Virtual reality

What Hacker News says

1. richardjdareJun 2021
   I was a programmer in the 90s but I didn't become a paid professional until the early 2000s.

   I thought that the internet would kill the tabloid press (I am in the UK), and give the public better quality news and information. Instead, the internet became the tabloid.

   I thought that it would be the "other guys" who would first leverage the internet as a political platform. People descended from 90s hacktivists, DMT-eating civil libertarians and the like. The rise of internet driven populism was a surprise to me.

   I thought that in the future I would own an SGI home computer with superpowered custom chips, or something like a Playstation 2 with an os and keyboard. That is, something highly integrated like the home computers were.

   I kind of miss the immersive experience of working with a computer where the whole thing is a unified design and you have a couple of big books which tell you everything you'll need to know to program them, and all the layers of abstraction are accessible and make sense to the programmer-user.

   Back then, I thought that the computers of the future would be more profound rather than merely more complex. That they would still be knowable to the lone hacker, only they would demand more from them. Instead we have these huge complexes of ordinary complexity, reminiscent of power station piping diagrams, that we work on in teams as bureaucrats of abstraction. Of course, back then I was a kid, in love with the mystique of computers, there was a lot I romanticized, and a lot I didn't know.

   I thought there would be more visual tools for programming, things derived from NeXT Interface Builder, Visual Basic and multimedia authoring systems that people used to use to make CD ROMs and information kiosks in the 90s. And I thought that the development process would be more integrated. We wouldn't be bothering with stacks of batch-mode build tools and things like that, and it would be relatively easy to open a window or play a sound in a high level language without having to do C bindings to third party cross-platform toolkits etc.

   I didn't think programming would be replaced with graphical tools, I thought it would be augmented by them, in a unified, ergonomic package.

   I thought VR would get going sooner than it did. I was a big fan of Howard Rheingold's 1991 book "Virtual Reality" (a great guide to early VR) and got to try it out in 1993 at a computer exhibition. I used to fantasize about going to VR arcades and playing flight simulators with a bunch of people. Now I do it at home with IL2: Great Battles.

   One prediction I got right was shaders on graphics cards. Back in the late 90s I was a user of BMRT, a shareware Renderman-compliant raytracer which introduced me to the idea of programmable shaders. I figured it was only a matter of time before they ended up in consumer hardware, and my ears pricked up when the author of BMRT went to work for Nvidia.

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2. argimenesDec 2013
   'Graph Databases' by Ian Robinson, Jim Webber, and Emil Eifrem

   'Hackers and Painters' by Paul Graham

   'Virtual Reality' by Howard Rheingold

   'Stack Computers: The New Wave' by Philip Koopman

   'Thinking Forth' by Leo Brodie

   'WIMP Programming for All on Acorn RISC Computers' by Lee Calcraft and Alan Wrigley

   'Frank Herbert' by Timothy O'Reilly

   'Modern Painters: volume 1' by John Ruskin

   'Aratra Pentelici' by John Ruskin

   'The Art and Craft of Drawing' by Vernon Blake

   'The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci' by Dmitri Merezhkovsky ('romance' in the old sense of 'biographical novel')

   'Prehistoric Avebury' by Aubrey Burl

   'A Canticle for Leibowitz' by Walter M. Miller

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3. pollen23Nov 2018
   I remember reading Howard Rheingold's book "Virtual Reality" when it came out almost 30 years ago, and seeing the Alvy Ray Smith (co-founder of Pixar) quote where he claimed that "Reality is 80 million polygons per second"

   80 million is nothing nowadays, and we still have 20 years to go. How could he be so far off?

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4. kryptisktFeb 2014
   > such a short period of time.

   I bought Howard Rheingold's "Virtual Reality" 22 years ago! :-P

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5. dalkeJan 2014
   "Begins"? A writer who knows little of history. The piece even mentions CAVE2, without mentioning the original CAVE work from the 1990s. News articles about the CAVE in our building, back in the mid-1990s, used similar holodeck references.

   (The enthusiasm has been here for decades. See for example Howard Rheingold's 1992 "Virtual Reality: The Revolutionary Technology of Computer-Generated Artificial Worlds - and How It Promises to Transform Society".)

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