The big question is, what do you do in a big virtual world?
There's a "build it and they will come" assumption here. There's Second Life, which peaked years ago. There's "There". There's High Fidelity, which is a higher-resolution Second Life with few users. Most of those can be used with a VR headset. But nobody cares.
It's not a technology problem. The current technology is marginally adequate. It's lack of market interest.
I don't know much about Improbable but from what I've read they shouldn't be viewed as VR firm, simply you could use their technology to create a massive virtual world that you could then explore using VR. I think the media (and maybe Improbable's PR) just likes to go with the VR angle as it's a recognised, understood term
The product is 'Spatial OS'. Want to build a massive simulation of various agents interacting in different ways than cannot possibly fit on a single server? That's where 'Spatial OS' comes in.
Interesting blog post here: https://improbable.io/2016/03/24/what-we-found-when-we-simul... a couple of people from the UK government visit improbable for 3 days, successfully build a detailed simulation of the internet (at the routing level, so simulating all routers involved in BGP). Looks pretty impressive.
Besides games, there is potential to run real-world simulations. If you can describe the behaviour of a single agent, you can accurately predict how a large number of such agents, e.g. humans, would act given an environment, say a city. Their blog [0] is showing a few such examples, incl. a simulation of the internet [1].
Making it really easy to develop such simulations could open this tech up for people who have applications for it but can't afford to build this kind of thing from scratch as the companies building things like Second Life.
How does VR impact agent based modelling techniques? I could be missing something, but real-world simulations seem entirely possible without needing the extra work for visualisation.
Improbable's SpatialOS is not a VR platform in the Oculus-way. Real-time simulations can be (and are) used as the backbone for super-expansive game universes which are visualised using VR graphics engines (or any other technology, really).
They were discussing this on BBC Today programme this morning. Apparently, it can be used to in fields like biology, economics, geography, where you want to see a model play out.
Of course, whether it will be good enough that researchers will want to pay for it is another matter.
Thinking about geospatial use, there are already plenty of tools that model complex systems and allow realtime or near-realtime exploration of cause/effect - for example a tool called ArcFM that I have worked with allows modelling of utility networks and as a very simple example you could disconnect part of the system and see how the rest of the system is impacted. This type of system implies a significant up front and ongoing cost, and these days is usually based on one of the established COTS solutions. I think Improbable would find this a difficult niche to sell into.
I can see that a utility network could be just one part of a larger system i.e. a rich city model with all key systems modelled, such that you could simulate a tsunami and see what power networks go down, how this affects rail links, where that strands people in the city, what evacuation they may need, etc. etc. The trouble with this is that the investment in creating such a model may vastly outweigh cheaper simulation that provides a good enough result, and that you may end up with such complex interactions that you can no longer get results in a timely manner.
SDSS's find application with NP-complete problems, and work around this NP-completeness in various ways to find solutions that are good enough. Instead of modelling all possible outcomes, single parameters are varied to view their impact, and in this way the nature of the problem can be ascertained. I can see that this methodology could work within SpatialOS, with the system providing a container for vastly scaled up models.
Further edit: I wonder what coordinate systems are available. If they are serious about geospatial they may have some work to do.
Having just finished "Ready Player One" (Ernest Cline, recommended), I think the 'if you build it' approach may work here.
If the virtual world essentially becomes where you go for TV / film / music (which isn't impossible, when you look at how we're starting to consume) and where you chat whilst getting to be the version of yourself you really want to be, or using it for an escapist 'coworking space', or whatever else - I could see it having some future.
It would probably encourage interest if the inequality gap broadened and people struggled with terrible living conditions, or a more dystopian world, and looked for escapism.
This isn't necessarily for end users. You could test games with it (simulate loads of users hitting your game, find out where the bugs and choke points are). You could also run an MMO using this infrastructure instead of building your own infrastructure to run games - I think that might be their target market.
There are other applications of course (crowd simulation for architectures, planners, or despotic dictators), but for now the money will mostly be in game testing/simulation.
Very good point - I guess it could work of someone somehow invented an economy in there that allowed for people to exchange time for money (as in work). No idea what it could be, but in theory - why not, right.
It's not a technology problem. The current technology is marginally adequate. It's lack of market interest.