Game Made for VR on a $1 Processor? | Hacker News Reader

Game Made for VR on a $1 Processor?

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104 pointsRicoElectrico27 comments

"A processor designed to operate little more than a light bulb."

Come on, the ESP32 has a 240 MHz CPU, 320 KB of RAM, and WiFi! It's more powerful than my first computer, and that did a lot more than a light bulb!

Kids these days...

Agreed. The ESP32 can run Windows 3.0, aside many other interesting things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDV8q9bwW7c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kz9D9lpATwg

CNLohr is a genius, but that line is quite a stretch.

In CPU terms at least, 33x more powerful than my once-beloved Amiga 500, which was my first 'real' computer after 8-bits. Only slightly slower than my first PC in the late 90s, which ran at 266mhz.

Looks like the ESP32 costs £5, lol.

ATMega328p (Aka: Arduino Uno) is 24MHz, 2kB of SRAM, and 32kB of Flash (ROM / program space).

Arduino Uno is more powerful than the NASA Apollo Guidance Computer that guided the space program to land on the moon (43 kHz). With an addon SPI-SRAM chip, you could have more SRAM than the guidance computer too.

This is more powerful than my third computer...

My first computer was a person!

Actually the specs are not so far off from the first iPhone...

Absolutely insane level of integrations and reverse engineering across a vast, unruly tech stack. Additionally with a hard deadline, I can only imagine the difficulty of delivering this, especially without too many bugs.

The surprising part is, thinking back to it, I don't know if any bugs surfaced. Nothing really glitched out. As long as the internet was up, everything just ... worked. And it's not like I tried extra hard to make it that way. I guess I just threaded the needle luckily.

This was incredible feat of engineering hacks. And it all came together beautifully. Great post!

Cool, but the game running on the $1 processor isn't a "game made for VR." I clicked to see what kind of compromises would be necessary to render 2 eyes at a high frequency, but it turns out it wasn't a VR game at all.

I'd say the game made for the swadge (or whatever he kept saying), was extended into VR. I wouldn't consider the title misleading, just not as clearly communicated as it could have been.

There was interop with VRChat, but I wouldn't say that VRChat was running on the swadge. And VRChat itself is both a desktop game and a VR game. I can understand your point, but it is easy for one to assume that the video will include a VR game on a $1 processor.

“Cool, but”

Wow, did you actually watch the video, and understand what was accomplished?

The technical expertise shown in this project is extremely impressive, and you are getting hung up on the title not living up to your interpretation of it.

>Wow, did you actually watch the video, and understand what was accomplished?

Yes. He's not the first one to make a 3D game on an ESP32, nor is he the first to communicate with a VRChat world using a video stream and shader, nor is he the first to read data back from VRChat via reading pixels that are set by a shader. These are all existing things that are well established and are put together to make a cool app for the badge and it looked like the attendees got joy from it so I would call it a success.

I am not saying that building this was trivial especially since he went the route of building most of this from scratch, but it just wasn't what I was hoping to see when watching the video. As a fan of VR I was interested it seeing problems related to the hardware being too weak and seeing just what was possible on such limited hardware.

“Cool, but” pretty close to “Well, actually”.

Charles makes sophisticated stuff look like a breeze (to him). I envy him his brain.

The cat lipping the controller made me smile

This is a perfect example of do less with less.

So what is the processor?

ESP-32 S2

Tensilica Xtensa.

We're still romanticizing "the connections" made from people jumping up and down in front of a camera and a screen?

I have a number of long lasting relationships that began/spent years in front of a camera. You should consider that what you're bringing to the table in these interactions might be limiting the scope of what you can get out of it.

its called exercise

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