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comment by goobster
goobster  ·  2788 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post:

Jaron Lanier was in my circle of friends when he invented a bunch of VR tech back in the 1980's and 90's. I got to go to his house, try the things out, work in booths for hardware companies that made graphics cards for his kind of stuff, etc.

VR then was pretty dang simple, with wireframe models you could manipulate in the air, music you could play by waving your hands around (with appropriate gloves, of course), and all that. This woman I knew was a software engineer on the VR project and had also been in Playboy, so interacting with her in the VR space was a big draw at tradeshows, etc. You could toss a virtual ball back and forth, etc. Usual VR stuff, I guess.

While the graphics may have improved, I still feel the current approach is just fundamentally flawed in some way.

Even back then, the whole headset+outerwear approach just seemed like it was always going to provide a stilted, mechanistic feel, rather than ever feeling "natural" or "flowing."

I still think that some day images will be projected or drawn directly on our retina or cornea, and mature sensors will sense our place and movement in space remotely, rather than requiring us to wear equipment. Some confluence of MoCap and LiDAR-on-a-chip, that is so pervasive our environments sense us, rather than us telling our environments what to do...

... the road to any sort of real, consumer-level, pervasive VR is apparently a long one.





psychoticmilkman  ·  2788 days ago  ·  link  ·  
kleinbl00  ·  2788 days ago  ·  link  ·