Virtual Reality Potentially Taking Killer Apps Too Far

Hamlet Au over at New World Notes has posted a link to an excellent article in The Verge : The Rise And Fall And Rise Of Virtual Reality. The tag line for The Verge’s article is : In the wake of Facebook’s purchase of Oculus VR, can this revolutionary technology triumph anew?

The premise of the article, as the headline suggests is that Virtual Reality has never really got going yet. They see the internet as an alternative, not a version of virtual reality. This is not a short article, but it does make for fascinating reading. However the more relevant part of the article for people who read blogs such as this and Hamlet’s blog comes with the Facebook QA, which is an interview with Second Life co-founder and now Vp of Engineering at Facebook Cory Ondrejka.

In the interview Cory talks of the advantages of using a headset such as the Oculus Rift and how immersive it can be. People may be wondering how people are going to use these devices and Cory touches upon an area that links in with the Facebook theme but also offers an interesting use case :

So let’s say you have a friend getting married and you can’t be there. Today you’re going to get texts and videos. But what if you could put a 360 video camera in the audience? Then, what you have is an ability to really feel like you’re there, and look around and see what’s going on in a way that’s making an incredible connection. Moviemakers will take advantage of this. You think about what you could do with director’s commentary or additional scenes. What if you could turn around and have these 360-degree views of the set while they’re shooting? Wouldn’t that be the coolest thing ever?

I’ve seen people touch upon similar areas before in terms of a rock concert. Hey you can’t get a ticket to the live event, but how about a ticket for the virtual reality event? There’s potential there. I’m not going to reveal too much of Cory’s interview, it’s well worth reading if you have an interest in virtual reality, as is the whole article but let’s get to the killer app issue because the lack of a killer app has been cited as one of the failures of virtual worlds as we know them :

What’s going to be the killer app? While we don’t know exactly what it’s gonna be, we’re confident there will be a bunch of them. And that killer app is gonna be so much better than anything you can experience on a screen or phone.

However some people have a different view and we may have to rejig how we describe killer apps. In an article in Gamesindusty.biz, unrelated to the excellent Verge article,Cloudhead Games’ Denny Unger warns :We’re very close to having the first death in VR.

The article serves as a warning to devs regarding just how immersive virtual reality could get and why devs should use caution in their delivery. In a Q&A session following a VR panel at Unite 2014 in Seattle, an audience member asked “What are the “VR evils” that pioneering developers should avoid?” Denny Unger replied :

“The low hanging fruit of VR, to me, is horror games that purposely do jump scares. We’re very close to having the first death in VR – I firmly believe that. When the commercial version comes out, somebody is going to scare somebody to death  somebody with a heart condition or something like that. It is going to happen. Absolutely.”

This may well sound very sensationalist, but virtual reality is going to have the possibility to scare the living daylights out of people in new and interesting ways. New technologies often find ways of going too far early in their development, as many of us who remember video nasties from the early 80’s will be able to recall, then matters seem to calm down and get regulated. The real warning here is that devs should tread carefully. This is not the sort of Killer App we’re looking for.

However let’s quickly go back to The Verge article. A theme running through it is how VR has been tried time and time again but the technology simply hasn’t matched the vision. There’s a fascinating discussion between Kevin Kelly and Jaron Lanier. In that discussion you can see the excitement for the concept of ritual reality and how it hasn’t quite got there yet :

I wonder if the reason we keep on cycling back to hope about cool things like VR is that for all the tech news and our fetishizing about our touch devices, we’re still a little disappointed in the menu of tech items that we have at this late date. It’s 2014 and you can buy a robot to clean your house, but it doesn’t really work that well yet. We all think it will, some day, but it’s not quite there.

There are also warnings there about people spending too much time immersed in virtual reality :

I’m kind of bracing myself; waves of teenagers whose bodies have become so inactive from being immersed that hospitals have to sever their limbs or something.

There have long been warnings such as that with the general way culture is changing via the digital revolution. However it is something society should not ignore, the outdoors is still a wonderful experience. However their discussion also contains a warning for Cory’s Facebook too :

We have to evolve out of what we’re calling the advertising business model. If you extend the idea of advertising to total surveillance in the way that we’re doing it, it doesn’t result in a stable, serviceable way to build a society. We have to all come to that recognition, find an alternative, and it’s never more true than with the VR stuff.

Obviously, I’m hoping Facebook’s business model will evolve by the time they ship something. Facebook is kind of painting itself into a corner where both it and Google are in this mutual embrace of making each other more and more creepy in battle. And they have to find some way out of that.

Quite, this isn’t the first time Facebook has been called creepy. The Verge’s article really is fascinating reading, if you have the time do read it. However you can bookmark it and read it in small snippets if you prefer.

The Rise and Fall and Rise of Virtual Reality was created by Katie Drummond, Ellis Hamburger, Thomas Houston, Ted Irvine, Uy Tieu, Rebecca Lai, Dylan Lathrop, Christian Mazza, Casey Newton, Adi Robertson, Matthew Schnipper, Melissa Smith, Sam Thonis, and Michael Zelenko.


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