VR: Virtual Reality · 2:35am Jun 18th, 2016
VR: Virtual Reality
I currently have both the Vive and the Oculus. I've been saving up for VR for many years.
My initial impressions are thus:
The Vive is the real deal - it is amazingly immersive, and with the hand controllers, and the ability to walk around and interact with virtual objects as real things... it is just about the most incredible experience you can imagine. The view is a little bit like wearing a slightly wider scuba mask. You can see the grain of the pixels, but the view is clear and everything is precise. The goggles completely block out the world, and seal around your face. They are high quality - everything is super high quality. I have never gotten motion sick with the Vive. It has everything needed right out of the box.
The downside of the Vive is that it is heavy, the cables are thick, you have to set up 'lighthouse' laser boxes at opposite corners of the room, and you need empty space to move around. My reserved VR space is 12 by 14 feet, for example. The sound is earbuds. It is a pain in the ass to set up and get working, every time. Also, it is hot, and if you are out of shape or old, like me, it gets exhausting fast. Stooping and crawling and standing and moving levers and turning wheels and pressing buttons and throwing balls and walking to and fro and ducking monsters and... it's a complete workout. I always come out drenched in sweat. But damn. Damn is it beyond awesome.
There are few games for the Vive, but all are open to everyone, including users of the Rift.
The Oculus Rift is... adequate, but less impressive. The visual quality is similar, but has some blur and glare with bright virtual objects. You have to use it in a dark room because light from outside gets in around the edges easily. You can look down your nose and see your lap for example. You don't get hand controllers (Yet. Soon, supposedly. Sold separately). You get a single microphone-like thing on a stand which monitors your goggles. You sit and use a Microsoft game controller. You don't physically walk around, you have to sit, or stand in one place. You cannot grab anything. You can look around. It's good for flight simulators and staying in one place and looking around at a virtual world. Or floating along behind a tiny character. There are games that let you joystick-move, but that also can cause... problems.
The Rift does have the advantage of being cheaper, it is lighter and vastly less sweaty, and it has thin, easily managed cables. It works almost the moment you plug it in, it isn't a pain to set it up. It doesn't need regular recalibration. It has integrated headphones and doesn't require the use of earbuds. It is as close to 'plug and play' as anything can be until the Playstation VR comes out in October.
There is a lot of software for it, but any that involves motion with the joypad could make you throw up. A lot. For a long, long time. All the games are Rift-only. The Rift goes out of it's way to be incompatible with anything other than itself. Basically, the Rift is trying to be a DRM locked console, rather than a peripheral like a monitor screen. The Vive considers itself a peripheral, open to anyone for anything.
My opinion is that, in the end, that the Vive is the vastly better system, but also the most frustrating and difficult to use. Only it alone truly provides a holodeck-like experience. But it will fail, because it requires space to move around in. You can use it sitting down too, but... then you would miss out on being inside a goddamn holodeck! It is troublesome sometimes to get working right, and it is slightly more expensive. Not a lot more expensive - if you count having to buy hand controllers for the Rift into the cost. But a bit more expensive.
The Rift will do okay, but not great, because it is cheaper, and it is easy to set up. But it is also an inferior experience in some ways. Even when the Rift hand controllers are released, the fact is that it is still a sit-down or stand-in-place experience. You won't be crawling through air ducts on starships with the Rift, or blocking dragon fire with a shield, not with your actual body. But that is probably good enough for most people.
The real winner, I am convinced, will be the Playstation VR - and I say this even not having yet tried it. I know the specs, and I know what to expect from the Vive and the Rift. Forty million (plus!!) Playstation 4 units and the best games companies in the world committed to PSVR, not to mention console-simplicity at every level - and the cheapest price of all - pretty much guarantee that PSVR will dominate... in the end. No question about it. And that is not bad, I guess. I'm sure it will be fine. I've got one on order.
But... I have to say this: the sheer, overwhelming wonder I have experienced on the Vive is... there is nothing else like it. I have poked gigantic jellyfish at the bottom of the sea and watched their massive surfaces ripple from my action. I have fixed cars and hand-poured 'headlight fluid' in a future where robots barely remember what humans were. I have lifted a torch off of a dungeon wall and used it to light a monster on fire. I have swung a sword with my hands and arms to deflect the blows of a skeleton knight. I have painted three-dimensional portraits in space with virtual brushes made of light.
And... I have dropped to the floor, exhausted and covered in sweat, my heart pounding out of my chest, because I am 56, out of shape, and fighting skeletons for real at my age is beyond my physical capacities. Dammit! If only this could have happened when I was twenty-something! What a cheat life is!
That's my report.
Sounds incredible!
I'll wait for the PSVR just in case... because I can't afford both.
Sounds pretty nice.
Economy of motion, Chatoyance! No wasted movement!
Someone was telling me about the Vive the other day. I don't have any way to save up for it, but it does sound pretty nifty. Sometimes I think the only thing between us and the Singularity is the lack of a programming language that doesn't suck.
Great review ... my brother's been gushing about the Vive, especially it's haptic feedback options; glad to know that it measures up to the hype. Still, that and the Rift are - sadly - both well out of my price range. Heck, I'm going to have to save for about a year for a used PSVR
gee thanks, now I have to buy a vive and build another room to host it. don't worry, that sweating and collapsing is good for you, just remember to eat right and drink lots of water!
On the plus side, the more you exercise, the more in shape you will get. I'm only 33, but still badly out of shape, so I started stair climbing at work (the stairwell conveniently stretches a full 34 floors from the second floor lobby to floor 36... and probably up to the roof too but I don't have access). I'm up to ten flights at a time, twice or more a week, and pretty sure I could do more if I didn't mind collapsing before I could get back to my desk. And four flights daily since I take the midrise elevators and walk the rest of the way up to our team's floor. Oh, and the one or two (depending on how it's counted) in the lobby before I even get to the elevators.
Think of it like practicing to get good at any other game, only this has positive benefits for real life too!
Look up Nerd Fitness good way to get in shape
Best VR experience while sitting down is definetly flight sims. Ive been using track IR5 for a couple years now for my flight sims and the immersion is amazing.
I should make a longer post, but I'm not feeling it right now. Just wanted to say that you could take this time to talk about PonyVRville - it is kind of relevant ;p
Thanks for the great review, I've definitely been keeping an eye on this, even if I'm too broke at the moment to spring for one of these.
Haha, DCS World actually has "auto-detect Occulus Rift" in the settings menu now, even though it also supports the Vive. I'm probably still going to wait an iteration or two for the tech to improve before I get one, though, although everyone says it's a massive game changer, as big a step up as TrackIR is from mouselook.
Fitness is real important and so I run in the park most days and have a little kludgy home gym but last Christmas when I went hiking in the mountains with my dad's 80 year old neighbor I still had to ask him to let me take a breather after a few miles, while he wasn't winded at all despite walking like he was going to be late for a meeting, so it's not like age is always the factor it seems. Think I'd still rather get a lighter headset, though, since I'm going to use it overwhelmingly for flight sims and given how dogfighting involves regularly glancing over your shoulder and prolonged periods of staring straight up.
This sounds amazing, though, and I hope you can keep us posted on any new developments in that real-life holodeck experience.
Great review, and honestly all par for the course as to what I expected, particularly Oculus' failings. It is trying to lock down its software ecosystem too, whereas Vive is paired with Steam, which is more open and vastly more successful.
I do agree that the current iteration of Vive won't be an industry wide record smasher, but I disagree that it will fail entirely.
I choose to hope that it will be more like the iPhone; The pilot version will sell well as a niche, but ultimately be just a prototype, and the revenue and interest from that, combined with the pace of tech, will lead to a vastly superior set of successors which see increased specs, decreased price, and wider adoption.
Vive gets a lot right, after all.
I tend to believe the future of best-experience VR will always lie with PC because the hardware needed to drive open-world high-res VR is going to be far beyond what consoles are willing to go all-in on, because consoles are trying to stay cheap and low maintenance. Consoles may have some great VR games, but the first fully immersive total-access worlds for VR will probably come from the PC.
I also think that the secret to the ultimate in-home holodeck experience will reside with two primary technologies moving forward:
1: Miniaturizing and turning the headset wireless. When there are no cables, and it is lighter to wear, there won't be so much of a comfort limit.
2: A small, scale-able, inexpensive 'just works' omni-directional treadmill solution.
Whomever has the market cornered on that 2nd one, even as a 3rd party, stands to make some pretty solid bank on the wave of the VR revolution.
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I too want the Vive to succeed... it is the most amazing experience I have had with VR.
That said, I have had some serious fun with the Rift - Lucky's Adventure, essentially Mario in VR - worked remarkably well. ADR1FT was... a bit puke factor, but could be controlled. Subnautica actually works very very well with the Rift. I was amazed.
I've discovered that moving around, using a controller, can work easily and well provided certain conditions are met. The speed cannot be overly fast, pitch and yaw are fine, but roll is unbearable. Spinning in general is unbearable. But walking, floating, or moving with a level head is always comfortable, so long as frame rates are solid. Judder always causes nausea.
So, I don't think that a treadmill is required, likewise I do not think any longer that the Vive solution of teleporting is necessary. If sitting, movement with a controller works and does not cause nausea, as long as the frame rate is solid, the head is level and the view does not tilt, the speed not too fast, and no spinning like a top. Swimming in the seas of Subnautica? Not a bit of trouble.
Heat is a huge issue. Those headsets get warm, and after a while that gets very uncomfortable and causes some nausea just by itself. It's like having a hot water bottle strapped to the face. The issue of face heat has to be fixed.
I think, I truly think, that these problems will all be solved within the next decade. I see a Ready Player One future. I truly do.
I see myself getting PSVR first, since I have a PS4, and I do not have all that great of a graphics card... a Radeon HD 5770 (and I run Mac). I'll enjoy PSVR first, then look at whatever Vive's next gen offering can do for me. By the time I upgrade my GPU, I suspect VR will have matured a little bit, and it'll be time for me to upgrade from PSVR (or compliment, rather).
I used to play hours on the Nintendo Virtual Boy... It never made me sick, and I've taken to 3D like a fish in water.
If I can survive that, then I can survive the new gen of VR! Bring it!
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What I have read, and seen, of the PSVR suggests it is robust and a good VR system. The field of view is just a bit less wide than the Vive and the Rift (100 degrees versus 110) - BUT it has more pixels, 2160 × 1200, or (960×1080 per eye), which is better than either the Vive or the Rift. So, slightly narrower view, but clearer and less 'screendoor' effect.
Frankly, I think the PSVR is going to be good. Probably very good. I'm looking forward to it!
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Mmmm, headset heat isn't one I'd considered but it makes total sense...
I'm so busy imagining Subnautica in VR now though, and so terrified, that I can't form any other insights...
I bought that game thinking "Oh! I loved Operation Neptune as a kid, and never did find another good sea game, and I love sandboxes..."
And now my thoughts run more along the lines of "Entry number 4 in my top 10 games I can't play at night under any circumstances: Subnautica"
That helps me make my decision
I think VR will be a catastrophe, but I also think you don't need my pessimism. So I'll just say that the availability of free or insanely cheap distribution for game developers is a change that's more subtle, but also more exciting for everyone. Or heck, same goes for books, video, and anything else that involves creativity.
Yes, content oversaturation is a big challenge, but that's the kind of problem we are lucky to have. We're not limited to store shelf mass appeal for entertainment anymore. Or even character copyright owenership, as this very website demonstrates.
Cute horror themed platformer? Sure. They Bleed Pixels will fix you up. Too hard? Try Eversion. Don't like it? Maybe some rationalist Harry Potter fanfiction will calm you down. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is too dense for your taste? How about litrpgs? Read books about someone else leveling their mmo character. It's a thing now! People spend money on them!
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In that you think it will fail as a consumer product?
I can see an argument for that: VR has yet to find a killer app. Personally, I think that app would have been No Man's Sky for the PS4 and PC, but there does not seem to be any will from Sony to make that happen... and they would need to be the ones to do that, because Hello Games is small and overstretched as it is. Not making No Man's Sky the lead game for Playstation VR is a terrible, awful mistake in my opinion. That combo could put VR over the top.
That said, killer app or no, my experience so far with both the Vive and the Rift has been... transcendent. Especially on the Vive, where it is possible to physically manipulate the world with hand-held graspers and tools.
Even just on the Rift, with no hand controllers...
Sometimes, I will just sit, in the cockpit of this starship that exists within this game called Farlands. It's a silly little game, sort of Pokemon Snap Goes To Space. You beam down and scan and photograph weird space animals. But I like to sit in the cabin of the orbital ship.
I'm there. Completely there. I got off my chair, and pushed it back, so that I could get onto my knees. I wanted to look under the consoles, to see how they were wired. Then I lay down and looked out the lower portholes. Even with the lowly Rift, that was so damn awesome. I was there, inside a tiny starship, orbiting a semi-realistic, semi-cartoonish planet. I got back into my chair, and moved it back into position so the controls were easy to use. You use them by looking at the control and then pushing A on the joypad.
The feeling of being somewhere else is absolute. It is escape. It is freedom from the world, if only for a moment.
People drink to escape, they have random sex to escape, they do all manner of drugs, they read wild stories, watch cartoons, movies, and play video games... all to escape. But it is always through a tiny window, or stuck in the imagination. Always there is the awareness of being stuck on earth, no matter how hard you play, or drop, or chug.
VR is different. It isn't like drugs - it's consistent and real. It's being somewhere, somewhere else. It isn't like books, you can see and hear and - on the Vive - even touch another world. It isn't like movies, there is no tiny window. It's all around. Above, below, behind, it is underneath a shelf where the bolts hold the boards to a wall that isn't really there, but every sense tells you that it is.
It is the closest thing to a man-made dream I have ever experienced.
If controllable, consistent, actualized dreams can't sell, even with a hot face and fussy cables, then... I clearly don't get how 'escape' works.
I think VR might have a hard sell for some, but in the long run... from my own, personal experience? It's the bomb. It's some schwifty biz, and I nearly shit on the floor the first time I wore my Vive. VR has a ways to go before it equals Ready Player One status... about ten years I figure... but seriously: this stuff works as advertised.
It's revolutionary.
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>[Your name is Renny, and you live in a big house at the edge of the Matrix.
Right now the living room is a garden. Silver flowers bend and bow. Sometimes there is a wind that makes them do that. Now they do it by themselves.
Whatever arguments I could make, I'd be attacking a dream of yours, and that wouldn't do either of us any kindness. I just meant that there's tons of windows opening these days, and you shouldn't invest too much emotion in any one of them.
I was kind of hoping someone would get that quote. Admittedly it's a low percentage reference that can't be googled, but it would've been a treat. They're the first meaningful lines from the novella "Virutal Realities" from Shadowrun sourcebook #7107 of the same name. It's one of those rare stories that got the future wrong yet still has meaningful things to say about it.
Ross Scott just did a pretty good video about his passion for VR, and his frustrations with it. I'd be willing to bet he'd love to hear your perspective on it.
Ross Rants: Virtual Reality Launch
Accursed Farms
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Just finished listening to him.
Because he has never personally tried the devices he rants about, Ross doesn't know what he's saying, basically. Likewise with that crazy guy going on about 'god rays'. Maybe that might have been true back in the earlier, pre-production versions, but... no. Not now.
There is a very small amount of glare on the Rift when looking at bright objects, there is zero glare on the Vive. The Fresnel lens issues (concentric circles) are nonexistent, at least now. Looking through the Vive is like looking at another world. It's like being there, like a holodeck, only you can make out pixels. That is true - in both systems there is a slight 'screen door' effect, because the pixels can be noticed. That said, in my personal experience, this just... goes away. It becomes something that the brain just ignores, because the virtual world is so totally compelling. It's only when I stop doing things, and take stock of the fact that "Hey! I'm in bloody virtual reality!" that I become aware that I can see pixels.
When I am busy, say, making a virtual sandwich for a robot customer, or blocking an overhand swing from a sword-wielding skeleton, no, I don't see any pixels. I just see "Fuck! That skeleton is going to crush my goddamn head!".
I feel glad I took fencing in high school.
No, the Rift and the Vive are not perfect - fuck no. They feel hot after a while, they can be heavy on the face, when I get sweaty, I have to reposition my glasses under the headset, and the cables can get caught and tug at me when I am trying to do something amazing. But... that is kind of bullshit, because the bottom line is... I am seeing and doing something amazing.
Now, I can only speak for my own, personal experience... and what I have observed of my family and neighbors who I have let try the devices. And in every case, it is basically massive wows and astonishment. One of my spouses, Elde, uses the Vive to relax. She likes to sit under the ocean and watch jellyfish swim by. It's something she can't do in real life, and it is photorealistic, and as she says, she doesn't have to get wet or drown.
Now, by photorealistic, I mean that. Like real life type real... for those apps that do real-world stuff, like the one she likes, called 'The Blu'.
Me, I spend more time in fantasy places, some of which are pretty cartoony. But... that's cool too, being in a cartoon world. That's very unearthly. I like unearthly.
I honestly do not think it is possible to have a useful opinion about VR unless a person has actually tried the Vive... and to a lesser extent, the Rift. It's easy to talk about VR, and to swap articles that praise, or damn VR, but... the reality has to be experienced.
In my experience, VR today can be summed thusly: it is just the beginning, things are not perfect yet, but holy god damn hell is what does exist right now nothing short of incredible.
I don't know how else to put it - VR is flawed, but even in a flawed state it is one of the most incredible experiences of my entire life. Any improvements to what it is now can only make it more worthwhile, and more accessible to everyone.
I honestly reason that, within ten years, VR will be commonplace, it will be the usual way to play most games, and it will be affordable, lightweight, and super high definition. It's not bad now: it is mind blowing. Better would be almost indescribable.
I came into the VR scene expecting things to be rough. I bought my headsets expecting them to be tiny peepholes into grainy, juddering worlds. What I actually got was waaaay better. Not perfect. Not super duper good. Just really amazing.
Still, that said, really amazing is... pretty damn good. I like really amazing things. And... so does everyone I've let try the devices. I've brought tears to people's eyes with my Vive - one neighbor just bawled like a baby when she tried Eldenath's favorite underwater program. Her son, apparently, had been a scuba diver before he died, and she always wondered why he had loved diving so much. She'd always wanted to try it.
She just died, this week, across the street (she was 80 and had a stroke). I feel so glad I was able to let her dive under the virtual ocean before she croaked. VR gave her something she could never have, and it meant a lot to her.
I don't think Mr. Ranting Ross has sufficient understanding of his topic... or of what current, commercial release version VR has to offer.
We definitely need better games and apps. No argument here from me on that.
But... it's just the bare beginning. It's only just started. When the first personal computers came out, the software was crap. The games sucked ass. But now, now we're playing Overwatch and soon No Man's Sky.
VR is a baby. But it is a baby Godzilla. Tokyo has not got a chance.
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I feel like you took a different message away from it than he intended. Maybe he gets off on the wrong foot by talking about hardware he's only researched or used developer versions of (at least he says so very clearly), but the main video is about the lack of a content bridge.
His main issue is the lack of a 3d theater mode to enjoy older content while the technology gets off the ground. I thought it was a good idea that should exist...and it almost does. It'd expand the appeal quite a lot and let people get new life out of older games while the ecosystem develops. Companies said they were working on it, but it's apparently vanished. That's the bulk of the video.
Returning to his knowledge of the hardware, I could liken his experience with me trying to buy headphones over the last five years. I think I tried and sent back....maybe ten pairs, and stuck with four further that broke or had design flaws I only found out about later on. Manufacturers misuse even the most rudimentary terms. Nearly all of them lie via omission. Audiophiles have a lot of very valuable insight about the technology....but they're also completely full of crap half the time. It's more than a little ironic that I've learned to trust them on everything except sound quality.
I filled your criteria for knowing what I'm talking about by buying and trying...and it was YEARS of frustration. God, all the misinformation I had to wade through for the simplest wishlist imaginable. [I wrote a page long rant here, with a lot of specific product references, but it was kind of rambling.] The short of it is that this is an established industry with an established fanbase that still left me without any trust for anyone.
For what it's worth I finally found a satisfying pair in some used Sennheiser RS 175 RF's.
Chatoyance! It's so good to hear from you, my friend.
I tried an Oculus DK2 a couple years ago with Minecraft and it was interesting but not compelling, largely because the device was just too darn heavy and annoying to set up.
Not too much later, I got my hands on a Google Cardboard -- one of the perks of working at Google was that I got one really early on. Still have it. The lighter weight and the higher-resolution screen (HiDPI phone screens rock) really made a huge amount of difference. Modern phones have so much processing power that I was amazed at how effective the effect actually was in a well-written app. I always told myself I was going to put some Velcro on my Cardboard so I could mount it on my head without needing to use my hands but I never actually got around to it, but even today I still from time to time feel like picking it back up, because it really does feel otherworldly.
Cardboard is also ridiculously easy to write for. <3 I don't know 3D programming very well at all and I was able to get a basic Tron-styled flight simulator working without even needing a tutorial. I don't have a Rift dev kit of my own to try it, but theoretically Rift and Vive should be compatible as well, so... If you ever have a thought about something you'd like to see in VR, poke me and I'd love to talk about it.
... My brain injects a crazy idea: Pokemon Go in Cardboard.
Chatoyance, .. ping from 2018. Anyone interesting occured on this VR front? I figured out while you have it and even want to use somehow (as evidenced in your timeline posts ...) - may be setting up some 'old political philosopher meet unicorn in VR' type of thing will be adequate type of fun for you, and some way to connect to some people in Europe (me and Julian and further, for example ...I still have trouble getting Julian on this board, because he thinks he have very few things to say left {same feeling here, mostly} - but I hope he is wrong and something not just new but _useful_ in realworld can be done with all those techtoys......)
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I've had some amazing experiences in VR this year. I've walked through a photograhically realistic representation of a Japanese Shinto temple while talking with a man from Russia, one from Germany, and a friend of mine from three time zones away in the US, we tried to talk with people from Korea... after exploring the temple, we all went together to sit in a hot spring that existed on a stone pillar that stuck out of a gas giant in an alien star system and talked philosophy. Then the Russian gentleman opened a portal to a recreation of a Moscow housing project where we went to play pool in the basement of the structure. Later, my US friend and I watched a 3D movie together in a virtual IMAX. That was just one night.
And during all of that I didn't mention how we were briefly visited by some guys from Switzerland who showed off their cool avatars by turning into, in order, a tiger, an elephant (all life size!) and a megalodon shark. Which briefly ate me. I was able to look out, through the gills.
I have spent nights, in VR, inside a virtual Hollywood mansion, where I jumped up and down on the beds. Outside the windows, other players partied, and all of them creatures and beings from every imaginable show and movie and cartoon. One was a tiny cat that I petted.
It isn't Ready Player One yet, not by a long shot, but it is getting there, by and by. I have had some amazing experiences. I've also just wandered around inside an abandoned Tardis, walked through the Shibuya district, and watched virtual fireworks from a barge party ship anchored in Tokyo harbor. All in VR. That was pretty cool, all of that.
I keep thinking that, if this is what VR is now, and VR is basically in the Atari 2600 era of itself, then... wow... what will it be like when it reaches the Playstation era of its own development? I think that Ready Player One will come true. That is what I think.
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Yeah, sounds interesting. I haven't watched this film ( "Ready Player One") yet, I'm sure it already pirated for my consumption :P Well, I keep pressing 'politica' matter partially because I still think all those things (books, texts, video translation, VR, etc) must somehow alter very world we live in - because default trajectory ..well, you know. Thanks for reply, it mean a lot for me.
and one more update: I decided to research input and output side of VR today...especially with Open Source side of things. Apparently, you can use OpenHMD for some VR helmets, including Playstation VR. Positional tracking (for Vive) still required some reverse-engineering, but it comes ...I think . You probably can try OpenTrack for some webcam-type positional input ..roughly?. Some ultracheap VR glasses using smartphone for image generation and some positioning, it seems..so, they more like shutter glasses, I think? Because cost seems too small for any active display matrix inside .... Vive just launched (September 2018) wireless extension adapter for Vive, yet it has no driver for Linux ...
SteamVR uses Vulkan API, so your GPU and drivers must support it ....
Some generic info about those specialized stereo formats - https://lubosz.wordpress.com/category/vr/
Also, apparently failed in market Microsoft's Kinect (2) can be used as 3d (depth) camera - search for OpenNI , libFreenect(2), PCL (point cloud) (quite cumbersome for setting up on Linux, it seems, yet...some videos seems to confirm it works)
Probably not new for you video, but I watched it for the first time just today.
Professional Sculpting in Virtual Reality with Oculus Medium -
Adam Savage’s Tested Published on Dec 6, 2016
Well, one interesting observation for me was ... this kind of 3d sculpting still mostly creates novel form/shape, and not quite going up from basic functions.. Animations (3d kind of it) seems to be more functionality-oriented. This is on "form follow function" principle ...
Trivial observation - my self too inpatient for doing even simplest artist's tasks ... if you not count attempts at communication as art, heh.