While there's a lot of talk here about the future of IDEs, difficulties with current hardware and other challenges, I'd like to take a moment to talk about what's actually in the video.
This fills me with almost childish glee. This is a virtual reality, where you can pop up a "god window" and create/mess with a world around you. Even just what's in the video, making some cubes move and change colour is wonderful. It's fun!
Remember the early bits of amazement at programming? Where you could make the computer say your name or draw a square? How much cooler would that be in VR?
Reminds me of Worldbuilder [1], a scifi short about a VR interface for editing the world around you.
I kinda like the "grab object & kiss to save" gesture: it wouldn't make sense in 2D but feels natural in VR, although "grab & push object in your brain" might be easier implement to represent a save function.
Did you ever catch a look at (or play with) OpenCroquet (which then morphed into OpenCobalt and... kinda stalled, from what I can gather).
Croquet was this (but without the Oculus) in 2007. I miss it, but it went nowhere, but.. that's Smalltalk for you - seems to scare people for some reason.
This is pretty much how I imagined Notch's sadly abandoned space game project that had a programmable CPU as the heart of your ships. I hope someone takes over his torch on this, I'd love a fully fleshed out programmer's game. Imagine using such a thing in programming class as an introduction.
For a year or so I worked as a contract programmer on the inworld content team for Second Life. I didn't have VR, and the language I programmed in (LSL) was even worse than Javascript, but it was still incredibly fun to use code to shape the world around me. It's even more fun when you can do that in a shared space and see others interacting with your creations.
Someday there will be something like Second Life with Oculus support and a decent programming environment, and that will be awesome.
Second life looks like a great game that I would never play. Most people on it seem to be only interested in the social aspect, but it's pretty awesome that you can create programmable objects and sell them.
InWorldz is working on it, or at least talking about eventually adding both Oculus support and another language. They've already made considerable improvements to LSL and to the grid and viewer software.
The thing is though you can do this today without the VR glasses. Sure the VR glasses offer a coolness factor, and I am excited for that, but I don't see the revolution here yet.
My problem is that it lacks imagination. Let's just take our text editor over to the VR world. Not come up with a new method of interacting with code utilizing VR.
I agree with your overall sentiment, but I also have an observation: I have the DK2 -- and while I haven't had a chance to play with this yet, I have been playing a little bit of the Elite: Dangerous beta.
The revelation there, is that working headtracking makes working with a huge "display" feel very natural. You can only look at one (or a few) things at once anyway -- but with head-tracking you don't have to worry about lining up five 30" screens in order to keep track of everything -- having it all (sanely) mapped out in 3d actually works just as mundanely and boring and well as you'd expect.
And that in itself is kind of a revelation. Suddenly you have almost unlimited screen real estate, that is even more naturally and intuitively accessible than multiple desktops (and I'm generally a great fan of xmonad-style tiling, no-full window managers with easily accessible multiple workspaces).
Another "wow" factor for Elite was the fact that what seems like a kind of silly gimmick on a single screen -- that "holograms" pop up with info when you look at them -- actually works in VR.
The one thing they did botch in Elite in the previous beta, was font-size -- the DK2 leaves "half-hd" per eye -- and that's not really enough to read "fine print". They sort-of fixed it in the new Beta just out -- but now the UI for space docks is "too wide" -- the text is more readable, but the "holo" should've been placed "further away" from you, so you don't have to move your head from side to side to read a line of text. I've yet to try it plain 2d -- I suspect it works fine on a regular screen.
Anyway, the point is that even a completely boring an unimaginative use of VR for programming can actually be a minor revolution. Fully working gloves/hand tracking would be better -- maybe with just a "dummy" keyboard for touch input (I'm not convinced "drum on a tabletop, visual-tracking keyboard" is actually that usable for touch-typing -- at least not when your back-tick is at shift-two-places-right-of-zero and opening-curly-brace is at meta-7 etc -- as it is on a Norwegian layout).
Finally -- immediate feedback certainly is nice -- and this is where the "big screen" effect of VR can really help. You can be effortlessly aware of both your evolving 3d model, and the text-representation of your code -- without having to have two screens, or switch between virtual workspaces.
Thanks for this. I am really excited for the DK2 to arrive. I ordered it a bit late but it should ship soon. I did try one at PAX Prime, it was outstanding.
You make some good points and I'll have to investigate further once I get the headset. Currently using the SDK and it just isn't the same.
> The thing is though you can do this today without the VR glasses.
Yes, and I think live coding is pretty cool.
> but I don't see the revolution here yet.
Neither do I, but I don't think it needs to be. It certainly didn't seem to be sold as that. That was part of the reason for my post actually, that people are alternately seeing this as the next big thing or falling short of some incredible goal. It's neither, it's just cool.
> My problem is that it lacks imagination.
Well feel free to create something else incredible, and I'll be happy to find that awesome as well. This doesn't hold anyone back, it doesn't stop anything and it isn't being billed as TheNewWave(tm), it's just an interesting experiment combining a few different bits of tech together.
It's a drastic shame to see people poke holes in something just because it isn't world changing.
You don't need to down vote if you disagree. I was contributing to the conversation. Either way, in my opinion it's valuable feedback. If I was working on something like this, I'd want to hear what people really thought. Not useless cheerleading. I did not poke holes - I gave suggestions. Look for alternate methods of input not just rehashing the same methods from a desktop.
Also I am working on something on my own. Which is why I thought I'd give feedback. I encountered the same issues myself.
I'm not sure if that was aimed at me, but if so you can't downvote replies to your own comments (at least I can't, maybe there's a higher karma threshold where you can but I doubt it).
If it wasn't you I apologize. I have no problems being down-voted if I am out of line but it is annoying when people just down-vote because they disagree.
While watching the video, I kept hoping he'd look down at the cubes and "jump down" to them. Like, enable gravity and jump down onto the cubes as a player. That'd have been awesome.
This fills me with almost childish glee. This is a virtual reality, where you can pop up a "god window" and create/mess with a world around you. Even just what's in the video, making some cubes move and change colour is wonderful. It's fun!
Remember the early bits of amazement at programming? Where you could make the computer say your name or draw a square? How much cooler would that be in VR?