From: Marc Bernatchez
<marc.bernatchez@polymtl.ca>
Date:
To: ben@cyberedge.com, 3d-ui@hitl.washington.edu
Subject: Re: Is there any standard in VR?
Thanks Ben to have corrected me. Fell free to further correct me.
You are right, there is a market. I guess some of us in the field get lazy
at times when talking about VR markets. I guess I badly phrased my thoughts
thinking in terms of software for VR. The way I see it, the main VR / VizSim
market activity at the moment is more localized on the hardware than
software aspect. There are some software libraries and tools, but not much
yet, to my knowledge, in term of user interfaces specifically. In addition,
if we remove the VizSim portion of the market and strictly consider the VR
applications, excluding flight simulators for examples, I bet the remaining
market is much narrower. Maybe we should consider these as two distinct
markets actually. VizSim applications are very particular and have specific
requirements that are not representative of more
generic VR systems. Ben,
what is approximately the ratio in % between these two?
The way I see it, we should have some sort of equivalent to what Windows and
MacOS are for consumer PCs at the moment. If we do it right, the standard
layer should be generic enough to please all types of VR users, for any type
of application they are interested in. The Windows operating system can run
spreadsheet, word processor, CADs, molecular simulations, ...
The interface
is generic enough to fit them all. I am convinced such a thing can be done
for VR as well.
Also, we have to be careful when talking about markets. I see two things
here: markets, and potential markets. There is a big difference between the
two, although they can refer to the same pool of users worldwide. The
potential market represents people that are using VR technologies (hardware
devices like CAVEs and HMD, gloves, ...), but mainly
use their own software
to create _their_ VR. In that sense, they are only partially participating
in that market. It is not a connected market in that each group of people
are doing on their own on their island. If we say that
this is acceptable,
then, who needs standards? The day VR will get like a big 3D windows OS,
with thousands of different applications available for it, the market will
be many times bigger than it is now...and any person who knows the user
interface standard it uses will jump on the VR application and be productive
right away.
If we assume that the 80's personal computer pattern applies to the VR
market. It means that we are considerably lagging as we have been trying to
get VR up to speed for something like 20 years now. By now, we should
already have some basic VR specific standards.
Your remark about the universal standard vs. translators is quite
interesting. I do not see translators as physically existing entities as
such, but yes, there is often bridges or links that
are made between many
standards. The problem is, we don't have much yet to
link together.
My apologies if I flooded your email accounts of those lengthy posts. I am
thinking of setting up a web-based discussion forums with many rooms to chat
on various aspects of VR. Email me privately if you are interested in such a
thing.
This discussion is indeed quite fun and formative.
==============================
Marc Bernatchez
Ph.D. candidate
Ecole Polytechnique de
marc.bernatchez@polymtl.ca
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ben Delaney" <ben@cyberedge.com>
To: "Marc Bernatchez" <marc.bernatchez@polymtl.ca>;
<3d-ui@hitl.washington.edu>
Sent:
Subject: Re: Is there any standard in VR?
Hello Marc,
While I agree with much of what you say, I have one substantial
disagreement. you said, "Granted, there is no
real VE/VE market
yet."
In fact, there is a huge VR market, valued worldwide by my
company at $36 billion. this includes all aspects of
VizSim/VR --
hardware, software, consulting, salaries, maintenance, site prep,
training, etc. This figure is derived from our annual study of the
VizSim/VR market, The Market for Visual Simulation/Virtual Reality
Systems, currently in its fifth edition. More information is found on
our web site, http://www.cyberedge.com.
In fact, each individual industry using VizSim, such as oil and gas
exploration, medical training, architectural visualization, military
training, and so on, creates its own standards which are applicable
to the field. this is usual and appropriate.
We need to keep in mind that VizSim/VR is not an
stand-alone
technology. Rather, it is an enabling technology that is used in many
diverse fileds. Each of these fileds has particular, and
often
exclusive requirements, and therefore, develops standards and
conventions to meet the needs of its practitioners.
So, perhaps the question is not a universal VR standard, but rather,
translators to enable people to move between standards. We see
many examples for this, such as converting analog video to digital,
feet to meters, USB to RS232 ports, and many others.
Thanks for starting a stimulating dialogue. I hope this adds a bit to it.
Ben Delaney