A friend of mine just got one and this seems like the goddamn future we should all be going crazy over but no one seems to care much
VR is incredible, but it's also kind of dangerous. People think of it as video games, but it's actually kind of an exploit into tricking your low level brain into thinking what it's experiencing is real... Which is awesome for video games! I spent like 10 hours on Half Life:Alyx this week. But the biggest manufacturer of headsets right now is facebook and their business model is making behavior manipulation platforms that they then offer up access to the highest bidder. Like we're totally going to get awesome games out of all this, and we are also going to get an insanely horrible dystopia... if the current horrible dystopia doesn't cause the technological advancement to collapse before we get there. Kind of a mixed bag.
Well, right now facebook's biggest ability is to manipulate individuals' opinions by curating the information being presented in their echo chambers. They leverage people's friendships and known likes to present content in an amiable manner that an individual would be more open towards. It's an inbetween point from targeted advertising where advertising networks are supposed to present you with what you're looking to buy to an evolved form of advertisement where they target mental states in which you would be more likely to buy into beliefs or products.
So right now, with biometrics and the tracking data not really being resource rich just yet, the risk is pretty low. But as things like heart rate, pupil tracking, and even EEG becomes more prevalent their platform (and it will be a platform, in much the same way they became gatekeepers for the personal information apps had access to) will be able to discern patterns of physical behaviors . They'll see who you're attracted to, the things you're afraid of; what elicits responses. And then combining that with A/B testing they'll be able to present information to you in a manner that you'll think it's your own idea to engage with. It could be something as simple as presenting thousands of banner ads in a game that have slightly different colors, actors/actresses/etc (think netflix's many title cards, totally A/B testing) or it could be numerous bots throughout a game wearing different t-shirts. There's tons of ways to do it, but once you know what stimuli elicit a response and the patterns of responses that get the behavior you're looking for, getting someone to feel what you want towards something becomes trivial.
Now, using current techniques they've likely already manipulated political sentiment to their advantage. Ignoring 2016, it wouldn't surprise me if they've elevated GOTV campaigns towards people who would be more likely to vote for neoliberal gig type bullshit like california's prop 22 or something. But imagine, in the future, if someone like Elon Musk had the ability to buy a campaign that found the exact versions of himself that thousands of individuals were more likely to fawn over. No more hit and misses at being a quirky meme king, instead he could just buy admiration by tapping directly into a database of people's biometrics and allowing them to be presented with avatars that showed him as being their fantasy of perfection. And it doesn't have to be for a person, it could be for a product or even an idea , like the aforementioned political stuff. And yeah, it would take a lot of collected data to get to that point, but we're talking about a technology that people are going to be immersing themselves in for hours and hours a day for the rest of their life.
The basic biometrics in cheap headsets, en masse, probably not in the next five years. And it's tempting to be like yeah, no ethical consumption under capitalism. But buying into facebook headsets makes them popular in the VR space ensuring they'll be around to do the really bad shit. I don't know if it's avoidable or not at this point, but I still discourage people away from facebook VR for being a closed garden.
That went a bit longer than I planned and it's late. Hopefully it's coherent.
Right? A lot of this shit is diabolical because as the technology provides more data rich feedback it preys on our unconscious behaviors. You don't need to do a full turn around for a red dress to get meaningful data when the tech is picking up an eye flicker milliseconds longer than your usual responses.
The Soylent Green film gave the rich expensive arcade games for a reason.
The problems are the price of entry is generally too high for good VR (you need both a PC/PS4 and a headset), Facebook is mucking shit up with Oculus, and exclusivity deals are a headache. I don't see things seriously taking off for a while as it needs to get significantly less expensive. Like until its low enough that Nintendo can ship a VR headset for less than $400, I just don't see it becoming super mainstream.
AR games though? That shits got potential. I think we'll be seeing the next Pokemon Go size hit soon.
I dunno, looking at the new quest it looks like it has what it takes. I the facebook thing is weird but after it dies down, I think most people don't really care about whatever possible facebook privacy trouble could happen between two divisions of the same company.
The new quest is hitting that pricepoint and it looks like it works better than any of the old stuff.
Also I'm pretty sure they cracked the quest 2 already to bypass the facebook shit.
they did but the exploit isnt public yet coz theyre tryna protect the hackers from legal action
does it look like beat saber is gonna get mod support ever? I looked up the method to do custom songs and it arcane as hell.
It wasn't too difficult when I did it. When did you last try? I'm talking about the PC version, specifically.
Just recently. The quest version but I am haven't done much andoid modding type stuff so I inexperienced.
Modding the Quest version is a whole other ball of wax. Apparently there are tools called SideQuest & BMBF to load mods and whatnot?
Its kinda confusing, to me at least, but I had to sign up as a occulus developer to have it let me run unsigned code on the device. I am a company now.
Its about 10 minutes of setup for custom songs on the Quest 1, which is arguably locked down moreso than PC. After that tho it was pretty much plain sailing ! plus it has crab rave by default 🦀
Whats the clean way to do it? I was looking at the instructions and it makes so sense to me.
If you have a Quest like I do, I followed this tutorial. Really straightforward and about 15 mins to set up.
https://youtu.be/v5TIWITI67Q
Oh rad. Yeah, quest one. I will try it that way. I jad watched a diffrent video but I ended up having to reinstall beatalsabver
VR is the shit. I primarily play H3VR these days. After that, most other FPSes are pretty lackluster.
It IS expensive as shit though. Expect to sink upwards of 4k into it to get the most out of it.
Standalone VR is more than capable IMO. you miss out on stuff like HL:Alyx but its deffo the full VR experience for people who arent Pc gamers
I dont have a massive amount of room, but if you have somewhere you can turn 360° with your arms out wide, you have enough room to mess with VR.
You'd probably have to use something like an Oculus Quest tho, which is cool as fuck (i got one on loan from uni) but it requires Facebook bullshit so some people might wanna jailbreak it first.
Word. I normally keep a room with an open floorspace but it isn't the full 5x5 that most games max out at and i am real tempted to start commandeering ither space
I'm waiting until I can get a 6800XT.
Then maybe an Occulus Quest 2 if it looks like there's a solid way to use it without ever connecting to FB, otherwise IDK.
I'd be willing to spend more on a higher res headset, but none of the higher res ones seem to support wireless.
Anyone have any suggestions or experience they can draw on?
Quest 2 looks like it does 90% of what you cold want, and it works real well to wirelessly link to the PC and it handle the rest.
I signed up with my facebook, but then facebook was never more than something to check in with out of state family so privacy isn't a big concern. However opsec wise I used to do stuff on facebook but I switched to more secure platforms.
It worked pretty werl with the quest one. The reports are of it working fine so far
Theres more variables in wireless mode. Its probably better for 90% of users to get a 5m+ USB cable. Any USB-3 port on your motherboard works fine and users report USB 2 being okay too, but not from the front USB header.
Vive supports wireless according to this thread.
Quest 1 is deffo 100% okay for PCVR. I use it for racing sims and Alyx. Quest 2 has been jailbroken to bypass facebook logins, but the hack hasnt been disclosed.
Im using a 1070Ti that I got off Ebay and its working great for PC games. Obvs not max settings and the Quest isnt best for its resolution but imo you forget about those things in VR.
At the very worst you can start off basic and move up if you need to, but paying $$$ for your first dip into VR is over-rated.
It isn't literally my first dip, I had an Occulus Rift. Most of the games were the equivalent of shitty flash games from 2005 and I was pretty sure standalone VR was a ripoff, but I got my PC to stream to it via Stream Theater and played Alien:Isolation with a wireless controller.
The experience was insanely immersive in the moments where I wasn't battling issues with only having 3 degrees of freedom, arms attached to the side of my head, nauseating cut-scenes, unreadable menus, and controller issues.
Yeah if youve not played VR for a long while its 200% better now in my experience.
Half Life Alyx is imo a genre-defining game, plus there's a load of quality VR titles now compared to the experimental stuff that VR started with.
Ive got a Quest 1, which works just fine without a PC (Feels great to play games without a cable attached) but getting it working for PCVR is quite easy too. Not plug-and-play just yet but I've been able to use it like a Rift or Vive without the massive price, or dozens of base station things
is NMS worth getting? I got the Quest 1 but I just remember the cluster fuck that NMS was on release
I was really into VR for a couple years, got an Oculus dev kit and then one of the first Vive orders. Modded Skyrim and Minecraft all the way back then to experience them in VR and it was mind blowing. Spent a long time telling people that this was the new shit, and worrying over the fact that Facebook's tech was objectively worse than Vive/they had a closed anti-competitive ecosystem but it was on its way to market dominance due to the much lower cost (selling at a loss probably for just this reason). I have no idea what's been happening in the space for the past couple years though.
Wow, thanks for the summary. This is... possibly the most dystopian way this could have played out so far. Additional support for the theory that this is the worst possible timeline, I suppose
The novelty will wear off once you've beaten the 5 good games and you have to set it all up and move your furniture for the 10th time.
In the context of the new drama younare giving facebook the same data you gove google or apple. So you are just skipping the step where they buy it from a tbird party and split the difference so I don't think there is currently any much tonworry about
It's a lot of fun. Better for sims than other types of games so far.
Beat Saber, HL Alyx, Population One, Echo VR, Google Maps/Tilt Brush, Tetris Effect. and thats the ones Ive played.
