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Comment by cooper_ganglia | Hacker News Reader

I’ve frequently compared modern VR headsets with cell phones of the 1980s. Big, bulky pieces of metal and glass that will one day look comical. Meanwhile this guy invents VR of the 1960s!

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Big and bulky wasn't really the problem, price was. Size/weight isn't an issue with a car-based phone, the fact that the phone was prices as much as a car is.

Size/weight wasn't an issue as long as you were basically talking about a car-phone which was a valid but specific use-case. (Back in the day, my senior manager would occasionally give me rides from my car dealer and he'd put me on the phone with various senior sales people if there was something he wanted me to have a conversation with.) But you're right that the phone plans were also out of reach for all but execs and very high net-worth individuals. Heck, until the late 90s or so, cell phone usage was pretty expensive for a random person for all but very occasional use.

Even in mid-late nineties I would have never paid for a cell phone personally (too expensive), but they were becoming cheap enough that it was common for employers to see the value in making sure you had one.

Most kids had cell phones in mid late nineties where I lived, the phones themselves were cheap but using them were not very cheap, but giving a kid a phone so you could call them if the parent needed seemed popular.

According to [1] (which might be incomplete, IDK) cell phone sales went from 100 million per year in 1997 to 400 million per year in 2000. Subsequently, sales rose to 1.5 billion per year.

So when talking about how many people have cell phones, the difference between "mid 90s" and "late 90s" makes a big difference :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_ph...

Indeed, in Norway for example, the tipping point was ~1995: Suddenly the competition had heated up enough that there were "free" phones with contract, and "everyone" got one - in absolute numbers they were still not everywhere, but the rate of increase was dramatic, and you'd go from not knowing anyone with a cellphone (me in '94 - literally zero people) to a large number having one by the summer of '95.

Other countries will have different specific times when this happened, but my impression is that cell phones largely took off in a lot of countries in the same way, because competition and high prices for spectrum meant the large telcos suddenly had a reason to poor vast amounts of cash into pushing cellphones almost "overnight", and suddenly even if you didn't have one yourself you'd at least know enough people that it wasn't anything unusual any more.

I'm 48. While I've seen many technical changes, and been part of e.g. driving internet adoption (the company I worked at in '95 was an internet service provide I co-founded, and triggered a price war on internet access in Norway with, that we soundly lost but at least it helped significantly change the market), but none of those changes - including the internet adoption - had such extremely rapid, very visible, effect on society in such a short period of time

(I think pervasive internet access has probably made a bigger difference in the long run, but of course part of that was also enabled by cellphones, but it took longer for it to shape things as visibly)

I had cell phones from sometime in the probably late 90s but they were only used for specific purposes like if I were meeting up with someone and I wanted them to be able to reach me. I didn't really start using cell phones until I got a Treo in 2006 and then an iPhone maybe a few years later.

1) Kids? You mean only high schoolers, right? I lived that time period and can't imagine any kid who didn't drive having a cell phone, then.

2) I graduated in the early '00s and I think maybe 5% of the kids in my graduating class, at most, had a cell phone by graduation. Mostly some shitty Nokia with a phone-only or low-texting plan (texting was still crazy-expensive), mainly for contacting parents about after school activity stuff.

Middle-class-spectrum car-dependent exurb. Maybe it was different for, like, kids growing up in Brooklyn or something? Or rich kids, perhaps.

A more-common perk for children of free-spending parents, in my town, was still a second POTS line, though I do think that was starting to tip the other way just at the end.

Where I lived in Sweden, 1998-1999 was when the breakthrough started with prepaid SIM cards with subsidized phones. In my graduating middle school class there were maybe 3-4 kids with mobile phones (none of us were rich at all, just middle class, and all too young to drive), but in the following 3 years in highschool that went up to basically 100%.

The US was far behind on mobile phones for a long time.

There was maybe a 5-10 year period when personal cell phones were something you had for emergencies or when you were meeting up with people but didn't casually use for extended conversations much less to replace a landline.

For one thing, they sounded like absolute shit even compared to digital landlines.

You know I kind of forgot the dynamics of that as a 90s kid, compared to 13 year olds with iphones now. Imagine how much TikTok kids would watch if they were charged 10 cents per video.

Definitely early adopter neighborhood though

I feel like the Quest could be very light if they took the Apple approach and moved the battery and computer to a pocket box. Even before any of these headsets existed I imagined most of them being that way.

That would need quite the cable to support 6 camera video feeds, 2 display video feeds, 2 audio feeds, and some other control data in addition to power.

Would it? How much total throughput and power would that be, vs a skinny USB-C PD 3.2 Gen 2x2 cable that can carry a 100W or more along with 20 Gbps of data? How about 2 or 3 of them in a wrapper?

The Quest can be a PCVR headset with a 3.2 Gen 1 cable, ie 5 Gbps. How different is this?

I’m pretty sure outboarding most of the hardware that’s not speaker, camera, or screen is plenty doable. It just blows Meta’s selling point of making it a self-contained device. I’d probably prefer it though, especially if I could attach the outboard module to the back of the head strap as a counterweight.

>How different is this?

Hardware decoding / encoding all of those video streams requires a lot of processing power on both ends, adds 10s of ms of latency, and makes the video quality worse.

Not video encoding, raw-ish signals.

Let's say DSC is allowed, which costs microseconds and is basically invisible, and can compress down to about 8 bits per pixel.

That USB cable can transmit 20Gbps in each direction. The display needs to do 23 million pixels 90 times a second, and at 8 bits per pixel that's about 17Gbps.

The video cameras going the other way are 13 million pixels for the main cameras plus some amount more for the 6 tracking cameras and the other sensors. And those main cameras are outputting 8 bits per pixel before any compression is applied.

It's a tight fit at that bitrate, but we can upgrade to USB4 and get 40Gbps in each direction. That leaves plenty of room for everything, and makes sure there's headroom for HDR and 100Hz and whatnot. It works out.

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