Last year, CES 2017 heralded the age of ubiquitous Virtual Reality or VR as the cool kids call it, but now CES 2018 has come and gone and you probably still don’t own or use a VR system. So why not?
VR has been a slow burn. The problem has been to create realism to the extent that the brain can stop nagging you that you’re not in a real environment and just adapt, and learn whatever’s being presented.Yes, that is the question. But a lack of realism is not the problem with VR.
A quick search of YouTube will turn up videos that show people falling over while wearing VR headsets after trying to climb on, or sit on, virtual objects. Yes, VR sickness is still a thing, caused by signals from your vestibular system that conflict with the visual information that your VR headset is providing, but that's not the same thing as saying that VR doesn't look realistic enough to fool your brain, because anyone who's tried a VR headset will tell you that simply isn't true.
So, higher resolution images aren't the silver bullet that VR is waiting for. And passages like this one are simply nonsense:
Even if you have high-definition displays, they don’t emulate moving through a real environment. This is because you overlay a flat image onto a surface, but when you “pass by” that object, your peripheral vision doesn’t detect the other side of the image being displayed on the other side of the object.Again, I direct to to YouTube for thousands of videos filled with evidence which rebut this argument. And, for the record, I don't think that AI is the answer to VR's problems, either:
However, due to the strong strides and commoditization this year in AI cores that “know” or can infer more about your changing environment, the overall experience can seem far more real. AI has come a long way in recent years, especially around integrating it into other environments through hooking APIs and such.Talk about whistling past the graveyard. Notice how there isn't a single sentence in there which talks about the current state of AI research in any detail, or any specific claim about how application of AI to VR would help. Instead, the claims are nearly identical to those that VR advocates have been making for the headsets themselves: vague, nearly limitless, and somehow due to arrive any day now in spite of a total lack of anything resembling a relevant detail. AI is not magic; you can't simply wave an AI wand at your failing technology to make it magically relevant to consumers are almost entirely uninterested.
VR is not catching on with consumers because VR's advocates do not have a value proposition that it good enough to sell the tech. It really doesn't matter how low the price goes; VR still isn't useful for anything that can't be done without VR, which means that it will continue to be too expensive at any asking price. VR does not suffer from a lack of realism, or a lack of AI, or a lack of content, or an excess of sticker shock. I mean, yes, all of those things are issues with VR, but they are not the issue.
No, the issue with VR is that it fails to provide sufficient value for money to be worth buying. And nobody connected with the VR industry seems to care to tackle that fundamental issue, thus ensuring that it goes unresolved.