Does virtual reality require killer apps?

December 23--in 1783, on a bitterly cold morning in December, about 400,000 people gathered in Tuileries, Paris, to witness the world's first manned flight of hydrogen balls. Jacques Charles (Jacques Charles) and his assistant Nicolas Louise Robert (Nicolas-louis Robert) rose to 1800 feet, carrying a mercury barometer, sandbags and bottles of champagne.

"The moment I took off, the surprise filled my whole body, and I never had a similar experience in my life," Charles later recalls.

On the ground, Benjamin Franklin (Benjamin Franklin), the American ambassador to France, witnessed everything from his carriage. "What's the use of this balloon," said a conservative companion beside him. "What's the use of a newborn baby," Franklin replied. ”

What he means is: Your vision is not wide open.

Joseph (Joseph Banks), then president of the Royal Society of England, first learned of the balloon in a letter from Franklin, and insisted on understanding the potential application of the balloon. Some are easy to come to mind-map-making and military reconnaissance-but he asks whether balloons are also "able to contribute to society or science". Banks put forward the idea of using balloons to reduce the weight of horses carrying goods. As a result, it usually takes 8 horses to pull the load, and by this method, now only needs 2 horses.

Franklin is more far-sighted, pointing out that balloons can "pave the way for certain discoveries in the field of natural philosophy that we have not yet had." He compared balloons to electromagnetic phenomena, and "the initial experiment of electromagnetic phenomena was only for recreational purposes".

The balloons of the year, today's VR

As with the hydrogen ball of the year, the lack of ideas has also constrained the development of the most imaginative technology in the recent past-virtual reality devices. Oculus's groundbreaking work for VR was originally designed to "design a special head-and-wear device for video games, forever changing the way people think about games," and few-especially gamers-see the use of VR beyond high-end gaming peripherals. Like the new graphics card or the bigger and clearer TV, the player's ideas are reasonable, and this is only a boost to the current game display technology-the goods that were originally dragged by the horses can now help with balloons.

We have a few years to embrace and become accustomed to the concept of VR, and some have begun to explore the possibilities of VR. Wired magazine hopes to lead the trend of thought. A few months ago, they declared that VR would "change games, movies, television, music, design, medicine, sex, sports, art, travel, social networking, education and reality". Of course, celebrating the birth of new technology is a consistent tradition of the magazine. In an article published in 1788, Esquire magazine (Gentleman's Magazine) described the birth of the hydrogen ball as "the most significant discovery ever made in human history". The magazine assured the reader that it would show the various uses of the balloon.

Now, there is also the question of the most promising VR technology: What is the killer application of VR?

Find the power to get people to wear VR equipment

In fact, when asked what is the killer application of VR, what people really want to ask is: how to convince the public to wear this thing on their faces? This is the idea. Wearing Oculus-head-wearing equipment really makes people look stupid.

Recently, at a VR convention, I crossed a hallway and passed by a guy. This man is still waif, even by the standards of technology fanatics. He sat on the bench, wearing Oculus Rift, and he was out of tune with the surroundings. Next to him was a book with a mouse on it, and he was clicking quickly to manipulate objects that only he could see.

He raised his hand to adjust the equipment on his face, and I saw a chance to become a "bad man". I crept close to him, picked up the mouse, and put it down a few feet from the bench. As usual, he leaned his hand toward where the mouse had been, and found nothing. I observed him frowning and groping on. For me, even if the engineers completely solve the VR vertigo problem, they won't be able to eliminate the situation.

At the CES show next month, hordes of new VR companies will sell their inventions, and executives and investors will inevitably ask: what is a killer application? By definition, a killer application is a technology that makes the public worth buying. For the game host, this question is more meaningful, because there is no one game host can be a faction. For game consoles or most consumer electronics products, if there is no killer application in the months after the launch, then the product has a bleak future. Without this application, game consoles and other devices are useless.

However, the VR situation is quite different.

VR differs from other technologies

Like a manned flight or a regret pill, people's desire and dreams to escape from reality existed long before the advent of technology. This is the ancient civilization recorded in the myth of things. When people ask, "What is the killer application of VR?" "They are assuming that VR will follow the path of general consumer products." When Apple launches the iphone, many of us repeat the game: "The company has to prove that their product is not a dud," we said, "otherwise no one will pay for it." ”

But the thirst for killer applications in VR is a short-sighted pursuit of capitalist-style utility. The potential of VR is far greater than we can imagine at present, it has the ability to touch the human mind, which is the innate human nature of our millions of years of evolution, far more than the newly emerging, shiny little toys of the past.

You can see the expressions of those who just ended the Oculus demo experience. They looked dazed and sleepy, as if they had just woken up and had been interrupted by a dream. "Let Me go back," shouted one fellow, who had just ended Oculus's star-Moon Bay prototype demo experience. "I want to stay inside." ”

Back to Charles and Robert's first flight, they flew aimlessly for 2 hours, landing 27 miles away. For a moment, Charles had unwisely asked Robert to step out of the basket, unaware that the reduced load would lift the balloon.

By reducing the burden on one person, the balloon went up again, and this time climbed to a higher height: 10,000 feet in 10 minutes. Charles remained calm, slowly dropping the gas in the balloon and returning safely to the ground, but he was terrified by what had happened. He never returned to the basket.

Let's fly in the VR boat.

The first balloon was an easily broken, dangerous invention that did not find its place in the real world, but succeeded in broadening the imagination. At that moment, the brave French adventurer Jacques Charles and the Mengelfi brothers filled the huge bags with gas and floated over the countryside, which was the beginning of madness. Since then, the balloon heat swept across Europe, the dream of manned flight to the challenge to become a matter of course. It is no use tying the balloons to the wagon, but it doesn't matter, because those with the deepest eyes know that the balloon is like a baby and will thrive in time. From the birth of the first balloon, to the creation of aeronautics, to the advent of airplanes, to the successful landing of mankind, today we can rightly see the causal relationship between these things.

Go to any VR conference and you'll find that for ordinary consumers, every demo on the show is full of flaws. For many people, motion disorder remains a problem. And in the demo, the performance of the scene is still immature.

But it doesn't matter at all. On the road to the discovery of VR and the search for meaningful uses, those who bought the VR developer Suite and carried out countless trials are teetering on their way. We crossed a line, and the same line was crossed by a balloon that was airborne in Paris early in December 1783. Virtual reality does not require a killer application, it needs to continue to maintain the existing form-continue to develop-continue to fly-so that crazy people can take us to the new unknown.

(Responsible editor: Mengyishan)