Meta now involved in making metalevel standards for the metaverse A smattering of big and not so big tech companies have linked arms to shape the emerging industry known as the metaverse. Although the metaverse has been around for a considerable amount of time, it gained much more attention and nurturing in the past year, particularly with Facebook's October 2021 rebrand to Meta. But many …
I would think that a surgury is a situation where you stay focused on a very limited amount of space. You're not driving a car, flying a plane or walking around town turning your head every which way.
So yeah, maybe for surguries this tech is good, and so much the better.
The funny thing is, humans tend to not like to have stuff stuck on their faces in order to just move around.
Quote: "...researchers [PDF] who recently asked volunteers to work in VR for an entire 40-hour work week saw poor results. Two of the 18 volunteers dropped out entirely and the rest felt frustrated. Some reported significant nausea and sore eyes."
Looking at the PDF, seems the volunteers were given Oculus Quest 2s, which are basically a ~£320 all-in-one system. Essentially a mobile phone type spec device, strapped to your head. Tracking can be a bit lagy, it runs at 120Hz refresh, which is about the bare minimum for comfortable VR, and it doesn't have anywhere near the processing power of a PC. You also have to go via Facebook to use it!
Might have been better off with something like an Index, much better laser based tracking and faster refresh. One issue could be weight though, as the Index is quite heavy (and the cost, plus you also need a PC with the Index).
The lenses are different for left and right
Ditto.. -12d in the left eye but only -10d in the right..
If I take my glasses off my maximum focal distance is about the end of my nose with my right eye. Slightly less with the left eye,
I'm very, very glad that modern materials are better at bending light than glass was. Even so, the edges of the left lens are about 12mm thick.
I qualify as partially-sighted and the government gives me a generous £5 towards the cost of each lens (which cost roughly £100 each. The optician gives me the discount but doesn't bother getting it back since the time spent dealing with the paperwork would cost a lot more than £10..
So I'd have to wear my glasses anyway with a headset unless it uses some sort of beaming method that could overcome the extreme myopia and astigmatism.
I wear glasses all the time in VR (Steam Index). I'm 67 and have astigmatism, different prescriptions in each eye and the usual age-related long-sightedness. I normally wear varifocals but find them a bit strange in VR. What I did was to get my optician to make up a pair of glasses with my vanilla prescription without any sort of magnification for reading, VDUs, etc.. To keep the cost down, I just got two new lenses in an old frame.
The glasses work fine, the picture is clear except at the edges where the frames can be seen (vaguely). The frames fit in the Index with no problem. Prior to the Index, I had a HTC Vive Pro which was also OK, in fact, it had more room than the Index.
Summary: glasses are OK as long as the frames are not to large.
Phil.
You wear your normal distance vision glasses or contacts under the headset.
Dame Edna would have trouble, but most glasses will fit just fine.
You can also buy prescription lenses that fit into the headset itself, if you find it annoying to squeeze your glasses inside.
For something that doesn't exist? You don't know what the metaverse will actually be, or what end users will actually want to use it for (if anything)
So you've got engineer wish lists of things they want to make it do, and marketers dreams of what they can sell end users on it being, and they'll mash those together into a fine paste they'll use to create standards. Worse, it is being done by committee!
Imagine if Nokia and Microsoft had got together in 1998 to create standards for the "smartphone". How useful would those standards have been? How long would they have held things up until everyone decided those standards were useless?
Read the article again:
" But don't expect the forum to create standards: it explicitly said it will not. Instead it will take on a more top-level, one might say "meta," role by coordinating requirements and resources to "foster the creation and evolution of standards within standards organizations working in relevant domains.""
Smartphones use a plethora of standards. All the various telephony ones for a start, then there are the Internet ones, multiple security ones and each smartphone OS adds in its own, including UI and standard APIs for accessing the phone's hardware.
The metaverse will need a lot of standards too. How does your client interact with the host, how does your avatar move from one host to another, what's the metadata and data associated with an avatar that needs to go with it, what's the difference between an avatar and a user, what's the difference between a corporate user, a corporation and an individual, what's the standard for making secure payments, what's the standard for transferring purchased assets to other hosts or to other avatars.. I'll stop there, but I could keep going.
Will the committee created standards be useful and survive? Some will, some won't, but the ones that don't will, by failing, inform their replacements which then have a chance of meeting the needs of the hardware, software, media and digital asset creators, and the people using all of that.
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