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The techy news of the day yesterday was Facebook agreeing to buy the virtual-reality hardware developer for $2 billion dollars in cash and stock. At first glance it looks like a case of fools and their money being parted. Maybe it's not. But it does look more than a bit shaky: a software/service company trying to get in on the ground floor in a very different business. First off, if it wasn't something of a whim, Facebook could have opened their own hardware division and developed their own system for a tenth the cost. Other companies are trying to do that very thing.
Virtual reality (essentially a mode of personal 3D image projection) has not exactly had the best track record. The first system I had experience with was designed for use with the old Commodore Amiga computer back about 1990. I don't even remember the name of the device any more. The hardware and demo software worked fine. The 3D image was shown in a visor arrangement like the systems currently being developed. The Amiga had powerful graphics hardware for its time, but not powerful enough to do much more than show a single forward view in the 3D device with small brightly-colored objects moving toward the viewer against a plain background. Today's computers could do better. But the future of getting walking-around visual fidelity equal to the 2D graphics of the game consoles that are being phased out is probably six or seven years down the road. It's not that it couldn't be done now (in relative terms) but the system software to support that within the computers just isn't there. Software is the killer. The military may happily pay billions for a system with software for its needs. But you are going to have to sell a hell of a lot of game software at say $100 a pop to make a $2 billion dollar hardware investment pay. The Amiga device, despite 'strong interest' from software developers, spawned not one piece of mass-marketed software and its hardware company soon went out of business.
What's needed today is less a matter of glitzy hardware than the low-level system software support and programming tools to convert efficiently from current rendering software without having to do semi-manual conversions for the distances between the 'eyes.'
Without knowing it, I lived for a number of years without 3D vision because of faulty glasses. I noticed it when I got it back, but can't say I danced in the streets over regaining it. People with one eye get along fine without it. The recent 3D TV-with-glasses fad seems to have been a flop for the same comfort issues movies have had since the 1950s.
There is a lot of interest in virtual reality these days from businesspeople who don't know what they are getting into. Does Facebook know? We'll see.
Virtual reality (essentially a mode of personal 3D image projection) has not exactly had the best track record. The first system I had experience with was designed for use with the old Commodore Amiga computer back about 1990. I don't even remember the name of the device any more. The hardware and demo software worked fine. The 3D image was shown in a visor arrangement like the systems currently being developed. The Amiga had powerful graphics hardware for its time, but not powerful enough to do much more than show a single forward view in the 3D device with small brightly-colored objects moving toward the viewer against a plain background. Today's computers could do better. But the future of getting walking-around visual fidelity equal to the 2D graphics of the game consoles that are being phased out is probably six or seven years down the road. It's not that it couldn't be done now (in relative terms) but the system software to support that within the computers just isn't there. Software is the killer. The military may happily pay billions for a system with software for its needs. But you are going to have to sell a hell of a lot of game software at say $100 a pop to make a $2 billion dollar hardware investment pay. The Amiga device, despite 'strong interest' from software developers, spawned not one piece of mass-marketed software and its hardware company soon went out of business.
What's needed today is less a matter of glitzy hardware than the low-level system software support and programming tools to convert efficiently from current rendering software without having to do semi-manual conversions for the distances between the 'eyes.'
Without knowing it, I lived for a number of years without 3D vision because of faulty glasses. I noticed it when I got it back, but can't say I danced in the streets over regaining it. People with one eye get along fine without it. The recent 3D TV-with-glasses fad seems to have been a flop for the same comfort issues movies have had since the 1950s.
There is a lot of interest in virtual reality these days from businesspeople who don't know what they are getting into. Does Facebook know? We'll see.