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Comment by finknotal | Hacker News Reader

"Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure."

Beautiful example of article where the author was skeptical based on the wild west of the current state of technology. What current technology is the same? VR? Self driving cars?

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VR would be my bet. Every time is exit VR I feel like my monitor is limiting.

It requires quite a lot of work though, and unlike the web, it probably can’t be done by one person in a basement. Which I think is important to it’s impact, because google probably wouldn’t have existed if it couldn’t have started small and gradually build its way up.

> It requires quite a lot of work though, and unlike the web, it probably can’t be done by one person in a basement. Which I think is important to it’s impact, because google probably wouldn’t have existed if it couldn’t have started small and gradually build its way up.

This may be why VR hasn't taken off yet. If it requires a lot of resources to create an experience using it, then you've limited the number of new ideas that can be built/tested.

Maybe it'll do better when more frameworks and engines for VR applications are a thing, and building one is as easy as making a website or mobile app is today.

It feels like decent VR has been 'any time now' away for decades. Is Oculus still the only real attempt at it these days?

Technical progress is slower than the VR hype train. Not only that, but ergonomics was a bigger issue than many predicted.

In the meantime, I don't see any reason why we can't see arcade venues bounce back, with dedicated VR rooms using powerful projections rather than headsets.

I know I'd prefer a room with 360 VR projection done well, moving platform or chair to simulate driving, flying etc, and surround sound with huge cinematic range, than a headset with headphones.

The other issue with headsets is when sharing them, particularly public ones. There's a certain hygiene factor, if you know what I mean!

> Is Oculus still the only real attempt at it these days?

At least HTC Vive and PlayStation VR (if you are a console player) additionally come to my mind.

I have to admit I often feel like VR will be the next 3DTV.

Blockchain and cryptocurrency comes to mind - especially given HN’s frequent dismissals and distaste of the two.

The funny thing is that the mainstream media is often breathless over the possibilities of blockchain these days, but the nerd forums in the nineties for the most part understood and were excited about the impact of the internet and web.

Draw your own conclusions I guess.

I see a lot of people making this exact mistake regarding blockchain:

>So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?

IOW, “It hasn’t displaced some other market already, so it never will.” It’s only a few steps away from “it has the volatility associated with being a small market, so it’s inherently flawed”.

With that said, I’m skeptical about whether it will find any large scale use myself, but it’s unfair to criticize it for the above reason.

Isn’t most of the critique of crypto currencies that better systems already exist? I have an app that lets me send cash instantly and free to anyone else with the same app. It’s operated by our largest bank, but it works for anyone in my country regardless of what bank they have.

I can also shop instantly all over the world, I do pay a tax to the bank for this, but it’s currently a lot cheaper than paying for most crypto transactions.

I guess with crypto, I would be free of the banking tyranny, but I actually rather like the security that comes with centralized banking.

The internet on the other hand changed the world. It made it possible for me to browse your product catalog, buy and pay for your products, almost instantly, even though you live in another part of the world.

Crypto never really had that, it wanted to uproot existing systems for political reasons, but the technology by itself, has frankly always been somewhat obsolete.

The internet was hard to predict because it was new, a currency isn’t exactly a new thing. Hell, blockchain isn’t even the first attempt at a decentralized currency.

>Isn’t most of the critique of crypto currencies that better systems already exist?

Of course there are other arguments. I even suggested I agreed with that one. I was just pointing out one kind of fallacy, of using current low adoption as evidence of a fundamental flaw.

Well, a bigger problem in terms of transaction count is that proof-of-work systems are designed in such a way as to put a hard limit on the number of processable transactions that's nowhere near the world's needs, and moreover, they expend multiple orders of magnitude more energy to do it.

For what it's worth, I still prefer reading on paper. Buying ebooks is cheaper, though (because you need the device you use to read them for other reasons), and the logistics of storing such books are much simpler

Yes but some devices will have screens more like paper. We're slowly seeing small steps towards that. For example Wacom now talks up their tablet screens for feeling more like paper when you draw on them with the pen. The glass has more granular resistance or something. I think iPad Pro also makes these claims.

In terms of reading, I guess in time the very thin screens that can be rolled up will hit the market.

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