Fool me, this is real good shit ! [the VR thread]

[Darkflame]

The Wii was, relatively cheap, and was also sold partly thanks to its sport/fitness angle.

Given the Wii was the biggest selling console of all time, and 3D films are still released as normal, FB should be VERY happy to be as remotely successful as either of those.

This will work for movies, sports and a shit load of other mass market applications.

No it wont. What movie is made as a 360x360 panorama? 5 worldwide a year maybe?
Sports? Where you are tied to a pc and carrying a heavy weight on your head?

Besides, if your just using it as videogoogles then we have had them for decades, many more suitable for that use then this.

[gravy]

Watching sports Durgh

And how is "it'll take some time for 360 films to be a reality" a "no it won't"?

[Darkflame]

Because it takes wayyyyyyyyyyyyy more effort then 3d.

Aside from special cameras, and massively more editing needed, and new formats, you also need to construct sets in 360 degrees.
Think about the logistics of film making, it makes it all much much harder. Even simple things.....no Boom mic for you, it would be visible. Hidden mics only.
Interesting challenges, perhaps, but not enough for any large numbers of films to be made.

Expect Google street view city tours more then anything scripted.

[gravy]

Oh yeah there are challenges. It's doable though. Immersive 3d for narrative doesn't have to translate to free movement in the scene to give you an order of magnitude of improvement over cinema IMHO.

But sports are a good starter; a lot less challenge and a proven market.

Sky and other new content delivery platforms have driven growth by buying up exclusivity to sports coverage.

[Dio]

I'm not at all certain it will work well for that sort of thing though. Stereo 360 degrees is all very well but what about translational movement?

VR works because it's in a rendered environment with the user's head as a camera. So to make VR work we don't just need to record images, we have to capture scenes. Whole scenes, in 3D, which can then be rerendered locally. That's a _huge_ ask.

[gravy]

Why would you need translational movement for sports spectating?

[Dio]

Because you want to barf if you don't have it?

[gravy]

In my experience though the barfiness comes from actively navigating a scene with a fixed head position despite your own head moving about. Running around in Quake for example. If you stand still and just look around it's just awesome.

Even so small delta translational movement that'd mimic your head movements of sitting in a chair watching telly may well be possible. If the action is a medium distance away it'd mostly just map to image translation.

And it could be streamable with minimal local rendering reqs

[gravy]

There we go, from the horse's mouth

http://time.com/39577/facebook-oculus-vr-inside-story/

Strategy is pretty much what it seemed to be, a play for a billion user+ content delivery platform.

Whether that will work or not is another thing but there can't be any dispute that this is their goal.

[venusian]

Is sport spectating not a tribal/social activity. Which football fans are going to sit in the pub, or at home, with a high-tech blindfold on, trying to drink beer without being able to see either their glass or their hand or what their mates are doing. It's just a fundamentally bad way to have an experience.

[gravy]

Is sport spectating not a tribal/social activity.

Probably not. My guess is the majority of viewers for any major sporting event will be on some form of paid TV. 450m people watched F1 last year.

[snaff]

What's to stop FB just using it to build a big VR patent portfolio and stifling competition. They might develop something nice, but we lose all the potential good that a hundred smaller companies in the industry might have done, without ever knowing what that would have been. Only the likes of Sony and Google will be able to get involved.

[Dio]

Why couldn't Oculus have done just that?

[snaff]

Why couldn't Oculus have done just that?

It seems that the bigger companies get the more they have access to government and the less they have to rely on wealth generation to make money.

[gravy]

Facebook was a tiny company less than a decade ago