Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2002 13:19:25 -0500 From: "Jim Angelillo" Subject: RE: Is VR dead? Sender: To: "'Anders Backman'" , "3-D User Interaction Mailing List" <3d-ui@hitl.washington.edu> Cc: "Mark Hall" Message-id: MIME-version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2653.19) Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Importance: Normal X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.72.3110.3 X-Authentication-warning: torch.hitl.washington.edu: majordom set sender toowner-3dui@hitl.washington.edu using -f X-Priority: 3 (Normal) Anders, Coming from one of the companies that delivers visualization solutions to industry as well as to the educational and government communities, I agree with you to a point. As a "for profit" entity, Fakespace would have liked to have seen a far faster curve in acceptance of the technology to date. As a reference, I started Pyramid Systems back in 1989 with my two partners and in late 1995 commercialized the CAVE (R) a development from the University of Illinois, EVL. This was the first commercially available projection based VR device. So, if you start from Jan 1996, there were 0 commercial projection based VR devices in existence. In Jan 2002 there are approximately 1000 commercial projection based visualization devices in the world. That is a growth of 166 per year on average. Not the same growth as the PC market by any stretch, but nonetheless, slow steady growth. I think that the original intent and definition of VR may have changed, but the general use of interaction and visualization of data is still very much a need in industry, education and government. We have countless examples of how it is being used for automotive styling, engineering, training; geological seismic interpretation, well planning/engineering; marketing/customer presentations; battle planning, troop training, etc. In short, the excitement over the original VR concept has been replaced or evolved into large scale visualization. Not as complex as what was originally intended, but very useful and measurable by organizations regards its worth. Do I still want to see the original intended idea of VR researched? Yes. I think that there may still be kernels of knowledge and technology that could be commercialized that will further enhance what I am calling large scale visualization. But is VR, the way that it was originally conceived by the highly intelligent and creative groups of researchers from the past, going to become pervasive? Not sure, but I would not bet on it. As a "for profit company", we need to take those parts/elements of the early research that are truly, commercially viable (Can be replicated effectively and efficiently. The result is a product/solution that is compatible with the software that is acceptable to the masses. The end price to the customer is acceptable by larger volumes of users. etc.), and leave the parts that are simply to difficult to productize and move on. Fakespace has done an extremely reasonable job of transforming itself from an early research group to a commercial developer of solutions that are acceptable to the marketplace at large. This is how we succeed and grow, not simply survive. We are not able to simply do skunk works projects as were possible in the past. We must provide solutions that the higher volume users will adopt and purchase. Also, surviving is not an option for us. Growth and profitability is a necessity and we are achieving that. However, I applaud the numbers of researchers that continue to work on VR technology and are always open to looking at their developments up close in order to determine if any of them are commercially viable. We are always interested in licensing technology if it makes sense. And the researchers are the ones that provide the diamonds in the rough. One last point that one of my colleagues mentioned, was that VR is offered in seminar/course formats around the country and even at the college level in some cases. This reflects the interest that is widespread. Does this make it profitable? No. But it does potentially create an era of users that someday will be making decisions at organizations that will have budgets to buy VR/Visualization solutions. Your timeliness of bringing this discussion to the forefront I think is good. Best regards, Jim Jim Angelillo VP, Strategic Relations Fakespace Systems Inc. 39650 Orchard Hill Place Novi, Michigan 48375 phone 248-735-4334 fax 248-735-4381 jangelillo@fakespacesystems.com www.fakespacesystems.com "BETTER WAYS TO CREATE & COMMUNICATE" -----Original Message----- From: Anders Backman [mailto:andersb@cs.umu.se] Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2002 1:59 AM To: 3-D User Interaction Mailing List Subject: Is VR dead? Hi all. After working a couple of years in the VR community it seems that things have changed, a lot. Someone said: - The failure of gloves and goggles. Refering to that using an HMD and goggles (with trackers) was supposed to change the way Of life. But it has failed. Due to sloppy hardware, latency (sloppy hardware?) Cables, high costs etc... I can see some areas where VR is still alive: * Visualizations using Powerwall (car industry, research, oil) Usually in the car industry no trackersystems are used, they just don't work. * Driving simulators www.oryx.se is a good example of that. Ok, there are some applications using HMD:s too, but are they really making a profit? How many are they? I can see some trends: * A lot of VR companies are struggling to survive. (some are already gone) They still try to charge a lot of money for products not delivering what they should. People blaim interaction methods, bad hardware, bad software. * In the latest Medicine meets VR conference a lot of researchers were using game engines such as Unreal, Quake etc.. They are for free (but beware of the monster warning. Some research results show that test subjects are afraid that monsters will jump to them behind the next turn, just because the "feeling" of the environment.) * Try to find a decent HMD nowdays, its impossible. None is doing any development in this area. Nothing really new. (VRT will change the way of life, anyone heard thatone before?) It seems that company research in the VR-hardware area has stalled? * Vrsource website, not much new there compared to gamasutra and all the other game sites. * A lot of research institutes have VR websites dated 00 and older. * More and more research seems to directly be aimed at gaming and animation (more money?) So Im looking forward to a discussion here. (I will probably also publish this onto the Vrsource webforum!) I really look forward to the VR2002 conference. I really don't want VR to be dead. So prove me wrong. Is VR