Well if your comment gets buried I do want to note that your perspective at least sounds reasonable, and your personal experience is worth extrapolating to a more broad experience or market potential. I've got my reservations about the 'revolution' that VR will be able to bring in the mainstream sense. I think the physical discomforts you mention are absolutely worth noting as a caution.
I'm not saying it's a great correlation, but some of the excitement regarding VR reminds me of other fancy, tech-oriented entertainment innovations that sounded interesting, but didn't quite pan out. Specifically the one where the movie audience was supposed to be able to have an effect on the story[1].
>"In another year, you'll see the pistol grip plus a seat with gyroscope motion control," Mr. Bejan said. "Two years after that, it will be virtual reality, with the goggles and gloves." (1993)
The purpose of mentioning such a whiff is as a reference point for my personal belief that people tend to like their entertainment simple and relatively easy to access. Great advancements in tech and media - successful ones/profitable/etc - seem to have been more about delivering traditional content in an 'easier' method of convenience. Netflix didn't revolutionize the business of making films, but rather the distribution. People are funny when it comes to art, no doubt.
Well I think the reference you're citing is more about the length of the film - 3 hours and 45 minutes - moreso than the fact that it's in Technicolor. A closer parallel would be comparing Gone With the Wind to a Michael Bay Transformers film, in that almost 3 hours of cinema is typically hard on the viewer, and moreso when there are tons of visual explosions and loud sounds that wear down on an audience.
I love THX theater sound. SDDS. All of them. However, those tools can be very much abused by certain practitioners, and that's not the tech's fault. Basically I think that improvements are welcomed but gimmicks never last. Is VR a new gimmick in the grand context of entertainment? We're about to find out it seems.
> Well I think the reference you're citing is more about the length of the film - 3 hours and 45 minutes - moreso than the fact that it's in Technicolor.
It's both – if the film had been in black and white, the comment would not have been made, nor if the Technicolor portion of the film were shorter (e.g. in The Wizard of Oz, which the reviewer had seen some months prior).
I'm fairly confident that the VR headsets of today are equivalent to the bulky brick-size cellphones of yesteryear – the utility they provide to the early adopters is more than enough to offset their cumbersome nature right now, but in 10 years' time everyone will want one, and they'll be priced much more competitively.
...or the production quality might degrade to the point of bursting into flames, like those $XXX self-powered scooter boards, which dampens the appeal.
I'm not saying it's a great correlation, but some of the excitement regarding VR reminds me of other fancy, tech-oriented entertainment innovations that sounded interesting, but didn't quite pan out. Specifically the one where the movie audience was supposed to be able to have an effect on the story[1].
>"In another year, you'll see the pistol grip plus a seat with gyroscope motion control," Mr. Bejan said. "Two years after that, it will be virtual reality, with the goggles and gloves." (1993)
The purpose of mentioning such a whiff is as a reference point for my personal belief that people tend to like their entertainment simple and relatively easy to access. Great advancements in tech and media - successful ones/profitable/etc - seem to have been more about delivering traditional content in an 'easier' method of convenience. Netflix didn't revolutionize the business of making films, but rather the distribution. People are funny when it comes to art, no doubt.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/13/movies/when-the-film-audie...