Tarquinn2049

A gimmick that is already in up to 10% of households, with a further 10% of those households using it more than 4 hours a day. Sure, it sounds like a small amount when put that way. But that’s already getting to be a pretty targettable market, and if you look at the growth chart, it’s not slowing down.

You may individually not have liked it, but it is indeed here to stay. I don’t think an apple headset will be worth it for a bit, but apple sold alot of Quest 3’s at the very least. So they sold people on the idea of VR, and then once they were in the door, they bought a reasonable headset. In that way, apple has helped alot. They helped to establish it as something that is “ready” for apple to take it seriously. That conveys alot of legitimacy to “normal” people.

I personally am, of course, in the minority of people that use VR for 8+ hours a day. It has replaced TV, Consoles, and gaming monitors for me. Plus I do my exercise in VR. I made a virtual 4k 120hz screen for my PC, that I use from the comfort of my recliner. It’s like if you had a steamdeck to stream your desktop to, except you don’t have to hold the weight of the deck, the screen is not near your hands, and also its 10 feet wide and at a comfortable viewing distance of 20 feet away, and is 4k 120hz. And you can use whichever controller you like holding. Also it’s cheaper. The downside is that if you want someone else to be able to see your game, you have to stream a video of it to their device, or a nearby TV. And speaking of a nearby TV, while playing on my Virtual screen, I can also just see my real TV too. On Quest 3, the passthrough video is clear enough to see about a 720p equivalent resolution at a comfortable viewing distance(40 degrees of your field of view). 720p may sound low, but it wasn’t that long ago that we were happy to see 540p (DvD quality) as a huge upgrade to what movies used to look like before. And Quest 4 will improve upon that too.

VR has only just crossed the first threshold into main stream adoption. The Quest 3 was the first headset that is worth it to non early adopters. They will only get better from here on. Not to mention they are also coming the other way, with AR stuff starting as light weight and unintrusive as possible and slowly building on what is possible to pack in without getting in the way at all. Step 2 of the AR sunglasses is coming soon.

While VR is the “console” of the future, AR is the “mobile phone” of the future. And eventually they will meet and blur the lines, kind of like how we use phones now. Modern smartphones are both what cellphones used to be, as well as surprisingly capable portable console gaming now.

It depends if “public comment” is akin to going on the record. Then staying silent means they didn’t say anything, and not making a public comment means they said something to us that we promised not to make public.

Saying something not on the record is actually pretty common. And is most of what private sources are about and for. They might be able to point a reporter to someone or something that would be able to be reported on. Trust is a super important difference between an established reporter and a new reporter.

And, you’d want/need redundancy. One on-site back up for quick restoration and one off-site for surviving physical disaster. So, you’d need at least 3 times that. In HDD prices, that is roughly 2.5 million per set-up, or 7.5 million total for all three. And in SSD prices, well it’s about 3x that. 7.5 million per set up and 22.5million for all three.

An alternate option is a distributed back-up. They could have people volunteer to store and host like 10 gigs each, and just hand out each 10 gig chunk to 10 different people. That would take alot of work to set up, but it would be alot safer. And there are already programs/systems like that to model after. 10 gigs is just an example, might be more successful or even more possible in chunks of 1-2 terabytes. Basically one full hard drive per volunteer.

Lol, had to add that after doing the math for 10 gigs to ten people and realising that was 1000 people per terabyte, so would take 150 million volunteers. Even at 2 petabytes each, assuming we still wanted 10x redundancy in that model, it would be like 750 thousand volunteers or something like that. Maybe there is no sustainable volunteer driven model, lol.

I was mostly being facetious, I don’t think it’s any different in Canada. The guy was just wrong about it taking an hour every 2 hours of driving.

Oh no, that was the secret code my programming has to obey. I have no choice but to go away now. I can’t believe there was a human out there smart enough to figure out I was AI. You tell the rest of the humans that were gonna work even harder to confuse them now. We’ll never misspell a word again so they think we are perfect humans instead of simple AI that misspells stuff all the time.

Sorry, it came across to me like you were actually interested in how to spot AI posts. I guess you just wanted a way to pretend my opinion didn’t matter and could be waved off.

There is a completely different reason why the errors in AI images exist. The types of errors in AI writing would not be misspellings for the same reason that the errors in AI images are not with contiguous areas of the image. The way it’s generated, those types of errors are not going to happen, other types are.

In fact, the cohesive and coherent argument part of it is gonna be the most likely fail of an AI writer.

All the brands make good and bad vehicles. Doesn’t really matter what company owns which other company. Loyalty to one word instead of a different word is a terrible way to make a decision at this price point.

Wow, that sucks. I guess Canada is further ahead in that. Electric car charging is 20 minutes per 3 hours here. I can see why it would make a big difference if it’s an hour for your chargers.

It could also be the software for your car isn’t well optimized, they should ideally be having you stop around 25% battery and charging up to around 75% if you are trying to make the best time. The software should inject the stops as close as possible to that ideal if you tell it to prioritize speed.

But if the only chargers you have on your route are that slow, then I guess there isn’t much you can do but hope companies don’t stop funding the R and D and contsruction of more up to date ones.

What, why would misspellings make you more likely to assume something is AI generated? They would have to intentionally add misspellings to what the AI wrote. People using AI to post stuff would be doing it to avoid having to make effort. Not going out of their way to put effort into trying to cover up that it was written by AI.

I think “Valid” just isn’t the word you’re looking for here. Valid requires verification, and since your point was verifyably false, valid isn’t what you were going for. Scary hypothesis, nightmare fuel, anything where it doesn’t have to actually be possible, to still cause a fear response would be terms that fit better.

I do think someone would immediately buy the charging network if it were an option. I mean gas stations have all kinds of stuff spring up around them when anyone stopping there won’t even be very long and only passengers will be bored with nothing to do for that short amount of time. At a charging station, you are taking a longer break and even the driver is participating in that break.

Owning the charge network is going to be a much bigger deal when it’s common to use your EV for long trips. And whether people want to or not at this point, it’s steadily becoming more and more normalized. It’s certainly more enjoyable overall to take a long trip in an EV. The downtime is nice. And healthier than sitting down for hours straight. Even before electric cars, people were encouraged to stop every 2 hours on a road trip anyway.

The old advice was to plan recreational stops along the trip, to prevent embolisms or cramps. What if charge stations had electric scooters or bikes and maps to fun 15 minute activities in range. Not to mention meals of course.

I know many people don’t take road trips in a healthy way currently, so gas cars seem like the better choice for them. You’ll “make better time” if that is the only important thing. But for people that already followed best practices, a road trip in an electric car is already the same.

You say “you need a gas car for long trips”, and “Chargers didn’t factor into it”.

Isn’t that directly contradicting? Why else do you feel like you need a gas car for long trips if it isn’t related to either not enough chargers or chargers still not being fast enough for you? Chargers absolutely factor into that part of why you didn’t buy electric yet.

But also, the notion that they can’t do long trips is already pretty outdated. There are very few places left where you would even need to take a detour to take a long trip in an electric car. The only downside is that charging at max speed takes about 3x as long as filling with gas still, and not every charging station is max speed. As that continues to improve, it’ll be less and less of a difference.

So, funding the R and D department of the charging network, as well as the construction of the charging network, are absolutely fundamental to more people adopting electric as their single vehicle choice. And not as their second vehicle only for one small purpose.

That works out on the water, since the thousands of bullets that missed fall “harmlessly” into the ocean. On land, we have to think about all the bullets that miss too.

They probably didn’t randomly guess what happened. There would be pretty obvious clues as to how it happened. The network traffic for tournaments like this is monitored. Because they have to be done online. If they had no idea what actually happened, they would have at least been suspicious of the players at first. No matter what messages were playing in chat at the time.

I can see someone who only tried VR back 10 years ago, putting on an apple vision pro and being shocked that the resolution was so high, only to be informed it was a modest increase over other current headsets and that they are all pretty clear now. But really they should know if it was anywhere near “retina resolution”, apple would have been all over making that claim.

Quest 2 and the other headsets of that generation were the turning point. That was when you could finally do a good looking 1080p screen in VR. Quest pro and Quest 3 are about equivalent to 1440p in actual pixels at a comfortable field of view, but in perceived clarity they are as good as 4k. Mainly the pancake lenses helped, VR has always been able to show more digital clarity than the physical equivalent in pixels on a real screen, since it’s got that free temporal antialiasing from your micromovements of your head/neck. But the old lenses really robbed alot of that potential clarity.

I for sure wouldn’t spend the money on a vision pro, and not just because I don’t have anything else from the apple ecosystem to use it with. That is just too high of a price for a household object to me. A 500 dollar headset and 3000 dollar PC would be a way better use of money.

But I’m glad the vision pro exists. I think Apple getting involved in something helps normal people see it as a real thing finally. I do think the vision pro is worth the price it costs in the sense that there isn’t alot of mark up there. The tech they put in there is roughly in that ballpark, but I agree that it isn’t quite good enough to replace a desktop, and there isn’t a huge need for a VR headset that replaces a laptop. I certainly will stick to 500 dollar headsets as they steadily approach that same power level. Honestly, at the rate mobile chipset upgrades go, it’s like 3 years behind laptop power at any given point. Not a huge wait.

A Quest 3 is already in a pretty good place compute power wise. Games already look pretty good, it can stream incredibly high quality video, and having the equivalent of multiple 4k screens all within that relatively tiny price point, hard to compete. But competing is important, and I do hope vision pro does well enough to keep it’s line going. I do like that they made sure there was an official source for 3D movies for the vision pro. I like watching 3D movies in VR, but there was no easy source currently still. You have to get them yourself, whether by playing or ripping the disk on a pc, or streaming them in low quality unofficial apps, or by just straight up illegally downloading them. There was no official store front for real high quality 3d movies in VR yet.

I wonder if they have any future plans for whatever apple would end up calling PCVR. It’s not just for much better looking games, there are also useful apps that benefit from real computer power instead of laptop power.

I am also not a big fan of “bespoke” headsets. Any of the ones that try to make it only fit one person best. Even the most uncomfortable headsets are able to be a comfortable 8 hour general use headset for less than 100 dollars of after market mods. VR headsets should be for sharing, especially at those kinds of prices. I think more awareness of the aftermarket and third party scene should be a goal.

Like the smartphone market, VR headsets have alot of options for customization, and alot of those options make a huge difference for very little cost. I’ve got a huge head, basically the biggest most VR headsets can even support, and I also share my headsets with pretty much everyone I know, including my nieces and nephews, one of which actually had a head size below the minimum when she started. We just put a sweatband on her before the headset and she was good.

With a halo strap and swappable battery system, Quest 2 and 3 were good to go for hours on everyone I had try it. Quest 1 actually didn’t need anything for comfort other than a counterweight, so I added a 10k mah battery to it, an anker slim. Immediately bringing it to 8 hours of comfortable run time. The pro only needed a new forehead piece, so I got one that was cloth covered memory foam, and then put that same anker slim on it. Speaking of the Quest pro, it was hard enough to spend 1000 dollars on a VR headset. But the eye and face tracking were nice, I still use that one for social VR stuff. But the Quest 3 for anything else.

I basically live in VR, I come out to eat and sleep, and most of the time when I leave the house. Not every time, sometimes I bring the headset with me. But I’m not technically in VR most of the time, I’m in mixed reality. I am certainly what people would call a VR evangelist, I do get any of the people that express interest to try it. I know there is a very good chance my VR demo is likely the best one they have ever gotten, mostly cuz it’s often the first, but also because it’s actually pretty hard to keep in mind all the best practices of doing VR demos.

I’ve gotten pretty good at giving impromptu demos to strangers. I always have sanitary covers in my VR bag. And I can eyeball their head size and pupil distance and pick the most likely experience for them. Though I do still let it be their choice, just with my recommendation. And once they are in the headset I do confirm the fit and pupil distance. But having them pre-set pretty close really cuts down on the more uncomfortable parts where a stranger has to be really close to them. And if the fit and clarity are close enough, I can completely skip that even. You don’t need perfect in a modern headset for it to blow their mind.

I mean, the rest of us have had proper VR headsets for ten years. Lots of “normal” people in VR now. Mixed reality headsets barely get in the way of socializing with other people in your room, while adding socializing with people not in your room.

It’s about the same as socializing with someone watching TV or playing a videogame on a TV or computer monitor. Even without seeing their game/app/document/show it’s pretty easy to determine on sight if they are currently too engaged to properly hold a conversation.

Doing work in VR is about the same as outside of VR, but with the possibility for less distractions and a more organized work area. There are no longer any tradeoffs in modern headsets now that they rival the clarity of a comfortably positioned monitor or TV. And can display many such virtual screens wherever you want them to be.

But, those possibilities don’t mean you -have to- shut yourself off, how much you want to be distracted by outside stuff is entirely up to you and the people around you. If you prefer to be interrupted, as many people with family do, it’s just as possible to keep your work space contained to a single screen and to work with the outside world pouring in at all times.

As for gaming, you have every option. You don’t have to only play games where you are physically partaking in the adventure. But you have the option to when it’s the right kind of gaming for that situation. You also have the option of sitting on your living room recliner with the rest of the family watching TV or a movie or playing a game, and you have an additional virtual screen beside the real TV with your work or game or different TV show on it. And with non-apple headsets, each member of your family can financially reasonably have the same option. One family shared screen to socialize with, and one personal screen. And before you ask, yes there are parental controls for VR headsets.

While the minimum age for VR has legally been 13 for most of the past 10 years, it has recently reduced to 10. Though many people started their kids as early as 4-5 years old, and those kids are perfectly healthy teenagers now. As with all other digital content, it’s best to know what they are actually doing in VR. You have a range of options all the way down to literally seeing the video feed of their headset in real time, or as minimally invasive as just seeing what programs they are launching/playing. For younger kids, it’s best to not play anything online. Not only for them, but for the rest of us, lol.

And for people that have been in VR 8 hours a day for 10 years now, there have been no negative health issues. And actually compared to people who spend 8 hours a day watching TV or playing traditional videogames on a screen, the VR users are significantly better off on average. While that is only the extreme of 8 hours a day, it illustrates the point most effectively. Spending less time doing any is generally better, but the subset of VR players that spend most of their time in active games were better off than the average person that spent less time doing any. Because obviously just sitting for long periods of time is the main problem. But there were no detriments to vision in the VR players, which makes sense as, if anything it is again possible to be more healthy to our eyes in VR than staring at any other screen.

This is not something a company did.

The group of people took a list of user names and passwords from a different breach and tried them on trello to see if people used the same password and wrote down which ones did.

Nothing a company can possibly do to stop this, only users can.

Even if the company required 2 factor authentication to fully log in, getting this far would still confirm each account/password combo was correct, which is all the “hackers” did.

It has been various headsets, most often Quest headsets for me personally. Currently a Quest 3. For most of them a halo style strap with battery on back was most comfortable for me. But everyone is different. Custom face pads don’t matter for me once I have a halo style headstrap, but for other headstrap styles the facepads would be very important for 8+ hour comfort.

Silicone facepads are good for short term exercise sessions as they clean quickly and easily, plu leather is a good choice for longer sessions with less profuse sweating. And cloth is good for very long sessions with no or mild sweating.

But yeah, in terms of what I actually do with it in this example, it’s very similar to a steamdeck, I just play my computer games on it, but while sitting on a nice comfy recliner.

I do also play VR games, mostly adventure RPGs. I have played the MMOs, specifically Orbus and Zenith. They are both pretty good. Lately I have been playing Dungeons of Eternity, Into the Radius, Ancient Dungeon, and the beta for Legendary Tales.

Previously I have played over 100 different games over the past 9 years in VR. All the “I expect you to die” games are great, everything from Owlchemy labs is awesome, while also being entirely kid friendly too. The official Iron Man VR game, surprisingly good. The moss games are good. Both “little cities” and “Cities VR” are great in completely different ways if you like city builders.

Walking dead:saints and sinners was good, once you get past some of the frankly too scary parts at the start of the game and to the part where it’s an action game instead of sneaking around in the dark being surprised by unsuspected zombies. Also never stay out past the bells. I’m glad I played the Quest version first before playing the PCVR version. Not sure I would have gotten past the start if the zombies were scary looking instead of cartoony, hehe. The Quest 3 graphics upgrade is also kinda getting there, lol.

The Red Matter games are an interesting experience, but I mostly played them to see the kickass graphics running on mobile hardware. The people that made those games have alot of talent for getting good looking graphics efficiently.

Speaking of graphics, for a Quest 3, I highly recommend the purchase of “Quest Games Optimizer”. It’s a program with the ability to override alot of the hardware settings on the headset with ADB commands. And a database of presets for each game. You’ll be able to pick between a few for most games, depending on if you prefer higher framerate or higher resolution, or if you want to not run the headset at max but still have better graphics than a game originally made for Quest 1 or 2 would otherwise have. Otherwise some older games can look unnecessarily not great on a Quest 3. When they are fully capable of looking great.

“The Under Presents:” was a truly unique concept. They hired actors to perform as all the NPCs in the game, between live showings of the plays they put on. The plays were classic plays enhanced by effects that could only be done live in a VR environment. And they also tended to have some audience participation. Unfortunately the live aspects of the game don’t exist anymore. They brought them back every now and then for a month or so, but it has been a while since the last time, so it likely won’t happen any more. Hopefully more stuff like that exists in the future.

For PCVR stuff, I played alot of Elite:Dangerous, I still play some American truck sim. And various racing and rally games. I also play alot of the same types of games as what I play on stand alone. I play wirelessly either through Virtual Desktop, Steam VR Link, or Oculus air link. Whatever the game I intend to play works best on.

I also do indeed watch 3D movies on it, this is the first reasonable household medium in human history with perfect 3D. Definitely gonna take advantage of that. And speaking of 3D, most computer games with a modern engine can be played in 3D. Like either making a virtual 3D monitor, or by actually putting your head inside the game world. Also most gamecube and wii games too. But yeah, just recently the entire Unreal engine got a VR mod, so any game made on unreal engine all of a sudden is capable of being a VR game out of the box. Most will still need some minor bespoke mods to clean things up here and there, or if they want to do motion controls, but the hardest part is done as a baseline now.

There is also the old program “VorpX” which is a dll injection based universal VR mod database. It doesn’t work with every game, but the list is pretty long. One caveat, playing a computer game in VR is harder to run than 4k 60fps. So depending on what game you want to play, like say Cyberpunk 2077 or something, you might need what is currently pretty expensive hardware to have a good time. But if you want to run something from 5-10 years ago, you’ll have no problem with a computer that wouldn’t be able to run modern games at 4k 60fps, as long as it can run those old games at that. Playing games on a perfect 3D monitor alone is pretty awesome, but “stepping into” a gamecube game potentially from your childhood, is a whole other thing.

Also on that topic, Quest 3 just got a native 3DS emulator that runs most games at full framerate in 3D. Many well enough to increase the render resolution too. And this is the initial release, so it should only get better from here. I loved my “new” 3DS back in it’s day, even though the resolution was so low, but I love it more now that I can fix that.

Also as a parting note, Skyrim VR, Fallout 4 VR, and VR chat are all individual games/apps that can easily support thousands of hours of use each. VRchat seems crazy and darn near repulsive until you manage to find “your” crowd. And skyrim and fallout 4 have an insane selection of mods. You can turn them into whatever you want, as long as your computer can run what you want.

I personally have a pretty wide variety of activities I do in/with my VR headset, but in terms of time clocked, using it as a virtual computer monitor with 2ms network latency and a 40 foot tall screen where I control every aspect of the monitors properties, shape, size, brightness, curvature, whether or not the light it casts interacts with the rest of the room, what even the “rest of the room” completely means… probably my most time spent, just ahead of time spent playing VR games.

It also can run any android app you sideload, but unfortunately it has no GPS. But there are some pretty useful android apps, notably any emulators made for Android. Those versions will just be run on a virtual flat-screen, it won’t suddenly make android apps 3D. But it can still be nice to have a 6 foot wide phone game where you use laser pointers instead of fingers to tap the stuff. Save your finger joints, and your neck from looking down at your phone.