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Comment by dna_polymerase | Hacker News Reader

The only place I see such devices are highly polished demos to show the 'capabilities of AR/VR'. I've never seen such headsets used for anything even remotely useful (not considering gaming as extremely useful). I think the AR/VR craze is just here because we have nothing really new at the moment and investors want to pour money into something.

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I run psychology experiments (motor control/spatial decision making) in VR and and its been a gamechanger in the last few years. Create your experiments completely in software to allow them to copied, modified, and distributed much more easily.

That is an absolutely fascinating application that I've never considered before. One could design all sorts of experiments, not just exclusively spatial reasoning.

Imagine allowing a class of undergraduate students to participate in a version of Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment and draw their own conclusions as to potential flaws in its methodology.

Or, as a philosophy student: allow students to engage in a real life rendition of Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment, where a student "competes" against his or her classmates and various versions of text generation algorithms from simple Markov chain generators, to OpenAI's GPT-2 and beyond.

Interesting. Anywhere I can see more on this?

Here's my work so far.

https://github.com/immersivecognition/unity-experiment-frame...

https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758%2Fs13428-019-01242...

There are also some older papers by Loomis et al. https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/BF03200735

These devices are powerful enough to perform regular desktop workstation tasks. But selling general purpose wearable computers is not cool, as is not cool selling hackable mobile phones. So apparently makers will keep making sexy locked-down devices in hope it surely sells out this time. Open it up - no-no, they won't be fools to do such mistake.

Disclaimer: I have a wearable computer with head mounted display (Vufine+, ~$200) and one-handed wireless keyboard (Twiddler 3, ~$200). The rest is Raspberry Pi Zero W and a powerbank. All devices are off-the-shelf, no soldering whatsoever.

I'm curious, what kind of work do you do with this setup and how much mileage do you get in a day out of it (work wise, not charge wise)? If you had any issue with it that you could rectify immediately what would it be?

You've missed out something in between "games" and "useful".

The arts.

There's still a lot of interest (at least from where I'm standing) in VR etc as a creative medium. There's some really remarkable work being created.

Is there a good resource for finding such work?

I recently experienced some VR art at the Walker Art Center (museum of modern art) in Minneapolis and was decidedly underwhelmed.

> Is there a good resource for finding such work?

Not really. Most stuff is released to Steam or the Oculus Store and it's reported and occasionally reviewed on VR blogs and subreddits.

> I recently experienced some VR art at the Walker Art Center (museum of modern art) in Minneapolis and was decidedly underwhelmed.

What was it? Actual VR or just 360 video?

There are plenty of others but these are some that have stood out to me.

SIGGRAPH has a VR Theatre where they show short VR films [1].

EyeJack is a platform for AR art, though you may need to visit an exhibit to see the actual art. [2]

[1] https://s2018.siggraph.org/conference/conference-overview/co...

[2] https://eyejackapp.com

Is there a market in there somewhere, or is it a whizz-bang gimmick like 3D TVs?

I've seen a lot of VR gaming, or at least, I did, approximately 18-12 months ago, but it really seems to have petered out.

> Is there a market in there somewhere, or is it a whizz-bang gimmick like 3D TVs?

There's very little similarity between VR and 3D TV. The latter was mostly driven by marketing teams whilst the former was and is mostly driven by enthusiasts.

> I've seen a lot of VR gaming, or at least, I did, approximately 18-12 months ago, but it really seems to have petered out.

The Quest is about to be released. That's where most of the excitement is at the moment as it's a new form factor and potentially a new market.

Also engineering—meaning physical engineering, not software. Think: CAD, simulations, architecture, manufacturing. You could do a virtual walk though of a factory before breaking ground, or just look at the output of a numerical simulation to get a gist of it instead of spending time writing summary tools.

When VR controllers get there you could program an industrial robot arm just by doing the activity yourself in a simulated environment.

Personally, if I was an architect, I'd have bought into this stuff heavily. The ability to let people walk around the house I've just designed and request tweaks before the foundations are poured would be _immense_.

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