I am not alone in this, certainly, but I have so many ideas for things that I think would be really cool, or really informative, or really compelling, or really je ne sais quois.
Here’s an idea that would appeal to me, and quite possibly to at least a dozen other people: VR Model Railroad. Imagine a Model Railroad enthusiast has gotten himself a 3D Printer so they can download models from thingiverse, print out little buildings, cars, whatever, paint them, and add them to that monstrous thing that takes up way too much of the basement. Or the garage. Or the club’s building. Or whatever. Well what if those buildings didn’t need to be really printed? What if the model railroad was assembled in Sansar, or HiFidelity, or some other VR platform, and the train was also virtual? All the valves. All the levers and knobs. The roaring and hissing and clatter… all within the Oculus Rift with Touch Controllers.
Or, in a more AR way, what about a model train locomotive that has 360° cameras, and there was an interface between Touch controllers and the Model Railroad controls? Pop on the Oculus Rift, and shrinkify yourself INTO the cab of your locomotive, and engineer that puppy around the plywood and styrofoam from the Engineer’s perspective.
And shouldn’t every major art museum be making a VR version of their spaces?
And shouldn’t every state’s History Society be hiring 360-cam operators and VR designers to get even more eyes on History? Well heck, that’d also be an interesting area to do AR. Walk into some historic house, then view it through your AR-enabled phone app, and see an actor-portrayal of whichever historical figure sitting at his desk in the study, engrossed in the business of governance or whatever.
There’s a great deal of potential, but the recent articles seem to indicate that the XR market is still quite small (though the ARKit stuff in the latest iPhones may sway those numbers quite a bit).
