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And this possibly wasn't the beginning of tensions at ID/Zenimax about Carmack splitting his time with outside or non-core activities. Before VR there was Armadillo Aerospace and his pre-iPhone interest in mobile games. Carmack claimed that he tried to maintain some level of involvement with ID after quitting as a full-time(ish) employee, but that this was refused. Beyond even that, the spat may have been partly a continuation of ID office-political strife that stretched back to the Quake (1) era.

Then there's a whole other tangled story involving Michael Abrash and his comitatus at Valve, Palmer and the original Oculus guys, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, other teams at Valve that also got excited about VR or AR at different stages, and Valve's office politics and internal decision-making.

EDIT: watered down some adverbs.

The thing that always had me shaking my head in that saga is that Carmack tried to get Zenimax work on VR but Zenimax had no interest before Facebook entered the picture.

Investors care very deeply about social proof. And there's no better social proof than another big investor putting money into an idea.

Then again, if Carmack being interested in something so strongly isn’t social proof enough, maybe you just aren’t very good at being an investor in this particular field.

He was right place right time almost always even if he didn't succeed. Armadillo Aerospace could have been SpaceX in a different timeline. Was clearly on the money with VR.

It's hard to feel bad for Zenimax here, they had opportunities and generational talents and wasted them.

Not only did they not have any interest, they didn't seem to balk when Carmack left ASAP when his contract was up and joined Oculus.

The fact they sued once they found out FB was involved, just makes it seem like they suddenly realized what Carmack was working on and could've delivered for them, and now that big money was involved, they panicked and had to slow the company down somehow.

I'd love to know what the actual timeframe is from the time Carmack left to the time Zenimax sued. It just seems so suspect the timetable and reeks of desperation of a company who discovered too late what they had all along and let go for nothing.

> From my memory of the early rift I am positive that outside of Palmer it was Carmack's genius that made this viable and Carmack's video lent credibility to the campaign.

I'm positive of this. Palmer spotted an opportunity to use phone screens + MEMS sensors for cheap VR and garnered public support for his prototype by presenting it as an open source gadget.

Carmack thought it was cool, and brought his name, time, resources, business acumen and legendary development skills, got it running Doom 3. Next thing you know they have a million dollar Kickstarter and are pulling in massive rounds of funding.

Seems like both were necessary. Palmer had an idea and made a prototype, Carmack came in and helped spearhead the execution into a business.

Isn't that a fairly standard way that startups get started?

Well yeah, isn't that what the GP was saying? Palmer had the initial idea and cobbled together a very basic proof-of-concept, Carmack then did the heavy lifting.

Carmack was already doing the MEMS sensor stuff a bit before, attaching it to a Sony HMZ and using gyro code from his rocket company.

Add to this that most of CV1 architecture was lifted directly from the Valve Steam Sight headset - not sure how much of that went into rift. The valve employees who argued that valve should give the technology to Palmer without license (before any whispers of facebook acquisition) then jumped ship to facebook's oculus. Shady as fuck.

See details in this comment here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28871907

Oculus is a company that started shady and just gets shadier. They have a cheap good product but I won't support them. That doesn't even get into purchasing third party exclusives during their launch to keep them away from the competition, something that wasn't really a thing on PC at that point.

If this were true, there would be a lot more similarity between the CV1 and the Vive. From my medium-depth technical understanding, they seem about as dissimilar as it's possible to be while still both being PC-connected VR headsets and both being compatible with the same third party Unity/UnrealEngine games.

They’re both nearly identical in the ways that matter except for their outward appearance and minor things like audio, accessory ports, and the Vive’s camera.

They both have the exact same resolution OLED displays with a butterfly mechanism to adjust the IPD and fresnel lenses. They both use IMU’s as the primary tracking system with external components used for drift correction.

They both use optical tracking (except Vive is inside-out and Rift is outside-in.)

They both have incredibly similar software, with a very minor tweak needed to fully translate all the Rift calls to work completely on Vive.

The original Rift and Vive are very, very similar headsets. The most different thing about them is their controllers.

according to Yates the optical tracking and fresnel lenses were the only things Oculus changed from the Steam Sight to the CV1. The rest of the actual architecture was the same.

The question will be what changed from the CV1 to the Rift, but I don't think valve is going to sue oculus either way. This is just to expand the understanding of how slimy a company oculus was even before it was acquired by facebook.

CV1 and Rift are alternate names for the same headset.

You're right I was confusing CV for the DK headsets - I remember playing fallout 3 on the DK2 and loving it.

I would say Alan Yates and Ben Krasnow are pretty credible.

This sort of analogizing might fool a layman, but it will not fool someone who has looked at teardowns and done actual software development in the space. You need to be able to tell whether a similarity is more like two cars having the same engine controller firmware, or more like two cars both having carburetors, or more like two cars both having bought tires from the same third party supplier.

You picked the wrong two headsets to compare. The steam sight hmd is not the vive. You read a comment about the steam sight hmd and made a comment about the vive.

What secret knowledge of the steam sight headset do you have?

It's not really fair to call the Lighthouse system an "inside-out" tracking system. "Inside-out" generally refers to the tracking data collection and processing happening on data collected exclusively by the headset, without any specialized, external reference. That's not what Lighthouse does.

Lighthouse is nearly identical to outside-in camera tracking, with the one wrinkle being that the photons flow in the opposite direction. Instead of a fixed, designed constellation of point-like emitters on the headset, you have a constellation of point-like detectors. Instead of a stationary grid detector, you have a stationary grid emitter. But otherwise, the data is practically the same, the math is all the same, the calibrations are all the same, and the whole system doesn't work without those stationary, external reference points.

Similarly, ray tracing doesn't simulate photons leaving light sources, bouncing off surfaces, and arriving at a camera sensor. The simulation is of anti-photons, leaving the camera, bouncing off surfaces, and seeing what lights they hit. It's like conventional current actually being the opposite direction of electron flow. The systems can run forwards or backwards and get the same answer.

Actually inside-out tracking does a completely different thing. The acronym "SLAM" stands for "simultaneous locating and mapping". It's building up a coherent, consistent model of the world around it. It adapts to new surroundings.

Bump a Lighthouse emitter or CV1 camera out of position and everything stops working because the data no longer makes sense. Designing a Lighthouse headset or controller requires given the tracking code a 3D model of the position of all the detectors.

But move the furniture around in a room and SLAM catches up in a few seconds. SLAM also doesn't care about the shape of thing you're tracking. Hell, it really doesn't care all that much about the quality of the camera feed, other than being relatively high framerate and not very noisy.

It's simple enough to say that on the lighthouse system, the sensors are on the headset/controllers, and the beacons are cast from the lighthouse boxes.

On the oculus system the sensors were the external cameras, and the beacons were the LEDs on the devices.

My experience with both was that the oculus system did really well in a seated system but for room scale games the lighthouse system does better, especially when the controllers go behind you like in the valve archery game.

I haven't bought an oculus system since the DK2 so not sure how sophisticated it is now.

Rift S, Quest, and Quest 2 all use inside-out tracking.

not sure that's any better for controllers behind the back/head

Controllers behind the head are tracked by some algorithm magic that fuses the last seen position by the cameras with accelerometer and gyro data for the blind spots. Seems to work like a charm. Probably not as good as full lighthouse system, but good enough.

Every extant tracking system uses IMUs as the primary tracking sytem. The Lighthouse base stations and the Oculus camera tracking are used to correct for sensor drift.

You need it to be this way, because the IMUs can run at fairly high frequencies (200 - 1000Hz), which is (in part) keeps latency low. The data paths and processing needed for the reference frame corrections are so complex that they can't be run anywhere near as fast. It's why the hand tracking on the Quest is so high-latency: there's no IMU on your hand.

And it's not "algorithm magic". It's mostly just Kalman Filtering.

It's not really a problem.

Windows MR (both VR headsets and the HoloLens), Magic Leap, Vive Focus, Pico Neo, and the upcoming Linx all use inside-out cameras, all with their own implementations. HTC Vive, Vive Pro, Vive Cosmos, Valve Index, Varjo XR-3 and VR-3, and PiMax headsets are the only ones using outside-in tracking anymore, and they're all using specifically Lighthouse.

First of all, you just don't really do that very often. People have rotator cuffs and elbows that make any action in those regions fairly uncomfortable.

Second, the all current VR systems primarily use inertial tracking. The visual tracking is only there to correct for drift out of the reference frame. Whether it's Lighthouse or Rift CV1 outside-in cameras or inside-out cameras on every other system, you can put your hands in the sensor blind spot for several seconds before it becomes a problem.

99% of the time, you're working with your hands in front of you. Lighthouse doesn't care about your hands in relation to your body. But it does care about your body in relation to the base stations. Lighthouse's blind spots are constantly changing over the course of your play session. Quest's are always in the same spot.

So many times I've found myself in a corner on the opposite axis of my base stations and my own body is blocking my controllers' view of the base stations. When that happens, you have to have enough awareness of what is going on to understand why your hands start slowly floating away while you are trying to work on something, having forgotten your orientation in the real world room. It's literally immersion breaking.

"Inside-out cameras can't track behind your head" is really not the problem that your random Valve fanboy on Reddit makes it out to be.

The vive is a device engineered by HTC. The Steam Sight headset was the device valve developed in their office. They are different headsets, and most people have never seen a steam sight headset.

The vive was developed in a hurry once valve realized Oculus' betrayal and the very real chance that the VR renaissance would be primarily owned by facebook and oculus' closed garden.

Unfortunately FB is gaining the market at the low end already. While not as high quality, you can even plug your Quest into a PC (assuming the PC is powerful enough to run VR) and run PC VR games. And with video cards so expensive, the only way VR is going mainstream any time soon is with lower end less expensive setups. Vive is about to release the Flow, which looks interesting, but from their product page I don't fully understand the niche it's looking to fill.

The flow is an ultra portable (think ultra light HMD that uses glasses arms to support itself on your head), phone controlled (Accelerometer and screen swiping) and phone driven (as in uses the phone video graphics) device which is a 3DOF headset primarily aimed at content consumption rather than games. Unfortunately at its price point, and lacking the controller and movement I'm use to with my headsets, it's a non starter for me.

It's an interesting idea at half its price, maybe.

Facebook gaining control of mass VR is basically why I feel pretty bearish about VR in general. If there's any company that can turn it into an anti consumer ad driven experience that experiments on you, its facebook.

Hopefully valve continues to put out competing hardware even if its niche for people willing to pay for a premium experience. The main issue right now is, as you say video card availability and prices.

Honestly, Zenimax sound like really unpleasant to work for

Everything I know about Zenimax leads me to believe they are the absolute worst.

Zenimax was owned and operated entirely by m̶i̶c̶e̶, i mean lawyers.

And that doesn’t just mean legal had the reigns. It means a weird percentage of the top leadership were literally D.C. attorneys.

The tensions go all the way back to the post-Doom (1) era. Carmack wasn't blameless either. Here's a fun war story from Sandy Petersen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_ga1TFBrBo .

So they’re kinda like the Oracle of gaming :)

Yeah, but Oracle is much better at it. If Zenimax really wants to compete with them, they need to be sending license auditors into my house to count the number of occupants as potential users and send me a bill for their use of &/or gaining of enjoyment through watching me play their games.

Everyone I know who works at Oracle seems to love it there. IME it's the people on the other end of the contract who tend to despise Oracle.

seems

Work conditions and business practices aren’t the same things.

Yeah this is a curious dichotomy. Universally hated from the outside but beloved from the inside. It does seem perhaps a little cult like though, the median tenure seems incredibly long - people join and _never_ leave.

If they didn't love it there, wouldn't they leave? In this market, it's relatively easy to do so.

The founder https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Altman was connected to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_Credit_and_Commerce_... From which he was banned from the banking industry when the bank was caught laundering money for drug cartels and the cia.

I learned today that we need a “Wolf of Wolfenstein” movie.

amazing title! haha

I would see that movie in a heartbeat.

Name sounds like some prescription drug.

I consider the videos of Carmack demoing the rift duct tape edition with Doom 3 as the start of modern VR.

I had no idea (the modern iteration) went back that far, to be honest. Interesting stuff.

It sucks that there are just flocks of vultures waiting to profit off anything that results from his work. Business!

Well, you are kind of a dolt for doing side work on company time with company equipment and expecting anything other than the company expecting ownership/equity of the results.

The real lesson is not to work with blood sucking lawyers. They'll look for any excuse to steal from anyone they can, and they'll use the legal system to do it.

I mean, you have a point, but at the same time, Carmack and Romero have literally been pulling these kinds of shenanigan's since John^2 were working at Softdisk. It doesn't make for the best business or legal decision, but it's certainly not a surprise to hear. It's kind of his MO.

I would find it hard to believe that Zenimax was unaware of what was going on.

Continuing to do the same thing again and again does not make it right, nor justify the behavior. Stop doing it. Your life becomes much easier. If you don't have self-discipline, then consequences happen. Yeah, it sucks, but dems da breakz.

Also, you are not always in control of who your corporate overlords will be. They can be decent, then sell, then new owners are not cool. Happens all the time.

Reading this strongly reminds me of the book The Fountainhead, where those who refuse to follow the same playbooks as the majority, are the ones who not only are responsible for helping to drive their respective industries forward, but are persecuted for it.

I think it’s fair to call John Carmack a visionary who has moved his industry forward multiple times. I think while some investors and business owners did not benefit (as much as they could have) from his work, the rest of the gaming world absolutely did.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

I think this depiction of corporate highlights why innovation becomes difficult for larger companies at some point and why good engineers should cut ties from time to time.

> Your life becomes much easier.

Life hasn't turned out too bad for Carmack.

I'm sure he's really enjoyed all of those meetings with lawyers and various depositions and what not. There's probably nothing better he could have been doing with that time instead. You're totally right.

He has been and continues to be wildly successful.

Maybe he sees those meetings, depositions, and what not as part of the price of that success.

Fully agreed. While his life would have definitely been much easier if he followed the "reasonable rules", easier != better. And to be fair, I am glad Carmack went for what he thought was the right move vs. him going for the move that he thought would lead him to an easier life.

He is one of the very few people in the industry (not just gaming, but technology in general) who manages to move the entire industries forward not once, but many times, and consistently so. All while remaining true to himself, caring about what he thinks matters the most, and not jumping head deep into corporate games just for the sake of it.

Maybe I am fanboying a bit here, but after reading Masters of Doom (a biographical piece on the early life of both Johns [Carmack and Romero], how they started ID Software together, and how it all turned out; heavily recommended for everyone here), it feels like I am experiencing an even more exciting sequel to it happening in real life in front of my eyes.

So, where is Carmack now?

He's working on artificial general intelligence. But still does consulting for FB.

Great writeup, I didn't know Carmack was involved to this extant.

My opinion on this, completely irrespective of the actual terms and laws:

Zenimax doesn't deserve anything.

But anyone who funded the original Kickstarter does (I was not one of those people). Anyone who put $200+ into that Kickstarter deserved some sort of payout. I feel like, at the very least, they should get free Oculus headsets for life.

It's hard to put a number on the total value created by that initial Kickstarter funding if it had been treated as an actual investment, but I'd be willing to bet that it's already in the billions, and will only grow.

I mean, I got both the Dev Kit promised to me and they sent me a free production Oculus Rift when it launched, so I don't feel too cheated - But still disappointed by the Facebook sellout.

With you on this. Someday maybe a collaborative DAO or similar model replaces Kickstarter if the SEC can sort their heads out and makes this a reality.

There are platforms like Fig and Wefunder that do this sort of thing now.

> I feel like, at the very least, they should get free Oculus headsets for life.

Is there something different about this kickstarter than most others? Did they offer ownership? Because it sounds like you think you bought something they don't think they sold.

Just because you compliment my son on his lemonade stand and tell him you believe in him and buy a lemonade doesn't entitle you to a share of his eventual billion dollar lemonade empire.

This seems optimistic.

Just gotta crack the whip as a dragon dad. ;)

In all seriousness, it doesn't sound all that more far fetched than someone deciding they want to bring VR to the masses, starting a kickstarter, and then fast forward a few years and it's a large division of Facebook.

Just add a bunch of caffeine and call it an energy drink. Add some snazzy graphics (hell just put the kid's face on it) and you've got an empire. Or forego the caffeine and add some seltzer, or add some alcohol, or or or. Empires await!

I was one of those backers.

We got the headset that we paid for, and we also got the next dev headset after that for free. I definitely feel like I got my money's worth from it.

I then switched for a Vive for my first retail headset, but I've since switched to Quest 2. Even though it shouldn't be better, the wireless functionality and ability to play games without a computer make it better than the original Vive. I'll likely be upgrading to whatever is next in the Oculus lineup.

I backed VR because I've always loved the idea of VR and AR, and desperately wanted it to take off. Palmer and Carmack did a great job of making that happen, and even though I don't like Palmer's politics, I'm very thankful that he got this ball rolling. If I had only gotten that first headset, I'd still feel like I totally got my money's worth. But the continued and increased presence of VR is the real payout for me.

My wife also has a Quest 2 now and we often play multiplayer games together, like Walkabout Minigolf. It's just amazing.

> Anyone who put $200+ into that Kickstarter deserved some sort of payout

I agree but you'll have to blame the SEC for that. I'm sure Oculus and Kickstarter would have loved to sell equity to the public, and if they did then every backer would have made thousands of dollars on the deal. But the SEC's rules didn't allow equity crowdfunding at the time and they still impose limits that make it basically infeasible.

I also funded the Kickstarter and received a DK1 (and DK2). I believe I was fairly compensated, and that demanding some unspecified extra payout would be excessive. If you want stock, buy stock, and deal with the added risk that true investment entails.

Would be awesome if every Apple product I ever purchased had been treated as an investment.

The 2000 dual-CPU Power Mac G4 would be worth a million now.

Every Kickstarter backer got exactly what they were promised (ranging from tshirts to dev kits, studio visits and more), and a bonus production headset on top, so I'm not sure where the question of deserving more comes from.