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Comment by superasn | Hacker News Reader

I don't know but for some reason this article feels like one of those things - which is what will be see in a show 20 years from now about where/how it all started.

Like the guys from 1980s talking about video games in the recent Netflix documentary 'high score', where some people started spending 8+ hours a day playing games with really primitive graphics because it was just enough to be enjoyable.

VR now seems like something that is almost finally ready to explode and like the atari or iphone is going to change all our lives forever.

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I can tell you what, that much screen time right on your face is going to fucking ruin millions of eyes.

Is there some basis for thinking that? AFAICT your eyes/brain seem to overlook the physical location of the screen and are tricked into variably focusing based on simulated depth.

It's not just focal distance, but also accommodation and general eye coordination. (Today's) VR screws up your visual neurological systems and studies show this:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00036...

Are "focal distance" and "accomodation" separate issues? Isn't accomodation focusing on an object at a certain distance?

Sorry, I meant to also mention convergence, which is the movement of the two eyes together to focus on near objects because of line-of-sight. This is perhaps the bigger problem.

Worth it.

>are tricked into variably focusing based on simulated depth

No, the focal distance in a headset is fixed. The light hitting your eye is always coming in at the same angle.

The actual focal distance on a Quest 2 is about six feet, that's further away than I keep my desk monitors.

The issue isn't (only) the focal distance. The difference is that your desk monitors don't encapsulate your entire eye cavities and cause pupil dilation, pumping blue light directly onto your retinas, which has been suspected to accelerate macular degeneration, night-blindness, and dry eye, as well as cause poor sleep.

https://www.webmd.com/eye-health/blue-light-health

Can't you use blue light filters in VR like you can with regular monitors (eg Flux or Windows Night light)?

Yes, that is a system level software option in the Oculus menu, along with brightness control.

Yes VR a technology that's been around since the 90s is finally going to take off ... maybe ...can anyone name another technology that started decades before and later became a product that changed the world like the iPhone?

Why would I want to wear a headset strapped to my face for hours to interact with memojis of my co-workers? I've definitely tried out VR games in the past few years ... cool, but novel fun and the headset strapped to my face annoyed me.

Yes, lots of technologies work like that. Solar panels. Deep learning in pretty much its modern form was invented decades ago, but had to wait for the hardware to get good enough to show results. Personal computing took decades to take off. Heavier than air travel spent centuries as a curiosity.

Tipping points are fundamental to the nature of reality. Technology improves through decades of little tweaks and incremental improvements, which can sometimes bring a technology to a point where it's optimal and suddenly dominates the landscape.

Sure I agree with you but the cellphone brief case of the 90s looks way different our iPhones.

The form factor basic idea of VR hasn't changed since the 90s which is still strap a bulky headset to your face. Prescription or sunglasses aren't bulky ..what humans have worn for possibly centuries.

Maybe it will finally change how we play video games but working virtually with my coworkers emojis for 8 hours or long periods of time with a headset strapped to my face is lol

The example you gave (iPhone) is itself the result of decades of advances in microprocessors, cellular communication, display tech, and input devices. Apple was successful because they put in the resources to develop a device with mass consumer appeal once the underlying tech and engineering allowed for it.

You could've asked someone 20 years earlier "why would you want to walk around with a suitcase attached to a phone so you could make calls from your car?" Or you could ask someone 10 years earlier why they would want to carry a small brick in their pocket so they could scribble notes with a tiny stylus. Or 5 years earlier why they would want a phone that ran "apps" when you had to buy them at the store on SD cards and interact via a small resistive touch screen.

Few-to-none of these things spring fully formed from the minds of a lone genius. They're the result of identifying new and potentially useful things that can be done with tools that are just becoming good enough to be adequate.

Do not confuse the existence of a technology with its viability as a consumer product.

VR may have been invented in the 90s, but it likely wasn't until a few years ago that we could do it well enough and cheaply enough to make it worthwhile for consumer-level gamers.

VR in the 90s was incredibly low resolution and and had low framerates, not to mention thousands of dollars and with shitty latency. It was ugly and nauseating.

To make VR useable for consumers, it had to be semi-affordable and attractive. It wasn't until the last 10 years as small high-DPI LCD screens dropped in price and PCs could render at the 90+ fps needed to keep latency low (And really, since it's 90+ fps PER EYE, it's really rendering at 180 fps) that VR became viable.

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