glove device on or whatever it may be, then you're more likely to

feel like you are actually in that virtual environment. Right, You're not just playing a video game and you happen to be wearing the screen instead of looking at it. And this was this, this whole project started off as a crowdfunding campaign. It wasn't originally just you know, a company coming out with a product. This was this is a true start up. Yeah, well, it's easy to forget now.

The Oculus was a Kickstarter baby, Yeah, good old Palmer coming up with this idea and saying, hey, originally this was just gonna be about provide kits to people VR kits for them to put together themselves. But it got so much early attention, and it really it hits so much success that it then went on to become beyond just a kit, to let's create a finished product, to the point where you get folks who were coming over from Valve and saying, maybe this is something I want

to work on instead to Facebook acquiring the company. So it was on the business side, something that was rapidly successful, even though we had not yet seen to date, as we record this, we have not yet seen a consumer product. Um probably one of the most anticipated pieces of hardware in sixteen from a gamer perspective, I what else is competing with it? Other VR headsets may in a moment, I think I've read that the Oculus is still the

most popular platform with VR game developers. It wouldn't surprise me simply because it's the dev kit has been out for so long that a lot of people have had the opportunity to think about how they would design an experience that would be fun and immersive when wearing an Oculus Rift. Uh, they got a pretty good head start. The downside of that is that gamers have been waiting for it for a few years. Again, I've had all

all of that media attention drama up. Yeah, and the question is by the time it comes out will one will gamers still care and to will it live up to the hype? Part of the problem, maybe not problem. One challenge that they face is the fact that making this technology isn't cheap and it doesn't look like it's going to be sold as a loss leader type of peripheral, at least not initially. Keep in mind that any young technology when it comes out as a consumer product for

the first time, tends to be mega expensive. I remember when CD players came out and they were like hundreds of dollars for a CD player. Well, you're you're really paying for the development at that point, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So in this case, uh, we've we now know how much the Oculus Rift costs because pre orders opened up in January and it costs five hundred dollars, which is more than any of the current video game consolets. So a lot of people kind of not more than the

computer it would take to run the Oculus Room. This is true. Yeah, if you wanted to, if you wanted to figure out how much the computer would cost, well, tech Radar uh kind of did uh you know, back of the napkins sort of of calculation, and they estimate which side of the napkin is the front, the part that you put your mouth on when you ring, when you and then you turn the napkin face down. You don't want to look at the stuff that had been

clear on the ranch, right, Uh? Never right on the ranch, man, That's that's leisure time when you're on the ranch. They estimate it would cost about one thousand, thirty dollars. That's in addition to the six hundred dollar Oculus Rift headsets. So you're talking about a six dollar investment assuming you don't already have a computer capable of running at the

specs that are recommended for the Oculus Rift. Now, I I wonder, oh man, this is probably going to create a whole genre of hilarious YouTube videos of people trying to run Oculus Rift on the computers that are extremely

underpowered to do so. It makes me think of the videos we saw when Tesla released the driver assist autonomous mode, where people like one of the things that says, hey, this isn't meant for you to take your hands off the wheel and just lean back and act like the car can take you there, which is exactly what everyone did, and they shot videos of it, and then you know when when accidents happened, they were like, well, the technology is not ready, idiot. It says, right there, do not

do the thing the thing you just did. Why is it that when we tell people not to do something, the first thing they go out and do is that thing. And not only do they do that thing, they video themselves doing that thing. I mean, I wonder if it will have fail safes built in to detect like, hey, the computer you're trying to use to run this thing on is gonna make you sick and maybe you shouldn't

do it. I think it'd just be funny if it just starts running like you know, an eight bit version of of of Donkey Kong, or or a Galagha or something like that immersive Gala. I'm on board. So also that sixteen hundred dollars I mentioned doesn't include the touch controllers that will come out later in However, if you're wondering is this going to be a barrier? Is this going to truly kill the oculus before I can ever

have any success? It depends upon whom you ask. Because c nets Jeffrey Morrison wrote that the demonstrations he had experienced had convinced him C hundred dollars was worth it was. It's totally worth that price. It is it is an experience that is so compelling. Six hundred dollars is not

a problem. Now. Granted, keep me mind, six hundred dollars is not a problem for people who have six hundred dollars to spend on a computer peripheral, right, I assumed, yes, yeah, And other people have said, including they're a writer for The Verge has said that this suggests that VR may remain a luxury technology, something that only a niche is able to afford and enjoy, and therefore it will never really blossom because the market won't be big enough to

support the amount of development you would want for a really robust world, like a library, a real library of games and experiences. Well, I imagine that'd be the case early on. But I mean again, I don't see why you couldn't think that at some point VR hardware will

will be a loss leader technology. Just what consoles are You know, you've got people developing games for them, and they're going to make money back on those games, as long as you have a way of making money back on those games, right like if you if you have it where there's some sort of licensing fee in order to be able to use that technology, because if it's not your company that's developing the games, you have to find some other way of of monetizing that, right Otherwise,

otherwise you made the hardware, but other people are making the software that runs on it. Um another. And if that's the case, if all you're doing is making the hardware and you're not making the software, it can't be a loss leader. It's just a loss because you're you don't have anything else to sell. So it's definitely one

of those things that still a question mark. Uh. My hope is that it would be like other consumer technologies that we mentioned before, where the initial price is relatively high, but then we see it decrease over time and more people can adopt it, and so you have, you have like that long tail, right, you've got the early adopters who have the cash to spend on this sort of stuff. I mean, just think how cheap virtual boys are now. Yeah,

let's not talk about that at any rate. At any rate, So that that's the big daddy is the Oculus Rift. But there are other players. There's another big daddy, I think, so, well, there's a couple I would argue, but Sony's PlayStation VR is a is a definite big one, and it has a huge advantage over the Oculus Rift in that you already have an established base of gamers who would be capable of using this technology because it's compatible with the

PS four. So this is a peripheral for the PlayStation four, And unlike the Oculus Rift, where even if you're a PC gamer you may not have a machine capable of supporting the Oculus you know your audience in this case, yeah, you've already got an established base, and granted only a percentage of that base is likely to go into the VR world, but you still know they're they're right kind of games they buy, You know how much money they're

willing to spend. You don't have to convince them to buy a new machine because they already have a machine that works with and uh, there are some downsides to this, obviously. PC is one of those things where over time you can upgrade it or you can buy a new one, and it's going to be more powerful and the games can therefore take advantage of that increase in power, whereas with the console you have a cap, a hard cap

of how much power it can put out. Well a few exceptions where occasionally you'll get a console where there'll be some way of upgrading it, but that doesn't happen frequently. Yeah. Well, yeah, these days you've got like memory chips and stuff that you can add in. Yeah, and sometimes sometimes there's a firmware upgrade or something. But sure, sure, but but for the most part, your processors are going to remain your processes from the life of the product, which is what

is it these days, five to seven years. They the goal usually Sony aims for is ten years. That's what they wanted for the p S three, So the PS four and Xbox one I think are both they were they were trying to future prove them as much as possible so that more money could be made along the game's side, and you don't have to go and launch a new console and completely negate all the stuff you've already made. Also, it would be compatible with Sony's move controllers.

Those are those little wands that have the balls on the end with a led inside that can change different colors, So you could use a couple of those along with the headset to interact with the virtual world. They could be like, you know, there could be guns. They could be a sword, they could be a light saver. Uh, I really want to really want to cool Star Wars virtual reality, like because they'd be huge crab claws that could be they could be you know, a paintbrush. That

could be a mop. It could be pretty much anything. Excuse me, I need to go start a savings account. Hatchet guys. Yeah, uh yeah, it could be. It could be any number of things. It could be you know, uh, spaghetti. It could just be a lot of spaghetti. That's what your hands are. I would play that. I would play that My Hands are Spaghetti game every day I have. I have often played it, usually whenever I don't want

to deal with something. This is a great idea. It's a franchise of games where we have to do things like you have to defuse a bomb, but your hands are spaghetti. You laugh. But there is the game Octo Dad, which is essentially that, right, Octodad is not that different from the concept of my hands are spaghetti. You also have to prevent the chief from finding out that you're spaghetti.

If if any of you make a game in which the character's hands are spaghetti, I want credit at least I want to at least based on an idea by Jonathan Strickland. Uh So it can also work along with the PlayStation camera, which not everyone has, but you know, it was one of those add ons that you could get with the PS four, but the camera could allow for some of that positional tracking that we talked about with the Oculus as well, the same sort of thing. Um. And one of my favorite demos that I got to

see was something called Job Simulator. So you're laughing at at spaghetti hands Johnson. Latter was the funniest video I've watched today, and I've watched a lot of them. So Job Simulator starts off where you're in like a cubicle that is absolutely lousy with stuff like coffee mug and uh, you know, books and binders and staplers, and there's like a copy right there in a terminal. You're supposed to

be playing an office drone in twenty uh. The person who wrote up the little description said, I assume you're you're doing jobs that are too menial even for a robot. And as it starts, like all the all the person does is start picking up everything in the little cubicle

and just throwing it across the office. Like there's a point where they pick up the coffee mug, pour creamer into the coffee, tilt the coffee mug back as if they're drinking, and you hear like a glug glug glug noise as soon as it's empty, throws it across the screen, then like grabs two staples and starts firing staples like like they're like John Wu style all over the place. It was phenomenal. I was immediately like, well, this is

like goat simulator. It's one of those games where you you can't really see yourself playing it for a really long time, but you can see yourself laughing your butt off for a good like ten fifteen minutes with your friends while watching someone just go eight inside an office. I'm not sure. I'm not sure that I have a

top limit on how much I like to throw things. Also, I guess it helps when you think, like, if you've had a really bad day at work, you can exactly out in the virtual world and just totally trash your workstation. Um oh yeah, yeah, if you could build your own workstation like I, I do not know exactly what levels you can do. Also, in the demo, there's one point where they put a red swing line stapler in the copier and start making copies of it while also destroying

and throwing things everywhere else in the office. I'll show you the video after this is done, because it is hilarious. Excellent. Okay, that's not it. There there other there's other hardware on the way, right. Yeah, let's let's wrap this up with a couple more quick descriptions. So this, this is one that I think is a real contender. The HTC Vibe, the Home Man Vibe. I was calling it viv A yeah, I understand, and a lot of people are like, is

it viv Is it vibe? Well, when they were first talking about they had read dash Vibe, which tells me that it's going to be five. But I've heard of people say Viv as well. I've never heard Viva until today, but congratulations. Oh no, I guess it would be v I don't know, like like vive Le France. Yeah, I understand yet that well, it makes sense, but it is the Vibe as far as I am aware. So HTC Vibe is coming out with another dev kit version before

it comes out with a consumer product version. The dev kit version is going to be the Vibe pre This is the headset that is backed by Valve, which is the company that that does the Steam platform for game district you should game playing computer PC game PC gamers and a really well known name in PC gaming. Uh. And so the consumer version of it is scheduled for

release in April. We still don't have a price as of the recording of this podcast, but we can assume that it's going to be probably not dissimilar to Oculus Rifts, somewhere in that range. Like it would shock me if it's less than five dollars, It would not surprise me if it's six hundred or thereabouts. But this one's got a got a different camera set up, right, It's got an outward facing camera. Yeah, the So a previous def kit version used external cameras that were attached to your

computer to map the room you're in. The idea being that you would be able to use the physical dimensions of your room to wander around inside, and the the system would protect you from walking face first into a wall by alerting you that you were getting close to the wall. It would show like a little grid, kind of like the hollow deck in Star Trek Shimmer. Similar to that, it would show you that to let you know you're getting close to an obstacle, so you should

stop moving forward or you're going to injure yourself. The most recent version, instead of using those external cameras, uses a forward facing camera on the or i guess rear facing camera really rear facing camera on the device, where it's it's facing outward into the world, and it can detect when you're getting close to an obstacle. So if you're walking close to a wall in a real physical space, you get the virtual alert so that you don't slam your face into it. Now, this gives you a lot

more flexibility. You can move around in an actual physical space and have those motions translated into in game actions or in world actions if it's not a game. Um, and so it's not just holding a controller and pressing forward to make your character walk, you could actually do some walking. Now, I think most of us probably don't have an enormous room we can dedicate to this kind

of thing. So it creates some channel inges to create a game where you know you're doing this sort of action where it's not just gimmicky, where you're not just like dodging a dodgeball or something. Yeah, I mean you've got to kick someone that you live with out of your house. You've got to empty their room out right. In my case, like I have an office where that's where my PC is, and if I put my if I made it my gaming PC, which is essentially what it is at this point, I'm not using it for

much else. Um, there's a desk in there, there's a couch in that room. There's not a whole lot of floor space for me to move around in. So I'd be very limited in what I could do. So the kind of games I could play would have to be pretty limited to I can't imagine playing a big, open world sandbox game, right. I couldn't play like a modern day legend of Zelda game and and run across high Rule because I could only go three steps and then

I have to stop. Uh. I have seen some interesting research in VR outside of this, where there have been worlds designed where it gives you very subtle hints to turn earn so that you change your pathway you're not and it feels like you're walking in a straight line, but in reality you're actually walking in a circle. But you have to make that a pretty big room so that you can make it a big circle because it

has to be subtle. Sounds like yet another ticket to nauseation Land, right, you're just turning in circles and your nausea nausea. Yes, uh, I think that's a good word.

Annaucigation nation. That sounds like a terrible wrestling stable. But at any rate, um yeah, So it's it's a cool idea though, the idea of actually incorporating your physical surroundings so that you can interact with them in a virtual way, including things like detecting that there's a chair, a physical chair in front of you in the real world and presenting a virtual chair in the virtual world and you could actually reach out and touch this chair and sit

down in it because it's really there in your room, but it's also there in the virtual reppers station of whatever world you are in. That's that's something that this system is capable of doing, and I think it's one of It's also one of those that well, sorry, I'm just imagining. You're running around in sky room and every now and then there's an office chair or a treadmill or something that should just be a throne. It's just a throne that's in the middle of nowhere for no reason,

but it's shaped exactly like an office chair. It would be pretty funny. Yeah, what would be really funny is if it's a throne, but you sit in it's actually an office chair on casters and you roll it at the throne itself just slides across the landscape. That'd be hilarious. I would I would watch the YouTube videos that would result from that. But would you play it? Probably? I gotta be honest. It look skyrom so um but so so so this isn't this is similar to augmented reality, Yeah,

a little bit. It's kind of a it's kind of a bridge between augmented reality and virtual reality because the world that you are experiencing isn't entirely virtual. It's dependent upon the physical space you are in. But it's not really augmented either, because you could have a completely virtual representation of your environment. It's just incorporating physical elements so that you don't break your legs playing. Yeah, the term would be it would be the inverse of augmented reality.

It would be like realized virtuality. What would it be? Isn't that a song? But augmented virtuality? Augmented virtuality? Yeah, yeah, there you go, There we go. We've invented a whole new genre. And and you know, you could also pair this with something else, like we've we've seen some interesting peripherals that are designed to allow you to run are in different directions without actually moving anywhere. So one of the ones I talked about it looks kind of like

you're running in a giant walk. It's it's a hemisphere may metal, and you wear these very low friction booties. You can run in place, and you're on the pestle that actually has a bar around it. So when you inevitably if you can only eat it so hard, exactly, you can't eat it totally like you're not gonna go. You're not gonna go rear end over tea kettle, right, You'll just slam your face into you, guys. I can't walk on regular fricative surfaces. I haven't seen this in person.

I heard that it was at c E S, but I didn't get a chance to go to the VR on a R section, which really I'm sad about because I wanted to have I wanted to get a chance to see because I've seen the pictures of it for years, but I've never had the chance to actually experience it and see what it was like. There are also other peripherroles that are similar to allow you greater amount of movement within a physical space to translate that into virtual actions.

But probably the biggest advantage of the viv Or Vibe now i'm doing it, is that it's backed by Valve, and because the Steam platform is so popular, has a big advantage. Again, You've got a huge known audience, and that might make it more a active to A consumers

and B developers. Yeah, so I think I think that one's got and and also I've just seen a lot of really positive reviews saying that the experience using HTC Vibe feels more immersive than a lot of the competitors, although I've seen some really positive stuff about the Sony VR headset too, So all of these have had pretty enthusiastic reviews about them, even the ones where they like here are a couple of things we think need to

be fixed. But um, but the vibe in particular, I think gets a lot of really you know, positive press. All right, is that pretty much what's out there right now? Or what else? What else do we have? You get some VR light stuff, Yeah, kind of like half steps towards VR, Like like if you guys have heard of Google Cardboard, which is a VR slash, a R platform from Google that turns your phone into a headset sort of the same sort sort of the same way that

the Gear VR does, but a little bit more low fi. Yeah, it's uh. It's largely used as an educational tool these days, actually to the point where people have talked about using it for virtual field trips. So but I mean, which makes sense, Like if you're talking about a field trip to a place that is too remote for a class to go to, for example, if or if your parents wouldn't sign the permission slip, well, well I just think,

like I grew up in rural Georgia. If they gave me the opportunity to take a field trip to Washington, d C. Virtually, that would certainly be more realistic in the sense of what my school was capable of doing than actually busting a whole bunch of potential lawsuits off to our nation's capital. And um and so this, you know, I can totally see it from that perspective. So yeah,

it uses your smartphone. The smartphone tends to have, you know, a rear facing camera which can take in the scene of the external world for the augmented reality purposes um VR stuff is pretty simple. The interface tends to be based on magnetic interaction, where again it's it's manipulating that digital compass where you bring a magnet near the phone and because the compass will detect the presence of the magnet,

that could be a way of putting input into the device. Now, they are also capacity of touch surfaces that will interact with the screen um and there's usually on the very top of the one side of the the cardboard, so you you know, it can run your finger across that and use that for the input. But again it's it's not like an external control that you would use with some of these other devices. It does have the wireless advantage the gear does. You can walk around and trip

over lots of things while wearing it. And if you wanted to make your own, if you have an Android phone, actually it's not even just Android now, Google Cardboard is available on other platforms. But if you have a phone that's compatible, like of a compatible size, you can get the schematics from Google on how to build one yourself, or you could order one. There are a lot of companies that make kits. Yeah, I mean for for like

twenty or thirty bucks. It's a pretty cheap. It's it's by far the cheapest experience, and a lot of them are actually made out of cardboard. They really are made of cardboard, and some of them are really high quality cardboard. But yeah, with the Burger King crown and some tape. Some of them are made of more robust materials. Like there's some that are clearly made out of plastic or other stuff. There's one that looked like a an old stereoscope.

It was yeah, well yeah, like the like the one where you would put a stereoscopic photograph on a little platform which would be a certain distance away from your eyes, and then you have a viewfinder that would focus the lenses on that image so that you get that three D effect. So it's like a steampunk version of Google Cardboard essentially. That's what it comes down to. It looks like it would fit right in with a steampunk world. Um so yeah, it's very similar again to the gear.

Uh and there are a few there are a ton of other ones too, but yeah, yeah, well and and one one thing, one thing before we move away from the from the cardboard specific Some critics say that we really shouldn't call it VR, particularly because in most of the apps that are currently available for it anyway, you're you're not controlling the movement of the camera through the environment. You're you can control your gaze within the environment. But

it's more like a movie that's choosing where to take you. Right, So, so it's like being on rails you can look anywhere, or on a roller coaster. Think of it that. Yeah, like you're you're on a roller coaster, which is fun, but you have to go the way the roller coaster goes or things have gone terribly wrong. Uh, And you can look any direction you want as you ride the roller coaster, but you're still going in the direction of the coaster, same sort of thing, um, which limits the

feeling of immersion and also interactivity. Obviously. Yeah, there are also other ones. There's a lot of third party ones, a lot of you know, smaller companies that are trying to get into the space or trying to take advantage of the trend. But for the most part, I would argue that they're aiming for the market of parents who don't really know what it is their kids want for Christmas,

so they go out and buy that thing. Yeah, you know what I'm talking about, the police station for Yeah, yeah, it's I'm not saying all of them are in that category, but a few of them could be. Okay. So that's basically what the virtual reality landscape is looking like right now. What are we What do you guys think about the future? I mean, how how do you guys think this is

going to shake out? You know, I hate to invoke the killer app mindset, but I really do think it's the kind of situation where it's going to depend on games or experiences or content or whatever you want to call it, because no matter how good the hardware is. I think it's just not going to take off until there are some several pieces of content on this medium that people won't stop talking about. I can tell you right now what I think a killer app would be,

and I'm I'm being totally serious. I'm not making a joke here. I think if someone can make a truly immersive, terrifying survival horror game in a virtual reality style where you are put in the position of somebody who's in like a super creepy house, and it's you have to walk around that creepy house by yourself, and you've got that positional audio coming into your headphones. Your perspective is limited to whichever way you're looking. That's gonna sell systems.

I would really enjoy that. But I don't know. I don't I don't even have a good sense, I guess of how popular horror games are in general. I just outsiders,

aren't they. I think I think they're relatively I mean, yeah, you think of things like that, they're Some people have sold some copies of Resident Evil, I mean, and there's been there's been a real renaissance recently two with things like five Nights at Freddie's that's a PC game that has gotten insanely popular, and it's a very simple premise, but it's it's a survival horror style or Emily wants to play. That's another new one that's fantastic. I don't

even heard of these. I'll talk to you about them after the show. They're great. Yeah, okay, well I would have I'm my heart rate increased just thinking about like that. I'm not sure if that would be for me and my old delicate age. I have a pretty good idea of I think what the killer app is going to be, and it's something I read about earlier today, apparently coming to the Oculus rifted and PlayStation VR, Penn and Teller

present Desert Bus to this time. It's in VR, So give a quick give a quick rundown of what Desert buses for the people who have not heard about Jonathan, I haven't played it. I think you have, so you

should say what the original Desert Bus is. So, Desert Bus was a game that Teller had proposed in a Actually it was Penn who proposed it in a one of their books a few years ago, several years ago now, and the idea they had they actually came out with a I think it was for Sega c D. They came out with an idea that never actually made it to market, but later on was released in bits and pieces.

One of the games they came up with based upon their experiences touring as a as an act, and they said, well, what if we made the world's worst video game where you are a tour bus driver and you're driving a bus from I think it's Tucson, Arizona, to Las Vegas, Nevada, and you're going along like a desolate highway. There's no traffic. You're in a bus that's top speed is fifty five miles per hour, might be, but at any rate, any rate,

it's it's somewhere in that range. The bus always pulls a bit to the right, so you have to constantly correct for that, and it time passes in real time, and it really does take you eight hours to drive from Tucson to Las Vegas. And when you can, you can, you can pull off to the side of the road, but then you you know, you're just sitting there, You're not doing anything. It's just times just passing um. But you you keep on going and when you get to

Las Vegas. You get one point and then you turn around and you have to head back to Tucson and and uh so this has actually been used by a couple of Well by One charity group in particular, where every year they do a marathon session to try and get more points than they did the previous year. And it's also every point is eight hours of gameplay. Yeah, and I can't remember nothing happening. I can't remember what

that high. Yeah, but they do. They do rotate out people playing, so it's not one person being tortured for like days on end, but the eventually the system would overheat. They rate Yeah, because a boid the demands on that are so high. But yeah, they raise a lot of money for charity through through that kind of marathon system. But well, anyway, Pendalette says, Desert Bus two is coming, So this would mean that you would coming in full

virtual reality? Would you would have the I talked to Joe earlier said this would really be impressive to me if you could add in audible but incoherent mumbling, so like like the people you are driving or having a conversation, Yeah, but you can't make out what they're saying. You can just hear that they're having a conversation, and occasionally someone's getting excited about something, but you still can't make out

what the conversations about. And it'd be even better that if you turn around and look behind you, you just see a curtain. You can't see into the back of the bus about who is talking. All you're looking at is just a blank curtain. And then you have to just turn back and look at the desolate highway ahead of you as you continue your seemingly endless journey. That I think would truly bring that experience to life. So

for you, this is the ultimate future of VR. This is what we are going to see in the next few years. I think we're gonna see a lot of different attempts at using VR. Whether or not they'll be successful remains to be seen. But I've seen a lot of products that are looking at using VR headsets not as a means of creating games, but other types of experiences, like a really immersive film. One of the products I saw at ce S was the three sixty fly camera,

which is capable of capturing three reads a video. So this solves a problem that some filmmakers have encountered where they thought, I want to use this VR headset to film a scene of some sort in three degrees, so that the audience can choose where to look at any given moment in the scene and see something different, and even have characters surrounding the audience member. You could even create such an experience where you are a passive participant

in this scene. Maybe you are a character within the scene, but you you don't have any lines or anything, but you you are representing someone who is actually there while all this other stuff is going around you. That could be a possibility. Um, and this is a camera that helps filmmakers who want to make such an experience do that. Obviously, filmmaking in that style would be really challenging. I mean you have to figure out how to light the scene and get the sound and do that without the film

crew being there, because that would just be weird. Like you're looking ahead and you're seeing this amazing scene and you turn around and there's the gaffer. You know, you could all this problem by having by by that old writer's trick of having everything take place on movie sets. You could do that. That would that would solve it.

Where you know, you are maybe sitting in the director's chair, and of course then you have an enormous camera blogging your view straight ahead, but everything really interesting is going

on behind you anyway. Now, the question remains, is this going to push VR into a must have piece of technology that gets wide acceptance or will it just remain kind of a gimmick, sort of the way three D has been for particularly for the television market, where you know, it's usually one of those things that's just an add on feature that hardly anyone ever uses. When they get their their television that's three D capable, they don't use it very much. That's a possible outcome of VR. I

honestly don't know the answer to that. I hope that it becomes a viable piece of technology, but you know, there's some pretty big hurdles to overcome in order to get there. Yeah, I think that the VR boom is going to come, and I do genuinely think it's going to come relatively soon. Non entertainment sectors, in uh, stuff

like sales and marketing and design. Development of that technology and the public's comfort with it through those kind of channels could then lead to a boom in the entertainment sector.

But I think that first it's going to be stuff that people who like making money can use to make more money, which I just honestly don't think gaming is going to be the first the first bit that that's that that's going to happen in UM for for example, UM like in in the United States, UH, we have we have a big box chain called Lows that does like hardware and appliances and home design stuff like that, you know, UM And in a few select stores around

around the country, they offer what they've called the Hollow Room, in which customers can lay out of virtual kitchen or bathroom using and in store iPad app and then explore their design using a developer level Oculus rift kit, and you can then save your design to lose customer website, you can export it to a YouTube three sixty video so that you can watch it at home on a

cardboard or something like that. And according to representatives from the company that the tool has increased sales in stores that have been using it. Interesting, now, this is something that I would imagine a are also coming in really handy because then you could use that sort of thing in your actual home environment and see what those overlays

look like. Oh exactly. Yeah, Yeah, I think that that kind of thing for for the for certain class of people is going to be right, because I mean because because who has it's the kind of person who has enough money to buy a like six hundred dollar headset that they then used to contemplate buying what I can

only imagine is a ludicrously comfortable share. I could just imagine this being used for comedic purposes in a in a television show or movie in which you have that stereotypical scenario where you've got the couple and one of them is demanding the other one move a piece of furniture to another part of the room in order to see if it looks better there, except in this case, they're both just wearing headsets like, no, I think I liked it better over in the other corner. Can you

put it back over there? Throws it yeah, like like like in like in the job simulator, Yeah yeah, or or at that rate, it would solve a lot of couple fighting problems in stores for people going like I really don't think this color couch is going to work. Yeah, if they if they've got a three D rendering of their home, then they could see right, and if they had any sense of well, if they had sense of taste, Yeah, that's a separate issue. It would not work for me.

As far as I can tell, no one has been able to market a sense of taste yet. Um. One more thing I did want to want to bring up.

There was a really great piece on c net just today about how VR demos are being used this week at the National Retail Federation's yearly conference, which they called the Big Show, which, having hung out with wrestling people too often, reminds me of a whole different, separate issue, but is big so for for example, one luxury home retailer demoed an app for the gear VR that lets you move through a virtual catalog, which sounds so boring in one way, but in the other way is probably

a really clever marketing tool like letting people letting people use that kind of thing to spend more of their money. Microsoft showed off an app that's that's basically a virtual brochure for Virgin Atlantic's upper class flights, which which is a whole hilarious thing. There's like guided meditation. I don't know anyway, but but yeah, so it's the sort of thing that could be used at trade shows to help sales reps demonstrate their their products or their product experiences.

In this sort of case, I could I could see that, like, you know, again, anything that makes it easier for you to to have people get an idea of what something is about, especially something that's so like luxurious and high end, trying to convince the people who have the money to spend on such things. I could see that being a very valuable marketing tool. So that's an interesting of you. I know, whether or not that would ever trickle down

to a more broad base is an interesting thought as well. Uh. I think we will probably revisit this, maybe an early twenty seventeen, once all these headsets have come out and had had some time in the market place to see, you know, how things are shaping up, had a holiday season. Yeah, yeah, I mean it's a lot of these are coming out well ahead of the holiday shopping season, so it's a good question to see, like, well, are they going to

get some early adoption? Will it be very limited? I suspect it will be pretty limited at least early on, but h and will it live up to the hype? Well, people actually think, oh this was worth the way, Yeah, but this was really fun. Guys. Uh and you listeners out there, what do you think about virtual reality or is it something that you're ready for? Is it something you have absolutely no interest in. Is it something that

you've tried and you hope is finally ready. Are you old like me and you remember the really bad VR from the mid to late nineties. Let us know, and let's know if you have any suggestions for future topics as well. Email address you can reach us at is f W thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter. At Twitter we are FW thinking. Just search fter you thinking in Facebook will pop right up and leave us a message

and we'll talk to you again virtually. Willison. For more on this topic in the future of technology, I'll visit forward Thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's go Places,