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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]

#61

Post by timleewards »

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…

I sure hope you want for a pc vr headset and not the oculus quest. HTC Vive Pro and Valve Index are simply stunning and can see them become the future of gaming.

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

#62

Post by timleewards »

gonehome wrote: post #29

I think his point about latency is a big one. I suspect a lot of the problems with videochat (and VR) has to do with this. Bad latency is frustrating and wears you down, at some point it's not worth attempting to speak up because it's tiring to deal with. In real life communication transitions between people are fast and you can overlap a bit. VR could solve the issue of what people are looking at least which I think…

Chatvr seems to have plenty of “players” - in the millions actually. Premature optimisation is not ideal, and a delay in the tens of ms is not unheard of in regular chat apps either. I mean how many live on a 10 Mbps home connection with high latency yet they make perfectly fine calls.

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

#63

Post by dntrkv »

munificent wrote: post #40
dougmwne wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that is the same as a dead end. Right now this is a very expensive, multi-billion dollar toy with toy demonstrator apps and proof of concept games. It needs to be a game changer and the future of something or the research funding and developer ecosystem are going to dry up. And given the amount that Facebook must be losing on the Quest 2 and the all-in nature of this launch, if this doesn't take off now, the…

> It needs to be a game changer and the future of something or the research funding and developer ecosystem are going to dry up. I hate that we live in a world so dominated by network effects, economies of scale, corporate consolidation, and shareholder value that there are fewer and fewer realms where "small success" still exists.

There are plenty of places where "small success" still exists, usually in the form of tools that solve a problem for a specific trade/industry/etc. Though you won't see these small successes on HN.

As a society we need a way to determine where we invest resources. Some of those metrics you mentioned, though not perfect, are proxies for evaluating whether or not we should be investing more in certain tech. Otherwise, how would we determine where we should spend our limited resources?

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

#64

Post by nitrogen »

kkdsafjid wrote: post #60
smolder wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me, too. I think economic pressures like you described generally harm quality of life. We end up with less "real wealth" --all the work-products that would otherwise make net QoL better, for the sake of monetary wealth concentration. As usual this comes down to the incentives and disincentives we've baked into our system not aligning with the best overall outcome. They align with the perceived needs of the biggest fi…

Being able to buy a VR headset for 400$ is "real wealth".

I have to disagree. This argument comes up in every discussion about wealth inequality. 'The non-wealthy can't complain, because everything is so cheap now.'

Real wealth is, you know... actual wealth. It's being able to start a high 6-figure to 8-figure business (or even smaller if you are satisfied) and not being laughed at as a failure. It's being able to buy rather than rent everything you want to buy. It's having productive assets.

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

#65

Post by quux »

aantix wrote: post #47

Could Oculus 2 serve as an ok display for coding?

From some of the reviews I’ve seen it seems like it’s either there or really close. I think Tested, in their review said it was possible to have a usable virtual monitor with 1080 resolution, but the virtual monitor had to be large.

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

#66

Post by modzu »

wlesieutre wrote: post #48
modzu wrote: post #43

question for VR people: is the tech at a place yet where a headset could be a monitor replacement for productivity work? i mean my laptop screen is 13" -- could i instead be coding on a virtual 100" screen, still using my regular OS, keyboard and trackpad?

Carmack talks about this a bit, the Quest 1 had enough pixel density that a big screen in VR (such as the Netflix app) could give you about 720 of useful resolution. With the new screens, it's more like 1080p. But if you're doing multiple smaller screens rather than a big movie theater, they'll be less than that. They're launching an official project for this, called Infinite Office. You see the world in black and wh…

thanks. the infinite office demos are pretty funny. all the users doing "office productivity work" are just browsing facebook

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

#67

Post by theschwa »

timleewards wrote: post #61
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…

I sure hope you want for a pc vr headset and not the oculus quest. HTC Vive Pro and Valve Index are simply stunning and can see them become the future of gaming.

With the Quest being able to be used as both a PC VR and and standalone, why not Quest? I'm saying this as someone who owns 4 different VR headsets, and I find myself using my Quest 1 the most.

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

#68

Post by dougmwne »

olau wrote: post #59
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…

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 power budget, his belief that foveated rendering was not going to save the day, his recognition that the lenses were now a limiting factor vs the screen for image quality and that other lens designs would be fragile and suboptimal in a shipping product.

I didn't mean to say that I thought he was pessimistic about VR overall, just that he didn't seem to think there were any large gains in hardware quality coming soon and it was down to the software to make full use of what was there.

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

#69

Post by sedatk »

Robotbeat wrote: post #52

It occurs to me that there are a bunch of fairly simple things that could be changed to make wireless headsets more practical for actual work. My smartphone hasn't been working, so I've been using the headset a lot more as a secondary computing device. The keyboard is not nearly as practical as it could be task switching requires quitting out of each application. The pass-through environment is only available in the…

> If there were some way to just grab controls directly in 3D space instead of using the pinch-as-a-mouse mechanism,

You mean virtual controllers?

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

#70

Post by gonehome »

timleewards wrote: post #62
gonehome wrote: post #29

I think his point about latency is a big one. I suspect a lot of the problems with videochat (and VR) has to do with this. Bad latency is frustrating and wears you down, at some point it's not worth attempting to speak up because it's tiring to deal with. In real life communication transitions between people are fast and you can overlap a bit. VR could solve the issue of what people are looking at least which I think…

Chatvr seems to have plenty of “players” - in the millions actually. Premature optimisation is not ideal, and a delay in the tens of ms is not unheard of in regular chat apps either. I mean how many live on a 10 Mbps home connection with high latency yet they make perfectly fine calls.

The full quote of that premature optimization trope is this:

"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%"

People often ignore that second half.

> "I mean how many live on a 10 Mbps home connection with high latency yet they make perfectly fine calls."

I'm not sure I agree with 'perfectly fine', people just suffer through things being terrible because they don't know they could be better. Latency on a 1:1 call is bad, but tolerable - things get a lot worse as you move towards group interaction (dealing with group video chats often because of covid it's clear how much worse this is than in a real life room).

It's not premature optimization to get the latency down when that's probably the most critical feature tied to usable performance and better experience, arguably everything else should be lower priority.

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