was reading this - https://medium.com/@dgryski/i-have-a-super-power-memory-50d60fe3900aand it occurred to me that VR for education (my friend got an oculus and she has been raving about it so much). Well designed would be a superior experience to what exist currently. You can basically immerse the student in that world completely and give them memories that would make recall easier. I am guessing the problem is that VR is expensive to build. Is it expensive to build because the tools could be better? Could there be tools similar to autocomplete(ala GPT-3, TabNine) help to smooth out the edges? Also could there be innovation in how we write software that help make the process much easier. I have no experience with VR or games at all so curious to see what takes anyone has.

VR are not really any harder than any games up to a point. Both Unity and Unreal you can have a world up in VR in seconds. Start a new project, click VR, run Unity has also has larger starter project Unreal does as well

I'm intensely skeptical of VR being better than real life for anything. VR will not match the full sensory spectrum of vision and hearing, much less touch and motion, for decades. Especially in education for children I think those are all very important. Unless you mean better than remote education in lockdown, in which case sure.

Yeah, but I mean things like teaching biology, or exploring the oceans or exploring the solar system. Not everything can be done in real life and real life is more expensive and impractical to experience

Right, that makes more sense. Maybe I jumped to conclusions. :)

@Andrew F what is your VR experience? @opeispo I hope and feel that we're still in the early days. Some things are janky some are remarkable. Two relevant VR affordances: focused attention and novel senses of space.

VR is expensive due to content, for VR content creation to be cheap for an average person, or even an average developer, we need very easy to use photogrammetry that approaches the complexity of taking a photo or video

@Scott Anderson I hear you on much easier photogrammetry. Right now it does feel a lot like taking a photo in the 1880s.

Is photogrammetry is really that important? Most of the things I want to show people don't exist so I can't take a photo of it. I can't take a photo of a spaceship, or a new building I want to have constructed. Maybe if I could ask an AI model "build me an interactive set of a submarine" so that all the buttons, dials, switches, etc are clickable and I can add scripts to them because I won't get that from photogrammetry directly. i do agree content creation needs to be more accessible. I'm not entirely sure something like dreams is the solution or if just the interesting things we see are the 0.1% of the 9 million players they have that happen to have talent and or patience. There are a bunch of VR creation tools. Google Tilt Brush, Google Blocks, Oculus Medium, Oculus Quill, Gravity Sketch, and probably 10 others. They excel in that they are arguably way more approachable than traditional 3D software like Maya or 3DSMax but they also still come short, mainly like Photoshop or Painter or Illustrator they are just tools and if you're not an artist and willing to put in long hours of training they won't help you make pretty things. People have shipped VR titles that used art made in some of those though and at least for simple prototypes I know a few people that have used Google Blocks to build a test level for a game. I think one way forward is AI or algorithmically enhanced content. That and maybe voice recognition? Let's say I want to build a living room set. I need probably min 50 models. A sofa, a table, stuff on the table, bookshelves, stuff on the bookshelves, an entertainment center, the stuff in the entertainment center, wall decorations, windows, doors, stuff outside the window even if just a facade, etc... Just the time finding those assets takes hours and that assumes I'm not picky. Whether those assets are online or in app it will still take hours to select them all, especially if I remotely care what their style is. But, if I could say as in voice control, "give me a sofa", "slightly larger", "more rounded edges", "make it, green", "lighter green" etc... and the system responded both by making the change and maybe displaying a relevant set of sliders for that feature and some AI was generating them the same way we have the face generator today then I could build the entire living room in 10-20 minutes. The tech seems close in that it seems like it exists but yet another problem, at least with current AI models, is there's just too many training sets needed. Even photo content recognition sucks. I can search for "car" or "airplane" on Google Photos but I can't search for "gull wing door jaguar" or "P-38 Lighting"

I think people wanting to show fantasy objects and explore fantasy worlds are niche outliers

And there's those of us more interested in abstract places. 😎