Here's another interview by kotaku with more detail on the hacking process Carmack went through: http://kotaku.com/5916210/carmack-being-carmack-a-dozen-minu...
thanks, this actually shows the helmet in action. I think I'm gonna buy this kit.
John Carmack is making a virtual reality headset
41–50 of 69 posts
Re: John Carmack is making a virtual reality headset
#42[deleted]
Re: John Carmack is making a virtual reality headset
#43Nice interview with John demoing and discussing his work:
"So the way this has gone, is, I decided to treat myself after Rage on there, I bought a, you know, a head mount for $1,500 or so. It's a little cottage industry, there's a few places that do these things with integration, and... it sucked. It was really bad. It was everything that I expected it to be, that it, it didn't look like there had been any progress in 20 years, since... or 15 years since I had looked at these things last.
But, when I got that, then, I started taking it apart, both literally and figuratively, to go ahead and see what are all of the aspects on here, on the sensing side, where, when I wrote my own test software for this, using their library to go ahead and get the head-tracking, it had 100ms of latency, and this just didn't make any sense to me. Why is it so bad, did they need to have so much filtering?
And, I wound up, I took the software that I wrote for Armadillo Aerospace for our rocket control with fiber-optic gyros, I took that gyro integration software and took raw values from the micro-machine sensors on there, and all the sudden it got way better. You know I can only guess that they may have filtering from 10 years ago when they had really noisy sensors, and they're a lot better now."
[...]
Resolution is gonna get better. We're gonna get to 120Hz displays, I'm haranguing all the display vendors about this. [...] Removing the latency, one of the cases that I've been making that shows the ridiculousness of it all, where, I can measure 50ms of delay on this, and I do that by, I have a program that switches colors when I hit a button, and you put a high-speed camera here, you mash it, and you wait, you count frames until it switches, and it's 50ms for that over a very fast display. That's more time than it takes to send a packet from America to England, you know. That's just ridiculous! But it's because router people and switch people care about latency, they know it's important so they don't pile it up. Display people don't know yet, but I'm trying to educate all of them about that."
[...]
"And this field of view (90 degree horizontal field of view, 110 degree vertical field of view), you couldn't get in a $10,000 head-mount display; actually, you still can't today, it's that much higher."
[...]
"The head mount display stuff is, it makes even this 8 year old game a fundamentally different experience. It really is like nothing you've ever played liked that... 10 times more graphics power doesn't give you that level of intensity."
Re: John Carmack is making a virtual reality headset
#44[deleted]
Re: John Carmack is making a virtual reality headset
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, this isn't it. We're entering an age of higher order technology, where each advancement leads to faster advancement. In short, we are approaching what many have called the singularity.
The singularity specifically requires AIs that can build smarter AIs. I'm not sure any of our current progress is really leading to true AI.
"specifically requires AIs that can build smarter AIs"
The trendy "rapture of the nerds" version of the singularity does.
The original definition is technology advancing at a faster rate than humans are capable of integrating and managing it. It was identified while trying to identify existential threats to humanity.
It's fascinating watching a warning about future dangers get repackaged by AI focused futurists into a utopian neo-religion.
Re: John Carmack is making a virtual reality headset
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, this isn't it. We're entering an age of higher order technology, where each advancement leads to faster advancement. In short, we are approaching what many have called the singularity.
The singularity specifically requires AIs that can build smarter AIs. I'm not sure any of our current progress is really leading to true AI.
> The singularity specifically requires AIs that can build smarter AIs.
Not really. The singularity requires an intelligence explosion. A perfectly acceptable alternative route is human-intelligence augmentation, via some or all of biological hacking (genetic or otherwise), chemical hacking, and tool use. The former two are plausible but not yet off the ground, but regarding tool-based augmentation I think we're seeing meaningful, if preliminary, progress. (Then again, I think literacy counts in this bin.)
I think the key question is whether you think the self-amplifying returns of technology that we're already seeing will extend sustainably to amplifying intelligence (either human or artificial).
Re: John Carmack is making a virtual reality headset
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
The singularity specifically requires AIs that can build smarter AIs. I'm not sure any of our current progress is really leading to true AI.
Agreed. However, I don't think we really want AI. We want IA (Intelligence Augmentation). AI leads to slavery or at best pet-ness. IA leads to godhood (maybe?)
The slavery-inducing AI is more like pandoras box. Inevitably someone will try to create and harness such tech for a competitive advantage, but they have created something they cannot control...
Re: John Carmack is making a virtual reality headset
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like you may not be familiar with Armadillo Aerospace yet...
Yeah, Carmack has a rocket company: http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/
And it looks like he used some tech from Armadillo in this unit. The software for the gyro sensors come straight out of the Armadillo rocket tech. Awesome.
(see the youtube video mentioned in another comment)
Re: John Carmack is making a virtual reality headset
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Entering? This is it.
Ain't seen nothing yet. Just wait until: We have fully reusable rocket ships that let us put people in orbit at less than $200k per person (SpaceX reusable Falcon 9 / Dragon, likely to see fruition within the next 5 to 15 years or so). We have hand held computers and smartphones with the cpu power of an entire server rack today and with petabytes of non-volatile storage that's nearly as fast as ram (memristors, possi…
And when I close my eyes it's already here.
Re: John Carmack is making a virtual reality headset
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, Carmack has a rocket company: http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/
And it looks like he used some tech from Armadillo in this unit. The software for the gyro sensors come straight out of the Armadillo rocket tech. Awesome. (see the youtube video mentioned in another comment)
Well, the software. IIRC, the Armadillo flight electronics use a Crossbow IMU, (which must be very accurate, endure a whole lot of vibration, and drift very little) which is $100k.