> For 2019, Kurzweil predicted virtual reality glasses being in “routine” use. That does not look like it will happen.
What? At the most charitable and even holding it to 2019 strictly instead of allowing a few years, you're going to have to parse 'routine' to mean very large numbers, otherwise this is obviously going to be true.
Sales of the best-known top-end VR headsets (Oculus+Vive+PSVR) are already around 1m; throw in Gear, Daydream, Cardboard, and the various other Chinese, Microsoft, and miscellaneous projects, and it's at least double that. The last time I walked through a Best Buy, I saw a Oculus demo; the last time I walked through a mall, I saw a Vive demo. And 2017 is not over yet, leaving 2 full years. (For comparison, the Vive & Rift haven't even been out for 2 years.) The cost of the headsets has been dropping rapidly and capabilities improving, with Rift and Touch going for ~$350 in Black Friday sales and the last Nvidia/AMD GPU generation also cut hundreds of dollars off the price of entry. On top of that, everyone expects considerable improvements: untethered/wireless will soon be feasible, the screens are expanding, and tracking is going inside-out. Something like Oculus Go but higher-quality is closer to what you should expect in 2019/2020.
Even assuming no growth in sales due to the cost continuously decreasing & quality improving or the buildup of respectable software libraries, that still implies several million top-end VR headsets in use. How is that not 'routine'?
Already in the 1990s the group I worked for routinely used VR glasses. I maintained about a dozen them, for 3D visualization on SGI displays. We even had a special projector and screen for a shared VR display during group presentations or collaborations. I left the group, but they still routinely use improved versions of the same setup.
So you have to interpret it "to mean very large numbers" because if you don't, it was already true when he made the prediction.
How are we to know what numbers he meant when he made the prediction?
Personally I think it was deliberately vague so that once 2019 comes he can say that his prediction is true, no matter if it's 1 million or 100 million VR headsets.
Any guess as to how many VR headsets there were already in 1999? Our building probably had a hundred or so glasses, with the different people doing VR-related work. I'll guess there was a good fraction of a million in the world. Wikipedia tells me the "first contact lens display" was in 1999.
The Chinese VR glasses are sold everywhere in Latin America (I'm not sure if they're actually used or just a novelty item), and I expect them to be in the tens of millions too.
Do people actually use phone-based VR for anything? I got to try one of the Google phones in VR mode for a few minutes and was... thoroughly underwhelmed. It was ugly and unconvincing enough, and so low on interactivity (necessarily, best I could tell, having no input device other than the phone itself) that I can't imagine actually using it on a regular basis, and I'm the guy with a 10-year-old TV and similar-vintage monitor, so my standards aren't exactly high. I'd probably sell or throw away one of the headsets, given it for free.
Do people actually use them much? And if so, what for?
Honestly I can't tell... I do see them being sold, maybe as a trap gift for grandparents.
I've heard of people using it to watch YouTube or Netflix as a replacement for a big TV (most people have a phone but not everyone has a big TV in his room here).
So 1% of the population owns high quality VR headsets, and say 25% of those use it on a regular basis. That's not routine in the way Smartphones are, that's routine in the hobbyist sense of the word.
As the article points out and I agree: "I think that this cultural drag is becoming increasingly important. William Gibson’s saying that “The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed” is even more apt than when he said it."
What? At the most charitable and even holding it to 2019 strictly instead of allowing a few years, you're going to have to parse 'routine' to mean very large numbers, otherwise this is obviously going to be true.
Sales of the best-known top-end VR headsets (Oculus+Vive+PSVR) are already around 1m; throw in Gear, Daydream, Cardboard, and the various other Chinese, Microsoft, and miscellaneous projects, and it's at least double that. The last time I walked through a Best Buy, I saw a Oculus demo; the last time I walked through a mall, I saw a Vive demo. And 2017 is not over yet, leaving 2 full years. (For comparison, the Vive & Rift haven't even been out for 2 years.) The cost of the headsets has been dropping rapidly and capabilities improving, with Rift and Touch going for ~$350 in Black Friday sales and the last Nvidia/AMD GPU generation also cut hundreds of dollars off the price of entry. On top of that, everyone expects considerable improvements: untethered/wireless will soon be feasible, the screens are expanding, and tracking is going inside-out. Something like Oculus Go but higher-quality is closer to what you should expect in 2019/2020.
Even assuming no growth in sales due to the cost continuously decreasing & quality improving or the buildup of respectable software libraries, that still implies several million top-end VR headsets in use. How is that not 'routine'?