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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)

#51

Post by vidarh »

alpaca128 wrote: post #47
vidarh wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on a tablet computer ca. '99. We were not first, nor did we have any illusions we were. There were novel parts about our business plan, but a tablet was "obvious". But it's an illustration of what you describe: When the iPhone and later iPad were launched, a lot of people thought they were new. Even though there had been a whole fad of touch devices in phone and tablet form that had come and gone before the…

I'll never forget the crowd going bananas when Steve Jobs showed that you could scroll on the iPhone by just dragging the list with a finger, or zoom a map/website with two fingers. Smartphones weren't new, but one where you didn't have to rely on buttons or an input pen on a terrible resistive touchscreen on the other hand was a big improvement. I still miss phones with qwerty keyboards but not the UIs before the iP…

The touch certainly was a big issue. I think gestures would've been less of an issue vs. getting decent capacitative touch instead of those horrible resistive screens.

This is the one I worked on then:

https://linuxdevices.org/freepad-norways-alternative-to-swed...

The screenshots you see are real (the phone dialler even has the name of one of the employees up...). The GUI was NanoX, which is still around (and despite the name it's not an X11 server, but has partial X11 source-level compatibility; we built our own toolkit for it).

And even that, of course, was a testament to the limitations - we picked NanoX and writing our own toolkit not because we wanted to but because fitting an actual X11 server cost too much in terms of extra RAM and flash. It added many months of engineering. Fun months, but time that'd have been better spent on more applications.

I still love that project, but the hardware limitations gimped it so painfully.

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

#52

Post by s_dev »

sschueller wrote: post #40
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.

OpenAI made the first AI chat bot product that didn't suck. There is a critical mass of innovation and Open AI got their 9kg of Uranium-235 together first as reflected in the market.

The real question isn't why did OpenAI get there first but why Google didn't, they had every advantage.

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

#53

Post by andruby »

s_dev wrote: post #52
sschueller wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OpenAI made the first AI chat bot product that didn't suck. There is a critical mass of innovation and Open AI got their 9kg of Uranium-235 together first as reflected in the market. The real question isn't why did OpenAI get there first but why Google didn't, they had every advantage.

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.

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

#54

Post by fragmede »

s_dev wrote: post #52
sschueller wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OpenAI made the first AI chat bot product that didn't suck. There is a critical mass of innovation and Open AI got their 9kg of Uranium-235 together first as reflected in the market. The real question isn't why did OpenAI get there first but why Google didn't, they had every advantage.

Because keeping the user on Google, so they don't need to visit the actual page, means that people won't make web pages anymore. that was a real concern.

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

#55

Post by c0n5pir4cy »

s_dev wrote: post #52
sschueller wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OpenAI made the first AI chat bot product that didn't suck. There is a critical mass of innovation and Open AI got their 9kg of Uranium-235 together first as reflected in the market. The real question isn't why did OpenAI get there first but why Google didn't, they had every advantage.

Honestly it wasn't even having the first capable chat LLM. OpenAI released the first LLM that has interesting characteristics, based on an architecture they created to be good at this task (Generative Pre-trained Tranformers) and then iterated on improving those characteristics - It took them a while before they had a model capable of following instructions well. There was lots of interest in OpenAI when they released GPT-1 and much more when they released GPT-2.

All the while this was going on Google slept - I think the reasons for this are varied and many, stretching into company culture, structure, processes etc. This was after researchers at Google created the Transformer architecture in the first place.

Google seemed to panic suddenly when ChatGPT was released. I think this is when the people who could actually make change realised that ChatGPT could be a threat to Google in a number of ways - including for search market share.

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

#56

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

s_dev wrote: post #52
sschueller wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OpenAI made the first AI chat bot product that didn't suck. There is a critical mass of innovation and Open AI got their 9kg of Uranium-235 together first as reflected in the market. The real question isn't why did OpenAI get there first but why Google didn't, they had every advantage.

> OpenAI made the first AI chat bot product that didn't suck.

And let people try it for free. Non-techies were using it and the news was reporting on it. They nailed their launch.

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

#57

Post by s_dev »

fragmede wrote: post #54
s_dev wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI made the first AI chat bot product that didn't suck. There is a critical mass of innovation and Open AI got their 9kg of Uranium-235 together first as reflected in the market. The real question isn't why did OpenAI get there first but why Google didn't, they had every advantage.

Because keeping the user on Google, so they don't need to visit the actual page, means that people won't make web pages anymore. that was a real concern.

Steve Jobs always said in Apple if we don't cannibalize our own products someone else will eat them for us. So the answer is Google isn't willing to take risks like it used to.

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

#59

Post by iamflimflam1 »

dataviz1000 wrote: post #22
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.

There is a saying. How to make a lot of money? Be first, best, or cheat.

A lot of companies make money by being second or even third mover. There's a lot of benefit to having someone else create the market and then swoop in with a marginally better product (or even just better marketing).

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

#60

Post by Nevermark »

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…

> 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 "right" tech component arrived.

Breakthrough products also tend to take competitors by surprise. If the breakthrough product didn't happen, it could be years before any other team comes together with the same focus and insights.

So timing a little bit. The vision is important, but often was a common dream. The real rare resources are a very clear vision, stable highly supportive management, a densely talented team, and an intensely iterative focus, and a willingness to go deep and get previously unavailable specialized components made.

Somehow "timing" always follows those last resources.

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