Extended Realities (VR, AR, MR)

PSA: Regarding buying a VR headset right now. (Updated)

MikaDubbz

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I just honestly have no idea where you're getting that idea from or what makes it so "obvious" in your mind. Facebook is targeting mobile gamers/non-gamers. Valve is targeting PC gamers. PSVR is targeting Playstation gamers. Not a single major player in the VR market expects their target audience to go "VR-only," and most of them even recommend you limit VR time to 1-2 hours per session.
Bro, I'm not gonna waste my time with pointing out how large and blatant a push there was for VR in the last few years. You either acknowledge it or disregard it. You, notably are making your choice. I agree that it failed, so I can see how its easy to pretend that it didn't try to take center stage, but despite it's failure; I personally can't pretend that it didn't try to do exactly what it tried to do.
 

Xzi

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Bro, I'm not gonna waste my time with pointing out how large and blatant a push there was for VR in the last few years. You either acknowledge it or disregard it. You, notably are making your choice. I agree that it failed, so I can see how its easy to pretend that it didn't try to take center stage, but despite it's failure; I personally can't pretend that it didn't try to do exactly what it tried to do.
Uhh yeah, modern VR headsets only just started launching in 2017. Of course there was a push to sell them. There was no push, however, to go "VR only." With the first generation of headsets that wasn't even really an option, being that you needed a strong gaming computer to drive them. It was essentially assumed the people buying them already had a decent-sized library of (traditional) games.
 

MikaDubbz

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Uhh yeah, modern VR headsets only just started launching in 2017. Of course there was a push to sell them. There was no push, however, to go "VR only." With the first generation of headsets that wasn't even really an option, being that you needed a strong gaming computer to drive them. It was essentially assumed the people buying them already had a decent-sized PC gaming library.
As I said, I can't continue to pretend that it didn't try to do exactly what it tried to do. I want VR to succeed as it's own thing, but I I wont also pretend that it didn't set out to replace modern gaming, when it very clearly tried to do just hat. The sooner we can all appreciate the medium for what it actually is, is the sooner we can all start adapting it as a separate medium for it's own thing as opposed to some bizarre competing medium that it will never measure up against.
 

Xzi

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I wont also pretend that it didn't set out to replace modern gaming, when it very clearly tried to do just hat.
All in your head man. There were some rabid fans of the medium early on, but not a single VR manufacturer or developer pushed it as a means to replace all other types of gaming. Not even Facebook, despite their insane investment into it.
 
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MikaDubbz

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All in your head man. There were some rabid fans of the medium early on, but not a single VR manufacturer or developer pushed it as a means to replace all other types of gaming. Not even Facebook, despite their insane investment into it.
Say what you want I suppose. I wont take that right away from you. But I'm not gonna sit here and pretend that my knowledge of what VR was tyring to be when it launched, just straight up didn't happen lol. I tend to agree with you on these boards, so I find it interesting that you're so passionately against this (what I'd call very clear) reality. But that is where we stand regardless. I respect you, but I simply see you as straight up wrong on this matter.
 
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Xzi

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Say what you want I suppose. I wont take that right away from you. But I'm not gonna sit here and pretend that my knowledge of what VR was tyring to be when it launched, just straight up didn't happen lol. I tend to agree with you on these boards, so I find it interesting that you're so passionately against this (what I'd call very clear) reality. But that is where we stand regardless. I respect you, but I simply see you as straight up wrong on this matter.
All I'm saying is that if any manufacturer was actually trying to push VR as a replacement for traditional gaming, it would be objectively obvious to everyone. You wouldn't have to read in to the behind-the-scenes financial decisions of Facebook. We'd get a lot of commercials along these lines:

throw-out-rage.gif

(For both PCs and consoles)
 

tech3475

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From what I’ve seen, here’s what happens when a new tech takes of:
1) It gets over hyped
2) Companies rush stuff out
3) The market may have an initial surge
4) After a while things settle and it’s position is determined with winners and losers:
i) It more or less dies (e.g. 3DTV, Android consoles (more or less), etc.)
ii) It becomes niche (e.g. VR, 3D Printers, etc.)
iii) It becomes a new normal (e.g. Smart Assistants, Smart TVs, etc.)
 

FAST6191

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As far as presenting options (which I generally do for everything else) vs telling them because facebook are DRM pushing cunts... nah I will still stick with that.

I want VR to be good. I want it to be the de facto standard for gaming (basically all games are designed to be complete attention sinks so TV or VR screen matters little there*). I want it to be much like today where I worry about falling asleep in bead with my big headphones on and crushing them but with a screen (which in relative terms might as well be a cinema sized affair rather than my 27 inch thing across the room) on my face instead. However I don't see the landing being stuck for a while yet, and if it all vanishes up its own arse because it got stuck in a land of patents (most of which would have been laughed out of the patent office in the 1980s as being obvious) that will only set it further down the line. The potential for what it can do has been more than adequately projected for decades now even by mainstream stuff.

*screen as it is understood today could be just as much antiquated as me playing on a 4:3 CRT, or indeed the even narrower aspect ratios of years prior.

AR and simple puzzle things can still exist in this as well.

"What would it do for JRPGS?"
If you can't see the potential to massively improve UIs then... yeah. You can still have very nicely directed single angle scenes* but if turning your head/eyes to view stats or fiddle with things vs messing around with menus will not improve those and unlock potential for far more that would turn players off if you had only a joypad (see also why World of Warcraft and its insane UI works with a mouse and keyboard but nothing really mimics it on consoles).

*directing 360 degrees is hard and even if you can somehow manage that then humans still have eyeballs and minds designed to consider what they see, to say nothing of it also being less useful if required to physically act quickly if people are not similarly superhuman.


So yeah I think I will second the PSA, though it would read you probably want to wait 10 years, maybe give it a rental (not to mention they will probably have a nice setup and room for it). If by some miracle something good happens during that time (doubtful but someone might actually sit down and think how to design something) then you are not behind the curve.
Might make a sports car analogy but those tend to if not beat inflation then sell for more than you got it for.
However never mind the lack of games I am not even with a screen alternative I can just plug a HDMI cable into.

From what I’ve seen, here’s what happens when a new tech takes of:
1) It gets over hyped
2) Companies rush stuff out
3) The market may have an initial surge
4) After a while things settle and it’s position is determined with winners and losers:
i) It more or less dies (e.g. 3DTV, Android consoles (more or less), etc.)
ii) It becomes niche (e.g. VR, 3D Printers, etc.)
iii) It becomes a new normal (e.g. Smart Assistants, Smart TVs, etc.)
Are 3d printers niche? They are still doing loads, getting better all the time, making inroads into everything, taking over a lot of education, low volume manufacturing.
Now I don't necessarily expect one in every house too soon. One in every place I might have expected to find a per use photocopier in the 1990s, different matter entirely (though you also have the 3d printer companies and scale of web and ubiquity of parcel delivery meaning that might change a tiny bit, still enough for the common man to get it done though such that cheap, on a whim and readily available in short order is the standard).
Also have smart TVs become the standard other than people realising they can bolt on the failed android gaming boards that cost them $20 a board and sell a far lesser screen for $70 more rather than giving me better colours, resolutions, latency, inputs...

And plenty of people made millions in the 70s/80s arcade craze anyway, well before obscene wealth hoarding was acceptable by law/society in general.
?
When was it unacceptable? That tycoon is something of an old fashioned word says most of what goes there, vulture capitalism was all the rage in the 80s, plenty of stuff in between.
Certainly the tech push utterly eclipses the industrial push before it which eclipsed the move from subsistence farming into fertiliser/irrigation agrarian, which in turn eclipsed hunter-gatherers (all those previous relying on human capital and limiting output by wages, if I alone can make a game that a billion people buy then... all the farms and mines and factories in the world and history would not get that good a return).
 
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tech3475

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Are 3d printers niche? They are still doing loads, getting better all the time, making inroads into everything, taking over a lot of education, low volume manufacturing.
Now I don't necessarily expect one in every house too soon. One in every place I might have expected to find a per use photocopier in the 1990s, different matter entirely (though you also have the 3d printer companies and scale of web and ubiquity of parcel delivery meaning that might change a tiny bit, still enough for the common man to get it done though such that cheap, on a whim and readily available in short order is the standard).
Also have smart TVs become the standard other than people realising they can bolt on the failed android gaming boards that cost them $20 a board and sell a far lesser screen for $70 more rather than giving me better colours, resolutions, latency, inputs...

A few years back, I was seeing 3D Printers being promoted like they'd become a 'normal' house item similar to an Inkjet/Laser Printer. In that regard, at least for now, I consider them relatively niche in the general market.

Most TVs I see sold these days have some kind of smart functionality, usually it's just the lower end lacking it.
 

FAST6191

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A few years back, I was seeing 3D Printers being promoted like they'd become a 'normal' house item similar to an Inkjet/Laser Printer. In that regard, at least for now, I consider them relatively niche in the general market.

Most TVs I see sold these days have some kind of smart functionality, usually it's just the lower end lacking it.
I will give that the fad for 3d printing has died off somewhat compared to it being on all the popular science rags and such every five minutes, pretty much as soon as people realised engineering be hard yo, and cheapo 3d printer that does not have $1000 of niceties that the pro gear has (heated beds, optical sensors, sensors in general) means you get to be better still (though people burned, hopefully not literally, by the earlier stuff might want to contemplate a revisit as some of it is actually quite a bit nicer today*).
3d printers in general though. Anybody that has a half decent drill press and is thinking about going for a lathe probably makes a stop in 3d printer world though, or at least has it as a very serious consideration*.

*I say that but I still think CNC mill, even a basic dremel tooling one, is the better option if you want to use it in anger to do things, laser cutter being a potential other avenue there that could do better still for some people. Laser 3d printer being a further option still over FDM.

SLS (laser sintering, basically big tray of powder, laser comes along and your part rises up out of the powder at the end, mechanically good stuff, loads more material choices) dropping in price to medium hobbyist level will probably be the watershed moment as well -- right now it is dropping (maybe around $10000 if you do it right) but not quite there. To take it back to VR then when someone gets to consider VR goggles or a fancy new screen for my primary uses then this is that.
User driven injection moulding is also dropping like a stone, though dies for that one will be tricky there and I don't see a great way out of that for the common man.


I may also be letting my disgust at the awfulness of smart TVs, and the subsequent if not death then massive reduction in selection of good plain panels, cloud my thinking somewhat. So many of those I still get to fit PCs to, or see people use consoles, or external boxes to actually get functionality they want, assuming they use it at all and not just to decode over the air TV/satellite/cable. It was not even a hard problem to solve -- "take half nice android board with HDMI out, use internally" was all they had to do but even that they screwed up.
 

tech3475

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I will give that the fad for 3d printing has died off somewhat compared to it being on all the popular science rags and such every five minutes, pretty much as soon as people realised engineering be hard yo, and cheapo 3d printer that does not have $1000 of niceties that the pro gear has (heated beds, optical sensors, sensors in general) means you get to be better still (though people burned, hopefully not literally, by the earlier stuff might want to contemplate a revisit as some of it is actually quite a bit nicer today*).
3d printers in general though. Anybody that has a half decent drill press and is thinking about going for a lathe probably makes a stop in 3d printer world though, or at least has it as a very serious consideration*.

*I say that but I still think CNC mill, even a basic dremel tooling one, is the better option if you want to use it in anger to do things, laser cutter being a potential other avenue there that could do better still for some people. Laser 3d printer being a further option still over FDM.

SLS (laser sintering, basically big tray of powder, laser comes along and your part rises up out of the powder at the end, mechanically good stuff, loads more material choices) dropping in price to medium hobbyist level will probably be the watershed moment as well -- right now it is dropping (maybe around $10000 if you do it right) but not quite there. To take it back to VR then when someone gets to consider VR goggles or a fancy new screen for my primary uses then this is that.
User driven injection moulding is also dropping like a stone, though dies for that one will be tricky there and I don't see a great way out of that for the common man.


I may also be letting my disgust at the awfulness of smart TVs, and the subsequent if not death then massive reduction in selection of good plain panels, cloud my thinking somewhat. So many of those I still get to fit PCs to, or see people use consoles, or external boxes to actually get functionality they want, assuming they use it at all and not just to decode over the air TV/satellite/cable. It was not even a hard problem to solve -- "take half nice android board with HDMI out, use internally" was all they had to do but even that they screwed up.

I have an Ender 3 Pro, for what I use it for it does the job and doesn't take too much space for the occasional use I need. Still I wouldn't consider it a 'mainstream' device, I had to mod it just for a basic safety feature (thermal runaway protection) and a few other mods e.g. BL Touch, Yellow Springs, metal extruder, etc. And that's not including hours trying to configure the thing and deal with failed prints.

Some of the things I've 3D printed though would be a pain to try the more traditional way, particularly since I would need tools I haven't seen since School and would take up half the garage (space I lack). Although they're not as durable as they could be, at least with PLA but still good enough e.g. 5.25" bracket for my mSD to IDE adapter or my custom GBS 8220 PCI bracket for my Amiga.

If we do see 3D printing take off in the mainstream, it will need to be some kind of 'plug and play' style system, where as in my case it feels more like 'plug and prey', for the lack of a better phrase.

I suspect the quality of TVs would have declined anyway, these days for the 'mainstream' models it's a race to the bottom.
 

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*I say that but I still think CNC mill, even a basic dremel tooling one, is the better option if you want to use it in anger to do things, laser cutter being a potential other avenue there that could do better still for some people. Laser 3d printer being a further option still over FDM.

in anger to do.. things ?
Thats a very intrigung phrase.

Tho I agree on the CNC part.

3DPrinting is messy.

Shame there are to "stowaywayable" solutions.
Not everyone has a toolshed or secret underground laboratory-incase-of-world-domination-urges-kicking-in.
 

FAST6191

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"plug and prey"
That is one ending to the rise of the machines, though I suppose self replicating robots is one of the bigger ways.

On plug and play then SLS for me pretty much is that, or as close as you get without serious optical recognition stuff governed by AI (which is not an impossibility -- I am already seeing it in laser engravers, and the electronics world has has pretty hot pick and place for years now). As it is ground up particles of plastic (which the environmental nut jobs might have words about and act as the fun police) or metal in the fancier cases then you are also spared the 11 herbs and spices problem of filament and laser curing offerings (though I am some will try).

3d printers vs size taken. Outside of the fun internal cavities stuff then relatively speaking, especially if plastic is the material of choice, then benchtop mills and CNC would go for that. If someone pulls off a 4th axis mill at a price range that goes here then definitely


in anger to do.. things ?
Thats a very intrigung phrase.

Tho I agree on the CNC part.

3DPrinting is messy.

Shame there are to "stowaywayable" solutions.
Not everyone has a toolshed or secret undsrground laboratory-incase-of-world-domination-urges-kicking-in.
Using skills/tools in anger I thought was a reasonable popular phrase, somewhat ironic in most cases (you don't want to use your gun or martial arts training in anger -- clear heads get far better results). Though here it does just mean use it to do serious work, maybe even work you charge for.

As far as things you can get out and put away again. They do exist.
I am not sure what standard to go for here.
On the one hand I could go for the old model machinist thing. Here people would have small lathes they could use while their wife knitted or they were watching TV in their front room. If you have that then some of the proxxon CNC type things would be fine. In which case sewing machine and wheely table type size becomes the standard to play to, albeit moving it might be something you get to think about doing so might be more of a dedicated corner. Can do that happily.
If I have to go purely as small as some 3d printers then still got that. Roland imodela (roland also do a lot of stuff in the category above, and further up still in the "needs a small bench" world) for the more western stuff

In the Chinese milling machine world then the 6040 is the bigger one (though still could put it on a shelf or hide it somewhere easily enough), 3020/3040 being the mid size offering (though 3018 seems to be a popular term right now) and going right down to things you could hold in an outstretched palm. If you can find space for an average 3d printer + few reels of filament/bottles of laser curable plastic then I can't see trouble with that either.
Even if living in a flat I could see those be options for people like they might have a 3d printer. Dust collection/fume extraction gets a bit tricky but still could be managed, and it is not like 3d printers are pleasant to be around.


Anyway we are now somewhat off from VR and its failures.
 
Oculus Update

Mama Looigi

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Well after today's little shebang... anyone who has been in the market for a Quest 2- or cheap VR- or a standalone Oculus headset this year- feel free to purchase one now. Make sure you fit into at least two of those things I mentioned. If not, you'll want to continue waiting or start doing more looking around.
 
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Xzi

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When was it unacceptable? That tycoon is something of an old fashioned word says most of what goes there, vulture capitalism was all the rage in the 80s, plenty of stuff in between.
The top tax bracket for a good while was 90%, then 70%. It didn't really start to fall off hard until Nixon/Reagan. Up until that point, hoarding of wealth in the billions was seen mostly as something that only (communist) dictators/ruthless oligarchs do, assuming it was possible to achieve that level of obscene wealth (without crazy inflation making it worthless) at all. It took decades of propaganda to go from that to worshiping billionaires as gods while the homeless and starving population in America was growing exponentially. Not really a topic for this thread, though.
 

Willgheminass

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I skimmed through the Facebook Connect vod just now. Kind of a bummer there wasn't anything announced except for the existence of a high-end VR headset in the works. At least the tech showcase was pretty cool, being able to text with just your fingers in the future. I hope someone can make a cheap alternative for that for gaming, if it can happen at all.
 
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Mama Looigi

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I skimmed through the Facebook Connect vod just now. Kind of a bummer there wasn't anything announced except for the existence of a high-end VR headset in the works. At least the tech showcase was pretty cool, being able to text with just your fingers in the future. I hope someone can make a cheap alternative for that for gaming, if it can happen at all.
Well to summarize
New VR headset announced
New AR device announced
GTA: SA VR
Blade & Sorcery Quest 2
Facebook name change and rebranding
 
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Julie_Pilgrim

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Say what you want I suppose. I wont take that right away from you. But I'm not gonna sit here and pretend that my knowledge of what VR was tyring to be when it launched, just straight up didn't happen lol. I tend to agree with you on these boards, so I find it interesting that you're so passionately against this (what I'd call very clear) reality. But that is where we stand regardless. I respect you, but I simply see you as straight up wrong on this matter.
i HATE this back-handed compliment bullshit, at least have the fucking bravery to go "i think you're a dumbass"
 

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