From Business Insider:
As Facebook users around the world are coming to understand, some of their favorite technologies can be used against them. It's not just the scandal over psychological profiling firm Cambridge Analytica getting access to data from tens of millions of Facebook profiles. People's filter bubbles are filled with carefully tailored information — and misinformation — altering their behavior and thinking, and even their votes.
People, both individually and as a society at large, are wrestling to understand how their newsfeeds turned against them. They are coming to realize exactly how carefully controlled Facebook feeds are, with highly tailored ads. That set of problems, though, pales in comparison to those posed by the next technological revolution, which is already underway: virtual reality.
On one hand, virtual worlds hold almost limitless potential. [...] In these new worlds, every leaf, every stone on the virtual ground and every conversation is carefully constructed. In our research into the emerging definition of ethics in virtual reality, my colleagues and I interviewed the developers and early users of virtual reality to understand what risks are coming and how we can reduce them.
"VR is a very personal, intimate situation. When you wear a VR headset … you really believe it, it's really immersive," says one of the developers with whom we spoke. If someone harms you in VR, you're going to feel it, and if someone manipulates you into believing something, it's going to stick.As anyone who's read this blog knows, I'm definitely bearish on VR's prospects. I think it's essentially useless, that it's potential is far more limited than VR's proponents think, and that the current generation of VR headsets, including Facebook's, will not become a thing. Yes, if VR were to actually realize the potential that we keep getting told is has, then it could be a powerful tool for manipulating people... which would be troubling if combined with Facebook, which is built from the ground up to psychologically profile and manipulate people. It is Facebook that's the problematic part of that equation, though, and not VR per se.
Added to that, Facebook's shareholders are already unhappy about the billions being dumped into VR with no prospect of anything like profitability for a decade or more. I'm still predicting that Facebook will be writing down or spinning off their Oculus arm within two years, and given how much other trouble they're in, it might happen a lot sooner than that. VR is not, and will not be, a thing; you don't have to work about what Facebook will do with it. Or what anyone will do with it. Because nobody is going to do anything with it.
Which brings us to the other story in VR: HTC's new, better, and more expensive Vive. Yes, more expensive; apparently HTC are still betting their future on VR not only being a thing, but on that thing still having a high end for them to cater to.
From nwi.com:
HTC (NASDAQOTH: HTCKF) entered the high-end virtual reality (VR) market with its Vive headset in April 2016, and, roughly two years later, the company is set to ship its next evolution of the hardware. The soon-to-be released Vive Pro will feature an image resolution of 2880x1600 (up from 2160x1200 for the original Vive) and debut at a $799 price point.
[...]
In addition to better image quality and built-in audio speakers, the Vive Pro headset has also been fitted with a new strap that's designed to be more comfortable and allow less external light into the viewing portal -- a feature that HTC says will make the VR experience more immersive. However, the Pro does not include any controllers, a base port sensor, or a wireless adapter.
That means that for those who don't already own Vive peripherals, the cost of the Pro headset plus two controllers and two base stations for movement tracking will come out to roughly $1,330 before shipping. The price for HTC's new headset puts the device outside the range of affordability for most -- other than the most dedicated VR enthusiasts and those seeking VR hardware for enterprise purposes -- and there are already similar offerings with less-daunting price tags.
I'm just going to point out that the original, lower-priced HTC Vive is currently only owned by about 0.13% of Steam's 125 million or so users, which means that they've only moved 150,000 of them at most. There's no real way to know how many of those were sold before the savage price cuts that both HTC and Oculus put in place last year, but the idea that HTC's strategic vision involves selling their new Vive at double the price of the current Vive... well, good luck with that, HTC.