The 1993 Murder She Wrote VR episode (2014)

https://www.wired.com/2014/04/underwire-0402-murdershewrote/

by tosh • 4 years ago

116 60 4 years ago

QuarterRoy• 4 years ago

I’ve seen this episode recently. Murder She Wrote is one of my guilty pleasures.

eterm• 4 years ago

Me too, I spent a month in hospital last year and the fact that 4 different channels showed Murder She Wrote at different times during the day definitely helped get me through it.

This was one of the episodes I remember more clearly and I remember it was pretty good although it's fair to say I was on a lot of drugs so my review is probably not entirely trustworthy.

galangalalgol• 4 years ago

Did you see the one where she stumbles upon the murder of the very last resident of cabot cove, and she is forced into the realization that she is in fact the most prolific serial killer in history.

fatneckbeardz• 4 years ago

i never felt guilty about it, Angela Landsbury is a legend. RIP

Yuioup• 4 years ago

Cabot Cove is one of the most dangerous places on earth. Murders per capita is through the roof ;-)

Love the show!

ghostDancer• 4 years ago

My om used to say that Jessica Fletcher could make a living of getting paid not to get out of Cabot Cove. She was like an herald of Death.

Eleison23• 4 years ago

Pushing Up Roses offers an 11-minute review: https://youtu.be/Ur-5WCtSl10

markild• 4 years ago

Gave me a flashback to VR.5[1] from '95.

I remember it as an _amazing_ show, so I'm very weary of seeing any videos of it now...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VR.5

csours• 4 years ago

The exterior shots are the same building as Star Trek has used for Star Fleet Academy - Tillman Water Reclamation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tillman_Water_Reclamation_Plan...

habitue• 4 years ago

This is amazing. I really like that Angela Lansbury didn't make her character some bystander just because it was a tech-centered episode. She's like "I'm doing VR and I'm going to help out these programmers".

Like, the episode sounds ridiculous and strangely tech-phobic, but I just really like that she dodged the trope of "old lady skeptical of this new-fangled stuff" and instead she was really enthusiastic about it and not afraid to jump in.

DonHopkins3• 4 years ago

Back when I was playing Ultima Online decades ago, when the kids in the chat would tell outrageously boastful Chuck Norris jokes, I would counter by telling even more outrageously boastful Angela Lansbury jokes.

Chuck Norris can't hold a candle to Angela Lansbury.

psychphysic• 4 years ago

New tech became a trope in Columbo episodes which I always enjoyed.

The robot episode "mind over mayhem" is amazing and I still pretend to be the robot from it occasionally when I'm down and alone.

Julesman3• 4 years ago

I was just out of high school then. I seriously thought we'd have great VR in 20 years.

Maybe 15 years later I checkout out Second Life. Kind of basic, but still seemed like the plan was on track.

Over a decade later VR games seemed to imply a near-future result we had all be hoping for.

But now it seems that the idea can't robustly scale till the internet is something stronger. Like, we can't yet have Fortnite that's 3000 players.

Could we create a system that intelligently applies one stylistic theme to all resolutions. To not aim for one visual experience, but ensure the scope. You could be in any size of space with any number of users, but the complexity of textures would depend on local storage and bandwidth. So it looks low-res on a mobile connection, but super 4k with all the files local and a super fast connection. Every resolution has a managed outcome. Like Minecraft view.

Just fantasizing. Not an engineer.

usea• 4 years ago

Rendering things (~textures) already happens entirely locally. It has never been any other way. Also, intelligently rendering things at different resolutions in different scenarios is ancient technology at this point [0].

Roughly speaking, the only thing that's happening over the internet in a multiplayer game is communicating information about players such as location and discrete actions performed. Small numbers about the state of the game, not graphics or textures or anything like that. When you move, the 2999 other players need to know where you moved to, or where you are now. This has to happen many times per second to create a believable simulation. Even just sharing things like "I moved 2 inches in this direction in the last 30ms" or "I pulled the trigger of my gun when pointing at this angle" between 3000 participants is extremely challenging. It is heavily affected by the particulars of the game design, too. A turn-based game has to communicate a lot less often. Games that can guarantee no interactions between certain segments of players can reduce the information as well. Many game designs require that all players have up-to-date information at all times, or that things don't happen out of order.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_detail_(computer_grap...

majormajor• 4 years ago

I read Carlo Rovelli's book The Order of Time about time, relativity, etc. One of the striking things - that I couldn't fully follow, frankly - was something along the lines of there's a limited cone of spacetime for which you can even tell what relative order things happen in. That there's not a valid concept of "simultaneity" for places far, far, far apart due to speed of light, time dilation, whatnot.

So: just design a game where your players are so far apart that the speed of light is the mechanism that guarantees no interactions between some players. ;)

But more relevantly, this seems to be one of those problems that's been hampered by the slowing of single-core performance. Though disk and memory and network keep getting faster, so I wonder what the absolute limit if a game really focused on processing single state globally above all else would be. Maybe even at high bandwidth the latency to thousands of players wouldn't be good enough to get all the updates out?

Dylan168075• 4 years ago

For a single person in VR, you can track 6 positions, 3 with orientations too, using about 36 bytes. Add some more state and let's say 50 bytes per update. If you update the hundred most visible people at 60fps, and the rest at 10fps, then you could have 3000 people walking around the same area with about 14Mbps of bandwidth.

That's quite doable!

Gunplay adds more data for bullets but also you probably don't need such detailed positioning, and you can get away with sending the positions of only the nearby players and bullets.

Julesman3• 4 years ago

Thanks for the explanation.

NaturalPhallacy2• 4 years ago

Like, we can't yet have Fortnite that's 3000 players.

Interestingly EVE online (the only true MMORPG in IMHO) can have player battles that large. Typically they get TimeDilation™ applied, which means that the game actually slows down so the server can handle it on a given node. However, this would be utterly vomit inducing for VR.

That said, the main trade hub (Jita) always has about a thousand players on it at any given time. Though the vast majority of those will probably be docked, there can easily be a few hundred in system at once actively flying around.

I think a few hundred player VR game is plausible with today's tech.

cwillu2• 4 years ago

Planetside 2 routinely does a couple hundred in a big fight, and recently did a server test putting a bit over a thousand in a single fight. A continent (an approximately 1km-radius circular collection of regions that you will itself (approximately a 1km radius circle subdivided into regions to capture) will regularly have a thousand people on it.

cookie_monsta• 4 years ago

I seriously thought we'd have great VR in 20 years.

I wonder if there is an episode about self-driving cars

lordnacho• 4 years ago

I'm not sure the issue is technical, I think it might be business. Doesn't seem to be that there's a non niche use case for it.

If you take the actual words Virtual Reality and think about it, we already have that. Alternative worlds where you do stuff like fight monsters. The social element of that is already well served with traditional screens, and you don't really need to be able to be in it 3D for it to be engaging, because other people have engaged us since the beginning of time. Specific worlds like WoW or EVE are also popular because they're specific, one is fantasy, the other is sci fi. An unspecific world that kind of just looks like reality, what is it even? Who will go there?

Something like surgery that is on all the Meta adverts, maybe. I'm not a surgeon so I can't tell for sure, but it would seem to me that an already high value activity like that has already found all the educational materials it needs to let surgeons learn and practice their craft. A VR version world be nifty but how much is the value added over whatever surgeons are currently doing? So it might come but it will come because it gets cheaper due to general investment, not because the doctors really need it.

yummypaint• 4 years ago

Check out planetside 2, it's a fully mature game that effectively pulls this off. Thousands of people on a single massive map with individual bullets simulated as physics objects. Not sure about mobile connections, though, ping is fundamentally important.

a-dub• 4 years ago

He goes on to describe the murder as the sort of thing that would happen "up on the Embarcadero in Frisco by the wise guys," a phrase no one from San Francisco has ever said.

definitely had me lol'n

JKCalhoun• 4 years ago

Frisco, ha ha.

A co-worker lived up in The City (see, I'm legit) and I asked him if anyone called it Frisco. "No, no one does," he said in a monotone.

rcarr• 4 years ago

If I remember right there’s an Anthony Jeselnik standup special on Netflix where he asks an audience member where they’re from and the guy replies “frisco” and there’s a loud audible moan from the rest of the audience so Jeselnik starts lampooning him for it.

a9h74j• 4 years ago

Did she solve the mystery of Who killed the stock price?

UberFly• 4 years ago

For some more horribly bad VR fun, see the X-Files episode "First Person Shooter". Yikes. I'm ashamed of my year 2000 self because I'm sure I thought it was so awesome!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wXvVW118fo

PeterHolzwarth• 4 years ago

Written by William Gibson (and two others), no less!

rvense• 4 years ago

William Gibson (whom I adore) wrote two episodes of X-Files. They're among the worst.

MBCook• 4 years ago

The fact that the article needs to explain what Murder She Wrote was makes me feel so old.

sn_master• 4 years ago

Is there any VR that works decently for people with glasses? I tried VR for the first time last week and it was quite annoying for me, both for how the glasses were handled and some blurry vision from time to time. I'd never try it again by choice.

zelon88• 4 years ago

I have a Quest 2 and it fits pretty good. You can adjust the width of the lenses to match your eyes. The Quest 2 also comes with a spacer specifically for people with glasses which spaces the headset away from your face. If you were using someone else's VR who doesn't wear glasses this spacer is almost certainly tucked in a drawer or was thrown away with the box. These factors are easily overlooked and possibly a contributing factor to your poor experience. Also, if you're going to buy a VR headset in general; consider the cable, head straps, and face pads to be consumable. They break all the time and there's no good way to clean the face pads.

seanmcdirmid• 4 years ago

I got dedicated lenses for my Quest 2 so I don’t need to use the spacer. Much more comfortable than wearing glasses also, and only like 60 bucks to buy online.

taneq• 4 years ago

I used to wear glasses inside my Samsung Odyssey HMD until they started scratching one of the lenses (luckily I noticed before it became visible while using the headset, it was fine for a few months though) then ordered a set of prescription clip-on lenses. The clip-on lenses are great.

KVFinn• 4 years ago

Quest Pro. Relevant portion of review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RCUa2AADz0&t=182s

grumbel2• 4 years ago

There are a couple of headsets that allow you to adjust the diopter of the lenses so you don't need to wear glasses, e.g. Vive Flow or HuaweiVR. Both of them however have numerous other big issues, so I really would not recommend them. PanasonicVR/MeganeX is an upcoming one that has the same ability and that might be a descent headset otherwise, however it's going to be expensive (~$1300 for the full kit).

The cheaper alternative are prescription lens inserts, they get put on top of the existing lenses and replace the glasses.

Ancapistani• 4 years ago

I use a Quest 2, and use a 3D printed prescription lens adapter. It does a great job - you forget they’re even there when they’re on. I have an astigmatism, so a simple diopter adjustment wouldn’t be enough for me anyhow.

Here’s the source for the printable portion: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3642004

The lenses were cheap - the design is around a cheap pair of glasses from one of the online stores. While it’s been a long time since I put mine together, I want to say I have <$20 in the prescription lens adapters.

flanbiscuit• 4 years ago

I can't believe I've never seen this. This was definitely a show my family got together to watch.

I couldn't find it on Netflix (in the US), but the episode is on Peacock.

chadcmulligan• 4 years ago

Ok then, the community VR episode https://youtu.be/z4FGzE4endQ

"The font is larger! and Jesus wept for there were no more worlds to conquer."

manholio• 4 years ago

If we can have this and the animated gif where the woman shoots the guy wearing VR goggles, that would be a complete kit for making fun of Meta and Zuck.

Simon_O_Rourke• 4 years ago

Murder She Wrote was well ahead of the times - I actually remember watching this episode back in the day, and it prompted all sorts of questions back then. Like some people commenting here, I thought back then we'd have fully immersive haptic VR in 10 years or so. Things I didn't think we'd have is nearly HD virtual screens in VR, in my head things would have been still blocky but interesting. I'm not sure if I've become more pessimestic, but I can't see the Metaverse thing coming out in 10 years from now!

dvh• 4 years ago

Can someone explain the gap after VFX1 ?

grumbel2• 4 years ago

The VFX-1 was based on camcorder viewfinders micro-displays, those in turn where limited by PAL/NTSC resolution. This was not a problem when the VFX-1 was released, as most games where running in 320x200 anyway.

As time went on, monitors and games got a lot better and VR headset didn't, due to not having any better displays available on the market. The consumer VR market itself was never anywhere near big enough to incentivise the creation of custom VR displays.

There were still headset in the following years, such as the Eye-Trek FMD, but they went away from VR and towards just being a wearable screen. They didn't have any tracking or controller.

Even the modern VR revival only happened because smartphones got good enough and provided and alternative for the old micro-displays. Which in turn also allowed a much bigger field-of-view, which helps a lot with the immersion. A big field-of-view was also something that was impossible with the old micro-displays, as you need a physically big screen to get a big field-of-view, those micro-displays however were tiny and limited to 30-60°, modern VR has around 100°.

On top of that comes just the surrounding technology, when VFX-1 came out, most games where not even rendered in real 3D, just pseudo-3D. That means you couldn't even make full use of what the VR hardware was capable of. Without having position-tracked controller, VR was also fundamentally limited to being little more than 3D screen with a bit of headtracking. It didn't look bad, but it just wasn't comfortable to replace a monitor.

Also worth pointing out that nothing of his has fundamentally changed. Modern VR has been around for 10 years at this point, and is still struggling to find any mass market acceptance. VR support in normal games is just as bad, if not worse, than it was back in VFX-1 days. Meanwhile most native VR games are just small scale indie stuff. The tracking and controls got a lot better, but the screens are still far away from competing or replacing an actual monitor.

At this point I am reasonably convinced that VR won't take off until it can fully replace a monitor, meaning resolution has to be at least double of what it is now. The motion-gaming that VR can do, certainly has an audience, but that doesn't look to be enough to get any wide adoption. There is also nobody left to really do high-budget VR content, Sony might still have a shot, but Meta seems to have given up and everybody else left the VR space for good.

hi1848• 4 years ago

bagels• 4 years ago

https://archive.ph/xhu7T

1letterunixname• 4 years ago

And she got a reggae song and was overjoyed about it. Bless up to her wherever she is.

The 1993 Murder She Wrote VR episode (2014)

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