Yes, they could have done the same thing with an Android WebView. But the Chrome team is actively working on implementing WebVR (which also want to support many AR use cases) so they already have a native (= higher performance, lower latency, etc) implementation to modify with some smaller changes to use the ARCore API.
There's actually a couple of Chromium-based browsers on there, Samsung Internet for GearVR which has been out and quite popular for 360 video watching (Youtube.. etc.), and Oculus just came out with theirs.
Really looking forward to the the stereo rendering of non-WebGL content, HTML+CSS, which the Mozilla team is working on. More challenging path to figuring out but will open a lot of possibilities.
In particular, we have some ideas for preserving depth information between CSS and WebGL. Imagine, Z Fighting between something rendered in WebGL and something else positioned with CSS. Or I think a more compelling use case: correctly positioning an Iframe in a WebGL scene.
It's something we're looking into, but will take a significant amount of investment in platform (two very different parts of the rendering engine suddenly have to communicate).
For now, it's very low hanging fruits for content creators or engine developers to work with WebGL. It also doesn't hurt that it's much more performant.
Yes ideally they'd be able to be composited together at the depth buffer level. But even separate I can see a ton of devs making some very cool more UI-centric applications just with CSS mode. Can't wait to see the webdev community understand what can be done with VR and the webstack in 2016.
Jeff is speaking from a position of not having tried the good stuff that delivers a sense of 'presence' in the virtual world. That is the game changer, the thing that is making people believe something special is on the way. When he says "I have experienced modern VR. A lot. I've tried both the Oculus DK1, the Oculus DK2." he's just flatly wrong, he hasn't. Those headsets at not modern VR and using them as the reference for where VR is at is pretty crazy.
But you'll get a chance to try to presence-inducing stuff in the next ~6 months with the consumer release of the Vive and Oculus CV1.
To be fair, most of the people who are excited about VR (including myself) have been that excited already about DK1 and DK2, so your comment feels like it's just moving goalposts without seriously engaging the article.
Personally, I'm very excited about VR. But I know for a fact that other people have tried the same gear that I've tried and have been way less excited about it.
Overall, I'd say it's a good thing to see a bit of hype-reducing commentary on here from time to time.
Rapidly moving goalposts in tech are often completely legitimate.
3 years ago, people were breathless about oculus. They're not anymore. They're breathless about the next things that are building on what oculus demonstrated was possible with synced stereoscopic viewing and head tracking 3 years ago (with steady improvements always coming).
If he had pointed to people still being breathless about Oculus today, I'd consider the argument much more compelling. The hype absolutely deserves skepticism, but he is trying to argue from a place of authority that I don't grant him.
(I also nitpick his view of predicted market time frames. Affordable niche is not mass market is not mainstream is not ubiquitous. Smartphones are already to basically ubiquitous. I haven't seen many predictions for when VR of any particular variety will reach ubiquity).
I don't disagree completely but underlying the growing excitement was for the past 18 months (since Abrash, etc. started talking about VR and presence as something incredible, game-changing and deliverable in around 2 years) was in large part based on the pace things were advancing and what was in store for a consumer release.
Plus many of his specific points are just so temporary in nature, like resolution complaints, heaviness/comfort, tethered, form factor, etc. These will be solved in just the next few years.
I think it is very unlikely any of that will be solved in a few years.
For example resolution, arguably the easiest one to attack, when we are talking 4k res at 120fps, that is barely possible on the highest end PC rigs today with 2 or even 3 video cards in SLI.
Isn't this only true if what you want is the equivalent of AAA FP games blasted directly at your retinas?
If you could solve all the problems of lag, resolution and artifacting, but only give me Nintendo 64-levels of polygons and shading, I bet I could still have some pretty compelling experiences.
On the Gear VR (dev kit, 2014) there was a 2.5k screen at a smooth 60fps. The consumer Gear VR coming out this fall will likely have a 2.5k screen but we'll likely see 4k screens on mobile headsets in 2016. 120fps will be a nice improvement but not required, with the Rift CV1 at 90fps and sufficient for presence. So we're talking a 2-4x difference.
The graphics card issue is not that relevant, Gear VR with a mobile GPU is showing that it's not really about some arbitrary graphical fidelity bar. Yes, some of the highest fidelity cool stuff will be on PC but multiple cards won't be required. Both the Vive and CV1 will run great on one high end card, and by the time they upgrade to ~4k/120Hz... they'll still require just 1 card.
4k resolution is roughly 4x as demanding as 1080p. A lot of games run at 30 fps (especially on consoles) but most target 60 fps. If we want to do 4k @ 120 Hz, we are talking about 8x as much work. Rendering the scene twice (once for each eye) also adds quite a bit of overhead (lighting, etc.) and so that's a least a 2x factor. We are now looking at roughly 16x as much work. That is a very rough estimate but it gives a good feel for how much more processing is required to render the same scene in VR.
Honestly, the consumer GPU market has been in a state of stagnation for the last 3 or 4 years because there's not a ton of demand for anything higher than 60fps/1080p. Hopefully VR will drive consumer demand for higher resolutions to bring prices down.
I hope you're right, and I'm really excited to see what Oculus and Valve have coming out. Honestly, I would dedicate the space in my basement for Valve's setup if it proves to work well; I'm really excited about VR.
But I'm in the same position as Jeff: I've tried the DK2 and it's not there yet. But at the same time, back when it came out, journalists were all over the DK2, saying it was revolutionary and all sorts of stuff. And it just isn't. Maybe the consumer version will be, but the gap between my experience with the DK2 and what journalists sold the DK2 to be leaves me skeptical.
I hesitate to call presence a buzzword because I've felt it (if only briefly), but then again big data is both real and a buzzword, so I guess presence can be too. However, I haven't seen the latter used in a bullshit way very often yet. Usually the people who use the word are pretty serious about VR and cautious about saying they felt presence.
I like the example of standing at the edge of something in VR and feeling the feeling you get in your stomach when you stand on the edge of a tall building. This happened to me in part of the HTC/Valve Vive demo where you stand on a shipwreck underwater.
I think more subtle examples are more interesting, though. E.g., when you're just standing in a room in VR, and you shift your weight slightly from one foot to the other (which moves your head slightly, of course), and the lighting is just right and something clicks in your head and for a second you forget you have a headset on — it's a bizarre feeling and very cool.
It's parts of your lower brain aligning to convince you you're in a virtual world, and while it is a spectrum you really need a high end headset to experience it. Abrash himself mainly dismissed VR's potential prior to experiencing it.
I've interpreted presence as "how much can you fool the brain that you really are there".
The screen-door effect is still moderately high in DK2. I've heard the CV1 has much reduced the size of the pixels, so the effect is greatly reduced.
Also the refresh also needs to be jacked up further. I'd prefer 120hz or 240hz. That would assist in faster and more seamless head-tracking. I don't think HDMI can handle that much bandwidth though. I could be wrong.
Aside) The screendoor effect is the effect of magnifying pixels in a LCD screen so you can see the pixels along with the interstitial black space where the pixels arent. The black space creates black lines like a screen door. Your eyes will then flip on focusing on the image displayed and the screen door, losing the feeling of depth and presence.
The increased framerate only helps is the latency is low enough. If there is a very high framerate but the frames lag a few 10's of milliseconds behind the movement of the head of the user then that won't help one bit.
Of course. Ideally, head tracking would be locked to the latency no greater than the time between a frame.
240hz is only 4.16 ms, which is still within human perception of view. Ideally, I'd like 1khz refresh, but that's going to be a very long time away. I do remember an HN article recently discussing a 1khz 8bit screen with touch input running at 1khz as well. The comparison was fantastic and I believe also relevant.
A VR simulation where you are on top of a high tower/building, and you are physically unable to take a leap forward because your amygdala won't let you, that is VR presence.
It's less about the mobile as in using-while-walking-around than the ability to have with you wherever you're at and not tied down to the context of sitting in front of a PC. VR is for everywhere: the couch, the kitchen table, in class, at work, social gathering where you can easily share it, etc. The tether of the current dev kits actually takes away from presence.
While there are hassles of VR with Android that were only solved by making deep changes to Android, the hassles of PC are greater. And this is a phone accessory that is specifically not designed for changing hardware and software: it only works with the Note 4 running a custom optimized version of Android. But they do agree with you that a dedicated unit is what they want to do as well which is why this is not their own consumer unit.
