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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

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If people who only know JS and won't learn anything new can't contribute then that's a cost worth bearing. I think this is an unfair and unnecessarily-snarky take. My list of languages is fairly long these days. I’ve written php, ruby, and go in reasonable volume for mostly personal projects. I used to teach embedded C at uni. I write python professionally every day. Recently I’ve even started playing with rust (an…

Yeah, I don't really see functional programming being that great of a fit for VR. I mean, the 3D environment is inherently object-oriented and stateful. And you're working in an extremely performance intensive task, such that pure immutability really starts to get in the way. Also, Haskell's lazy evaluation has a bad reputation for poor and/or unpredictable performance. It's better to have a higher mean execution tim…

> the 3D environment is inherently object-oriented

What does it mean for the 3D environment to be inherently object-oriented?

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

#212
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

good question! depending on the project, it'll normally be browser for reference (or if its web based testing as well, but thats rare) then I have about between 1/2 and 2/3rds of the screen space left to have terminals in. I'll have one/two long terminals open with vim for the main file(s) I'm working on, then 1-4 smaller terminals for running the program/tests. if its a big project, then more terminals for reference…

Surely vim can manage its own display and you don't need multiple terminals each running their own instance?

It can, and sometimes its quite useful. If I have long terminals, I can :split, which is a nice option to have.

However a lot of the time the Vims are there for reference.

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

#213
post #157
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.

Ok nice, that's better than G2. What about IPD? All HMDs have too narrow IPD for me, what is the challenge with offering wide IPD? The Human IPD range is 51 to 77. Quest 2 offers only up to 66 mm, the Index up to 70mm.

How's the lens glare?

Can you use Simula currently with Quest 2 air link or do you need to be tethered?

EDIT: So yeah, this is Linux only? There will not be a Windows version?

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

#214
post #44

What's the resolution per eye?

Depends on the device you use. They seem to support a few different ones. From here: https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula it seems like anything that will run steamvr should do it.

I was obviously referring to their HMD.

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

#215
post #118
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely vim can manage its own display and you don't need multiple terminals each running their own instance?

Vim can , but why in the world would I have vim do that itself when that means I have to learn/use both vims windowing system and my window managers windowing system? What advantage does it give me...

I spend more time interacting with Emacs than I do my window system, so I am quite happy arranging terminals, database clients, REPLs and code inside that, and there are huge advantages to all those being able to communicate frictionlessly. It'd be very annoying having to constantly multitask.

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

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If people who only know JS and won't learn anything new can't contribute then that's a cost worth bearing. I think this is an unfair and unnecessarily-snarky take. My list of languages is fairly long these days. I’ve written php, ruby, and go in reasonable volume for mostly personal projects. I used to teach embedded C at uni. I write python professionally every day. Recently I’ve even started playing with rust (an…

Yeah, I don't really see functional programming being that great of a fit for VR. I mean, the 3D environment is inherently object-oriented and stateful. And you're working in an extremely performance intensive task, such that pure immutability really starts to get in the way. Also, Haskell's lazy evaluation has a bad reputation for poor and/or unpredictable performance. It's better to have a higher mean execution tim…

I disagree on the 3D environment being inherently OOP. ECS, a popular paradigm in 3D and 2D game making, can map pretty well to functional programming.

I would pick Rust as well here but just because Haskell has exceptions and it has less emphasis on safety and less pleasant defaults than Rust. In order to get the Haskell I want I need several pragmas and a different prelude...

I would say Rust is pretty functional itself, though.

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

#217
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ok nice, that's better than G2. What about IPD? All HMDs have too narrow IPD for me, what is the challenge with offering wide IPD? The Human IPD range is 51 to 77. Quest 2 offers only up to 66 mm, the Index up to 70mm. How's the lens glare? Can you use Simula currently with Quest 2 air link or do you need to be tethered? EDIT: So yeah, this is Linux only? There will not be a Windows version?

We're trying to hit as wide of an IPD as feasible. Right now with the BOE displays we can hit an IPD of 55-77mm, but the design isn't finalized yet.

Lens glare, too early in the design to tell yet. I'll have more info in late Oct.

It's Linux only as Windows doesn't have the APIs for what we're doing (being a window manager, basically). No idea if WSL will work nowadays; definitely not without a lot of finagling.

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

#218
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think writing Haskell ever gets easy, at least it hasn't for me over about ten years. Writing good code in any language is hard, but Haskell makes it harder to write bad code. I have to write object-oriented bullshit all day for my job, if I started a fun new project like this I'd happily choose Haskell. If people who only know JS and won't learn anything new can't contribute then that's a cost worth bearing.

> If people who only know JS and won't learn anything new can't contribute then that's a cost worth bearing. I think this is an unfair and unnecessarily-snarky take. My list of languages is fairly long these days. I’ve written php, ruby, and go in reasonable volume for mostly personal projects. I used to teach embedded C at uni. I write python professionally every day. Recently I’ve even started playing with rust (an…

> for whatever reason purely functional languages are the only ones that elude me

That's because all of the languages you listed are really similar conceptually. PHP, Ruby, Go, C, and Python (and others you didn't list: Java, C++, C#, Perl, Lua, JavaScript) are far more similar to each other than they are to Haskell - they have different syntax and slightly different semantics, but for the most part they're all in the same language family. It's much easier to pick up Java after learning PHP than it is to learn programming for the first time - or, alternatively, to learn a structured language after having written unstructured BASIC for your whole life.

Lisp users (of which I am one) frequently talk about how all of those languages are "basically the same" - but for all that, Common Lisp is still way more similar to Python than it is to Haskell (which I've also tried and failed to learn).

Also, Haskell isn't just a functional language - it also is a lazy language, which means you have to now learn two new ways of thinking at once.

Erlang is similarly in a different world from the mainstream imperative-OO languages, but I don't think that being functional is the only thing that makes it hard to learn - it also has a fundamentally different model of concurrency (as well as being designed around concurrency) that is difficult to learn if you're just used to pthreads.

Similarly, I think that Prolog (logic programming), Adga (is it a programming language, or a theorem prover?), Rust (maybe; lifetimes), and Forth (stack programming) all present unique challenges to people like us that have only written Python/Ruby/Perl/Go/Lisp...

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

#219
post #215
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vim can , but why in the world would I have vim do that itself when that means I have to learn/use both vims windowing system and my window managers windowing system? What advantage does it give me...

I spend more time interacting with Emacs than I do my window system, so I am quite happy arranging terminals, database clients, REPLs and code inside that, and there are huge advantages to all those being able to communicate frictionlessly. It'd be very annoying having to constantly multitask.

I feel like emacs makes a much better case for this than vim, because it actually takes advantage of everything being one program (at the expense of rewriting the world, and basically being it's own operating system).

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

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I don't really see functional programming being that great of a fit for VR. I mean, the 3D environment is inherently object-oriented and stateful. And you're working in an extremely performance intensive task, such that pure immutability really starts to get in the way. Also, Haskell's lazy evaluation has a bad reputation for poor and/or unpredictable performance. It's better to have a higher mean execution tim…

I disagree on the 3D environment being inherently OOP. ECS, a popular paradigm in 3D and 2D game making, can map pretty well to functional programming. I would pick Rust as well here but just because Haskell has exceptions and it has less emphasis on safety and less pleasant defaults than Rust. In order to get the Haskell I want I need several pragmas and a different prelude... I would say Rust is pretty functional i…

What? ECS is soooo object oriented. It's basically the modern OOP attitude of poo-pooing inheritance in favor of composition, writ-large. Yet, somehow, all the components have deep inheritance hierarchies themselves, so [shrug].
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