
The Tricky Terrain of Virtual Reality - sebg
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/15/public-editor/new-york-times-virtual-reality-margaret-sullivan-public-editor.html?_r=0
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ryandamm
Complaints about journalistic standards failing in VR are just Luddism.

Complaints that Google Cardboard is terribly inferior VR, on the other hand,
are totally accurate. A point of view that was sadly missing from the short
piece. I'm working in VR, and have terribly mixed feelings about Cardboard. On
the one hand, it's great that it's pushing VR to the masses, quickly. I
understand the Cardboard app had one million downloads _before_ the Times
shipped their 'headsets.' That dwarfs all the Oculus DK2s by a factor of at
least 10.

On the other hand, Cardboard is terrible. It has a narrow field of view, huge
chromatic aberrations, and latency that will make some users sick. (Gear VR
has much lower latency, thanks to kilohertz-class MEMS sensors and some solid
engineering... nevermind it only has to run on a single piece of hardware.)

So yeah... part of me wishes Cardboard just didn't exist, and part of me
wishes it were just substantially better. Because a bad introduction to VR is
worse than a late introduction to VR. It's not like the VR hype cycle is
lacking for opinions anyway; this is a sector that could probably use fewer
semi-informed opinions.

(So to be clear: if you've tried Google Cardboard and nothing else, you
haven't really experienced 2015 VR. That's my position and I'm sticking to
it.)

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grahamburger
Here's the thing that I don't get about the demos I've tried for both
cardboard and Gear VR. Why is it so common to have media that isn't
stereoscopic? I was at a trade show a few weeks ago with a gear VR demo that
was just a video that I could look around in, but it was flat. Lots of the
live-action stuff for cardboard, like the Conan stuff, is the same way. It's
.. underwhelming, to say the least. I get that it's hard to to 360 videos that
are also stereoscopic, but it seems like a disservice to the medium to push
content with such a lack of depth. Is that something that will be overcome
soon? Or have I just been unlucky in the content I've seen? Sorry if this is
OT.

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AJ007
Where the devices mis-configured? That definitely doesn't make sense, there is
360 stereoscopic video.

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grahamburger
I don't think the devices were misconfigured. I've never seen recorded-video
content that is both stereoscopic and 360 view (meaning that you're able to
look around in the scene.) If you know of any that does both I'd love to check
it out!

~~~
RobotCaleb
I'm not sure how you'd capture such.

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Animats
360 degree news gathering should be valuable. Right now, there's too much
judgment involved in where the camera is pointed. If you capture a full circle
or hemisphere or sphere, you get everything. This works really well for drones
and surveillance cameras. Cameras have so much resolution now that you can
afford to take all that angle and extract a view later.

Except for very short range images, just skip the 3D. Beyond a few meters,
nobody can tell, anyway. Besides, this isn't "virtual reality". It's just
panoramic imagery.

