[url]http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/two-possible-paths-into-the-future-of-wearable-computing-part-1-vr/[/url]
Interesting to finally get a taste of what Valve has been looking at with their hiring for hardware engineers.
Some highlights of the article:
[quote="Michael Abrash"]
If you’re not familiar with VR and AR, VR is the one where you sit down, put on a headset, and find yourself completely immersed in a virtual world like Snow Crash’s Metaverse or Ready Player One’s OASIS (and if you haven’t read Ready Player One, run don’t walk; it’s a great read, especially if you grew up in the 80’s, but even if not – I didn’t, and I still loved it). AR is the one where you put on glasses and walk around, and find that the real world is still there, but modified to a lesser or greater extent, as in Rainbow’s End’s belief circles or the Rivet Couture virtual society of “To Hie from Far Cilenia.”
So with VR, you might take a seat at your computer, put on your VR headset, and find yourself in Middle Earth or a starship or a Team Fortress 2 level. With AR, as you walk down the (real) street wearing your AR glasses you might find that there are (virtual) aliens shooting at you, or that when you encounter (real) members of your Belief Circle they’re wearing (virtual) medieval costumes and glowing faintly, or, to continue the TF2 analogy, that everyone you see is wearing virtual hats.
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...in the long run, VR-like experiences may be how we use our spiffy AR glasses much of the time, and in the short run, VR is poised to take off well before AR.
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...a VR marketplace appears to be emerging as I write this, in the form of the Oculus Rift and support for it in Doom 3: BFG Edition, Hawken, and other games, while AR is still some distance from viable products. It’s far easier to push technology forward when there are real customers to provide feedback, real products to provide incentive for better, cheaper components, and real revenue to spur competition, and VR will likely have all those long before AR does.
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You’re probably thinking that you don’t spend any significant amount of time in virtual experiences, but consider: as you read this, you’re looking at a screen. Imagine you’re doing it on a head-mounted display, and you’ll see that it maps better to VR than to AR. Sure, you could have the text floating in your field of view while still seeing the real world, but why? It seems far more useful to just look at a virtual screen in VR, since all that’s of interest is the text. You could have lots of virtual screens up in 3-space around you, and you could have information presented in all sorts of other ways as well.
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None of the foregoing says that standalone VR is going to be more important or successful than AR in the next five to ten years, although that could happen. AR is most likely going to change the way we interact with the world, much as PCs and smartphones did, long before VR makes it to the Holodeck. However, it seems likely that VR is much closer to being deliverable in a truly workable form than walk-around AR, and it also seems likely that VR-like experiences will be an important part of the ultimate AR future. Given which, there’s a strong case to be made that while the long-term goal is to produce superb, do-everything AR glasses, VR and VR-like experiences are worth pursuing as well, both in the near term and down the road.
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I was partially right in my speculation. This is gonna be interesting.
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