Dagra Dai MC. VSO. said:
FirstNameLastName said:
Nailzzz said:
I'm fortunate enough to live close by a really amazing theater. I used to feel the same way as a lot of people do about going to the movies being a huge waste of money. Now i go there and i can buy tickets to strictly 18+ theaters($12), so no worries about idiot parents bringing their terrible offspring to disrupt the experience. On top of that every chair is a really nice padded recliner complete with foot rest and a swivel tray. Why a swivel tray? Why that is for the meal that you order from the theater attendants who wait on you during the movie(and insure that people are not disruptive during the movie with phones or yelling). They even serve alcoholic drinks from a separate drink menu. Prices are average for a restaurant, not as overpriced as most movie snack bars for what you get and the quality is pretty decent. I plan on going tomorrow to go see Crimson Peak with my GF. I actually look forward to the experience now, and the whole event will probably run me about $55 to pay for the both of us total. Which is about the same as it costs me when i take her out to a nice restaurant. I love that when you order tickets online you also get to pick your seats in advance as they are all assigned.
But this seems like the only way theaters are going to survive. More of them need to really step up their game the way this theater did.
This all sounds like a luxury experience that the average person won't be willing to pay for, so I have my doubts it would be particularly profitable. I guess it could potentially survive as a niche experience.
Dagra Dai MC. VSO. said:
The moment VR becomes something ubiquitous (probably "glasses" type in 10-20 years) it's going to be the end of most theaters. They're just going to be like Blockbuster, totally relevant one day, and then next South Park is making an episode about you. [footnote]Which I guess is a kind of relevance, but not the kind they wanted.[/footnote]
Dagra Dai MC. VSO. said:
Nailzzz said:
I can imagine that working for a while, but eventually people are going to prefer a restaurant and a VR set at home.
Getting a bit optimistic about VR, aren't we? VR is already rendering people motion sick and it seems the only reliable solution people have found is to use it with motion controls in order to reduce the sensory conflict. This is hard enough with video games, but seemingly unsolvable with non-interactive media like film.
Besides, what exactly is it about VR that's going to kill theatres?
Is it about the film taking up your entire field of view, therefore, reducing the need for a large screen? If so, the obsession with increasingly large screens is kind of stupid. The real advantage of large screens is really only geometric in that it decreases the change in angle when offset from the centre, thereby allowing you to fit more people in front of the screen without distortion for those at the edges. This is only an advantage for the theatre, since it allows them to fit more people into a single screening, but it offers no advantage over a regular screen. The proportion of your field of view that a screen occupies is a function of the viewing plane's size and distance from your position. Realistically, if the screen has the same resolution, then you can just sit closer to the screen and achieve the same effect. The sterioscopy of your eyes isn't great enough to factor into the equation for any but the smallest of screens and closest of distances, so your view point can be taken as an infinitesimal point.
The only reason to have a large screen in your living room, rather than sitting closer, is that it also allows you to fit more people into a viewing. But a regular sized TV should be more than sufficient for a single couch load.
Outside of that, I personally don't really find the prospect of having a screen that takes up my entire field of view to be a pleasurable experience. I kind of like being able to quickly look away from a screen, rather than having to take off a a bulky headset. Not to mention the fact that you no longer have the ability to easily grab objects around you, such as drinks or food. Expect to either make sure to remain conciously aware of your real world surroundings at all time (breaking the entire point of VR), or, expect to have a lot more drink stains in your carpet.
If it's about the 3D effect offered by VR, then theatres already have 3D. Maybe the VR 3D is better (you know, outside of the whole
making people sick thing) but we don't have any VR ready films yet, so it's possible that regular 3D will have advanced by then.
I'm not really sure what else there could be that would make VR a theatre killer. I don't doubt that we'll probably see movies trying to cash in on the VR craze, but I can't see it killing theatre, or even becoming the predominant way people view movies in the future.
If anything I'm trying to be conservative about the future of VR. The motion sickness issue is already being tackled in several ways,
and increasingly appears to be an artifact of some early design choices. There's is very little doubt that VR wich includes at least hand and head tracking in-game, takes care of it. There's also no indication that VR makes people likely to be motion sick in the absence of motion, and sitting a in a theater and only motion your head isn't a problem that I've ever heard of.
Various design choices certainly exacerbate the problem, no doubt about that, but it's far from the problem's source. You simply can't remove sensory conflict through software alone. The ways in which motion sickness is being combated often involve full body motion controls, or similar ideas that don't involve people just sitting there with the device strapped to their head.
While it's not often talked about, people can get motion sick from pretty much any form of sensory conflict, yes, even regular films and games, especially when they take up a large portion of one's field of view. It doesn't matter how many pixels they throw at it, it doesn't matter how high the refresh rate is, or how well the game is designed for it, if there's visual motion without force then people will get sick. How many? That does depend largely on how well the game is designed for it.
And with that said, I don't trust developers to make games that don't make people hurl. At the moment it seems it's too much to ask that developers ship us a product that doesn't crash before the menu, how can I trust them to remain conscious of VR motion sickness? We still get games that don't even have a FoV slider, even though
that is a well know contributer to motion sickness. We still get games that have unskippable and/or unpausable cut-scenes, even though this pisses people off on repeated play-throughs. We still get games that have poor controller support on PC, even though that's been around for ages now. And non-rebindable keys. Not to mention shitty mobile ports that haven't been properly adapted to controller/mouse and keyboard. Developers continually do shit that is well established to be a faux pas at this point, and are too lazy to provide some of the most basic functions that can only ever enhance the experience. Unless VR becomes
the way to play games in the future, then expect to see it's adoption hampered by nausea inducing VR-ports that do the bare minimum to justify their existence.
Again, this is mostly about games, since that's really where VR has any real shot, but keep in mind that film has somewhat similar problems in that certain conventions have to be followed. Not all games, and not all films, make people motion sick to the same degree. Some films are worse for it than others, an example being found footage movies. All that camera movement is far more nauseating than a film with a mostly static camera. I'm pretty sure large scale action-movies like transformers with their confusing action and movement are also a known nausea machine. Point being, there are certain ways that a film has to be shot in order to reduce the risk of motion sickness. And, as with anything, these conventions will only be followed if there is a financial reason to do so.
Another problem that VR for films has is its lack of head movement. This is, as I've heard, a major source of confusion and disorientation in games; points where the camera suddenly cannot move. It's confusing to the brain to move your head yet your vision remains the same, which I'll admit is more or a problem for games due to the cycling between these states of control likely exacerbating the problem. Yet, with film, head movement isn't really possible unless they start rendering 3D films in real time and treat them like video game scenes. This isn't really a problem in regular film, since I can move my head and the room around me changes. If I move my head even the smallest bit, then I can still see the difference. With VR there isn't really any way to fix this, other than redundantly simulating being in a theatre to allow such changes in vision. It just seems unlikely that this problem with VR films is even solvable.
VR faces an uphill battle in that everything has to be adapted to suit it, which is unlikely to happen until VR becomes truly ubiquitous, which is unlikely to happen until everything is adapted correctly, which is unlikely to happen until VR becomes truly ubiquitous, which is unlikely to happen until everything is adapted correctly, which is unlikely to happen until VR becomes truly ubiquitous, which is unlikely to happen until everything is adapted correctly, which is unlikely to happen until VR becomes truly ubiquitous, which is unlikely to happen until everything is adapted correctly, which is -- you get the point. At the moment VR has the benefit of optimistic ignorance; many people dream of playing games in VR, but may reconsider once the novelty wears off and inconvenience is all that's left. A large scale adoption early on could cause the public to write it off due to its many problems, impeding its future and slowing the solving of said problems.
All in all, I have my doubts that the discomfort of VR will be solved anytime soon, and its adoption looks more limited than many would like to think.
You seem to be mixing the challenges of making games in VR, and something much simpler. VR has some huge benefits over theaters beyond 3D too. We're already using our phones like television, and there's just no way that we're not going to have good AR and VR before we have good portable holographic displays and that sort of thing. Some good VR/AR glasses can take the screen out of the equation entirely.
Imagine a phone that doesn't have a screen, just a really sturdy touchpad over the entire surface. The actual "phone" can be really thin, really light, and doesn't have to produce any light or support a display. Instead, your VR/AR glasses make it look to you like there's a screen, however large. Maybe it'll be a watch you wear, that your glasses track. The fact is that we're moving to highly portable, wearable computing. We are not however, moving towards highly portable, wearable screens nearly as quickly. We're not seemingly making vast breakthroughs in power storage either, so how to save power?
Use RGB lasers to pain "glasses" with moving images, until you master the tech to pain the retinas directly (who knows how long that might take). It's a lot less power intensive in theory than a screen, and why do we want a screen anyway? Think about, VR/AR with that kind of tech is the future, but even with pure VR goggles that use an actual screen, you have options. For the first time in a long time, a lot of different technologies are coming (or have come) to maturity around the same time. Most of all, the ability to use computers to brute force previously difficult problems is becoming increasingly inexpensive.
Add it all together, along with a world in which basically everyone is a cellular phone (and therefore eventually smartphone) customers, and VR/AR is inevitable. It explains the massive investment in it, because the first company that really breaks it, makes glasses you can wear all of the time and that do AR/VR? They're going to make Microsoft look piddling.
TL;DR Movement is an issue with VR games. Games have always been more challenging than movies, or simple displays. They will be what becomes ubiquitous first, with gamers pushing the technical and design envelope.
I actually somewhat agree with you on AR, despite my views on VR. AR glasses that effectively project a screen over
some of your vision, but not all, could likely have great utility and convenience. But I still disagree with VR as the future of games or film, since there are so many fundamental problems with it that can't be solved just by enhancing the technology.
