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John Carmack’s presentation at Facebook Connect [video]

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Re: John Carmack’s presentation at Facebook Connect [video]

#151

Post by andybak »

Animats wrote: post #92
blackearl wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beat Saber is the obvious answer with the most general appeal.

Right. Beat Saber works because the virtual world does not rotate relative to the real world. That rotation is what induces nausea. The player is confined to a small box in the virtual world; they never move very far, and the virtual world is locked to the real world.[1] Games with that constraint are limited. You could do ping-pong. Shooting galleries. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV1sw4lfwFw

I'm not sure your understanding of VR motion sickness is quite right. Most people are completely fine with teleport locomotion which is sufficient for a huge class ofs games.

Also cockpits seem to reduce nausea thus opening up another broad category.

It's mostly smooth first person motion with strafing and smooth turning that is problematic.

Re: John Carmack’s presentation at Facebook Connect [video]

#152

Post by andybak »

mlindner wrote: post #91
dougmwne wrote: post #20

This talk was such a treat. After all the carefuly crafted hype from Zuck and the gang, Carmack threw huge bucket of cold water on everything. I think it's just wonderful that he's allowed to speak so openly, about the things he's proud of, the things he thinks are failures, internal politics, the possibilities for improvement, the real hard physical limits VR is running into, and his growing pessimism for the future…

Hopefully you went with a real VR headset instead of the Quest. I guarantee you will be disappointed with the Quest.

I own several headsets including a Quest and I'd be happy with any of them. I guarantee you're mistaken.

Re: John Carmack’s presentation at Facebook Connect [video]

#153

Post by agar »

fxtentacle wrote: post #144
agar wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Others have said this, but I'll reiterate: your description of mass market is precisely what's happening with Quest. Your view of VR seems rooted in pre-Quest (i.e., exclusively PC-tethered) VR and not the stand-alone world. In fact, so many people literally went to Best Buy or Walmart to purchase a Quest that it has been sold out since the beginning of the year, online and off, with eBay pricing at 50%+ premiums. Yo…

The problem is, those numbers are nowhere near close to the price of making triple-A games. I heard Assassins Creed Origins cost 80 mio and Odyssey was 100 mio. With that in mind, "Top games have made over $10m" sounds like we won't be seeing high quality VR games anytime soon.

A few points to consider:

1. Facebook funds many of these games; think of it like a first-party game made to drive sales of a new console. The developer gets paid up front, Facebook recoups the revenue via incremental sales of HMDs and software on their store.

2. Note that many games are VR offshoots of existing IPs. This means the opportunity for asset re-use and consequently lower costs.

3. "High quality" and "big budget" are not equivalent. There is a huge spectrum between a tech demo and a flagship title with 400-500 people working on it (as is the case of AC). AAA-caliber, lengthy games can be made by teams of 50-75.

4. Again, those revenue numbers are on Quest only. PSVR is an even larger market, and PC VR (Vive, Index, WMR, Rift) is probably about the same size.

The most important point though is that if your entry point requires Cyberpunk 2077, Red Dead Redemption 2, or The Last of Us, then it is indeed too early.

However, the two hottest non-VR games right now are Fall Guys and Among Us - great, high quality games come in all sizes.

Re: John Carmack’s presentation at Facebook Connect [video]

#154

Post by ilaksh »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #145
ilaksh wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I just realized, after thinking about the forward looking AR research talk by the VP or whoever, that AGI is actually the long-term research goal for Facebook's AR. They want a personal assistant that understands the world well enough to insert content that you need. So John is actually still working on the next phase of the Facebook AR project in my opinion.

Nope. He's collaborating with his son on it, and he's being extremely careful to keep the work highly partitioned for IP reasons. He doesn't want a repeat of the ZenniMax lawsuit. I'd read it as his sunset project for his career, where he gets to take a longshot at something really ambitious, while enjoying hacking with his son.

I didn't mean he was actually working for Facebook. I meant it's an extension of the project there. Even though it seems unrelated.

Re: John Carmack’s presentation at Facebook Connect [video]

#155

Post by ksec »

thomasfortes wrote: post #26
aantix wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGI, artificial general intelligence as an independent researcher.

He was complaining a couple days ago in twitter that he couldn't buy a ton of expensive gpu machines on GCP as an independent researcher, but being John Carmack someone from google stepped up and fixed it for him.

Link below. Anyway why do they have such a low quota? To stop people from using it for Crypto? But surely they could have make multiple account if it needs to be.

So why put a limit?

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1305967411749892098

Re: John Carmack’s presentation at Facebook Connect [video]

#156

Post by jokoon »

wlesieutre wrote: post #30
jokoon wrote: post #25

I see many developers betting on VR. I could see it happening everywhere but at home. At best VR somehow is a perfect argument on why people should play escape games or paintball/airsoft. It sound like a second version of the google glass. You just need to use some common logic: a video game works on a screen. It's too difficult to add new sensors. You cannot bridge reality and virtuality. You either have a video gam…

VR games are great at home already. I'm not sure I understand your common logic about video games working on a screen. Is playing real paintball more immersive and real than playing VR paintball in Rec Room? Of course it is. It's also an expensive hobby with a bunch of equipment that requires you to set aside hours of time and drive to a paintball arena. You can't just jump from "This isn't a 100% faithful reproducti…

Thanks for the input

I just have more faith in augmented reality. Less latency problems, more possibilities of games like pokemon go.

I'm curious why they didn't try a version with transparent screens.

Re: John Carmack’s presentation at Facebook Connect [video]

#157

Post by criddell »

dougmwne wrote: post #132
criddell wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think VR headsets take billions of dollars to launch? The first Oculus was a Kickstarter project.

I think what Facebook and its vendors are building takes huge investment and lots of the best engineers you can hire. It's not just an lcd panel with lenses glued on, it's a room scale computer vision system, a VR optimised cpu/gpu with a suite of sensors, a VR software platform, controllers packed with sensors, computer vision tracking of controllers and hands, developer tools, a consumer app store, first party apps…

Some of that might be difficult, but none of it is impossible and all of it is getting easier and easier. Some parts don't need to be invented or kickstarted because it exists already and is ready to go.

Re: John Carmack’s presentation at Facebook Connect [video]

#158

Post by lhl »

dougmwne wrote: post #68
olau wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I watched the whole thing and I don't understand how you arrived at him having a growing pessimism for the future of VR? I had the opposite impression. He did seem to care about VR as a general purpose system (alternative to traditional monitors), even if it's not quite there yet, both due to hardware and software limitations. He also seemed proud that they were actually shipping stuff.

Yes, I do think he was very proud of the shipping product and saw that there were many more achievable gains. My impression of pessimism came from his skepticism that Moore's law would continue long enough to get them to where they really wanted to be on mobile VR, his struggles with latency probably making cloud rendering a poor experience for most, recognition that they were already at the ceiling of their heat and…

I'd recommend anyone interested in the future of VR displays to take the time to watch Doug Lanman's (FRL) recent presentation (IS&T Electronic Imaging (EI) Symposium: Quality Screen Time: Leveraging Computational Displays for Spatial Computing) to get a taste of what's coming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQwMAl9bGNY - it's great, and one of the more optimistic technology talks I've seen in a while.

As far as the limits of mobile computation goes, I think the thing to consider is that Qualcomm is already providing Wi-Fi 6E chips that have VR-class latency (<3ms) - this is bog standard, but of there are of course companies like Amimon that have been offering proprietary ultra-low latency (<1ms) solutions for a while now. We'll see if the PS5/PSVR2 offers a wireless solution, but I don't think it's too much to ask for those looking for cutting edge experience to use untethered, local compute - why do you need to strap an RTX 3080 to your face? There's already more than enough power on mobile to provide the basic I/O for presence and engagement in VR.

Re: John Carmack’s presentation at Facebook Connect [video]

#160

Post by esyir »

jonny_wonny wrote: post #110
dougmwne wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I do think he was very proud of the shipping product and saw that there were many more achievable gains. My impression of pessimism came from his skepticism that Moore's law would continue long enough to get them to where they really wanted to be on mobile VR, his struggles with latency probably making cloud rendering a poor experience for most, recognition that they were already at the ceiling of their heat and…

I mean, I think the last thing he said regarding Moore’s Law was the comment about what that AMD exec said, which was basically that they still have tons of room for future improvements.

Specifically, that was Jim Keller who gave the "we've got this" response to that. I've been grumbling about moore's law for some time, but if Keller says that it's possible, I'll believe him on this.
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