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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)

#111

Post by fragmede »

vidarh wrote: post #92
Nevermark wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They didn't take technical genius. All the elements preceded them. Most of the design preceded thrm. They didn't engineer anything particularly new. That sounds quite mediocre! Except where were all these non-geniuses with their just-as-not-new phones putting Microsoft, Palm, Sony, Blackberry, etc., to shame? Most of that was crap in comparison. And despite many (many) revamped product lines (Microsoft!) trying to…

> That sounds quite mediocre! Except where were all these non-geniuses with their just-as-not-new phones putting Microsoft, Palm, Sony, Blackberry, etc., to shame? Most of that was crap in comparison. And despite many (many) revamped product lines (Microsoft!) trying to take smart phones mainstream. (I give the Blackberry kudos for being very good at what it did.) They had built phones with the same kind of interface…

The business end of things is not to be forgotten. The real trick was that the iPhone debuted on AT&T with an affordable data plan. that was the key. Blackberries had all the same capabilities, but they were so expensive that only business people could afford them through work.

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

#112

Post by Dylan16807 »

charcircuit wrote: post #31
geoelectric wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not video encoding, raw-ish signals.

Let's say DSC is allowed, which costs microseconds and is basically invisible, and can compress down to about 8 bits per pixel.

That USB cable can transmit 20Gbps in each direction. The display needs to do 23 million pixels 90 times a second, and at 8 bits per pixel that's about 17Gbps.

The video cameras going the other way are 13 million pixels for the main cameras plus some amount more for the 6 tracking cameras and the other sensors. And those main cameras are outputting 8 bits per pixel before any compression is applied.

It's a tight fit at that bitrate, but we can upgrade to USB4 and get 40Gbps in each direction. That leaves plenty of room for everything, and makes sure there's headroom for HDR and 100Hz and whatnot. It works out.

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

#113

Post by moritonal »

s_dev wrote: post #64
andruby wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My armchair answer to that question is that Google isn’t a product company. They might have had similar or better technical AI capabilities, but they aren’t great at productizing it.

>Google isn’t a product company. I disagree. Google does have great products, Google Maps, Search, GMail etc.

It has free Products. I would suggest that all three would struggle to act as individual paid products if they didn't cross-support each other.

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

#114

Post by moffkalast »

jacobsimon wrote: post #109
moffkalast wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, I don't think such projects should be left up to the private sector to develop. If we did space travel that way we'd make the first moon landing in 2038. This sort of live saving research is the best contender for R&D by government grants, if it's a worthy cause it can be supported for a long time (like fusion is being), and when the solution is found it can be immediately shared and sold at cost for the ben…

It’s a funny comment because I think you could also argue that the government misappropriated a huge amount of public money to put a man on the moon in the 1960s, when it should have invested that into medical research or better transportation infrastructure in America. The fact that the private sector hasn’t developed moon travel yet is a sign that it’s just not that important to most people, not a lack of productiv…

Or maybe that the return on investment is data they can't directly commercialize. Though I guess they could auction off pieces of the moon to the highest bidder or something of the sort. But yes I think we can all agree that that money could've been better or at least far more efficiently spent, same goes for the US's colossal military budget. This is in a nutshell the whole mindset behind the EU's spending the way I see it - social programs first, science second, everything else third.

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

#115

Post by tialaramex »

jmull wrote: post #108
tialaramex wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, ideas are worthless, anybody can come up an unlimited number of these ideas, if they were valuable you've got infinite value and that's ludicrous. Several other things really are valuable, one thing that surprises people is that Advertising is actually valuable, if nobody knows you made this thing/ service/ whatever then they can't benefit from it. Now obviously there's a big gap between "Have you heard about bic…

> No, ideas are worthless, anybody can come up an unlimited number of these ideas If you're trying to create a commercial device, the idea is such tiny part of what it takes to deliver a successful product that it is close to worthless on its own. But the context here is science fiction, where good ideas are a major part of it. (The other major parts are good characters and storytelling, but it's the ideas that disti…

Frederik Pohl wrote, "Somebody once said that a good science-fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam. We agree."

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

#116

Post by fennecbutt »

janoc wrote: post #62

The problem is that the guy didn't "invent" anything, more like had a farfetched idea and left all "the practical details" to others to work out. That's like saying that Meliès invented space travel - he too had the idea of flying to the Moon in a gun projectile ... It was only non-functioning mockup, at best, because the vacuum tube electronics of the era was simply incapable of producing a wireless device with thos…

Welcome to our patent system.

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

#117

Post by nradov »

moffkalast wrote: post #114
jacobsimon wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a funny comment because I think you could also argue that the government misappropriated a huge amount of public money to put a man on the moon in the 1960s, when it should have invested that into medical research or better transportation infrastructure in America. The fact that the private sector hasn’t developed moon travel yet is a sign that it’s just not that important to most people, not a lack of productiv…

Or maybe that the return on investment is data they can't directly commercialize. Though I guess they could auction off pieces of the moon to the highest bidder or something of the sort. But yes I think we can all agree that that money could've been better or at least far more efficiently spent, same goes for the US's colossal military budget. This is in a nutshell the whole mindset behind the EU's spending the way I…

Enjoy it while it lasts. The EU countries have only been able to under spend on their militaries because of US security guarantees. That subsidy is coming to an end one way or another and they are rapidly increasing defense spending. That means austerity for social programs.

In terms of novel drugs introduced per year (not just repackaging existing drugs), the EU as a bloc is consistently behind the US. So, their scientific spending doesn't seem to be paying off in pharmaceuticals.

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

#118

Post by cultofmetatron »

vidarh wrote: post #49
fragmede wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember the UMPC! That was a whole category of portable computers that didn't stand the test of time. Apple got a lot of things right, but I think it was less about timing and more about being usable, and affordable by the masses. Blackberry was great but it cost too much and didn't have a big enough battery.

Being usable was largely about timing, though. None of the choices that compromised our device - or those of most of our competitors - were choices we made because we thought they were right, or best, but because we were forced to by timing and what was available at what cost, and failed to realize that the result was too compromised to stand a chance. Put another way: Had Apple launched an iPad in 2000, it would've…

> Had Apple launched an iPad in 2000, it would've had exactly the same hardware usability issues

and thats what excites me the most about the vision pro. when Apple steps in, its generally a signal that the tech has achieved a certain critial mass.

vision pro is going to incentivise a lot of hardware manufacturers to start building components for the VR market and increase the ecoomies of scale for other vr systems.

Put another way, android wouldn't exist or be relevant if iphone didnt show us what a smart phone could be. now I can go to any store and buy a cheap andrpid for $200. is it as good as a modern flagship iphone? of course not. but it holds up well against any 4 year old iphone.

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

#119

Post by kalleboo »

wharvle wrote: post #97
Jensson wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1) Kids? You mean only high schoolers, right? I lived that time period and can't imagine any kid who didn't drive having a cell phone, then. 2) I graduated in the early '00s and I think maybe 5% of the kids in my graduating class, at most, had a cell phone by graduation. Mostly some shitty Nokia with a phone-only or low-texting plan (texting was still crazy-expensive), mainly for contacting parents about after school…

Where I lived in Sweden, 1998-1999 was when the breakthrough started with prepaid SIM cards with subsidized phones. In my graduating middle school class there were maybe 3-4 kids with mobile phones (none of us were rich at all, just middle class, and all too young to drive), but in the following 3 years in highschool that went up to basically 100%.

The US was far behind on mobile phones for a long time.

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

#120

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

vidarh wrote: post #67
Nevermark wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being usable was largely about timing, though. Most breakthrough inventions, in areas where people fumbled for years or decades, could have been released long before with earlier insight. Maybe not as advanced, but if the right things were done right they still would have been a win. Many of those "right things" were more practicality, psychological, or fit for market, not just waiting around to jump the moment the…

You really underestimate timing here, and I feel overestimate how great the first iPhone and iPad was. They didn't take technical genius. All the elements preceded them. Most of the design preceded thrm. They didn't engineer anything particularly new. The only previously unavailable component they got made was better glass, which was great, but not where the deal breaker was for previous iterations. I find it funny w…

this is like watching younger developers scoff at jquery not understanding how revolutionary it was at the time.

compare iphone to the mobile of the day and it becomes obvious why it won.

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