Questionnaire about VR and AR for my research

Good questions. Very astute.

1.
Balkanization which would have been born without the left-over know-how of the 60's, which was a necessity that followed WWII. This was just after the "greed is good" meme had reached a high point. Incredibly destructive. A cultural extinction event.

2.
How many people get car sick? Is there correlation or is this issue simply the talking point of the power point slides of the nay-sayers?
Either way, therapeutic use of tetrahydrocannabinol could be a long-term solution for those few people. Research is ongoing amongst ent community on Reddit.

3.
Immersion can always be increased at cost. Yes.

4.
See no. 1. This isn't a matter of technology. There is an immense transaction cost caused by corporate management in today's information economy. Largely this is caused by data-driven management, which has been translated at the front-line as an excuse to once only make an Excel formula which colours cells either green or red and be lazy while leeching money forever. Every IT professional knows that data only becomes information once it is interpreted by a human, but this level of competence doesn't exist in today's greed-is-good vibed management culture.

5.
Quite literally everywhere where the software exists. The entry-level hardware will be a folding cover with lenses for your multi-core mobile phone. Everybody will have them because making feature-phones will become overhead in manufacturing homogeneity.

6.
Mobile phone + positional tracking. Mouse.

7.
For VR, games. For AR, the internet. Chanceless; a HUD for your car.

8.
Medicine in particular. Climate studies. Both are vital to our survival as a species too.

9.
Because of the obvious military interest (just look at OculusVR's upcoming events for May), many large gaming companies will get sucked into those politics. Carmack could easily put explosives on one of his rockets, but we don't want to talk about that because by playing games we can avoid war. Indies will need to be protected from our best intentions.

10.
Not a clue. Marketing is expensive and doesn't benefit the consumer.

11.
Virtual goods will have a lot more value, so the good ones have a better chance of becoming physical.

12.
This is going to be connected with the gaming industry. We play games from an evolutionary impetus. We need games which teach us about resolving conflicts in peaceful ways... as a matter of survival of the species.

13.
They are missing about 15 years or so of advancement. There is however potential for a space-race or Manhattan project in terms of regaining that. The Chinese are just going to sit on their thumbs until they have a social revolution of some sort.

14.
Differential GNSS needs to become commonplace. I don't understand why this can't be accomplished with a 45€ public-access GPS dongle every square kilometere or so. Battery life will remain an issue.

15.
This was one of the first applications of VRML. However budgets are much smaller these days, and skies less blue. Universities will need to shoulder the responsibility for this.

16.
For mobile, battery-dependent applications, perhaps not. The markers also provide information to humans, as evidence of data. We always turn data into information, so a lot of potential uses will be missed if there isn't an easily recognized symbol that reminds us to use these new AR tools.

17.
Yes, but app stores need a lot more FOSS. Interesting data can be generated for the social sciences through this venue.

If you are at a university and are conducting a survey for research purposes then you need to make sure that you have all the Institutional Review Board stuff worked out.

Yes, even a little survey needs approval.

My answers:

1. 1990s was not successful due to the lack of software to enable the developing hardware that was being pawned in the 90s. VR markets are cyclical which rolls from hardware to software... we are currently in a hardware phase of trends. in the 90s we had the start of these platforms, but they lacked the software to make them really happen. Also the 90s were agnostic hardware solutions. Everything ran on Windows or Linux, the designers all wanted it to run on Macs. Autodesk and Unity Technologies picked up on this trend of "Mac being a graphics platform again". But it still need time to grow and mature. Plus we had a ton of "vaporware" and other false promises.

2. Motion sickness will always be prevalent in the realm of VR because of the relation of the physical space of the user and their mind. Sickness = brain saying "your lying to me" (simplistic statement). If you write crap code, have low framerates, poor hrz refresh on your hardware, etc... they all impact the experience of the user and drastically increase the rate of the user to sickness... VR has direct relations to the physical world.

3. This is a trick question, you can increase immersion and not affect your cost. The implementation to create more "immersion" is the real question you have here. The implementation to create immersion is what affects a VR System. More Intrusion and layers of device interaction will increase costs, but it will not directly affect immersion. A simple HMD can provide a good immersion experience if done correctly.

4. The strongest problem of VR and AR technology today is still user expectation on what the technology should do and the kind of return on the experience is should provide. eg. People want a great VR/AR experience but do not want to have layers and layers of devices and technology to experience it. If we had a contact lens that could provide all the same functionality of a HMD you would be closer to solving these problems but it would still have issues. :-)

5. This is another silly question, if we knew, we would already be there. I would say don't limit yourself. All the areas you stated are valid but each has it's own barriers. In my mind VR and AR technology will never truly be commercial successful due to the nature of the technology focus it's self. It will always be bleeding edge, but products of the technology focus will become more main stream, you have already seen it in the past with motion tracking on the smart phones, etc. The technology from VR/AR industry had this in the 80-90s. It "graduated" or evolved to mainstream commercial consumer markets when that industry needed a solution. To quote Jurassic Park, "Nature/Technology always finds a way."

6. It really depends on what you are trying to do. If you are interested in the input device that I use the most for VR and AR applications on a given day... it's still a mouse. :-) I like playing around with a LeapMotion since it is not very intrusive to use (stick hands in front of HMD), but it is not as accurate as a mouse when considering the kind of input I desire. As for inappropriate devices, this is actually a cultural questions not a technology question since "inappropriate" relates to social norms. A crap input device is a crap input device clean and simple. :-)

7. Smart phones have the most commercial potential, they are on the user all the time. They have the power to do VR and AR implementations. Things like Gaming and using a HMD to play games in changeless on user approval. People will put an HMD on to immerse yourself for an simulation/game, etc. This has not changed in many, many years.

8. I think you have a mis-understanding of VR. VR is a method of using technology, how you use that to a potential field of science is limited only to your comprehension and understanding of the technology. I have used VR professionally in therapy, visualization of micro-sciences and other sciences were you can not physically experience something (atomic level) or experience it in a safe environment (DWI car sim, experimental avionics).

9. I see it as many have seen it for years. VR technology in this implementation market is great fun (entertainment) for immersing you more into the game content, be it by input or output, allowing you to play with your friends around the world in realtime. This has not changed in years, but it's gotten a lot easier for you to do it in the current trends of development.

10. It's gaining in roads on implmenetation and acceptance by non tech stake holders, but it has been used before and is currently being used in those markets. You have a smart phone right? Is this really a VR / AR question? no... it's an implementation question. How do you plan to implement the technology? Advertising and marketing are all valid, we have been implementing VR/AR in those spaces for years.

11. Which kind of potential do you see regarding the use of VR and AR in science and product development?
Again, you are asking specific implementation questions on the technology. It all has growing potential because the technology is becoming easier to implement.

12. What do you think about the use of VR and AR in education and educational software?
Again, you are asking specific implementation questions on the technology. It all has growing potential because the technology is becoming easier to implement.

13. Again, you are asking specific implementation questions on the technology. It all has growing potential because the technology is becoming easier to implement. Quicktime VR is specifically dead, Apple does not support this implementation (the technology framework owners), X3D and Google Streetview are valid frameworks. Are you specifically asking more about Panoramic implementation of VR/AR technologies? It has growing potential because the technology is becoming easier to implement. It also is a more passive technology implementation over gaming with VR.

14. AR games have a ton of potential in many cross over markets (advertising, etc.). But what is your judgement on a good business model? Again it's about implementation and meeting or exceeding the expectations of the business stakeholders.

15.These are traditional AR implementation models, they will always have needs for improvement, but the value AR provides to navigation complex data-sets is in my mind one of the core points on this technology implementation. US military and commercial auto makers have been in this market for years.


16. Position markers are a disadvantage to the technology because they are fabricated. Again these are trick questions, you have an agenda in these questions. In the end the AR application should be "smart enough" to identify and make logical relationships to it's know data sets. Then the AR technology should overlays human understandable information in relation to the perspective of the user interacting with the application.

17. Sure, you just need to figure out a good implementation of VR/AR technology into your product design.