You are experiencing a fundamental failure of imagination. VR goggles do not necessarily have to remain large, face-blocking objects forever, nor do high-resolution 3D scanners have to remain large, expensive items.
Other people are thinking about the future. You are stuck in the present.
So your premise is that something you need to put in front of your eyes to see, won't be in front of your eyes at some point imaginary point in the future, and it doesn't matter if they are blocking your face because 3d face scanners, for which people will use them approximately once, will also become so cheap that people won't mind buying them in some imaginary point in the future.
Okay. Sure. I can't argue against arbitrary hypotheticals composed of arbitrarily defined technological sophistication measured against some indefinite point in the future with an unspecified price point that will always fit the future you happen to want.
Just like when I was six, and my friend kept changing the rules of the game we were playing so he always won, you got me.
I have many possible answers to your statements, such as an observation that we already have head-mounted displays that do not block faces, or that real-time 3d face scanning is a potential advancement, but you're such a depressingly cynical person to try and converse with, I don't know why I'd bother.
Your statement about when you were six is unwittingly apt. Such a concern with "rules" rather than nuance and discourse is befitting of a six year old, not the adult I optimistically presumed you to be.
I suppose this was inexcusably optimistic, given that I'd already read your statement that you would, seemingly regardless of circumstance, take a $2 billion offer and "retire to Malta", and feel no remorse for what effect that might have on anyone else.
Your worldview is sad. Sufficiently so that you have literally ruined my day. It's hard to forget having encountered such cynicism and conscious disdain for the possibilities open to us through technological and social advancement.
Sorry I didn't realize I was talking to somebody with a completely made up and fantastical worldview, where hard problems are instantly solvable with fairy dust and dream juice.
No wonder you feel like you can invent any future you wish whole cloth and in just a couple years, reality will bend to your will and products will appear on the market that bring your future to life at a price so cheap as to basically be commodities.
If thinking about how things work in the real world, identifying the problems and doing the hard grunt work to solve them is cynicism, I want some of what you're smoking. Because nothing happens as easy or as quick as you optimistically imply.
You've probably never brought a product to market, even one with zero R&D cost. Gone from idea to box on store shelves. It's hard. A few words of pithy advice and hard wishing don't cut it.
If it did we'd have hard-AI, FTL, jetpacks, and would live full-time in the metaverse from our isolation tanks on an orbital platform around Venus or Proxima Centauri fed only by our immersion in a pool of reconfigurable nanoparticle nutrients. We'd live lives as long as we care to in a post-monetary society.
We've been doing VR for the better part of 30 years and still barely understand the interaction models. I've used state-of-the-art haptic feedback systems intended for VR that are so new that there haven't even been articles written about them. They're the result of a hundred million dollars of nation state level R&D by teams of PhD researchers and they're still impossibly crude approximations of what real-life interaction feels like. The time-to-market on just this kind of device is expected to be 30 years at best. The expected cost in 2013 dollars when that happens is $150k-200k per limb.
Things have to be possible on the technology curve we're already on and have to respect physics. You can't waive your hands and insist that in your fantasy world it should just be possible. They have to be something that can be taken from nascent R&D to market at a cost consumers can actually buy. More importantly they have to be useful, non-fatiguing interfaces that don't take up half of somebody's living room. Most importantly, they have to be socially acceptable enough that the majority of the population won't feel weird participating.
Even the smallest of practical concerns, like will the headset smudge a woman's makeup can make or break something. Sweeping social change, where everybody on the planet suddenly stops what they've been doing for a lifetime (or in a larger context for thousands of years in their culture) and suddenly adapts to whatever fantasy product you've placed out are among the hardest things to push forward. Look at the near panic about somebody walking around with a near invisible screen on their face and a single low-resolution camera -- Google glass.
> such as an observation that we already have head-mounted displays that do not block faces
Like what, Glass? It also doesn't provide the necessary optics via physics to provide VR. If what you're talking about are two Glass-like displays, positioned like Glass, no matter the resolution or latency, you are no loner talking about VR and we're in a different discussion.
Glass isn't even capable of AR, let alone stereoscopic VR. So let's shift the displays down a couple inches. Then what's the point? I may as well just be looking at a 3d monitor. This buys me nothing and doesn't buy me convenience. You won't be walking around with this gear on, there's no camera to shoot your face and nobody wants to talk around with a quad copter taking video all day. And then you're literally obscuring your face because the displays are literally in front of your eyes. Physics is a ruleset we can't wave our hands at and get around.
> or that real-time 3d face scanning is a potential advancement
There's only two possible interaction models for the kind of virtual communication, the glass one which is trivial to demonstrate isn't a good model and the fully VR model which then requires you to be modeled and your conversation partner to be modeled to you each have something to look at. Presumably people will want to use their actual faces and a static model isn't very interesting to talk to. So you either need a model that's fully rigged and a device to recognize your expressions and translate them into controls for the rig.
Which we already do have, but it kind of sucks for any kind of general use.
Let's pretend for a minute that you don't have to markup somebody's face with dots to track, and some kind of near-term kinect-like system solves this.
Is this your vision of what people will be walking around with on their head? Except with two Google glass-like displays in front of their eyes?
Here's I did another mockup of your vision. Sorry for the shitty photoshop skills.
Is this really better than just video conferencing? Do I get anything out of this at all?
You can call me a cynic, and sorry if I killed your fantasy buzz, but not a single thing I've said here or before isn't true. Today or tomorrow.
Yeah sure, I read Snow Crash and got into the notion of the Metaverse. I think it's cool. I'm on board with the idea in principle. I'm just as upset as the next guy that the closest we've gotten to that vision is Second Life, EVE or WoW. It feels really close, but there are lots of gotchas that need lots of work to get past. Fantasy speculation isn't going to cut it.
Once again, your cynical rant focuses entirely on the present state of COTS technology with no allowance for advancement.
Your assumption about me, by the way, is entirely wrong. If you've brought a product to market, I'm sorry the experience turned you into a cynical curmudgeon. It only turned me into someone who had accomplished something hard. Things being hard is not a reason not to do them, a reason to act as if others won't do them, or to fail to look around and notice the advancements occurring all around us.
My impression of you is that the letters "VR" have short circuited your brian and caused you to forget that things have to still fit within the constraints of physics. Today, or with any possible future advancement. Hand waiving and "advancement" won't ever surmount these constraints. Building towards a future that can't ever happen is not a useful thing to do.
Things being hard are not a reason not to do things, things being stupid or impossible are.
The letters "VR" aren't even relevant to a belief that two-way 3D video chat is practical today, and will become more practical in the future.
You've bound yourself by artificial limitations on your thought process. Please do not act as if people who do not share those boundaries must be idiots.
Edit: By the way, since you brought it up, I've never read Snow Crash. I really don't know anything about it other than a brief synopsis I read at some point years ago. It's unwise to assume anything about my opinions comes from pop culture, as I'm largely disconnected from it.
How I think what will work? 3D video chat? You need a diagram for two cameras, a 3D monitor, and ordinary 3D glasses?
Or did you mean something else? Perhaps something you've been assuming I'm talking about because your response to abstract notions is hostility and arrogance, rather than a search for common ground and understanding? Perhaps you've assumed all this time that I've been saying a specific product, the Rift, could be used for face-to-face interaction, because you didn't ask, but instead called me a six-year-old idiot?
And now you have changed the rules again. Don't pretend like you're looking for common ground when you keep changing the fundamentals of the discussion.
The discussion is, oculus rift, 3d chat. Diagram it.
That may be what you want the discussion to be, because then you "win" according to some "rules" you wish existed, but it's not. Or wasn't, rather. The discussion is long over. It was over the moment you decided to be a dick.
So no then. You can't. Because it doesn't make any sense and it's a bad idea. I'm sorry you had to be the person who had the idea and I'm sorry I had to be the person to call you on it.
Okay, to be honest, everybody has this idea about VR. In your mind you see a glorious 3d representation of person you are chatting with, if your imagination is powerful enough, you can even feel the frame of the headset on your face and the wash of the display glow against the contours of your nose. But everybody who ever thinks about this idea, and is in a position to try and do it, runs into the same fundamental problem. Because in their imagination and their dreams, they're never in the place of the person they're chatting with, to see what they're seeing and they never realize that what the other person must see is them with a headset on...and then they realize the person they first saw in their dreams must have one on as well and the entire illusion shatters. You can't achieve the kind of telepresence we all wish for today or anytime in the near future.
I know you're struggling with accepting this scenario, but I've watched this same scenario play out for 30 years. There's nothing new about the Rift except it's consumer cheap. I've personally used systems better than the Rift and the moment you get the headset on, you realize VR telepresence, via video, won't ever work.
Nobody wants to have that kind of chat experience, so the only other possible mode is to do it with avatars.
The experience is obviously not what you or I are talking about though, even the first link which actually uses a VR headset (the Rift). But there's a very long list of well known issues to surmount that haven't been solved yet for very good reasons. No amount of "let's suppose that..." will make some of those very hard things a reality. At least not with the goal of something the general public will accept in enough volume to make it worthwhile.
Sorry to be a dick, but there really are unworkable ideas. You're a consultant, you know that you sometimes have to break bad news to the people you work for when they simply can't do something because it's not possible. You might come across as an asshole when you do, and people's feelings might get hurt, but somebody has to break the bad news.
Other people are thinking about the future. You are stuck in the present.