It does depend a lot on what you prefer to do with your free time in the first place. But if you happen to be killing time on YouTube or something anyway, watching a VR travel walk for example is actually really worthwhile.
I also find that because it is so immersive, I will consume less content because I am actually satisfied earlier than if I had been killing time on 2D content.
There are AR devices in the form of sunglasses now, but the displays and experience pale in comparison to VR headsets.
We're still a few more generations away from VR headsets shrinking and AR glasses improving for this experience to be universally enjoyable.
Linus Tech Tips did a review of it, so it's real. I have high hopes.
I wouldn't mind a hefty computer myself. The problem is, apparently nothing can be made today if it doesn't aim for immediate mass adoption. Niches and gradual evolution don't fly anymore.
How so? In the current VR resurgence of more than a decade now we've seen the field go through gradual evolution. The technology has been very niche, and still is today.
What headset manufacturers are betting on is that one day they'll come up with a winning formula that makes _everyone_ want their device. Similarly to what happened for smartphones with the iPhone. I think we're still a few years away from that tipping point, but I don't doubt we'll get there eventually.
Obviously the Vision Pro in a glasses format isn't possible now. However, the Vision Pro with a few hundred grams shaved off of it, plus being a little bit less "horizontally" bulky would result in a much more enjoyable user experience.
If the headset were solely a display then it seems straightforward, but I don’t know what existing system could be used to transmit all of the various sensor data down to a brick, especially in a way that would enable quickly iterating on the sensor set. I’m not a hardware person though so if someone from hardware land could chime in on plausibility I would be curious to hear that perspective.
Once the sensor set is more locked in and/or the market is more proven I’m guessing they will go ahead and invest in a custom solution to split the face and the brick hardware.
It would for sure be an obvious win, I just think it’s probably not easy to do.
https://www.roadtovr.com/exclusive-lytro-reveals-immerge-2-0...
Recent research examples:
* https://vidu4d-dgs.github.io/
* https://fudan-zvg.github.io/4d-gaussian-splatting/
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/771310/Welcome_to_Light_F...
From the same lab 2 years later, there's "Immersive Light Field Video with a Layered Mesh Representation" which is the same, but instead of photo it's video.
https://fudan-zvg.github.io/4d-gaussian-splatting/
But even with that, it would allow only limited movement because if you move to much in the reconstructed space then it would have to show you occluded areas that has been never recorded. But for that case generative AI could be used to fill in the the gaps, which means it wouldn't be true to life reconstruction anymore, but it could be still useful where that isn't that important.
Of course it's not magic so the views it can generate are limited.
Interocular, meaning distance between a pair of eyes/lenses
For example, if you wanted to shoot something from a cat's POV, you'd put the lenses closer together and shoot objects closer to the camera. That would make it easier to fuse images of a mousehole right in front of your face. Things farther away would simply look "less 3-D" and therefore abnormally far a way to a human viewer.
Instead I assume they're using the pair of lenses to approximate a 3d model which allows for display at a variety of angles (all reasonably close to where the camera is), and then rendering from that model for the person looking at the image based on the angle they are actually looking at it from. Which solves the interocular distance problem, because you render for each eye based on where the persons eye is resulting in a distance between the two display images that doesn't have to match the camera.
I wonder if we'll see more productions like this thanks to these cameras being more common.
But are we going to see better true 360° 3d cameras than the Insta360 Titan?
https://variety.com/2024/film/news/apple-vision-pro-original...
Current VR porn is typically 8K 60 fps at the max, which already creates HUGE files, like 500 MB/minute.
Shit, I didn't even consider the editing part.
A pair of 4K images (one 4K image per eye) with 8 bits per channel is nearly 50 MB per frame uncompressed. At 90 fps, it's a whopping 4.48 GB per second. 268.8 GB per minute.
I can't imagine they're actually doing the editing in uncompressed form. Even a modest 15 minute scene would be 4 TB, which after typing out, I suppose isn't actually THAT big. If they had an hour of footage, that's 16 TB, which is certainly big, it's not insanely big and could be done on consumer-grade SSDs.
Hence there is a limit and that camera is very camera like. Anyway wait for a cheaper version so to use my cheaper meta quest 3. Both 3d and 360 had their role.
iPhone video is impressive, but even moderately successful YouTube channels upgrade once they start making money. Some even use big cinema style cameras like red 8k cameras.
We're getting into "videophile" territories here.
The Alicia Keys one was first and my first instinct was to move back a bit, because she was so close, but I didn't, because I was on a stool and probably would have fallen. She was in my personal space, it felt almost uncomfortably intimate, like someone was right there. Then there were the flying ones, and I had that feeling I get in my stomach when on a roller coaster or zip line. I didn't expect that at all. I could have spent hours watching that stuff. I loved it. If they had a bigger library of immersive videos with regular releases, I'd probably get a Vision Pro just for that.
The windowed stuff was fine, but the full immersion is what I'm after.
I’ve used YouTube with a phone headset. It’s cool, but kind of annoying. The Vision Pro was also kind of annoying to put on and set up. And with both, the content is limited. So how much annoyance is someone willing to put up with for something that doesn’t has much content and only provides are marginally better viewing experience?
Televisions, computers, and phones, have very little friction and more content than a person could consume in 100 lifetimes. This makes the simple screen hard to beat.
I’m also remind of something I heard a film director say when being critical of the 3D movie fad… all movies are already 3D. There is depth in the shots when looking into the screen, no one really needs stuff flying out at them.
Going for a walk in a nice park is a better experience than walking around the block, but if I only ever walked after going through the trouble of driving to a nice park, I'd almost never walk. That's more like VR to me. Even if the cost is removed from the equation, it creates enough friction that using it becomes an event, not an everyday default, even if it's preferred.
[1] https://tv.apple.com/us/show/adventure/umc.cmc.5al10vz5fkqzx...
For PCVR users, that's likely going to be DeoVR. SteamVR has a built-in media player, but DeoVR is far better. More flexible, lets you move the video around, etc. Like, one of the big things for me when doing VR porn is that the camera tilt needs to match my head tilt, or else I get motion sick. So if the camera is pointed down 45 degrees, then by default, that means if my head is pointed straight forward, my view is actually looking down 45 degrees, and I get sick. DeoVR lets me move the video down, so that looking downwards makes me look at the center of the video.
Full spectrum rush.