Could this replace your gaming monitor... Someday

[Ralizek]

With all the hype surrounding VR and the 4k, 8k, and ever climbing refresh rate on monitors I have been doing some due diligence researching. I was looking for something both immersive and something that wasn't a one-trick Pony. Somehow I wondered into the wrong isle on Amazon and came across "home theater headsets" like the Royal Moon and it got me thinking, can these game? They claim they can run anything Hdmi  and while they may not be up to 4k standards "yet" could this still be a viable option or if they upgraded them for 4k could they replace or compete with traditional PC monitors? 

[Chionele]

Resolution is not really an issue with VR anymore, and hasn't been for quite a while (talking in terms of desktop use), but they won't surpass regular screens due to how cumbersome they are to use by design. This is the same with those "video glasses" we've had for decades already, because they're essentially the same things. There definitely is time and place for them, but regular desktop use is not that.

[Exidor]

I agree with what has been said above.

Glasses based systems are not there yet.

 

In general in all honestly in the past 12 years we have not really developed UIX much. More than 20 if you take the IPhone out of the equation and how it started the dominant march of the touchscreens.

I will give you an example I tried to go paper less on a business level. We got a bunch of note 10 and microsoft surface book 2s. We even considered buying a microsoft surface hub the 65inch one......

And I mean fair enough right? Artists have gone digital for a while now many use a stylus to draw etc....

Well I decided to be the guinea pig for this. I forced myself to work with only digital notes and abandon paper and whiteboards. After 3 months of suffering I mostly went back I still make notes on PDFs. But I went as far as buying a whiteboard and a printer for my home office as I am just so much faster.....

And this is not a new issue there is a very good reason why we still use paper for rough mockups and things like clay for models. It is just that much more intuitive.

Sure for calculation and technical models you use cad.

For more complex flow etc.... you switch to UML (unified modeling language) and block-schemes.

But that requires years of training and habit building and every one I know still walks up and grabs a pen and starts drawing on a white board..... Even considering all have phones laptops styluses etc... That can instantly connect wirelessly to a 75 inch screen.

Peoples brains judge physical dimensions better and without real depth perception we just get lost. Simulating it is not enough. (this is coming from a guy who lacks binocular vision because of a medical condition and basically has no depth perception....)

This is the same reason why 3D never took off outside of rollecoasters and other such applications.

Most people will prefer a bigger physical screen over a resolution bump and using 2 physical screens for work is always better than one wide one. (well this is mostly technical reasons) but also how our brain works we are still trained to arrange stuff like on a physical table think how few people intuitively use things like multiple desctops.

Even things that we seem to have figured out perfectly like maps and navigation.... Sure a smartphone map is great for navigation and using the tools to plan roots or using the search. But take away the metadata. Try zoning or planning pipelines or setting up search quadrants on a digital map I guarantee you most will pull out a physical map this is why physical maps are still standard in the military and at construction sites.

 

So yea all of the above drawbacks of wires and the mask format.

But in addition we are hardcoded on a biological level to search for physical reference points and we need them to stay there. Ever been on a ship and stared out into nothingness on the ocean? Or experienced loss of gravity in an aircraft? That makes your reference system collapse in an instance and takes some getting used to.....

We need haptic feedback this is why the mouse and pencil still rule.....

We make many mental adjustments so without reference and real depth we are bad at placing stuff.

We do many things automatically simulating something even as simple as drawing free hand grids and coloring them is tedious because we never think when we preform such a task and make up a reference system on the go (EG: draw a small 10to1 scale or what ever on the side of the map.....) That requires a shit load of tools and processes to codify.

In short the illusion is not perfect without physical reference and actual depth.

Motorics and interactions suck without physical haptic feedback and spacial awareness. Try changing the DPI on your mouse and notice how automatically you tend to move your mouse more or less. Your brain instantly mapped the mouse to the physical reference system of the monitor. This is why you want a 65inch or 75inch digital whiteboard yes you could scroll on that thing but nobody scrolls.......

Giving people new tools that try to replace things that are natural is always challenging. It requires a lot of training and unless it is universally applicable our brain gets confused. Think about falling our natural reflex is to put arms up front for protection. When you fall that usually means you get a broken limb. Sure better than a cracked skull but experiments have shown (well more like history by now) that actually moving your hands up to your head neck on the side you are falling on to protect neck and head tension muscles and make yourself roll when you hit the ground tends to work better. Or roll over when falling forward.... This is pretty much universal until you get to nasty shit like falling with a parachute where you want to sort of be semi limp and fall to the side... But still this is universally applicable and mapped to the real world. And until we start living outside of Nutonian physics will be fine. Now on the other hand replacing drawing something with a pencil. Well pencils are still more widely available and menus do not pop out of sheets of paper and other surfaces. A real world meter or centimetre is still the measuring standard.

 

Honestly projection is the next step and until then things will kind of suck.....

 

 

Ok yea sorry this turned into a really long rant.....

We will also need systems to learn to read context. When you address the room and say imagine this is 1km on the whiteboard everybody understands it no matter how long the actual line is. That is pretty much impossible with current programmed systems. (oversimplification think abstraction in general) We barely touched speech recognition and never mind specific terms and acronyms......

We need first to get the basics of a stylus right namely the lag we are so used to it being instant that using a stylus feel awkward because it is not instant. Also the feel on glass there is no give. Those things are getting better but this first needs to get a lot better same with the whole multitouch and needing a glow to insulate. As soon as we get a lot of free form data entering the system drawings etc... We will start getting those datasets to at least try to start building context. Right now it takes training and discipline to use one artists see the profit and benefits they train. Normal user or even a business or professional sees no point the benefits are not there yet. Simulating a proper pencil and bringing the cost down will open the flood gates of unstructured data for machine learning to have a crack at it to try and build context.

Never mind trying to simulate more complex interactions on a level better than a gimmick.

As a WoW thing when it works perfectly in a theme park or something it works great. But unless we refocus our games from story and classical gameplay to interaction focused things. This will always be a small niche as the market is small not many own the device and artistic freedom is even more limited as you have to build around the interactions. Never mind the fact that it is expensive. Those fitness tracking things and movement games like the WEEE kicked off are a good example. Point is it is a separate category for now. You can not translate existing play styles story game types ETC to this imagine playing a VR headset RTS or TBS..... RTS your speed is slow as hell and map is confusing and what are the benefits? TBS standing around getting sweaty and tired in a mask? WHY? Right now they are self-enclosed attractions they need to become more universal first to be appealing enough in a home entertainment context for the broader industry.

I still think arcades might be the stepping stone. They are still big in Japan and might get big again here. Like I want to try I flight sim (but dog fighting would suck) or HalfLife Elix but I wont buy a whole set up. If I would go out grab a bear and some snacks and try it out with a bunch of friends fair enough. But the investment to both by VR set it up get real estate and fund the development. That kind of money means you are locked for 7-10 years and PC hardware depreciates FAST....

 

Now we will get a whole litter of all sorts of better video conferencing apps.

But they will be mostly the same old crap. If microsoft had not butchered skype to push their other products we would have had no garbage like zoom.

Video conferences wont really change. They will be nice for updates etc... But for starting off a new project or getting a new client they will still suck.