On 03/03/2016 10:25 AM, Yui Hirasawa wrote: > It's another category of hardware if anything. I hope it won't be as > proprietary and closed down as the smartphone market is currently.
Hardware is not really the issue, in my opinion. The Oculus Rift, for example, is a relatively simple device. A smartphone can be based on a free hardware design but it won't matter if most users run the Facebook app on it (as is the case), and the same applies to VR peripherals. The problem is what is shown to users, and that's software. I am not optimistic about freedom in VR because all the popular services today are centralized and controlled by for-profit corporations, and that didn't change when decentralized free replacement were developed. Also, self-driving cars, the internet of things and powerful artificial intelligence are all proprietary, so there are bigger concerns than VR everybody is ignoring. I personally come from an unpopular perspective in the tech community, as I am strongly against Virtual Reality in any shape or form. There are simply too negative aspects for it to be ever acceptable in my view, regardless of its legitimate uses (like assisting surgeons), but I don't expect many people here to share my concerns because most of them are moral in nature (for example, I think letting a serial killer or rapist live out their fantasies in the virtual world is still wrong, even if it would only involve AI-controlled characters).
