"We Live In The Future": Post things that give you future shock!

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Yuli Ban
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Re: "We Live In The Future": Post things that give you future shock!

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And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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Yuli Ban
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Re: "We Live In The Future": Post things that give you future shock!

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Outrageous!!!
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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funkervogt
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Re: "We Live In The Future": Post things that give you future shock!

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Based on the videos you posted, it looks like the technology is here, and all we need to do is wait for the price to come down.
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Yuli Ban
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Re: "We Live In The Future": Post things that give you future shock!

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This led me down a very interesting path that I can't stop thinking about. I thought the Index and Quest 2 and Pimax and Vive Pro 2 was where we're at in VR technology right now I knew that it would get better over the years inevitably, but I didn't know that VR technology is this far along
Imagine this five to ten years down the line. By 2031, we might be able to get the XR-3 for about as expensive as a Quest 2 or, at worst, an Index. What's high end now will be mid-to-low end by then, and God only knows what the high-end will be like thusly.

I for one hope that, by 2026, we ought to be able to go to Dollar General and pick up an Oculus Rift CV1 for $50. A dollar store near me used to sell a cheap-o mobile VR headset, but ever since mobile VR died, I've not seen it once. Then again, mobile VR is cheating anyway.
The real point is to show that what we consider mid-range today will be easily low-end in the very near future. By 2026, I fully expect Index-tier VR headsets to have at least some of the abilities of the XR-3. For example, Meta's Project Cambria seems to be going in that direction, being a combination of VR and AR with eye-tracking. And what Valve's planning to show off next year with the Index's follow up may have some similar abilities too (though we know nothing about it at the moment).

No matter what, that the technology to do what the XR-3 does actually exists is exciting. I remember a user on the old forums mentioned that VR progress had been dog-slow, and that's certainly true— thinking back to those early days of hype in 2013-2014, we all hoped that the XR-3 would be the standard by 2020. Considering that there were plenty of people who were absolutely sure that the Oculus Rift CV1 was going to launch with 2K displays and foveated rendering for $399 in 2014, that surely doesn't sound like an outlandish prediction except in retrospect. It's true that VR didn't develop as explosively as we hoped. It's unfortunate that Moore's Law gave out in the 2010s. But videos like this surely put an end to the idea that VR is dead. Especially considering how easy it is to trigger phantom sense in people. I used to feel phantom sensations in MOBILE VR; it's piss easy to induce it in me. Thrillseeker needed a top-of-the-line headset to do it, but do it it did.

VR relies on these sorts of para-psychological thrills to truly work, which is the whole reason why we're so excited for the future prospects of FIVR/full dive VR. Same deal with AR. Once it becomes possible to make our brains start naturally accepting the virtual as real on a consistent basis, even without FIVR, that's when mixed reality will truly go into overdrive.
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funkervogt
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Re: "We Live In The Future": Post things that give you future shock!

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Imagine this five to ten years down the line. By 2031, we might be able to get the XR-3 for about as expensive as a Quest 2 or, at worst, an Index. What's high end now will be mid-to-low end by then, and God only knows what the high-end will be like thusly.
Ten years sounds about right. Probably an upper-end estimate, in fact.

Check out the gadgets that appeared at CES 2011, especially the Samsung UN65D8000 TV. Gape in astonishment at 65 WHOLE INCHES (!) of 1080p (!!) resolution.
https://www.popsci.com/technology/artic ... ts-future/

It was offered for sale later that year for $4,299.99.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/tv-review ... 00-review/

And today, I'm not sure if Samsung still makes 65" 1080p TVs because everything of that size and up seems to be 4K resolution. The Samsung 65" 4K Tizen is on sale at Best Buy for $569.99. Keep in mind that the price is probably higher than it should have been thanks to the global computer chip shortage.
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/samsung-65 ... /6401722.p

If Samsung were still making 1080p TVs, they would be cheaper than 4K models of the same size. And if the computer chip shortage didn't exist, those 1080p TVs would be even cheaper.

With those facts in mind, Samsung could probably be selling a UN65D8000 TV today for $429.99, which would be a 90% price decrease from 2011.

If we assume the same rate of price deflation, the Varjo XR-3 will drop from its current price of $5,995 to $599 by 2031. The latter is about the same cost as a PS5 console now, meaning it will be affordable to average people.

As I've long said, the 2020s will be the decade when VR becomes visually convincing and goes mainstream. It won't be the domain of a small clique of hardcore gamers and technophiles in a few years.
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Re: "We Live In The Future": Post things that give you future shock!

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Indeed; this might even be the reason behind the sudden push towards the metaverse in the past few months. It certainly couldn't escape notice that the metaverse went from a niche topic to "Jim Cramer telling you to invest in it" virtually overnight (no pun intended).
Be it a conspiracy theory, but I for one believe that the big tech companies know exactly what's coming in the realm of XR. Because of the constant "VR is dead/just a fad/didn't live up to the hype" reporting of the past five years, a lot of people misunderstand where VR really is and just how far along it's come and our perception of just how much further it's going to go has been skewed by that genuine stagnation I mentioned. It honestly isn't going to take much more than the Oculus Quest 2 to make VR go truly mainstream.

These big companies I realize aren't trying to force the metaverse but rather get ahead of it because they realize that, as you said, this is the decade when everything will come together for XR. It's like with the iPhone. Once the tech reached that inflection point, everything just fell in place. Who knows what the iPhone of VR will be.

I remember comments on articles circa 2019 when mobile VR died that went "actually ALL of VR is dying." These comments aged very poorly and will only decay that much faster over the next five years
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funkervogt
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Re: "We Live In The Future": Post things that give you future shock!

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Yuli Ban wrote: Tue Nov 23, 2021 5:44 pm Indeed; this might even be the reason behind the sudden push towards the metaverse in the past few months. It certainly couldn't escape notice that the metaverse went from a niche topic to "Jim Cramer telling you to invest in it" virtually overnight (no pun intended).
Be it a conspiracy theory, but I for one believe that the big tech companies know exactly what's coming in the realm of XR. Because of the constant "VR is dead/just a fad/didn't live up to the hype" reporting of the past five years, a lot of people misunderstand where VR really is and just how far along it's come and our perception of just how much further it's going to go has been skewed by that genuine stagnation I mentioned. It honestly isn't going to take much more than the Oculus Quest 2 to make VR go truly mainstream.

These big companies I realize aren't trying to force the metaverse but rather get ahead of it because they realize that, as you said, this is the decade when everything will come together for XR. It's like with the iPhone. Once the tech reached that inflection point, everything just fell in place. Who knows what the iPhone of VR will be.

I remember comments on articles circa 2019 when mobile VR died that went "actually ALL of VR is dying." These comments aged very poorly and will only decay that much faster over the next five years
I agree with everything you said. Tech tycoons like Mark Zuckerberg have access to much better market analytics and tech forecasts than we do, but I strongly suspect they've some to the same conclusion we have about the rise of VR by 2030. Here is Zuckerberg's famous demo video:



At 10:29 he says the Metaverse won't be mainstream for another 5 - 10 years, and at 36:40 he says the Metaverse "might reach" a billion people in 10 years. That accords with the timeline we have agreed upon.

Another technology that will return this decade is augmented reality (AR) glasses. It was also unfairly dismissed as a forever-failure in the 2010s after Google Glass failed. Clearly, the problem was that it was a technology ahead of its time.
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Re: "We Live In The Future": Post things that give you future shock!

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For the heck of it, I did a little more research on the Varjo XR-3 goggles. Remarkably, in ALL of the review videos I found on YouTube, the people give it rave reviews and say its video footage looks lifelike. See for yourself:







The pixels are so small and so densely packed that the "screen door effect" is gone, and the renderings are so detailed that they inspire awe. Consider that the people in the videos I posted are hardcore VR users who are hard to impress.

This means we've reached a crucial milestone in virtual reality: There now exists a VR device that produces a visually lifelike and highly immersive virtual experience. The technological hurdle has been surmounted. If every person could try out a Varjo XR-3 for an hour, they'd probably want to own one.

The only stumbling block is the high price tag of $5,995, which makes it unaffordable for average people. However, as with every kind of electronic technology, the price will sharply decline, and within ten years, something equivalent to the Varjo XR-3 will cost no more than a PS5 game console. At that point, we should expect mass adoption of VR across the world. We're close to the inflection point.

The 2021-2031 timeframe will see the rise of a VR goggle that will be as seminal to video gaming as the Atari 2600, NES, GameBoy, or Playstation.
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Yuli Ban
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Re: "We Live In The Future": Post things that give you future shock!

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And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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Re: "We Live In The Future": Post things that give you future shock!

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And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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