rygorous/vr_urgh.txt

## vr_urgh.txt
This just got linked to by the Y combinator news account, without proper context,
so a brief introduction: A month ago (end of May / early June 2014) I had a
Twitter conversation with a bunch of acquaintances. One tweet in the middle
of that thread, with obligatory hyperbole, was me saying that I think VR is
bad news.

Well, that part of the thread (but not the rest that provides context) recently
got retweeted, and then someone asked me if I could explain what I mean by that,
and because Twitter is a great platform for delivering 140 character slogans and
not so great for lengthy explanations, I wrote this. So, obligatory disclaimer:
if you're thinking "TL;DR" and want a 140-character summary: there is none. If
I had been able to sum up what I want to say here in a single headline, I
wouldn't have written it in the first place. And now, without further ado, the
original text.

----

Okay, first off, I'm not talking about VR in the abstract here, as some
scary vague futuristic concept that I decided to be scared about after
reading too much cyberpunk books. :)

I'm a programmer, and I spent January 2012 through September 2012 (9 months)
and February 2014 through April 2014 (3 months) working for Valve's VR team as
a contractor. In 2012 I designed and implemented most of the optical tracking
system used in Valve's VR rooms, this year I implemented basic head-tracked
binaural 3D audio, updated some of the scenes in their VR demo reel, as well
as adding a new scene to it. All of the aforementioned code is in active use.
I have used numerous VR headsets extensively, including the Oculus Rift (the
*original* duct-taped prototype, even, as well as the proper DK1s and DK2s),
Valve's headsets, and numerous heavy and/or nausea-inducing contraptions that
I'm happy to forget. Anyway, point being, I'm not some luddite sniping at tech
I don't understand and don't want in my life; I do know both the current state
of the art in VR and some of what's coming, and when I say that I think VR is
bad news, I'm not doing so out of a position of ignorance.

From a tech perspective, VR is really exciting. It's easily the most interesting
(and challenging!) thing I've ever worked on, and not only is it an amazing
subject in its own right, working in the field you also get to work with lots
of brilliant people. As an engineer, it's a dream come true.

At the same time though, I'm deeply ambivalent about it, for several reasons,
and have been for quite some time. This is the beginning of the mail I sent
mid-September 2012 when I quit my first Valve contract:

----

Subject: I want out.

As the subject says, I would like to end my contract with Valve - preferably by
the end of the month, though I realize that's probably too short of a notice.

Part of this has to do with the direction of the project. With AR, there's a
variety of information display/visualization applications, all of which are at
the very least interesting and could turn out to be tremendously empowering in
various ways. The endpoint of VR, on the other hand - all engineering
practicalities of first aiming for a seemingly easier goal aside - seems to be
fundamentally anti-social, completing the sad trajectory of entertainment moving
further and further away from shared social experiences. (As I have mentioned
multiple times, I find the limited, formalized, abstracted and ultimately
alienated social interactions in most forms of online gaming to be immensely
off-putting).

So, at least as VR is concerned, while I find the tech interesting and
challenging, I am deeply ambivalent about what it leads to.

That is not the primary reason for this mail, but it certainly is a factor in
my decision.

[The rest of this mail has no relevance here.]

----

For context, this is a mail written to a colleague that I met daily, and as such
is a lot more strongly worded than I would write the same thing if I was talking
to the general public, so keep that in mind. For context, what's now the VR team
at Valve was, at the time, still trying to figure out its direction; there were
"AR" (not the crappy mobile phone augmented reality, something more substantial)
and "VR" sides, and as you can probably tell I would've preferred the team to go
for AR, but that's not what happened.

Anyway, as you can tell, I'm not a fan of online gaming in general, and as such
the inevitable framing of VR as the gateway to the ultimate MMORPG (which is
what tends to happen) is a sore point for me; I prefer my social interactions to
be in person if possible, and so far what of it made it into online games is
just incredibly basic - as you can tell, the objections I list in that mail are
fundamentally aesthetic, not moral or technological, nor are they things that
cannot be resolved. Certainly, it's easy to imagine an interactive environment
with a richer set of interactions than voice chat and going on raids. :)
[I'm oversimplifying here of course, but I hope it should be clear what I mean.]

In fact, part of my problem with VR is that people's expectations are
inseparably intertwined with the cyberpunk "3D Internet you can walk around and
have adventures in", and while that sounds fun on paper, if you've ever actually
tried to translate traditional game systems into a plausible VR setup, you know
that most of it just feels really bad. I actually think that a lot of the
really interesting things one could do with VR are not games in any traditional
sense at all ("experiences" is probably a better term), and my concerns do not
necessarily apply to those.

So, to make sure that's properly unpacked: when I say that I think "VR is bad
news", I am talking specifically about the VR-enabled MMORPG-esque shared
universes that cyberpunk has promised us :), not about the much wider and more
open-ended concept of "things we might be able to do with working VR headsets
once they exist". And lest I be accused of setting up a strawman here, the VR
MMORPG universe really *is* what a lot of VR enthusiasts are hoping for, and
simultaneously what a lot of really smart people working on VR have repeatedly
(and publicly) declared to be their goal for VR.

The thing about VR is, it really *is* qualitatively different from other
entertainment experiences. This is what "presence" is supposed to mean, an
originally very strong term. Mike Abrash used it in that strong sense at his
Steam DevDays presentation, but it subsequently got picked up by everybody
as a neat adjective to slap in front of things and immediately saw inflationary
usage; I'm sure someone will try selling 34" televisions as "providing presence"
soon, if they aren't already.

But the intended sense is that a VR experience with low latency, a good
display, wide field of view and good tracking really does feel different from
anything you can do on a regular screen. For me, it relates to on-screen
("cinematic") entertainment the way a movie relates to a radio play; they're
different forms, and good at different things, but a movie is just a more
"broad-spectrum" experience; it engages more of your senses directly. VR
compared to movies is much the same way; it feels very differently. Despite
what some people say, it does not feel "real" at all - you're very much aware
you're in a virtual world - and there's still regular glitches etc. to
constantly remind you that it's a simulation - but it does get your mind to
a state where it's good enough overall that you can "opt in" to believe in
it, without immersion breaking every half-second.

So here's what we have so far:
* VR, which is just a lot more "broad-spectrum" than most other types of media,
  on a fundamental level.
* A general perception that the pinnacle of VR is a gigantic shared-universe
  MMORPG (or several smaller partially overlapping universes, but close enough).
  Running these things is expensive.
* The current tech business environment, where the standard way to sell a
  service to people who aren't willing to pay the (full) price is for it to
  be ad-financed.

So, here's the punchline: every single ad-financed operation is in the business
of "selling eyeballs". That's the actual term. And in the VR shared universe
case this is a *lot* more literal than most uses of the term.

The thing is, as has been pointed out numerous times, once you're selling ads,
the ad-buyers are your customers; the people on your service are, depending on
how cynical you're feeling today, either the product or your work force (in
the sense that they are the ones doing the work - generating ad impressions - that
actually keeps your business running).

And having an immersive virtual environment - hey, MMORPGs even without VR
get people to sink lots of time into them, and if anything that's probably gonna
be more pronounced in the VR version - that is set up to, ultimately, generate
ad revenue (and hence prioritize the needs of the advertisers over the desires
of its users) is just an inherently gross concept to me.

All these trends have been there for a long time. I used to be hypothetically
antsy about a major ad-run operation going long in VR. Now that Facebook has
bought Oculus, that's not a hypothetical anymore.

Now, I'm writing this just as the kerfuffle about Facebook running psychological
experiments on their users is ebbing. This is not surprising; if you're trying
to maximize engagement (and thus ultimately ad revenue), these are the kinds of
trials you run, because you want to know what to show to people.

So imagine a shared universe MMORPG, expressly operated by a company that
*already knows all your friends*, that's trying to maximize your engagement
("hey, all your friends are playing right now, don't you want to join too?"),
selling your attention to advertisers, and by the way, also building a detailed
profile on everything you do so they can do all of this even better in the future.
It's okay, go on doing whatever you want, we just want to watch! (Through your
own eyeballs if possible.) And mind, this has nothing to do with Facebook
specifically; given the current set of business practices in the tech industry,
this is pretty much what you end up with no matter which big player ends up
owning the thing. (Google is trying to tie you to their services too. As are MS
and Apple.)

That's a very cyberpunk future all right, but one I'd prefer not to live in.

- Fabian Giesen
  July 2014.
	This just got linked to by the Y combinator news account, without proper context,
	so a brief introduction: A month ago (end of May / early June 2014) I had a
	Twitter conversation with a bunch of acquaintances. One tweet in the middle
	of that thread, with obligatory hyperbole, was me saying that I think VR is
	bad news.

	Well, that part of the thread (but not the rest that provides context) recently
	got retweeted, and then someone asked me if I could explain what I mean by that,
	and because Twitter is a great platform for delivering 140 character slogans and
	not so great for lengthy explanations, I wrote this. So, obligatory disclaimer:
	if you're thinking "TL;DR" and want a 140-character summary: there is none. If
	I had been able to sum up what I want to say here in a single headline, I
	wouldn't have written it in the first place. And now, without further ado, the
	original text.

	----

	Okay, first off, I'm not talking about VR in the abstract here, as some
	scary vague futuristic concept that I decided to be scared about after
	reading too much cyberpunk books. :)

	I'm a programmer, and I spent January 2012 through September 2012 (9 months)
	and February 2014 through April 2014 (3 months) working for Valve's VR team as
	a contractor. In 2012 I designed and implemented most of the optical tracking
	system used in Valve's VR rooms, this year I implemented basic head-tracked
	binaural 3D audio, updated some of the scenes in their VR demo reel, as well
	as adding a new scene to it. All of the aforementioned code is in active use.
	I have used numerous VR headsets extensively, including the Oculus Rift (the
	original duct-taped prototype, even, as well as the proper DK1s and DK2s),
	Valve's headsets, and numerous heavy and/or nausea-inducing contraptions that
	I'm happy to forget. Anyway, point being, I'm not some luddite sniping at tech
	I don't understand and don't want in my life; I do know both the current state
	of the art in VR and some of what's coming, and when I say that I think VR is
	bad news, I'm not doing so out of a position of ignorance.

	From a tech perspective, VR is really exciting. It's easily the most interesting
	(and challenging!) thing I've ever worked on, and not only is it an amazing
	subject in its own right, working in the field you also get to work with lots
	of brilliant people. As an engineer, it's a dream come true.

	At the same time though, I'm deeply ambivalent about it, for several reasons,
	and have been for quite some time. This is the beginning of the mail I sent
	mid-September 2012 when I quit my first Valve contract:

	----

	Subject: I want out.

	As the subject says, I would like to end my contract with Valve - preferably by
	the end of the month, though I realize that's probably too short of a notice.

	Part of this has to do with the direction of the project. With AR, there's a
	variety of information display/visualization applications, all of which are at
	the very least interesting and could turn out to be tremendously empowering in
	various ways. The endpoint of VR, on the other hand - all engineering
	practicalities of first aiming for a seemingly easier goal aside - seems to be
	fundamentally anti-social, completing the sad trajectory of entertainment moving
	further and further away from shared social experiences. (As I have mentioned
	multiple times, I find the limited, formalized, abstracted and ultimately
	alienated social interactions in most forms of online gaming to be immensely
	off-putting).

	So, at least as VR is concerned, while I find the tech interesting and
	challenging, I am deeply ambivalent about what it leads to.

	That is not the primary reason for this mail, but it certainly is a factor in
	my decision.

	[The rest of this mail has no relevance here.]

	----

	For context, this is a mail written to a colleague that I met daily, and as such
	is a lot more strongly worded than I would write the same thing if I was talking
	to the general public, so keep that in mind. For context, what's now the VR team
	at Valve was, at the time, still trying to figure out its direction; there were
	"AR" (not the crappy mobile phone augmented reality, something more substantial)
	and "VR" sides, and as you can probably tell I would've preferred the team to go
	for AR, but that's not what happened.

	Anyway, as you can tell, I'm not a fan of online gaming in general, and as such
	the inevitable framing of VR as the gateway to the ultimate MMORPG (which is
	what tends to happen) is a sore point for me; I prefer my social interactions to
	be in person if possible, and so far what of it made it into online games is
	just incredibly basic - as you can tell, the objections I list in that mail are
	fundamentally aesthetic, not moral or technological, nor are they things that
	cannot be resolved. Certainly, it's easy to imagine an interactive environment
	with a richer set of interactions than voice chat and going on raids. :)
	[I'm oversimplifying here of course, but I hope it should be clear what I mean.]

	In fact, part of my problem with VR is that people's expectations are
	inseparably intertwined with the cyberpunk "3D Internet you can walk around and
	have adventures in", and while that sounds fun on paper, if you've ever actually
	tried to translate traditional game systems into a plausible VR setup, you know
	that most of it just feels really bad. I actually think that a lot of the
	really interesting things one could do with VR are not games in any traditional
	sense at all ("experiences" is probably a better term), and my concerns do not
	necessarily apply to those.

	So, to make sure that's properly unpacked: when I say that I think "VR is bad
	news", I am talking specifically about the VR-enabled MMORPG-esque shared
	universes that cyberpunk has promised us :), not about the much wider and more
	open-ended concept of "things we might be able to do with working VR headsets
	once they exist". And lest I be accused of setting up a strawman here, the VR
	MMORPG universe really is what a lot of VR enthusiasts are hoping for, and
	simultaneously what a lot of really smart people working on VR have repeatedly
	(and publicly) declared to be their goal for VR.

	The thing about VR is, it really is qualitatively different from other
	entertainment experiences. This is what "presence" is supposed to mean, an
	originally very strong term. Mike Abrash used it in that strong sense at his
	Steam DevDays presentation, but it subsequently got picked up by everybody
	as a neat adjective to slap in front of things and immediately saw inflationary
	usage; I'm sure someone will try selling 34" televisions as "providing presence"
	soon, if they aren't already.

	But the intended sense is that a VR experience with low latency, a good
	display, wide field of view and good tracking really does feel different from
	anything you can do on a regular screen. For me, it relates to on-screen
	("cinematic") entertainment the way a movie relates to a radio play; they're
	different forms, and good at different things, but a movie is just a more
	"broad-spectrum" experience; it engages more of your senses directly. VR
	compared to movies is much the same way; it feels very differently. Despite
	what some people say, it does not feel "real" at all - you're very much aware
	you're in a virtual world - and there's still regular glitches etc. to
	constantly remind you that it's a simulation - but it does get your mind to
	a state where it's good enough overall that you can "opt in" to believe in
	it, without immersion breaking every half-second.

	So here's what we have so far:
	* VR, which is just a lot more "broad-spectrum" than most other types of media,
	on a fundamental level.
	* A general perception that the pinnacle of VR is a gigantic shared-universe
	MMORPG (or several smaller partially overlapping universes, but close enough).
	Running these things is expensive.
	* The current tech business environment, where the standard way to sell a
	service to people who aren't willing to pay the (full) price is for it to
	be ad-financed.

	So, here's the punchline: every single ad-financed operation is in the business
	of "selling eyeballs". That's the actual term. And in the VR shared universe
	case this is a lot more literal than most uses of the term.

	The thing is, as has been pointed out numerous times, once you're selling ads,
	the ad-buyers are your customers; the people on your service are, depending on
	how cynical you're feeling today, either the product or your work force (in
	the sense that they are the ones doing the work - generating ad impressions - that
	actually keeps your business running).

	And having an immersive virtual environment - hey, MMORPGs even without VR
	get people to sink lots of time into them, and if anything that's probably gonna
	be more pronounced in the VR version - that is set up to, ultimately, generate
	ad revenue (and hence prioritize the needs of the advertisers over the desires
	of its users) is just an inherently gross concept to me.

	All these trends have been there for a long time. I used to be hypothetically
	antsy about a major ad-run operation going long in VR. Now that Facebook has
	bought Oculus, that's not a hypothetical anymore.

	Now, I'm writing this just as the kerfuffle about Facebook running psychological
	experiments on their users is ebbing. This is not surprising; if you're trying
	to maximize engagement (and thus ultimately ad revenue), these are the kinds of
	trials you run, because you want to know what to show to people.

	So imagine a shared universe MMORPG, expressly operated by a company that
	already knows all your friends, that's trying to maximize your engagement
	("hey, all your friends are playing right now, don't you want to join too?"),
	selling your attention to advertisers, and by the way, also building a detailed
	profile on everything you do so they can do all of this even better in the future.
	It's okay, go on doing whatever you want, we just want to watch! (Through your
	own eyeballs if possible.) And mind, this has nothing to do with Facebook
	specifically; given the current set of business practices in the tech industry,
	this is pretty much what you end up with no matter which big player ends up
	owning the thing. (Google is trying to tie you to their services too. As are MS
	and Apple.)

	That's a very cyberpunk future all right, but one I'd prefer not to live in.

	- Fabian Giesen
	July 2014.