Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your eyes do move, and they point at other stuff, but the focal length afforded by the lenses is fixed (it makes as if everything was at a few meters IIRC). I also wonder what could happen if the ciliary muscle isn't used enough. Does it get weak and you rapidly get short-sightedness, or is occasional exercise enough? Edit: maybe an answer could come from looking at people who recovered from extended comas. Does thei…
> but the focal length afforded by the lenses is fixed That seems weird to me because when I look at a screen at a different distance to the one I'm using I can see the other screens getting blurry just like in real life.
Simula One: an office-focused, standalone VR headset built on top of Linux
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Re: Simula One: an office-focused, standalone VR headset built on top of Linux
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but the focal length afforded by the lenses is fixed That seems weird to me because when I look at a screen at a different distance to the one I'm using I can see the other screens getting blurry just like in real life.
My guess is that this has to do with stereoscopic vision, not focal distance. Does the other screen become simply washed-out blurry or is it double-vision-type of blurry?
That said, it isn't any more or less strenuous on my eyes than IRL except when the text is too small. Font smoothing still isn't great, but if the screen is big enough you dont notice it.
Re: Simula One: an office-focused, standalone VR headset built on top of Linux
#133We're flattered that someone posted us to HN, but we were honestly not ready for this much publicity at this precise stage of our project. It would have been better had this happened a few weeks from now, when we have more accurate footage of our actual prototype to show. Let me explain:
1. *Video footage.* The video footage on the front page of www.simulavr.com is taken against an HTC Vive and an older prototype of our window manager. It doesn't showcase the higher resolution of the Simula One (more than 4x that of the Valve Index), or any of the new features we are intending on releasing with it (hand tracking, AR mode, environments, etc).
2. *Prototype pictures.* The website doesn't have any actual photos of our headset yet! That's because we are in the process of finalizing the design. We have printed parts and plenty of renderings, but they are still changing every week.
3. *Specs.* The specs are close to the final specs, but still placeholders. Between supply chain issues, stuff still under development, and issues getting support from manufacturers at our volumes, we might have to change things for the final prototype.
One of the reasons we threw up this website in its current form was to get the ball rolling for manufacturers. They won't supply us with parts unless we have some sort of product interest, but we can't generate any sort of product interest unless we have some sort of website. It's very much a chicken and egg sort of problem.
We appreciate everyone's kind words, yet also understand the skepticism. For people on the waitlist: expect updates to start to come from us in a few weeks, when we will show some previews of some of the actual goodies which makes our headset special.
Re: Simula One: an office-focused, standalone VR headset built on top of Linux
#134The killer "corporate" app for VR in my opinion would be some kind of teleconference app. I absolutely HATE trying to have interactive brainstorming/collaborative design meeting remotely. There are various pancake tools, but none really compare to the experience of 2 people standing in front of a white board, and making wild motions with their arms that seemingly both people understand while drawing on a board. Some…
That said, this "pancake" problem reminded me of the old Wii head-tracking project.[1] There might be an interesting hybrid opportunity with that idea and 3d avatars. I feel like the head-tracking hack never really took off because it only worked as a solo experience. But since remote work is mostly us all individually sitting at a computer I could see it working better.
Combine this idea with a large dedicated monitor/tv and now you have something that would literally just feel like a window/portal to the person you're talking to.
Re: Simula One: an office-focused, standalone VR headset built on top of Linux
#135Fun note, almost all of it is written in Haskell. If I remember correctly they've also done a bunch of stuff that helps Godot, or at least something to do with the Haskell bindings. Very accessible guys, I once asked a question on the gitter, and got helpful replies almost immediately.
If it's written in Haskell, it's highly likely that it'll be far harder to modify than something written in, well, not-Haskell. Haskell might be easy when you get the hang of it, but the vast majority of programmers haven't, and the language ideas are alien compared to the mainstream ones (Python, JS, C++, Lua). The design of Haskell also encourages users to be very clever, which only makes code harder to read.
This is BS - find me some "clever" code in one of these Haskell projects and I bet it's not clever but simply using a set of abstractions there maintainers like and grok and the reader just doesn't understand.
Re: Simula One: an office-focused, standalone VR headset built on top of Linux
#136The only two other examples of this going right now are Microsoft's Windows Mixed Reality platform with Windows Holographic and the Magic Leap One's interface. Windows MR works really well, Magic Leap is extremely half-baked and has had very little effort put into it (well, at least that was the case a year ago. I ended up selling my headset for lack of use).
Being that I've been a Windows developer for 20 years, it's extremely frustrating to me that Microsoft won't make a standalone VR headset. They have all the technical capability to do it. The HoloLens 2 is a sufficiently powerful compute platform and runs the full Windows MR experience. The PC-tethered Windows MR headsets are very high resolution and some of them are even quite comfortable (I regularly use a Samsung Oddyssey+ for work). But they seem hell-bent on pushing difractive waveguide displays for any mobile devices, which I think by now have pretty handily proven to be straight up garbage.
How a Linux headset could succeed here where others are really stagnating is to develop:
A) Hotswappable batteries. You're not going to get all-day usage out of a single battery pack anytime soon (my Quest 2 with the Elite Strap doubles the battery life to a whole TWO HOURS OMG!), and having to connect a wire to a device that is supposed to be standalone just for power is kind of like playing with one of those line-tethered model airplanes: what you really want is an RC model airplane, so you're just stuck being disappointed all the time.
B) A really good spatialized audio system. Spatialized audio is an often overlooked component of making a believable VR scene. All of the ambisonic audio drivers are platform-specific right now, and they each have their pros and cons. I really like Microsoft's HFRT as it seems more realistic than Oculus'. It'd be especially nice to have work put into Chromium and Firefox to upgrade the WebAudio system to use the system's spatializer rather than implement their own (Google's Resonance is particularly bad).
C) Really big emphasis on accelerated 2D rendering. 3D rendering is great for games, but work is all text and text is all 2D rendering. Some of the most costly components of my VR projects are the text rendering. You can go a long way with low-fi 3D as an aesthetic, but 2D absolutely needs to be crisp and tight. And it's not just about the resolution of the display. Your 2D buffers aren't going to ever map one-to-one to the display's pixels, because your head is moving around, you'll be looking at things at slight angles and in motion, etc., and most mipmapping algorithms are designed for gradients, not sharp edges. So making clear text is really hard. Oculus has a hack where 2D quads can be rendered in a separate pass from the rest of the 3D environment, but there are issues with it regarding scene compositing and hit testing.
D) A native scene graph, something akin to extending the desktop metaphor into 3-dimensions, not just for compositing 2D windows but for allowing 3D applications to mix and match objects. Windows MR and SteamVR are the only systems that really even attempt to do this, with neither really seeing enough emphasis. Every VR app right now runs in a completely exclusive, retained mode. That's fine for games, but it's completely unnecessary for things like teleconferencing apps. Why shouldn't you be able to "spaceshare" like we do screen-sharing? Then you'd be able to have your teleconferencing app separate from your whiteboard app.
Re: Simula One: an office-focused, standalone VR headset built on top of Linux
#137Re: Simula One: an office-focused, standalone VR headset built on top of Linux
#138Compiling Haskell in the background? Sold. Jokes aside I've tried a few virtual desktops in VR and it _seems_ promising. The text clarity is a hard one, the weight of the headset for prolonged sessions would also be difficult. A whiteboard app that works with non-VR users w/o 3D would be nice. Something like Miro but with nice feel in VR.
Re: Simula One: an office-focused, standalone VR headset built on top of Linux
#139I feel lucky to be born in times where we have technology and abundance but it didn't yet turn to a sci-fi dystopia created by tech nerds.
And even from a productivity perspective, a regular screen is enough if it's powered by a good window manager (i.e. i3wm). There's no reason to block the reality with a VR, unless you are living and working in a room with no windows, then maybe you can get yourself a nicer view and that's it.
Re: Simula One: an office-focused, standalone VR headset built on top of Linux
#140One of the founders of Simula here. We're flattered that someone posted us to HN, but we were honestly not ready for this much publicity at this precise stage of our project. It would have been better had this happened a few weeks from now, when we have more accurate footage of our actual prototype to show. Let me explain: 1. *Video footage.* The video footage on the front page of www.simulavr.com is taken against an…