Also, I think Newell might offer Abrash the entire company before he lets him slip away from Valve.
"So my personal opinion (which is not necessarily Valve’s) is that it makes sense to do VR now, and push it forward as quickly as possible, but at the same time to continue research into the problems unique to AR, with an eye to tilting more and more toward AR over time as it matures. As I said, it’s not the definitive answer we’d all like, but it’s where my thinking has led me. However, I’ve encountered intelligent opinions from one end of the spectrum to the other, and I look forward to continuing the discussion in the comments."
http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/two-possible-paths-int...
At the right price, this might even turn out to be cheaper than proper paintball arena's. You can charge more, and there's no cleanup involved. You could even host these 'games' in real-world environments (with permission or otherwise). Imagine hosting counter-strike style games in empty buildings!
I thought they were shifting focus away from that for now..
If they had been doing Oculus Rift type stuff I'm sure they'd still be at Valve.
It opens up a different set of game possibilities than a VR headset like the Rift. Think augmented multiplayer tabletop games rather than immersive worlds.
The tabletop market is already small and the only reason they can turn a profit is because their costs are low.
AR tabletop games would have an even smaller market and also be more expensive to produce.
It's bigger than ever and steadily rising.
Blocks for building dungeons made 2 million on Kickstarter: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dwarvenforge/dwarven-for...
I can see a single mind-blowing tabletop demo selling pretty damn well. The audience isn't huge and mass market, but it's decent sized, and willing to drop very high amounts of money on cool stuff.
That said though, when I play a boardgame, I'm just playing it on a table with some friends. I don't want the games to get any more complicated, and I certainly don't want to put on headgear or glasses and involve technology for some gimmick AR feature. You'd have to make the game concepts that require such a setup very compelling for me to consider them.
Virtual Reality - Oculus Rift
Augmented Reality - Google Glass
AR sits on top of/alongside the real world, where VR tries to replace it.
It's just a small screen in your vision, it doesn't analyze or enhance your existing viewpoint in any way (unless I am mistaken).
Cast AR is a better example:
http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/18/cast-ar-hands-on-with-jer...
A simple street view overlay + wikipedia filter would be basic AR, and that doesn't seem difficult at all. Google could monetize with virtual window ads that businesses would buy for glass+streetview users.
It would be extremely difficult. It would use a lot of processing power to examine the camera input and attempt to extrapolate positioning for overlayed elements. I'm not sure Glass has that power.
What camera input? Why go all in such a roundabout way, processing the image to determine the location?
What he proposes just needs the GPS/compass (if Google Glass has one, else it's trivial to add one). You get relevant wikipedia articles for your location (including the direction you're looking) using Glass's GPS, and the screen displays them.
This is actually a problem I have been thinking about a fair bit for the Rift. I'm not sure what the best way is to solve it in this package size. I'm thinking a first pass will need some sort of off-board reference.
For what? I remind you that we're talking about a Wikipedia filter. Wikipedia entries are so coarse grained with respect to position that you don't even need GPS-level accuracy. (Not to mention it can correct itself with the help of the built-in maps, e.g assume you walk in the sidewalk and not 4 meters across inside the buildings etc).
"That place is the Brooklyn Bridge, that thing down the road is the Katz delicatessen, further down is CBGB, stuff like that".
Where's the need for "more than a few meters accuracy"? If it can show me info of the nearby stuff (5-10-20 meters away) on my Glasses, it's perfectly good.
It doesn't have to super-impose it when I look at the specific building (that would be stupid anyway, cause it would necessitate me to keep looking straight at the building to see the info).
Conversely I'd happily install an app that put art over billboards. It would be nice to go to Times Square and feel like you're in the Louvre.
That's not going to happen for the foreseeable future. See http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/why-you-wont-see-hard-...
> Eventually we’ll get to SF-quality hard AR, but it’ll take a while. I’d be surprised if it was sooner than five years, and it could easily be more than ten before it makes it into consumer products.
Reducing that requirement by having it on your face is a fantastic first step. We have no idea whether the next Glass iteration will be stereoscopic, or cover your field of vision or what. It's that market preparation I am excited to see.
Of course not, but "always on" is not a very useful feature for VR. It's an incredibly useful feature for AR. Oculus Rift is not a good candidate in any way for an AR platform, since camera pass through to VR is not an acceptable replacement for seeing the world with your actual eyes.
Without that initial step, it's hard to see any practical path to AR actually becoming a reality.
Only if you consider AR to be something that is 'always on'. There are a ton of applications that do not require that.
Google Glass is wearable, but the display position is fixed relative to your head. You have to look up to see the screen, so unless you tilt your head down in some awkward manner to point to what you want the AR overlay on, it won't work. Not a very good AR experience.
A wristwatch and Google Glass are no more AR than a piece of paper with a map on it is.
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