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Linux in a Pixel Shader – A RISC-V Emulator for VRChat

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11–20 of 104 posts

Re: Linux in a Pixel Shader – A RISC-V Emulator for VRChat

#11
I nearly fell off my chair discovering this just under a week ago, and immediately posted it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28255821

I commented underneath:

> More details and demonstration, naturally presented natively in VRChat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2u7NOpzcBQ&t=5052s

> Video found via https://twitter.com/_g1fan_/status/1427073177142939648

> Source: https://twitter.com/fuopy/status/1427051048032620544

> Just discovered Twitter doesn't let you copy a link to a retweet reference D:, but I discovered this on https://twitter.com/whitequark/ 's timeline.

Re: Linux in a Pixel Shader – A RISC-V Emulator for VRChat

#12
Definitely watch the presentation by the developer in VR Chat:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2u7NOpzcBQ

I haven't played VR Chat in a few years, and holy cow this makes me want to jump back in. Seeing fully captured motion avatars of people is SO immersive. It's absolutely insane how the experience of interacting with people can feel so natural even when they're on the other side of the planet.

I just love watching "body language" of the presenter, it's such a precise rendering of what a "real life" presentation like this would be.

Plus, you meet people like the writer of this blog post, who are so knowledgeable and interesting and fun to talk to.

Re: Linux in a Pixel Shader – A RISC-V Emulator for VRChat

#13
post #7

reminds me of this https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/07/30/ubershaders/

That's a classic. While the technical stuff was neat, I still remember the line "Despite being around 90% complete, the last 90% still remained to be done."

Re: Linux in a Pixel Shader – A RISC-V Emulator for VRChat

#14

Definitely watch the presentation by the developer in VR Chat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2u7NOpzcBQ I haven't played VR Chat in a few years, and holy cow this makes me want to jump back in. Seeing fully captured motion avatars of people is SO immersive. It's absolutely insane how the experience of interacting with people can feel so natural even when they're on the other side of the planet. I just love watchin…

Why are the majority of avatars small children or furry-things?

I'm really not one of those people who bashes nerdy or alternative culture but I can't deny that it weirds me out a bit. It's a clear barrier of entry for me.

Re: Linux in a Pixel Shader – A RISC-V Emulator for VRChat

#16

Definitely watch the presentation by the developer in VR Chat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2u7NOpzcBQ I haven't played VR Chat in a few years, and holy cow this makes me want to jump back in. Seeing fully captured motion avatars of people is SO immersive. It's absolutely insane how the experience of interacting with people can feel so natural even when they're on the other side of the planet. I just love watchin…

Why are the majority of avatars small children or furry-things? I'm really not one of those people who bashes nerdy or alternative culture but I can't deny that it weirds me out a bit. It's a clear barrier of entry for me.

StraszFilms made a video touching on this subject : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v_Dl7i4Bcw

( he also made a very nice documentary about VRChat nightclubs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1wUg9HCODU )

Re: Linux in a Pixel Shader – A RISC-V Emulator for VRChat

#17

Definitely watch the presentation by the developer in VR Chat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2u7NOpzcBQ I haven't played VR Chat in a few years, and holy cow this makes me want to jump back in. Seeing fully captured motion avatars of people is SO immersive. It's absolutely insane how the experience of interacting with people can feel so natural even when they're on the other side of the planet. I just love watchin…

Why are the majority of avatars small children or furry-things? I'm really not one of those people who bashes nerdy or alternative culture but I can't deny that it weirds me out a bit. It's a clear barrier of entry for me.

Most of them aren't actually all that small, it's just that the perspective it's being filmed from (the narrator's head-camera) is on a stage, and VR warps things in your periphery pretty hard.

There's also the fact that it's easier to be immersed if you aren't leaning heavily on realism; Oculus has a lot of research on this, actually. For example, if you have a photorealistic avatar but aren't doing eye-tracking, it's actually more jarring and discomforting than a cartoon avatar without it. That's why the initial avatars they did had force-obscured eyes and no color, and the new ones are literally cartoons: your mind can adapt to something very different, but it can't adapt to something that's just subtly different.

However, some people do choose to do weird stuff. That's mostly a tech thing though. If you go to a normal place, you'll find a lot of actual kids and actual teenagers, and they're relatively normal. Very few people as weird as the tech community.

Really, technical people in digital spaces kind of get a bit wild with their self-expression. Some theorize it's because most of them don't express themselves much in real life.

I've tried this particular app only a handful of times (I don't like using proprietary software, but it's important to keep yourself updated with the state of it), and when I wasn't visiting explicitly tech-related things, it was pretty normal. Lots of copyright infringement of Nintendo characters, as you might expect.

Re: Linux in a Pixel Shader – A RISC-V Emulator for VRChat

#18

Definitely watch the presentation by the developer in VR Chat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2u7NOpzcBQ I haven't played VR Chat in a few years, and holy cow this makes me want to jump back in. Seeing fully captured motion avatars of people is SO immersive. It's absolutely insane how the experience of interacting with people can feel so natural even when they're on the other side of the planet. I just love watchin…

You got a timestamp? You linked to an almost 3 hour long video.

Edit: Presentation starts around 1:24:00

Re: Linux in a Pixel Shader – A RISC-V Emulator for VRChat

#19

Definitely watch the presentation by the developer in VR Chat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2u7NOpzcBQ I haven't played VR Chat in a few years, and holy cow this makes me want to jump back in. Seeing fully captured motion avatars of people is SO immersive. It's absolutely insane how the experience of interacting with people can feel so natural even when they're on the other side of the planet. I just love watchin…

Why are the majority of avatars small children or furry-things? I'm really not one of those people who bashes nerdy or alternative culture but I can't deny that it weirds me out a bit. It's a clear barrier of entry for me.

I bought an Oculus Quest 2 earlier this year to check out the whole VR situation. It was basically a ghost town with pockets of children and, IMHO, sketchy folks having childlike conversation.

I don't really know what I expected but it wasn't that. Aside from some focus issues the goggle hardware was pretty great but the VR world was not a good experience at all. :/

Re: Linux in a Pixel Shader – A RISC-V Emulator for VRChat

#20

Definitely watch the presentation by the developer in VR Chat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2u7NOpzcBQ I haven't played VR Chat in a few years, and holy cow this makes me want to jump back in. Seeing fully captured motion avatars of people is SO immersive. It's absolutely insane how the experience of interacting with people can feel so natural even when they're on the other side of the planet. I just love watchin…

Why are the majority of avatars small children or furry-things? I'm really not one of those people who bashes nerdy or alternative culture but I can't deny that it weirds me out a bit. It's a clear barrier of entry for me.

The number of people into furry or anime in the software community is large, especially among millennial generation. But unless we find someone of similar interests at work, we're not going to talk about it (or only describe it in vague terms) because it can creep some people out. Further if you're using VRChat I think you already self-select as unusual beyond that. (Anecdote, my college anime club almost a decade ago was almost all software engineers with an assortment of other science or engineering fields.)
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