Would be invaluable!

Apple researchers develop new finger swapping technology for the next iOS!

Far from that. I think that VR gear has multiple purposes. But none of them involve people walking down the street with it.

Please elaborate what you mean by "in public". Do you expect people to walk down the streets or sit in restaurants wearing a VR headset? You do know what VR is, right?

Show me a HMD with 100 FOV, high resolution, low latency ( ~20ms ), with 1:1 6 DOF tracking, weighting less than 250 grams for $200 and I'll commit suicide for you pleasure. Hell, you wouldn't find something like that for a million dollars in the past. The technology just wasn't there.

...3 years from now, and hear from the people who today think VR is a fad or just some gaming headgear. God, they'll feel stupid!

Who never had LP's and good sound systems back in the day, don't realise how much CD's took away sound fidelity with it's 16 bit 44khz digital encodings. It's about time someone made a push towards increasing quality. Specially now that storage space is so cheap.

First of all, what may be expensive now, could be much cheaper than actually raising chickens in a few decades. It's just a matter of perfecting the methods of mass production. Second of all, you missed the whole point of making artificial chickens, which is to avoid cruelty. 99% of the chickens consumed in the world are not happy chickens that roam around free in their pens, but rather they're raised their entire lives in little cubicles. This type of cruelty will no longer be needed if we're able to just grow their meat.

You can't compare the Glyph, who lets you watch a screen floating in front of you, with the 110 FOV Rift, who places you virtually inside the content. Positional tracking in not that important if all you'll be doing is turning around this or that way, while seated at a chair. Can you imagine having a 360 3D live video being broadcast from a court seat in an NBA game, or a tennis or football match, with all the notions of scale and depth you get with real 3D? This will be a huge thing with sports and other content that benefits from the sense of presence you'll get.

Here's a link showing some people who are developing tech to stream live VR sports :

http://www.roadtovr.com/ces-20...

Between 50k-55k dev kits sold, actually.

And your point is? Are you saying that because it didn't become a success in the 90's it is a failed concept?

The card I have in my computer now, is many times more powerful than an $250k Silicon Graphics Onyx that you had back then. The displays you had back then were crap and had very low resolution. The latency you had in tracking was nauseating and full of errors. Not to mention the huge weight of the "helmet".

Compare that to:

- 1920x1080 resolution OLED with low persistency

- Low latency 1:1 positional tracking

- ~20ms motion to photon latency

- High end PC GPU's capable of rendering realistic graphics at real time >60fps

- ~200 grams of weight and comfortable as the average ski goggles

- $300 price tag

It is so tiresome hearing people who never tried the Rift say it's hype and a gimmick based on 20 year old attempts at the technology.

For a long time I wondered what led people to leave gratuitously mean comments on Internet forums and bait people into getting into arguments for the fun of it. I always imagined that the Internet, due to it's protection of anonymity, just brought out all the negative aspects personalities (described in the article) that on regular social occasions they would never have the courage to display. The sad thing is, how big the number people like that is.

"Most of the problem is artistic, not technological."

That's the whole problem, and what people are trying to fix.

As long as games need to rely on expensive and talented artists or expensive motion capture to do human character animation, the production costs of games will continue to go up and up as games get more realistic, not to mention the all the limitations imposed by such methods. It's only when algorithms and software are fully able to imitate in a realistic the way humans look and move, that we will be able to see a significant drop in productions costs and a gigantic leap in gameplay and interaction potential with human characters in games.

Not sure why I bother replying such an "enlightened" human being such as you, but here it goes anyway. As someone who works in software development, and needs to constantly switch tabs to find different parts of the code, not to mention keep multiple internet browser tabs open, having 2 or 3 monitors is a must. In a virtual environment, you not only have the ability to dynamically create multiple monitors of varying sizes, but you also have the ability to share that virtual space with other remote developers. Collaborative or pair programming, demonstrations, sprint meetings using a shared virtual space would permit a much more natural and efficient way of being done, in comparison with todays online sharing platforms. But what would I know? I'm an idiot.

Virtual desktops will be amazing for work and remote collaboration. The problem is, we probably won't see anything like that in the first version due to the low resolution. We would need at least 4K in order to allow decent readable texts in a virtual desktop. Maybe 3 or 4 years from now. I'm sure it will be a killer application, having dozens of floating monitors of various sizes for you to work with.