
Marc Andreessen: VR will be 1,000 times bigger than AR - intheairtonight
https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/05/marc-andreessen-audio-will-be-titanically-important-and-vr-will-be-1000-times-bigger-than-ar/
======
zapzupnz
Another article on technology in search of a problem to solve. Once again,
Silicon Valley just can't quite see the human factor in why VR won't be this
universal technology that everybody uses. Yes, it will have its place, but
that place won't be in _every_ home.

Prolonged stretches of being unable to see the real world, invoking feels of
fear, anxiety, and uncertainty are completely alien to those who work in huge,
warehouse-sized, empty rooms in secure facilities, trying out what they assume
everybody will want to put in their ornately decorated front rooms.

There's a disconnect between the tech industry and the "real world", so to
speak, and it really makes you appreciate companies who can see the limits of
certain technologies in certain domains. Take Apple, working to make AR easy
and friendly on iOS; if, one day, VR takes off, then Apple is already prepared
with plenty of machine learning and physics frameworks.

Until then, they present AR as the next best thing to VR in a safe,
controlled, and non-threatening way; we can see the real world very clearly
both through our devices and around them, we don't need to pay for
prescription headsets or eyewear, and we are all free to put our iPhones and
iPads away at any time.

~~~
davidivadavid
VR technology is the ultimate escapist technology to be used as a platform for
entertainment. It's just a matter of time before it replaces TV. I can't see
why it wouldn't have a place in every home (like TV).

~~~
paulcole
TV isn't a dedicated activity that gets 100% of my attention.

When I have my TV on, I can still cook, flip through catalogs, look at my
partner, write emails on my iPad, etc.

~~~
zapzupnz
Even my grandparents can have a chat over the top of the boring part of a
programme or eat their dinner whilst watching the news.

Nothing sounds more tedious than having a conversation with somebody whose
attention is being drawn by something that only one of us can see.

~~~
dhh2106
Couldn't the whole family enter the same VR environment? Why limit it to just
yourself?

Then you'd be free to chat over the top of the boring bits...

I agree that replicating the full social context of TV will be difficult

~~~
barbecue_sauce
Because they could just share a screen in real reality?

~~~
TeMPOraL
Iff they're in the same place.

Try that with relatives living in three different places across the country.

------
nostrademons
The only condition where I'd see this being true is if VR leads to "good as
there" telepresence, where you can feel like you're having the sort of
spontaneous conversations that arise from physical presence at a workplace.

Telepresence done right would be an absolutely huge economic boon - it
subsumes transportation, housing, national boundaries, and lots of education
and training. If you could get the same sort of "all the web experts in the
room" like you get in Silicon Valley or "all the electronics experts in the
room" like you get in Shenzhen, but do so where you _literally have all the
experts_ (rather than just those who live in those cities), you'd get rid of a
lot of economic inefficiencies like houses costing 40x more in Silicon Valley
than Detroit.

Failing that, I see it as a niche product that'd revolutionize the
entertainment industries but doesn't change much outside of them.

~~~
mrguyorama
I love using VR, even for long (3 or more hours straight, no breaks) periods,
but dear lord would I hate using a VR headset to pretend I'm in an office.

Open offices are trash in the first place (at least for me), headsets do not
have enough resolution to pretend to have a screen in front of me, and even if
they did, it would likely produce more eyestrain than just looking at an
actual HD screen in front of you.

~~~
sl1ck731
Maybe wearing it all day as an office is a little overkill. But being able to
collaborate even in front of some kind of 3D whiteboard room would be a killer
for fully remote teams like mine. Drawing on paint-like sites or with clunky
web apps has been one of my biggest pains that VR controllers, if done right,
could be huge for me.

Maybe with enough presence remote would become even more commonplace. A man
can dream.

~~~
radiorental
Two thoughts, based on evaluating remote collaboration tech.

1) Writing on virtual whiteboard in VR just doesn't feel right, there's no
tactile feedback. It's doable but doesn't beat a real whiteboard (nothing
beats a real whiteboard)

2) Observe people working at a whiteboard. It's predominantly an asynchronous
one to many form of communication. Multiple people writing on the same board
at the same time isn't how we communicate with each other.

The best in class tool I've found to date is Microsoft's Whiteboard app
running on their 84" Surface Hub. Anyone who has the budget I highly recommend
taking a look at it.

The app itself is free on windows 10.

~~~
jacobolus
> _Multiple people writing on the same board at the same time isn 't how we
> communicate with each other._

Chalkboards are actually a great way to communicate and collaborate in small
groups, and have been for a long time one of the main forms of communication
in professional mathematics and some other technical fields.

The chalkboard is a very democratic medium, because anyone can more-or-less
produce the same output, it is easy to add notes over / adjacent to other
people’s writing (including formulas, diagrams, ...), and the possibilities
are very free and open-ended. This stands in contrast to fancy typography and
bespoke technical diagrams, which are often slow to produce, difficult to
modify, and require great expertise to do well.

Using a chalkboard well as a collaborative thinking tool takes practice
though.

~~~
barbecue_sauce
He was saying that we don't communicate via everybody writing on the board
simultaneously, not that its not a valid form of communication in groups.
People take turns.

~~~
jacobolus
What he/she said is that “it's predominantly an asynchronous one to many form
of communication”.

And it is true that this is the way many people use whiteboards, as a kind of
presentation tool rather than a thinking tool. But that is largely down to
lack of practice with the chalkboard/whiteboard as a personal, one-on-one, or
small group tool.

There are plenty of people who successfully use white boards as a tool for
routine technical conversations in small groups, with multiple participants
writing on the same board.

“Not everyone is writing literally simultaneously” would be a vacuous and
uninteresting statement, so I’ll give the previous poster the benefit of the
doubt that he/she was saying something more substantial. No kind of
conversation involves every interlocutor literally simultaneously
talking/writing in the same space at the same time: that would just be a
cacophony of monologues, not a conversation at all.

~~~
jungler
This observation is crucial to how we approach collaborative technology,
though: the assumed goal has always been to achieve lower latency and finer
granularity of changes to create the experience of simultaneous editing with
instant feedback.

What this means in practice is that we have a lot of software that makes it
easy to bring a group of strangers in to pseudonoymously vandalize a
whiteboard by drawing dicks on it - a true "cacophony of monologues." See
also: most comment threads.

~~~
jacobolus
Having the technical capability to all speak/write at once is wonderful. It
cuts friction in the conversation. (Think of the difference between a phone
call and a sequence of voice memos.)

That doesn’t mean people collaborating won’t be taking turns as a practical
matter, enforced by social convention.

------
partiallypro
I respect Marc, but I totally disagree. AR has so many practical business uses
that VR just doesn't have. Look at the AR demos Microsoft has produced for
industry...they are super impressive. And they work along with sensors and
other IoT devices. This is for a headset that is in its infancy.

The only way I can see VR having higher value is gaming. AR certainly will not
be a gaming device (imo) but HUD to display valuable information is the
future. Once it's at a state of being compact it can penetrate the consumer
market, right now it really only has business uses.

VR headsets are kind of already ready for gaming...but who do you know that
games with one of the sets? It's few and far between. Obscuring your vision
entirely just makes people feel silly and vulnerable. I also think gaming is a
sedentary activity, people aren't really that interested in moving around. If
they were, they'd go play paintball.

~~~
mattnewport
VR is already seeing significant adoption in business for training. Anywhere
where training on the real thing is difficult or dangerous, where the real
equipment is expensive and / or hard to transport or where the real training
scenario is difficult to recreate physically. Even where these factors don't
hold very strongly, the combination of immersion and repeatability has value
over traditional training approaches.

We're seeing success using VR for surgical training but it's also seeing use
for training in aerospace (Boeing both for pilots and maintenance engineers,
NASA for astronauts), factory work (Volkswagen), sports (NFL) and retail
(Walmart). Training and education is going to be a huge market for VR and for
many scenarios VR is better than AR.

~~~
snovv_crash
Another big one is mining. Often the machinery doesn't have a duplicate, and
the mine loses millions of dollars per hour of downtime, operating on already
thin margins. Reducing maintenance times and risks by having the apprentices
practice first in VR so they aren't a burden on the experienced technicians is
a huge opportunity.

------
bepotts
If the past two years have shown me anything, it's that people are becoming
skeptical of the technologist mantra that "technology will make people's lives
better." Not always; and with Apple introducing Screen Time and people trying
to figure out how to "break" from their cell phone and social media usage, I
think anybody who believes that the mass market wants to live in some VR
simulation is tone deaf.

Maybe AR will never be like _Minority Report_ , but I think if AR could get to
a point where no goggles are needed, or if the equipment is light enough to
not be a burden to the user (unlike VR headsets), then I think AR will be much
bigger than VR. The average user just don't want that crap on their face and
they don't want to live in a simulation like so many in the Bay Area would
like to believe.

When people talk about the Bay Area/Silicon Valley monoculture/hivemind, I
immediately think of VR enthusiasts. I'd also throw cryptocurrencies and
blockchain enthusiasts into this category as well. Both of those technologies
solved "problems" that the general population wouldn't agree to being problems
in the first place.

~~~
jameslevy
If you asked people before the age of cars how to improve transportation,
they'd ask for a faster horse.

That being said, I am skeptical of the claim that VR will be orders of
magnitude more popular than AR, simply because humans instinctually do not
like to have their vision occluded.

~~~
Skunkleton
True, but the is also a flipside. Technologists solved the transportation
problem, but introduced health and urban planning problems as a result. The
point is that people are becoming more savvy at spotting the downsides of
technologies. In particular, using VR will probably result in more sedentary
hours, which is something that people seem to want to move away from.

~~~
Impossible
The most popular VR games require significantly more physical activity than
traditional video games ([https://vrscout.com/news/man-loses-138-pounds-beat-
saber/](https://vrscout.com/news/man-loses-138-pounds-beat-saber/)), so if VR
does take off it could be a solution for sendentary hours, not a cause.

------
stuart78
I'd like to strongly challenge this line from MA: "I just think that’s only
true for people who live in a really interesting place in the real world. But
only something like .1 percent and 1 percent of people on Earth live in a
place where they wake up every morning and think, Wow, there are so many
interesting things to see."

I'm not really sure what he means by 'interesting', but I think it captures an
arrogance we in the Silicon Valley can have about the rest of the world.

Each town region has varying levels of interestingness depending on ones own
depth of engagement with that community. A tourist might be more interested in
the history of a place or landmarks (and in my read, this seems to be MA's
working meaning of 'interesting'). But a local has many more things to be
interested in and ways of participating in the community. Whether the store is
open, how to walk to an unfamiliar house, etc.

Whether or not AR is the right technology to help with this I do not know, but
people tend to find their local environments more interesting than this gives
them credit for.

As a parting thought, I don't read this as a statement MA put a ton of thought
into, so I actually chalk it up to imprecision rather than malice. But
approaching the world with an assumption that it is not interesting is a great
way to force the conclusion (if only for yourself).

~~~
mondo9000
People already choose the Internet (Facebook, Fortnite, or reddit) over their
real-life communities, just consider how they allocate their time, Internet
wins by a big margin.

------
the_decider
Everyone here is too shy to state the obvious; VR poronography will soon be a
billion dollar industry that will completely rewire how we as a society seek
physical and emotional intimicy. [http://www.wired.com/story/coming-
attractions-the-rise-of-vr...](http://www.wired.com/story/coming-attractions-
the-rise-of-vr-porn/amp)

~~~
tomp
Unless the porn actors can actually touch you, there's not a lot of difference
between VR porn and "just" 2D TV/computer-screen porn...

~~~
kennyadam
At the risk of outing myself as a VR porn consumer...

VR porn is completely different to watching regular porn. With POV 3D VR porn,
you are literally there, present, in the room. It's something that needs to be
experienced to be fully understood. Obviously, like all porn, it won't be for
everyone, but it's not something you should just dismiss as more-of-the-same.

The brain is a funny thing and can be tricked really easily.

------
nwhatt
The reasoning doesn't really make sense:

> But only something like .1 percent and 1 percent of people on Earth live in
> a place where they wake up every morning and think, Wow, there are so many
> interesting things to see. So for everyone who doesn’t already live on a
> college campus or in Silicon Valley or in a major other city, the new
> environments we’re going to be able to create in VR will inherently be much
> more interesting

Both AR and VR aren't just about entertainment. Also sounds kind of
pretentious to say that VR will more interesting than where 99% of people
live.

~~~
adventured
This is Andreessen speaking from his belief in a concept he borrowed from Beau
Cronin that they call reality privilege, and how VR can address it.

You can see Andreessen discussing it at the start of the recode / Code 2017
interview with Reid Hoffman:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZhBVBBBNs0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZhBVBBBNs0)

~~~
Animats
Oh, you mean from this article by Beau Cronin?[1] And this one? [2] "Andreesen
saying Harris' thoughts reflect the "reality privilege" that elites have, and
that most people don't have better experiences away from the internet."

[2] is worth a read. Andreesen on the nature of reality is strange.

[1] [https://medium.com/@beaucronin/unbundling-reality-
fa406f66ab...](https://medium.com/@beaucronin/unbundling-reality-fa406f66ab7)
[2] [https://www.pcmag.com/article/354005/marc-andreesen-and-
reid...](https://www.pcmag.com/article/354005/marc-andreesen-and-reid-hoffman-
at-code-we-dont-have-enou)

------
gfodor
Currently "AR" and "VR" are used to differentiate to separate (but mostly
decoupled) distinctions:

\- Hardware: VR means full eye buffer coverage of both eyes with no
transparent glass, AR means partial eye coverage with all pixels sharing
visual field with incoming world photons.

\- UX: VR typically means full environmental replacement with basic room and
body tracking and AR means real world augmentation with virtual entities.

In the long run these are separate concerns. We are either wearing headsets
with transparent surfaces or we aren't in the long run. This seems clear will
have a 0/1 resolution. For the UX side, it seems unrelated -- presumably you
should be able to move up and down the spectrum of full environmental override
at any moment.

In the hardware sense, I expect VR style opaque hardware to win (with
passthrough cameras to enable them to simulate transparent glass perfectly.)
In the software sense the distinction becomes irrelevant. Through the lens of
hardware full eye-covering visors seem to be likely to beat glass on the
capability/cost curve readily over the next 5 years so my bet is on Jordi-like
visors not glasses for daily drivers.

~~~
mncharity
Yes, there's so much confusion about AR vs VR

Imagine wearing an "AR" HMD, a nice HMD with an LCD occlusion layer so it can
render black. A black dinosaur is perched on your bookshelf. Great AR. Now you
turn around. Half your room is gone, replaced by the rolling hills of a
Cretaceous lowland. Great VR. But your laptop seems unchanged, sitting on a
Cretaceous rock shelf where your desk was, next to a tree stump where your
chair was. Great...err, hmm. You turn halfway back. On your left is hills; on
your right is a wall and a bookshelf with a dinosaur. Are you doing VR or AR?
Both? Half and half? One eye each?

Sigh. We so need to disrupt the technology society uses for thoughtful
analysis and its dissemination.

Or say I'm wearing my VR HMD. But it's showing only my laptop's desktop. Is
that still VR? My custom environment has a spatial geometry, and a response to
head motion, that is variously _a_ physical. I joke that VR is in its user-
onboarding skeuomorphic UI phase, and I'm much more interested in expert UIs
for XR... without the "R". Resemblance to reality as UI design smell. Is that
still Virtual and/or Augmented _Reality_? There's a camera ducktaped to the
front of my HMD, providing a video passthrough background. So is that AR? What
if I cut side windows in the headset blinders so I can use the real world for
balance (old laptop with integrated graphics). Is that AR yet?

Unfortunately, VR HMDs still have the unblurry resolution of a 1980's VGA
monitor, so I take off the HMD and look at my laptop screen. Is _that_ AR? No?
But I'm wearing anaglyph or LCD shutter glasses, and I'm headtracking, so
there's fixed-in-realspace 3D content. Is that AR? But what if my desk has
several displays, all doing synced high-resolution (but gappy) 3D, across much
of my field of view. Is that AR yet?

The XR+ design space seems quite broad and rich, but much underappreciated.

~~~
gfodor
Well put. I think the moment of "?R takeoff" is when the first person manages
to wear a consumer grade standalone VR headset for most of their day using
passthrough. It will probably be an experience for nobody but those with the
most hardened stomachs, but it will be an existence proof that you can then
build software that can assume you have a raster buffer between your retinas
and the incident world photons throughout your day that is 'full-cover' (ie
every incident photon to your eyes is software proxied and modulated
optionally by world photon sensor information via code, not physical
properties like transparent glass.) That is basically the "final visual
platform" for compute imho. Transparent AR glasses, if anything, are clearly a
transitionary technology since they do not provide full software control over
photon delivery to the eyes. (Also, I expect this event to happen quietly and
unrecognized in late 2019 probably buried in a forum thread somewhere.)

From there, it will just take the hacker community to build apps that provide
some type of 10x augmentation by a fully software-proxied visual system and a
little bit of cultural normalization of it (probably within circles of
teens/kids) to incentivize the acceleration of development of passthrough
visor hardware that works better, is smaller, and has longer lasting
batteries. But these will be mostly linear engineering problems, except
perhaps the frame prediction algorithms needed to deal with camera sensor
latency. Whereas the path to a set of AR glasses that mask out the world with
full FoV seems a much more theoretical future that stretches the limits of
known physics, this seems to be imminently becoming the problem of arranging
bits not atoms with the arrival of fairly capable consumer standalone VR
headsets with workable passthrough cameras.

If you think about it hard enough, if you woke up in 5 years and there was a
market with good AR glasses and good VR goggles, but nobody tied the software
together to enable all-day VR goggle wear via passthrough, clearly someone
would do it and suddenly those devices are insanely more capable than the AR
glass equivalent since they can take over your entire visual field _and_
deliver all the same applications of the glasses. So it seems pretty inductive
to me, if you buy into a few fairly simple assumptions, that this is our
future, assuming that a software-proxied visual system can deliver value to
daily life. The only counter argument (and in fact, one of the admitted theses
for many people working on AR glasses) is that wearing a VR visor all day will
make you look silly -- sometimes that's enough to tip things over for quite a
while, but in the limit people are going to converge on what improves their
life the most on net. (See: the segway has finally had it's day with the
arrival of cheap electric scooters.)

Full-cover, rasterized vision seems to be the end game for how our visual
system will interface with software systems.

------
jedberg
VR has the same problem 3D TV has -- it's an all or nothing experience. You
can't just casually watch a 3D movie or casually participate in a VR
experience while doing something else. You have to be 100% dedicated to it.

Some people like that. People who play COD for three hours at a time are the
kind of people that would do that.

But that's not most people. For example, I have kids. I can't do anything at
home for more than a few minutes at a time without interruption. I will never
be able to enjoy VR at home, at least not for 10ish years until my kids learn
to go do their own things.

I just don't see VR taking off, much like 3D TV failed to take off. Some
people love it, but most people ignore it.

------
jerf
Isn't it already? VR isn't huge, but it's definitely non-zero and there's a
plausible case to be made for more growth in the forseeable future. AR appears
to be indistinguishable from zero right now, and the case for growth in the
_forseeable_ future remains fairly hard to make. ("Forseeable" is a bit of a
fuzzy term, but let's call it 10 years for concreteness. In 50 years, sure, AR
everywhere, but on a timeframe even a long-term investor thinks on? Not sure I
see it happening.)

~~~
msbarnett
> Isn't it already? VR isn't huge, but it's definitely non-zero and there's a
> plausible case to be made for more growth in the forseeable future. AR
> appears to be indistinguishable from zero right now

What are we considering AR and VR here? Pokémon Go is an AR game and seems to
have a player base that’s several times larger than the playerbase of every
existing VR game lumped together.

~~~
rifung
Sure but I'd argue the success of Pokemon Go is not because of AR but in spite
of AR.

I am very skeptical people play Pokemon Go for it's AR integration considering
other AR games aren't nearly as popular and frankly the gameplay itself is
pretty poor.

Pokemon Go seems popular because it's Pokemon on mobile.

~~~
zapzupnz
And the game is also unplayable until you turn the AR off, unless you love
wasting all your Pokéballs because one arm can't quite flick the balls in the
right direction while the other arm awkwardly holds the phone just so.

------
sambroner
The justification for VR is pretty depressing. Could be true, I know many
people who enjoy losing themselves in digital worlds, but the idea of escaping
so purposefully just doesn't sit right.

"I just think [AR as the more useful technology] is only true for people who
live in a really interesting place in the real world... So for everyone who
doesn’t already live on a college campus or in Silicon Valley or in a major
other city, the new environments we’re going to be able to create in VR will
inherently be much more interesting."

~~~
Animats
Did he see "Ready Player One" too many times?

We have virtual worlds now. Second Life. Sansar. VRChat. Sinespace. High
Fidelity. The technology is good enough that we can see what they're like.
They're OK, but not compelling. They mostly appeal to people with too much
free time. Like Everquest, in the early years.

We even know what a fully immersive full body VR experience is like. Lucasfilm
and Disney have one running at Disneyland.[1] They have good cordless VR gear,
good position tracking, and a custom-built space you can move around. The
space is just blank walls with an occasional prop you can touch, and it lines
up with the VR.

They have a neat trick to make the space seem bigger. It turns out that in VR
you can get people to turn a little while they think they're walking in a
straight line, if you slowly rotate the visual world. So you can make the
players go in big circles and think they're covering a lot of distance.

This is close to the "holodeck". It works now. And it's just another Disney
ride.

(Is Marc Andressen thinking of the Ready Player One model as a way to allow
the real world to suck more while keeping the peons happy? Only the 1% have a
good real life, everyone else goes on line and pretends.)

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfD28LYYwWM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfD28LYYwWM)

~~~
matt_m
I got to try the VOID Star Wars attraction shown in the video (although it
might have been set up in a smaller space than the Disneyland installation).

It was a short, scripted, minimally interactive experience. The hand and prop
tracking were pretty glitchy and somewhat immersion-breaking. The equipment
was heavy and ridiculously cumbersome (even compared to current consumer VR
headsets). I'm sure the cost/work of setting up a system like that is
basically prohibitive too.

I don't think it's a great reference point for predicting the VR market in the
next 5 years or so, as the cost comes down and more polished and inexpensive
mass-market systems come out (like the Oculus Quest) that are cordless with
good tracking.

Millions of people spend huge amounts of time playing games on tiny rectangles
they hold in their hands. I think it's overly skeptical to assume they won't
want holodecks, if the cost is $400 and the HW/SW isn't terrible.

I expect it'll at least be an increasingly less-niche gaming platform as not-
terrible standalone devices come out (I tried a tennis game that was pretty
fun, I'm not a gamer but I could see myself playing some VR games if it was a
way to get real exercise).

The current non-gaming uses like corporate/sports/military training probably
will grow too as the quality and ergonomics improve.

I'd really like to try a system with good body/face/eye tracking. I think that
is kind of the minimum for social applications with really huge appeal. It's
hard to get an idea of if it's compelling or not (or how far away it is, what
needs to be improved, etc) without trying it though.

------
bacon_waffle
It seems to me that VR is, in some sense, inherently awkward in ways that AR
isn't. In either, your real body is in the real world, but VR disables most of
the mechanisms that you have built-in to cope with the real world. With VR
it'll always be necessary to deal with interruptions from the real world,
bumping in to things, looking like a flailing weirdo to Real or Augmented
Reality participants... In contrast, AR lets you decide on the appropriate
amount of virtual.

VR has been around longer simply because technology allowed for primitive VR
long before AR became possible. That means we've collectively had longer to
think about how it might develop, and so it is easier to imagine uses for VR
than with the relatively new AR.

My bet is that AR will be bigger than VR, by approximately a factor of 904.

------
fidla
Marc is sometimes wrong (he thought Google Glass would be a huge hit). I think
he's wrong here

~~~
krrrh
Let’s not forget this gem which with a straight face placed blockchain at the
same level as the PC or the entire internet:

[http://blog.pmarca.com/2014/01/22/why-bitcoin-
matters/](http://blog.pmarca.com/2014/01/22/why-bitcoin-matters/)

Obviously he played a big role in Mosaic and Netscape back in the day, and
a16z has also been quite innovative, but he gets way too much attention when
he’s just talking his book.

------
fasteddie
My unpopular opinion (based on reading this thread) is that VR's killer app
will be sports. Sports is a great fit:

-Once set up, it should be very straightforward to get cameras set up in a repeatable way. Venues have the money to set this up

-Fans willing to pay lots of money for an immersive experience

-No need to deal with many of the issues around the user needing to move around

The biggest challenges will be getting processing/rendering good and quick
enough to respond in real time. I personally can easily imagine a future where
you can buy the equivalent of a front row seat to a Giants game as part of a
season pass just as you would from mlb.tv

~~~
awad
The NBA is already rolling this out with VR games on League Pass and from what
I gather it's getting to be pretty slick. I 100% agree that sports is the
killer app here and am surprised to see it barely mentioned.

------
bigtunacan
With all of the naysayers on here about VR I have to wonder how many of you
have used the Oculus Rift or the HTC Vive for an extended period of time?

Even in it’s current state it’s pretty damn impressive. If it never moves
beyond a platform for video gaming it is still a multi billion dollar
industry.

------
theothermkn
Oh, dear. Here goes more karma.

The veneer of innovation over the monopolies of the FAANG companies is pretty
thin on most days, but VR and AR are two things that cause my suspension of
disbelief to collapse entirely. Can I get up to pee while "immersed" in VR?
Can I find my popcorn? Does anybody realize that the AR demos online are
showing phone screens, and not the reality that you will see without a screen
in front of you? (On some level, on that last, they do. But the hype seems
built upon an off-by-one error in representation.)

We are no longer in an age of innovation and disruption with regard to the
Internet. It has been thoroughly colonized, and any innovation will be bought
by one of the big fish, in order to prevent the disruption of fairly lucrative
relative monopolies that face no, or only the most glacial, threats from
commoditization. VR is not it. AR is not it. From here on out, it's ML to try
to improve on k-nearest-neighbor with k==1 to drive recommendation engines.

Much like the Moon Program propaganda informs outmoded (what I regret to call)
virtue signaling around STEM, propaganda from the era of the rise of the FAANG
group drives the same among ink-spillers around The Next Big Disruptive
Innovation.

Here's a hint: Whatever the next disruptive thing is, it's not going to come
to you via TechCrunch relaying Andreesen's ravings about which thing is bigger
than what. If it happens at all. It's entirely possible that nothing will rise
from the ashes of Facebook, for example.

------
SketchySeaBeast
Funny enough I'm most excited for more stuff like this:

[https://store.steampowered.com/app/382110/Virtual_Desktop/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/382110/Virtual_Desktop/)

Infinite window space surrounding me? Yes please. Let me cascade those 42
windows I have open trying to track everywhere this stupid JavaScript callback
goes so I that I can lay it all out in front of me, and let me keep Netflix
going in the upper left for giggles.

------
CharlesW
For anyone who's had time to listen, do we know what he means by "bigger"?

To me it seems obvious that AR will be _far_ bigger then VR as AR becomes
"ambient" technology while VR remains "somewhere you go", but I'm not sure
what his metric is.

------
mattmar96
Two weeks later: "Marc Andreesen Launches VR Startup _____"

Personally, I hope VR doesn't catch on. Reminds me of the humans in WALL-E.
Like others in this thread have said, VR at that scale would almost certainly
be founded on addiction. No thanks..

------
efsavage
Active usecases (games, design, meetings) will tend towards VR and passive
usecases (news, info overlay, prompts) will tend towards AR. There's plenty of
money to be made in both of those.

------
CM30
VR will certainly be big, but it'll be a while until it gets there. What we
have at the moment is... not that. It's a nice tech demo with a few uses for
gaming and training purposes, but it's a far cry away from what people would
want to use on a more regular basis.

When it gets to the point of direct brain connections and input controlled
directly by your mind/body (like say, The Matrix or many fictional works with
'lotus eater machines'), then that's where the market will take off. Gaming
would see its biggest tech leap since 3D became a big thing in the 90s, theme
parks would see a boom in activity, remote working would become virtually
indistinguishable from the real thing and the internet would see a bit of a
revolution too.

But while clunky helmets and controllers/mice/whatever are needed, it's not
gonna take off or go mainstream.

~~~
ricardobeat
The current crop of VR software is way past the ‘tech demo’ phase. Once the
new Oculus comes along ditching the cables and PC requirement, things will
move very, very fast.

------
kleiba
I personally think that VR will go the way of 3D television...

~~~
Animats
So do I. Some "thought leader"/pundit threatened to kick me off his Facebook
page a year ago for saying that.

~~~
wuliwong
What about AR? I've heard a lot of people make the 3D/VR comparison
prediction. I think it's reasonable to think VR and AR could have very
different fates.

------
eanzenberg
"If you can do things overlaid over the real world, that should be inherently
more interesting than having to construct a synthetic world.

I just think that’s only true for people who live in a really interesting
place in the real world. But only something like .1 percent and 1 percent of
people on Earth live in a place where they wake up every morning and think,
Wow, there are so many interesting things to see."

I disagree with this sentiment and it really portrays SV elitism, aka "most of
the world is a shithole except where me and my friends live, so I'm compelled
to show 99% of the rest of humanity what they're missing." It's also wrong
from a business sense, where "ARish" type product like Airpods, Apple Watch
and other passive product are doing well globally.

------
Prophasi
I think his point about podcasts and other audio is on the money, but it
undercuts his argument for VR:

> _They have this Bluetooth thing in their ear, and they’ve got a hat, and
> that’s 10 hours on the forklift and that’s 10 hours of Joe Rogan._

In other words, audio is successful because it's used as a complement to what
we're already doing, not an alternative to it. We can't quit our jobs to spend
10 hours in VR, but it's easy to imagine lightweight AR HUDs for everything
from entertainment (e.g. impromptu podcast menus) to specialized on-the-job
uses.

Seems like AR will require inherently lower friction and less trade-off with
the real world.

~~~
sixothree
I feel like AR would fit better inside of my company than VR. I imagine a day
when we sit around a desk and create "things" in a shared 3d space that we can
all touch and interact with.

To be clear I am very much hoping AR can replace the white board.

------
chrshawkes
Why do we care what this guy says? He wore Google glasses while promising us
Bitcoin was the way of the future. Who cares what he thinks? AR isn't that big
besides SnapChat and Pokemon Go so why is this news?

------
mrguyorama
Apparently HTC's Vive division had a poor 2018, and that kind of made me
afraid. I dropped $600 on my Vive kit and absolutely love it, but if the
company cuts it off, I don't think I have any way to continue to play VR stuff
as mine deteriorates or breaks, or no upgrade path (if I need one)

I'm not convinced the kind of VR I enjoy is going to become mainstream, and
therefore I'm not sure it will be anything other than a tiny market

~~~
wuliwong
Hmmm...I saw another commenter mention that they think VR will go the way of
3D televisions. I really doubt that. I can't imagine anyone was really ever in
love with 3D televisions. There is a modestly different experience vs 2D but
nothing substantial. I've honestly always thought 3D "looked worse" than
regular television. I'm not sure if there's something funny with my eyes or
other people experience it but it never looked as clear.

In contrast, for some users, VR really is amazing. It is substantially
different from the experience of interacting with a computer screen. Possibly
oculus or the htc vive are a littler early to market but having the entire
class of technology go away is unlikely in my opinion.

It is interesting to think though that 3D still seems to be popular in
theaters (which I also do not enjoy). I wonder if "going the same way as 3D"
could mean that VR will be something that is generally experienced at theme
parks or theaters or something but not be a technology that average consumers
own?

------
matchagaucho
That's kind of like saying e-Cigarettes will be 1,000 larger than tobacco
cigarettes.

VR at that scale is premised on an unhealthy addiction.

------
hguhghuff
I wanted to love vr but it literally makes me sick even to think about it.

~~~
theothermkn
Slightly off topic, but I can't play first person shooters--or, heck, even
Minecraft--because I get motion sick from simulated motion with no actual
motion. It's so bad that when I used to try to play, I'd continue to be sick
if I watched, after I'd get sick and stop, someone play from across the room.

The odd thing is that I don't get seasick, which is (mostly) from actual
motion with little, no, or confused apparent motion. Go figure.

------
ummonk
Fitness market and video game market both have ~30-40 billion in revenue in
the US. That suggests that there is roughly similar appetite for real life vs.
fantasy.

------
dmode
I sincerely hope and pray it doesn't. I have already ruined my life with a
smartphone to the point that without a phone I feel powerless and rudderless
and am constantly fidgeting. A smartphone is also toxic in surfacing constant
negativity. I find myself endlessly reading Reddit. Can't imagine what a world
where all of us are wearing around funky headsets and interacting with virtual
Avatars will look like. Terrifying.

------
sachinprism
I think VR's first breakthrough would be in boring service sector jobs. Most
of us have interesting surroundings and dont want to "escape from it" but if
you work in a boring service sector jobs like a call center, VR tech, even if
imperfect would be an improvement over the current surrounding. Add a bit a
gamification and people may actually like these jobs a bit

------
wwarner
Whatever happened to the decentralized ideal of ad-hoc networks? Shouldn't we
expect a much bigger payoff and a much better world if investments actually
made the _real_ world better for the consumer? What if VR made the wearer
smarter, stronger, nicer, wiser? Is that really so hard to imagine, given that
it's the bare minimum we expect from technology today?

------
navinsylvester
OT - on personal front i am not at all interested in wearable or gadgets like
echo/home. Not against any advancement in those region but look at the impact
smart phones alone has had and now we had to enforce rules like no smartphones
on the dinner table. Not sure what not to turn off to have a personal connect
in future.

------
acconrad
I'm not sure I agree. AR is like a HUD for your life. It didn't take off with
Google Glass but I still believe it will improve one's current life; only a
subset of folks want to truly escape virtually. VR is still very cool, but I
can't see it being as widely adopted (or practical) as AR.

~~~
dragonwriter
> AR is like a HUD for your life. It didn't take off with Google Glass

Google Glass isn't AR. AR is not a limited look-up display, it’s 3-D overlay
on your field of vision with awareness of location and, ideally, recognition
of and interaction with objects in your field of vision. In the limit case it
_subsumes_ VR, since the generated imagery can replace as much or as little of
the real imagery as needed for the application.

------
quantombone
A VR system that lets you walk around your house will have to detect the
tables/chairs/walls in your living space and place some kind of digital
content in their place so you don’t bump into stuff. VR without perception
won’t work. That kind of #VR is essentially #MixedReality

------
pmontra
> AR and VR are going to work, and that we’re going to have heads-up displays
> that are going to remove the need for what we have now, which is this little
> pane of glass that we’re expected to experience the whole world through

Any idea what kind of head up displays he's talking about?

------
aznpwnzor
Reading between the lines, I think what he's really saying is that outsourced
work will be bolstered by VR which will have much cheaper tooling.

Imagine sweatshop of 30k mechanical turks. VR makes more sense there than AR.

------
peter303
I heard Jaron said something like this back in the 1980s. Glad I didnt hold my
breath.

We probably need the Avatar of VR- a storytelling where stereo was good and
added to the story.

------
lj3
I think 3d holographic projections will be bigger than both.

~~~
ZitchDog
Isn't that AR?

~~~
adventured
That's PR, projected reality. With AR you don't actually project anything into
the physical world that can be eg observed by unaided eyesight.

~~~
bacon_waffle
Thanks for that - I've been tinkering with a Looking Glass over the last few
evenings, and had found the relationship between it and VR to be awkward to
articulate.

------
rdlecler1
Observation: Marc talks about the importance of wearables but is wearing what
could be a Rolex rather than an iWatch.

------
coldtea
Considering that AR is almost irrelevant (aside a few fads like Pokemon Go)
that's a pretty low bar...

------
yumraj
Both VR and AR are going to go the way of 3D TV. While there is definitely
initially a novelty factor, it wears off pretty quickly.

The holographic display technology, such as the LookingGlass
([https://lookingglassfactory.com/](https://lookingglassfactory.com/)) posted
here a few days ago, seems likely to have a more long lasting success.

------
bwb
I disagree, VR seems like a gimic whereas AR could be so useful to tons of
real world applications.

------
ykevinator
Absurd. They said this in 2000 when I bet my career on VR. It is a solution
looking for a problem.

------
megaman8
several of my VR friends who have VR headsets don't seem to use them very
much, often going for months without using it. I would guess that means the
current experience is underwhelming. there's still a lot of work to be done
here.

------
kumarvvr
VR is the quintessential boys toy. Not a mainstream product.

------
skookumchuck
I got swept up in the VR hype 30 years ago. Still waiting!

------
aaaaaaaaaab
Hmmm.

1000 * 0 = 0

------
sneakernets
Nothing short of a real-life holodeck will ever make the public care about VR.

------
seaghost
I completely disagree, VR will fail like 3D TVs.

------
flag_bcz_mad
What nonsense. Less people dying of heart attacks will just result in more
people living with chronic heart diseases. An net decrease in quality of life.

------
stuntkite
Well, that is a nonsense set of words.

------
kappi
Doesn't know what he is talking about. Complete BS.

------
angel_j
"People who argue VR is more interesting than AR are the Flat-Earthers of
technology." \-
[https://twitter.com/BoredElonMusk/status/975399958886023168](https://twitter.com/BoredElonMusk/status/975399958886023168)

~~~
wuliwong
What does that even mean?

~~~
angel_j
It means people who think VR has more interesting and useful possibilities
than AR are delusional on the topic.

