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

Alex Honnold: The Soloist VR

thesoloist-vr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 139 posts

Re: Alex Honnold: The Soloist VR

#61

Post by Someone »

1_player wrote: post #46
aeonik wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He climbs all these routes with a rope dozens to hundreds of times before free soloing them. The routes that he free soloes are also considered relatively easy to intermediate in skill level, well within his skill level. The really incredible part of his free soloes is just how long his body can last. It's Olympic levels of endurance.

Is his free solo climb of El Capitan considered an easy to intermediate route?

https://www.coloradomountaineering.com/2012/01/guide-to-yose...:

“Requires considerable knowledge of ropework, knots, and protection to climb. Although "free-soloing", or climbing without a rope, is admired and even revered by some as the purest form of climbing, it is a rare sort of person that enjoys climbing significant class 5 pitches without a rope.”

Class 5 is subdivided in 5.1 through 5.15, with ¿some/each? having a further a through d rating.

The route he took is rated 5.12d, maybe 5.13a (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14500208), so that’s highly elite. Free-soloing is easier than soling with safety ropes in the sense that you won’t have to haul up gear :-) but of course a lot harder mentally.

I think ratings ignore length of the climb, and that matters, especially in this case, where there’s little to no time to rest.

You have to be confident that you’ll be physically and mentally fit enough for the entire thing (climbing down is more difficult, so you’re committing going all the way fairly soon). For Honnold, that meant almost four hours.

Re: Alex Honnold: The Soloist VR

#62

Post by dividuum »

Stupid question, but is that really full VR in the sense that you can move your head around in a limited volume and see everything with real depth perception? Or is it a 360 degree video projected to a sphere and you virtually sit in the center? Is the former even possible to produce somehow?

Re: Alex Honnold: The Soloist VR

#63

Post by mojzu »

Vinnl wrote: post #39

> available exclusively on Meta Quest VR headsets I'm afraid this is going to be our future. There's web standards and VR browsers that allows us to enter any VR experience using your preferred device, but like Podcasts, there's a lot of effort to create silos that companies can act as a monopolist in.

I think VR is already there unfortunately, and that it's one of the things holding back wider scale adoption. On PC there's Revive which lets you play Oculus games on other headsets which is great, but it requires a little setup so most consumers aren't going to do it, and if Meta/FB decided tomorrow to remove accounts using it there'd be no recourse. So there are effectively arbitrary silos between hardware/stores on PC already, and any console headsets are unlikely to support OpenVR which further restricts the potential market for the devices and games. Arbitrary software and hardware exclusivity at this stage only seems to be serving the goal of some companies trying to dominate the market

Re: Alex Honnold: The Soloist VR

#64

Post by Traster »

I get extremely strong 3D movies vibe from this. I honestly think this is probably a worse way of watching this content than just viewing it as a movie. You might watch this as a gimmick but I don't think it really presents any value above real movies.

Having said that, I wonder if Facebook will start to engage in the content war, trying to ramp up their spending on original video content for their VR. It's an extremely expensive route to go, but it's certainly a possible strategy.

Re: Alex Honnold: The Soloist VR

#67

Post by desmond373 »

rjh29 wrote: post #40
Vinnl wrote: post #39

> available exclusively on Meta Quest VR headsets I'm afraid this is going to be our future. There's web standards and VR browsers that allows us to enter any VR experience using your preferred device, but like Podcasts, there's a lot of effort to create silos that companies can act as a monopolist in.

'Future' is an odd term, console game exclusivity has been a fact of life for 40+ years.

This is why I'm not too worried. I believe general purpose has an innate advantage due to versitility. PC is still around and still great for high performance gaming. Sure there are exclusives but that doesn't mean I can't play them on PC. Just means that some large company doesn't want me to and I'll happily ignore them like so many others. They may Sue me but it's not going to have a real effect unless they start catching way more people or making the fines unbearably huge.

I won't give up the fight against exclusivity because my side isn't the uphill fight.

Re: Alex Honnold: The Soloist VR

#68

Post by tehidiot »

dividuum wrote: post #62

Stupid question, but is that really full VR in the sense that you can move your head around in a limited volume and see everything with real depth perception? Or is it a 360 degree video projected to a sphere and you virtually sit in the center? Is the former even possible to produce somehow?

> Is the former even possible to produce somehow?

Google has done some research into it though it's not very practical https://augmentedperception.github.io/deepviewvideo/

Re: Alex Honnold: The Soloist VR

#69

Post by rplnt »

rjh29 wrote: post #40
Vinnl wrote: post #39

> available exclusively on Meta Quest VR headsets I'm afraid this is going to be our future. There's web standards and VR browsers that allows us to enter any VR experience using your preferred device, but like Podcasts, there's a lot of effort to create silos that companies can act as a monopolist in.

'Future' is an odd term, console game exclusivity has been a fact of life for 40+ years.

That at least made some technical sense up until recently.

Re: Alex Honnold: The Soloist VR

#70

Post by Fricken »

TheDong wrote: post #19
lordnacho wrote: post #10

Makes me feel weird just watching him. One wrong move and you die. So you need to have extremely high confidence in each move. But how do you build that without falling off something? Practice in a safe environment? Ok so when is it safe to try for real?

"how do you build that confidence without falling off?" The answer is that you do fall. Actually, you fall on the exact route you're going to free solo usually! The normal way of climbing (as opposed to "free soloing"), is with ropes. You have places on the rock where you can anchor ropes, you have someone belaying you, and at any point, if you fall, it's really not a big deal. Climbing ropes are dynamic (have a lot…

I think it's important to note that a big part of free soloing is the mental game, and no amount of rehearsal on a rope can fully prepare you for that. Alex had free soloed thousands of pitches of rock, at vary degrees of difficulty before taking on El Cap.

What impresses me most about Alex and other free soloists isn't so much their ability to keep their head together while climbing, but their ability to keep their head together while lying awake in bed at night, thinking about what they just did, and what they plan to do again tomorrow.

Post reply on HN