> The point was he seems to consistently grossly underestimate the difficulty of problems outside of his domain expertise.
Carmack made 3d games and game engines. I don't think VR was outside his domain of expertise.
And for the self driving one, that bet is still on
Facebook's VR plan seems to hinge on being "even more ubiquitous than mobile" <https://officechai.com/learn/mark-zuckerbergs-email-explaini...>, which is a level of constant use that 3D games don't really have.
I am not a VR or 3D game expert, but even I can list other key differences. I bet you can too if you try. I think those are reasons to think VR is not really the same domain. I am curious what you think.
> It requires engineers to ship high FPS and low lag to prevent nausea to a degree unheard of for PC gaming.
This is very much Carmack's speciality, and why his focus was on making mobile VR happen [0]. There are very few people who can outperform him at that, and most of them worked for Oculus :-)
[0]: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/q-a-carmack-reveals-the... (this predates the Quest, but it should give you an idea of the problems he was tackling)
He's now working on a startup in the AGI field, which will also probably go nowhere for him.
He gets to work on things that excite him - what a place to be in life. We can all envy that - but he's not very good at gauging problems and consistently underestimates their difficulty/time-to-market.