Oculus Rift Pre-Orders to Open on January 6
VR is not comparable to 3D TV because it&#x27;s not TV. It&#x27;s fundamentally an interactive medium over which the user has complete narrative control, yet one that doesn&#x27;t feel like you&#x27;re <i>interacting</i> with something, so much as wearing a piece of clothing. 3D TV is <i>burdensome</i> for <i>very little benefit</i>. VR is <i>freeing</i> for significantly greater benefit.<p>If you haven&#x27;t tried it, you don&#x27;t understand the difference between head tracking and moving a mouse around in an FPS game. They are not just different ways to move a pointer around. They are fundamentally different. They are so fundamentally different that it&#x27;s actually difficult to combine the two concepts.<p>VR is not comparable to the Wii or the Xbox 360 with the Kinect (which were <i>massively</i> successful products, so I don&#x27;t know what the point of comparing them is), because there is zero disconnect between motion and reaction. You aren&#x27;t looking at a mirror version of yourself moving around. You&#x27;re just moving around.<p>If you haven&#x27;t tried it, you don&#x27;t understand the difference between waving your hand around at the Kinect, trying to line up hits with no depth perception, and using VR with even a relatively low-res positional tracker like the Leap Motion.<p>If you haven&#x27;t tried it, you just don&#x27;t know what you&#x27;re talking about. You have nothing in your life from which to draw a conclusion. That includes anyone talking about the systems from the 1990s. I can, today, in a weekend, create a full VR experience that would blow Dactyl Nightmare out of the water, and give it to you for a handful of dollars. The order of magnitude difference in realism and price is staggering. It&#x27;s the between a real car and one of those RC cars that only turns when you put it in reverse, and then only in one direction. Except the real car is the one that costs $50, and the RC car was $20k.<p>VR is going to fulfill the promise of teleconferencing. If VR was a &quot;flop&quot; in the 90s, then teleconferencing definitely was, too. Talking to people face-to-face in VR is night-and-day better than using Skype or FaceTime. There is barely any comparison to be made. You forget you&#x27;re using technology when having a f2f with a person in VR. And this isn&#x27;t a prediction. This is available <i>today</i>.<p>The product development lifecycle is going to speed up, as VR is going to give us a new, virtualized testing cycle that isn&#x27;t bottle-necked by physical prototypes just to check look-and-feel.<p>Architects are going to make better pitches. Universities and hospitals are going to sell more buildings and research wings to big-ticket donors. Other universities will do away with their physical presence entirely. Doctors will be able to share life-saving techniques and train other doctors across the world in the fine-motor skill to perform it. Museums are going to be able to record exhibits in full detail, into perpetuity, and provide patrons unprecedented access to artifacts that would otherwise be too sensitive to put on display in public, relatively uncontrolled environments. Psychiatrists are going to be able to treat more patients. Data scientists are going to be able to recall and organize more information.<p>All of these things are doable on a smartphone in a cardboard box, say nothing about the rapidly developing market of purpose-built devices. Have you not been paying attention? Technological advancement has only been accelerating. It&#x27;s not going to be &quot;many years&quot; before these devices are any good. It&#x27;s going to be two. It&#x27;s going to be less time than it took the iPhone to get any good. Remember that original iPhone? That no-app-store-having, no-3G-having, no-GPS-having, no-speech-recognition-having iPhone? That glorified iPod with a relatively crappy phone crammed in it?<p>To quote Tom Hardy&#x27;s character Eames, speaking to Joseph Gordon Levitt&#x27;s character Arthur in the Christopher Nolan film INCEPTION: &quot;You mustn&#x27;t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.&quot;