Experimenting with doing it as a text post and having my own title:
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comme ... he_future/A few responses so far. I want to refine my approach as much as possible before I try more important places like VRTalk.
Also, since icy was talking about emailing Gaben and Palmer, it reminded me of a couple things that have been said on the topic of where they intend to take VR in their companies. (Not that Luckey has any say anymore, but still.)
http://www.businessinsider.com/palmer-l ... -vr-futureWhen you look down while within a virtual space, it only feels natural to also see your hands floating in space along side you, responding to your most subtle movement. Virtual reality may be the future of gaming and online interaction, but tracking your hands, body, and feet is definitely the future of VR.
Luckey and the Oculus team know this — they've purchased a slew of computer vision startups in the past couple of years that all involve hand tracking — but they still need to give game developers the time to build rich games and experiences that incorporate this tech, even its Touch controllers.
Note that this paragraph seems to be the interviewer's own words after his interview with Palmer, but it's absolutely the direction they're going in, considering their massive investments into computer vision.
https://soundcloud.com/gameslice/valveThis is an audio interview I remember listening to a while ago, and to spare everyone the torture of listening to Gaben talk, I transcribed the relevant part:
Interviewer: How far out do you see where Valve is going right now?
Gaben: You try to look into the future, and you try to have an uncertainty function around that. Here's an example of a conversation that we actually have. So, you're working on the VR stuff, and you say, "How long is VR going to be stable?" Look at phones. Internally, we had this argument that the current smartphone is actually a fairly short-term platform. Compared to the keyboard/mouse/desktop PC, it's not going to be nearly as robust, and we'll transition fairly quickly to what we think VR is going to turn into. This weird idea of having this tiny screen at arm's length was really cool, it really was an accident of battery technology and an input methodology.
Then we look at VR and say how long will VR last, and we look at the research that is going on right now in terms of how you can directly stimulate people's optic nerves. There's some really great research that's being done figuring out how to encode signals directly into your brain. There's all this really clever stuff going into how can you... well, I'll jump ahead. It's reasonable to expect at some point that your neurons essentially have the equivalent of a MAC address, and you're just talking into people's brains using some 60GHz spectrum, so you're driving people's brains directly without surgery.
You look at that and you say, OK, if that actually happens, which parts of this are a waste of time? So spending a lot of time building really elaborate touch gestural systems -- probably a waste of time. Having good solutions for navigating virtual 3D environments with a high degree of presence -- probably a lot of that is going to map directly over to this world. A head-mounted display without a head-mounted display probably still looks a lot like VR, so a killer app in head-mounted display land is probably still a killer app when you are...
Interviewer: instead of your controller it's your hand, or your brain
Gaben: ... you look at that and you want to test to make sure that you're not investing in something that's sort of fragile. But at the same time you have to go all the way back and you have to look at the person whose desk is next to you and say, Is that person happy? Is that person having fun today? Is that person being productive today? So you have to manage these time-spans simultaneously, and every once in a while... it's like you're looking at the yield curve. Every once in a while something really long-term will cause you to... it will propagate all the way back into the present in terms of choices you're making. But a lot of times it's just this tail whipping out around. And all of these issues that you're trying to keep in your head at the same time.
Every once in a while, we'll see something that we thought would occur five years into the future... we thought five years ago something would be true, and then it is and we all high-five each other, and then, fairly often something will just come completely out of the blue that we don't anticipate at all that we need to react to in the next three months. So sometimes you have a really good idea of what's coming and sometimes you're completely wrong.
Seems like he would be easier to convince than Palmer. But as many people know, one of the best ways to convince Valve of something is to convince gamers to scream about it in large numbers. Hence my reddit spam.