Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Simula One: an office-focused, standalone VR headset built on top of Linux

simulavr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 225 posts

Re: Simula One: an office-focused, standalone VR headset built on top of Linux

#151

Post by gfodor »

kanetw wrote: post #150
gfodor wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the best off the shelf inside-out tracking system you can get now? Does anything compete with Quest yet?

Nothing that's satisfactory in one way or another. Probably Luxonis DepthAI? The main problem with off-the-shelf solutions is that they add another set of cameras, and afaik nothing exists that allows custom cameras. We're gonna need an FPGA anyway due to the large amount of IO (2 cameras for AR, 2 for eye tracking, IMU, whatever other sensors we need, plus potentially mmwave radar if we decide to go that way) so it'…

Interesting - I guess I assumed the hurdle is both hardware and software. Oculus's hand tracking was a huge lift. Is there any commercially available software stack being worked on that is at least hardware generic? Or is everyone forced to build from scratch?

Re: Simula One: an office-focused, standalone VR headset built on top of Linux

#152

Post by xtracto »

maaaaattttt wrote: post #49
butterisgood wrote: post #46

I would definitely try AR glasses as a monitor replacement but I find most VR headsets to make me feel pretty ill after less than one hour.

I feel the same. I'd be ready to pay good money for an AR headset focused on replacing external monitors (no gaming but very good text readability). AR and not VR because I don't want to be completely isolated from my surroundings. And, if luminosity would allow, working outside with it would be a dream come true to me!

So much this!. I'm writing this while sitting in my desk, in front of it is my 27in monitor and to the left is my Mac's monitor in on a stand.

Behind all of this is my room's white wall with an area of around 4x2 meters. Imagine if I could change my monitor with an AR version of it that mapped/projected the "desktop" to my wall.

And then, let's say I want to get into a meeting with a colleague to do some diagrams, so we "map" some Whiteboard software into another wall in my room and a wall in my colleague's room. We will be looking at the same and could even "draw" with hand gestures or something.

I have more hope for AR than for VR as well.

Re: Simula One: an office-focused, standalone VR headset built on top of Linux

#153

Post by kanetw »

kleinsch wrote: post #39

From the wiki on their Github [1] and looking at Github contributors, this is a 3 person project (and no Github commits since June 2021). They're clearly not making their own VR headset, they're using something off the shelf (from other comments seems like an HTC Vive). Making the website ambiguous about this is just confusing. I saw a couple YC apps in there, so I'm sure they had to be ambitious, but thinking realis…

We're making our own headset. Nothing off-the-shelf was available or satisfactory.

Most of the recent Github commits are in the dev branch, but right now it's 90% George working on the code. I'm busy on the hardware and wrangling vendors side, our third employee is the ME so no coding there.

Re: Simula One: an office-focused, standalone VR headset built on top of Linux

#155

Post by xtracto »

evacchi wrote: post #41

Looks a lot like Project Looking Glass :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Looking_Glass

Also like SphereXP ( https://web.archive.org/web/20040130224608/http://www.hamar.... ) . A pretty undervalued project from around the same time

Re: Simula One: an office-focused, standalone VR headset built on top of Linux

#156

Post by BlueDingo »

journey_16162 wrote: post #139

I don't like to see where it's going. I mean, there are good chances this is the future of desktop computing. And it's no good in my opinion. Computers already cut us out from our bodies and trap in head as is. Replacing the screen with VR will push this effect even further. Expect more anxiety, depression, social awkwardness. I feel lucky to be born in times where we have technology and abundance but it didn't yet t…

The ease and portability are what make me moderately interested. I had kids over the last few years and no longer have a home office. I might get a desk area at some point but the only option is right next to my wife and my time to code would be when she's asleep.

So I plop on the couch with my laptop but the constraints of that setup quickly drain my energy. If I had a quality "multi monitor" setup that is ready any time, anywhere, my productivity would increase, even if the device/process itself isn't better than monitors + i3.

And if that happens, I'll have a happier time coding, probably produce more code, and live a happier life (because currently I am unhappy with my lack of output and that feeds back into my family life). That isn't some magical hope either, the same would happen if I had a multi monitor office again, but buying a single device is easier.

So don't despair, there will be plenty of good outcomes from stuff like this project.

Re: Simula One: an office-focused, standalone VR headset built on top of Linux

#157

Post by kanetw »

erikbye wrote: post #44

What's the resolution per eye?

We're evaluating 2880x2880 displays right now. With our upcoming optics, we can get up to 45PPD in the foveal area if everything works out as planned (they're basically a variable magnification optic).

Depending on vendor support we might have to go to 2.5k displays from another vendor, but hopefully we can get the support we need for the 3k displays.

Re: Simula One: an office-focused, standalone VR headset built on top of Linux

#158

Post by kanetw »

gfodor wrote: post #151
kanetw wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing that's satisfactory in one way or another. Probably Luxonis DepthAI? The main problem with off-the-shelf solutions is that they add another set of cameras, and afaik nothing exists that allows custom cameras. We're gonna need an FPGA anyway due to the large amount of IO (2 cameras for AR, 2 for eye tracking, IMU, whatever other sensors we need, plus potentially mmwave radar if we decide to go that way) so it'…

Interesting - I guess I assumed the hurdle is both hardware and software. Oculus's hand tracking was a huge lift. Is there any commercially available software stack being worked on that is at least hardware generic? Or is everyone forced to build from scratch?

There's a lot of research papers that I found, but nothing hardware generic unfortunately.

Hand tracking is a difficult beast especially, and we would like to just use the new Ultraleap module for that, but they don't support Linux yet.

Eye tracking is relatively simple because it's a closed/controlled environment. Just some IR LEDs, an IR camera, and some edge detection and math.

SLAM (positional tracking) has a lot of different approaches . There's open source software, but it's generally running on a normal computer and that's not particularly efficient (especially with our GPU already loaded). Some research papers use a FPGA, but the code is rarely available so you just have a starting point.

You could probably crib the software from DepthAI or similar? We could implement the AI coprocessor they're using and adapt the code. I haven't looked closely enough yet to see whether that's a good use of resources.

Re: Simula One: an office-focused, standalone VR headset built on top of Linux

#159

Post by kanetw »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #141
chungus wrote: post #42

Fun 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.

I often find myself wondering what the 'killer app' of purely functional programming languages is. For the longest time I assumed they would become much more popular as multi-core cpus proliferated, but pretty much every purely functional language out there is relegated to a dusty corner.

The absolute killer app is compilers, static analyzers, and similar. Other languages don't even come close for anything in that space.

However, I think that purely functional languages are useful for basically everything. Haskell is my general purpose language of choice, unless libraries or system constraints force me to another language.

Post reply on HN