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A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)

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Re: A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)

#31

Post by charcircuit »

geoelectric wrote: post #21
charcircuit wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would need quite the cable to support 6 camera video feeds, 2 display video feeds, 2 audio feeds, and some other control data in addition to power.

Would it? How much total throughput and power would that be, vs a skinny USB-C PD 3.2 Gen 2x2 cable that can carry a 100W or more along with 20 Gbps of data? How about 2 or 3 of them in a wrapper? The Quest can be a PCVR headset with a 3.2 Gen 1 cable, ie 5 Gbps. How different is this? I’m pretty sure outboarding most of the hardware that’s not speaker, camera, or screen is plenty doable. It just blows Meta’s selling…

>How different is this?

Hardware decoding / encoding all of those video streams requires a lot of processing power on both ends, adds 10s of ms of latency, and makes the video quality worse.

Re: A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)

#32

Post by flohofwoe »

charcircuit wrote: post #9

These had nothing to do with VR. It was only allegedly able to be used for showing steroscopic video, like a stereoscope. It was not capable of showing a virtual reality to the user where they were present in it. It's hard to find any actual information about this device as the articles that refer to this don't cite their sources and probably just copied the information off of each other. There is no evidence that th…

You can use VR goggles to display static 2D images, and they would still be VR googles though. It's actually a bit disappointing how close he was with his mockup to modern VR goggles (which are still a bulky contraption wrapped around your head).

Re: A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)

#33

Post by onion2k »

iancmceachern wrote: post #8

I have a story like this. My first job out of engineering school was working for Dr. Robert Jarvik, of artificial heart fame. He has a patent where there is a drawing of a person, on a treadmill, with cables tied to each joint. The idea is it's a virtual reality exercise setup. A Nintendo wii or kinect before sensors were any good. https://patents.google.com/patent/US5577981A/en?q=(exercise)...

This is the problem with the public understanding of patents - something superficially similar like "measuring someone doing exercise" is only a patent violation if the method used is the same as the patented invention. The Wii and Kinect use remote sensors based on video. Clearly that isn't the same idea as your former boss's patent.

Re: A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)

#35

Post by robertlagrant »

onion2k wrote: post #33
iancmceachern wrote: post #8

I have a story like this. My first job out of engineering school was working for Dr. Robert Jarvik, of artificial heart fame. He has a patent where there is a drawing of a person, on a treadmill, with cables tied to each joint. The idea is it's a virtual reality exercise setup. A Nintendo wii or kinect before sensors were any good. https://patents.google.com/patent/US5577981A/en?q=(exercise)...

This is the problem with the public understanding of patents - something superficially similar like "measuring someone doing exercise" is only a patent violation if the method used is the same as the patented invention. The Wii and Kinect use remote sensors based on video. Clearly that isn't the same idea as your former boss's patent.

I don't think the previous comment implies anything otherwise.

Re: A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)

#37

Post by jazzyjackson »

Jensson wrote: post #27
aksss wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in mid-late nineties I would have never paid for a cell phone personally (too expensive), but they were becoming cheap enough that it was common for employers to see the value in making sure you had one.

Most kids had cell phones in mid late nineties where I lived, the phones themselves were cheap but using them were not very cheap, but giving a kid a phone so you could call them if the parent needed seemed popular.

You know I kind of forgot the dynamics of that as a 90s kid, compared to 13 year olds with iphones now. Imagine how much TikTok kids would watch if they were charged 10 cents per video.

Re: A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)

#39

Post by michaelt »

Jensson wrote: post #27
aksss wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in mid-late nineties I would have never paid for a cell phone personally (too expensive), but they were becoming cheap enough that it was common for employers to see the value in making sure you had one.

Most kids had cell phones in mid late nineties where I lived, the phones themselves were cheap but using them were not very cheap, but giving a kid a phone so you could call them if the parent needed seemed popular.

According to [1] (which might be incomplete, IDK) cell phone sales went from 100 million per year in 1997 to 400 million per year in 2000. Subsequently, sales rose to 1.5 billion per year.

So when talking about how many people have cell phones, the difference between "mid 90s" and "late 90s" makes a big difference :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_ph...

Re: A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)

#40

Post by sschueller »

Terr_ wrote: post #5

I wish more people knew/appreciated the incrementalism of progress. A huge amount of constant "boring" percent-point improvement work or price-shifts are required to unlock the interesting changes, and often the people and companies associated with those new discoveries and ways of doing things are not really the first at all, but rather the lucky or the ruthless.

Prime example is OpenAI. General public thinks they have open some sort of Pandora's box when it has been a long iterative process of which a lot was done by others.
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